If there is one thing we know about those 1960s radicals, it is that they were idealists. Maybe they were a bit loopy; maybe they were irresponsible, drug-ingesting hedonists; but at least they were—and, those who are still with us, are—free of that narrow-minded addiction to materialism and middle-class values that have made the United States such a bastion of (horrible thing!) capitalist enterprise.

One of the first bourgeois values that these paragons dispensed with was consistency. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman famously asked in Song of Myself (a title that would work well as a motto for the Sixties generation), “Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” The caring, sharing, unmaterialistic radicals of the 1960s are, to a man, Whitmanesque in their tolerance of contradiction—or, to call it by an older term, hypocrisy. Remembe ...

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