The adult world with its fixed truths and serious responsibilities is less present than ever. Rather than imposing the reality that so many had expected, dismissing campus antics with, “just wait till they grow up and get jobs”, that world is a reflection of the same cultural chaos and instability. What is truth, morality, love, family, right and wrong, or even a woman, are up for grabs. And social media has become the battlefield for the endless debates about every element of reality.

The essence of ‘mutantness’ is that change has become its own identity. Radicalism exists for the sake of radicalism. The culture war was always about making leftist politics into the source of identity, but much as in Weimar Germany, this didn’t lead to dominance, just instability. What does perpetual rebellion turn into when there is nothing to rebel against? A broken society eventually slides into communism or fascism just so someone will finally end the chaos.

The ideal recruits for totalitarians are believers who can latch onto any mass movement at the drop of a dime because they desperately need something to believe in to fill the hole within. The leftist culture war has left behind generations of cultural orphans, robbed of faith, family and country, who veer between causes and identities, changing politics, religions and genders with total ease because they want to believe, yet they were born without anything to believe in.

[Greenfield puts the locus of this transformation on social media, but that’s merely its conduit. The true locus is in the educational establishment, both in Academia and in the public-school system whose leaders get created by Academia. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, I think I’d rather trust the education of young Americans to the first 100 names in a Texas phone directory than to the public schools. — Ed]