The right's themes, while seeming out of step at the height of the civil rights movement and the Great Society, were actually very much in tune with the growing fears of white middle-class and upper-class America. "Blacks staged sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, rode through Dixie on buses alongside of whites in defiance of local laws and in accordance with the rulings of the United States Supreme Court marched through the streets of Southern cities in ever-escalating confrontation with the customs and codes of segregation," Perlstein writes. "Millions thrilled to the moral transcendence of these heroic warriors for freedom. Millions more—perhaps communist dupes—were spitting on law and order, overturning settled ways of life with reckless abandon and might not stop until they had forced their way into their own Northern white neighborhoods." Millions, he writes, were stirred by Johnson's War on Poverty, but millions more "wondered why these people couldn't help themselves."

Or, as McGirr writes, "Concerns over 'law and order' and 'morality' and attacks on 'sophisticated intellectuals' moved to center stage. As American liberalism began to unravel, the focus of the Right's discourse shifted away from communism toward a more direct attack on 'liberal humanism' and the 'open society.' This shift in focus—which went hand in hand with the rise of the New Left, the student movement, the counterculture, the civil rights struggles in the North and the Vietnam War—represented not fundamentally new concerns but rather new terrains of struggle...."

How noble, how Christian of Ashcroft to cater so willingly to the "needs" of our very own willing executioners. And yet, how ironic. In V-chip nation, where parents are so concerned about the violence their children see on television, people are watching murder live on the box. What's more, they're having it piped in, special delivery, by none other than the Justice Department. So this is what's meant by compassionate conservatism.

Or is it the ultimate in reality TV? We shouldn't wonder, then, why Columbine-style school shootings are becoming a national sport. We blame it on Hollywood. We blame it on the gun lobby. But that's merely a deflection of responsibility. Our children's maladjustment is the fruit of our own example. We scratch our heads, wondering why, while overlooking the patent fact that those same children are being raised in a nation whose notion of justice is, apparently, one word long—payback—and whose thirst for blood outstrips human decency.

The implicit message is clear. When someone shatters your life, takes away everything you care about, decimates your emotional equilibrium, as happened to the victims and their families in Oklahoma City, you're not only entitled to kill him, you're entitled to make a public spectacle out of the killing, a media event. Think about it.

Put yourself in the shoes of a teenager whose world is almost entirely circumscribed by the walls of his school. Your girlfriend dumps you. You're denied a diploma. You've been put down repeatedly as a loser, socially crushed by the people whose opinion matters most to you, your peers. What now? In your solipsistic, adolescent worldview, you're as devastated as a parent who's lost a child or a husband who's lost his wife. And you want revenge. You want to kill the killer, and you want his death to be witnessed by the world because only then will it mean something to you. Only then will your "needs" be met, your grief assuaged. Sounds conspicuously like us, doesn't it?

"All good teenagers go to California," Brian Wilson once quipped, "when they die." Wilson's remark, far edgier and more richly ironic than any of the hit songs he wrote and sang for the Beach Boys, is invoked by Kirse Granat May in "Golden State, Golden Youth," a study that deconstructs the popular culture of postwar America and shows exactly how the California dream and the cult of youth came to be linked in powerful but also cynical and even ominous ways.

May, a historian who lives in Boston, digs through the accumulation of clichés and conventional wisdom about the California youth culture, and reveals how the whole phenomenon can be seen as the handiwork of media and marketing entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive and something much deeper and darker—the fear of class, race and generational conflict.

"Aware of the possibilities of television, music, and film to create a model of the good society, popular culture focused on the commercial possibilities of the baby boomers," writes May. "A new definable teenage type was created, and it was an ideal of exclusion: white, middle-class, mobile, carefree and conformist."

May is willing to name names, and she assigns Walt Disney a crucial role in the invention of the youth culture and the conscious decision to plant it in the rich soil of California. The opening of Disneyland in 1955 fixed California in the collective consciousness of a whole generation—and, indeed, the whole world—as "the land of America's destiny." Above all, Disney elevated the pursuit of happiness from an aspiration into a commodity to be packaged and sold to what May dubs "the child imagination market."

"By creating a monument to the dreams of youth, Disney offered a privileged model of life for mass consumption," she explains. "He turned his corner of the California world into an international symbol of 'the good life.' "

"Golden State, Golden Youth" invites us to regard the debut of Disneyland as the first of two defining moments for the baby-boom generation, a dividing line between an open-eyed if sometimes grim view of the world and a more comforting but also delusory one that was sold to us along with movies and music, T-shirts and lunch boxes, housing tracts and fast food.

By way of example, May reminds us that "Blackboard Jungle" and "Rebel Without a Cause," both released the same year in which Disneyland opened for business, offered a dark and dire vision of adolescence in America, but these movies did not depict the experience of the boomers and did not address them as an audience; we were still wearing our Davy Crockett coonskin caps and watching "The Mickey Mouse Club." By the time the boomers were old enough to buy their own records and tickets, we put former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello's "Tall Paul" on the charts and lined up to see Sandra Dee in "Gidget."

At its highest and purest expression, the California youth culture is captured in the iconic image of a buxom Funicello on an idyllically empty beach, dressed in a one-piece swimsuit and holding a surfboard—a promotional photo for "Muscle Beach Party," one of a series of beach-party movies from American International Pictures. The promise of freedom and pleasure, sexual and otherwise, is unmistakable, especially for a generation of young men who had passed into puberty watching her grow up on "The Mickey Mouse Club," but the beach-blanket movies were ultimately as safe and sexless as a Disney cartoon.

