We let in the people our ancestors left

“As Daniel Bell argued in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, European intellectuals and artists began in the late nineteenth century to reject the traditional values of the bourgeois ethic, which they found stifling. They became hostile to commerce and business, and their animus was reflected in high culture, especially literature, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. With the cultural revolution of the 1960s, those ideas found their way into the mainstream, where it became fashionable for a new generation of movie executives and other purveyors of pop culture to explore more transgressive themes, including those that questioned the institutions that employed us and furnished us with life’s essentials. The rise of post-modernism, with its ‘creed of pastiche and parody, of the idea that anything goes, of the enthronement of popular and low culture,’ further entrenched an ethos that widely derides big business today. The average American, from a young age and into adulthood, can’t escape being battered by messages that reflect a deep hostility to the traditional strive-and-thrive American culture that big businesses, especially, represent.”

https://www.city-journal.org/big-business-tyler-cowen

It has been my thought for some time that the nation’s true troubles began in the late 19th century with massive numbers of immigrants. Especially troublesome were the European radicals who passed through Ellis Island in New York City. Today, those who believe the accuracy of television would also believe all ancestors came into the United States by way of New York City. They do not know of the earlier numbers who arrived in Baltimore, Savannah and New Orleans. Do they believe immigrants on the West Coast also arrived first in New York City and hitched rides west?

The New York entries later achieved influence through writing, publishing, entertainment and politics. In those fields, the relative newcomers were able to push aside traditional American values and American’s themselves, deciding for the rest of us, “Our way is the way America must be.”