"We gave the illusion of being daring, but there was a lot of teasing with no real payoff," Sam Arkoff, co-founder of the company that produced "Muscle Beach Party," once told a reporter. The beach-party movies, he explains, depicted a teenage utopia in which there were "no parents, no school, no church, no legal or government authorities, no rich kids or poor kids, no money problems—none of the things that plague the young people today."

The same kind of deception and manipulation, as May shows, was practiced in the music industry. Dennis Wilson was the only member of the Beach Boys who actually surfed, but they elevated the surfing subculture into a shiny new symbol of the California youth culture. The Beach Boys may have lifted their guitar riffs, note for note, from Chuck Berry but, no less than "The Mickey Mouse Club" and "Gidget," they conjured up "a white, middle-class version of youth."

"As the Beach Boys told Time," May writes, "'We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white.' "

...[I]f one reason cultural conservatives are losing the war is that they haven't successfully enlisted grass-roots political conservatives in the cause, another reason is that, despite their heated rhetoric and noise, they just don't have the numbers. When the culture wars first began in this country some 150 years ago, it was because American elites and aristocrats, a tiny faction, feared and tested the rise of a genuinely democratic culture of almanacs, crime pamphlets, dime novels, penny press newspapers, theatrical melodramas, popular music, circuses—anything that seemed to challenge the elites' own cultural supremacy. As they saw it, this new culture, appealing to the masses, threatened the country by degrading both its standards and its morals. It was a culture of the proverbial lowest common denominator.

As the 19th century progressed, the elites gradually gave way to middle-class moralists and reformers, but the moralists' arguments were essentially the same as the aristocrats'. Popular culture undermined American values. It promoted sex, violence, vulgarity and disrespect for authority. This was the argument when cultural conservatives were attacking saloon shows at the end of the 19th century; it was the argument when they attacked silent films, including the films of Charlie Chaplin, early in the 20th century, and when they attacked sexual comedies in the 1920s and gangster pictures in the 1930s; and it is still the argument now when they attack movie blockbusters, cutting-edge TV programs and rock CDs. Nothing changes but the targets themselves.

If the arguments have remained the same, so have the motives. Though one certainly can't impugn the conservatives' sincerity, in professing to save America from the toxin of popular culture, they were also saving themselves. Popular culture promoted the sort of values that further marginalized the critics and made them seem even more old-fashioned and irrelevant to a modern society. It is a war they cannot afford to lose without immolating, so they have to keep soldiering on no matter how inexorably the popular culture seems to advance.

The roots of America's political deadlock go back to the great civil rights war of the 1960s, a cultural civil war in which a New Left and a New Right emerged to challenge the country's post-World War II consensus. The center emptied out, especially after Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter failed to govern effectively from the center. The dominant figures of U.S. politics in the late 20th century were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, two presidents whose political identities were forged by the conflicts of the 1960s. The 2000 election was a showdown between Reaganism and Clintonism. The result? A tie.

Europeans are often perplexed by the failure of Americans to get over "the sixties." After all, they, too, were convulsed by great cultural changes during that turbulent decade. But only the United States experienced a ferocious backlash against those changes, partly based on America's religious culture.

Religion has lost influence everywhere in the industrial world. But in America, it continues to thrive. In the early 1990s, I held a post as visiting professor of American politics at a leading Jesuit university. One of the perquisites of that position was an invitation to tea with the cardinal. After we exchanged pleasantries, the cardinal asked, "Is there anything happening in American politics that I should be aware of?"

"As a matter of fact, there is," I answered. "Since 1980, religious Americans of all faiths—fundamentalist Protestants, observant Catholics, even Orthodox Jews—have been moving toward the Republican Party. At the same time, secular Americans have found a home in the Democratic Party.

"This is something new in American politics," I explained. "We have never had a religious party in this country." Then I went a fateful step further, adding, "I'm a little uncomfortable with a religious party in this country."

The cardinal pounced. "Well, I'm a little uncomfortable with an irreligious party in this country," he said.

Stalemate.

By 2000, it was even more true that religiosity defined politics. Regular churchgoers voted heavily for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Nonobservant voters went strongly for then-Vice President Al Gore. American politics had become less and less about economic interests and more and more about lifestyle—a 1960s word.

What brought things to a head was Clinton. Clinton created an odd legacy in American politics. He brought the country together on policy and tore the country apart over values.

Clinton really did create a policy consensus. And why not? He stole most of his policies from the Republicans. Clinton's most significant policy achievements—welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, a balanced budget—passed only because of Republican support.

For most Americans, however, Clinton's most important attribute wasn't his policies. It was his values. He was the first, and so far the only, president to come out of the culture of the 1960s. (Bush is of that generation, but not of that culture.)

Conservatives never accepted Clinton as legitimate, no matter how much they agreed with his policies. To them, Clinton was the draft dodger, the war protester, the womanizer, the truth-shader, the gun-hater, the gay-protector, the non-inhaling drug fiend.

Clinton may have gotten elected because of "the economy, stupid," but what defined his presidency was "the values, stupid." The 2000 election brought three decades of cultural conflict to a head. And neither side was able to prevail.

Stalemate.

So the culture wars may ebb and flow, but they will never, never end because both sides have too much at stake. Conservatives cannot concede defeat since to do so would end the hope of their worldview ever prevailing. Instead, they take each new assault as a mortal threat to the nation and regird for battle.