I don’t recognize the Mayses in Wolfe’s analysis of the 1970s. They might have been New Agers, but they certainly weren’t narcissists; Suzanne spent years playing therapeutic music for people in palliative care[*]. I did, however, recognize a familiar brand of cynicism. Permeating Wolfe’s assessment of the Me Decade is a contempt for utopian thinking of any kind. He makes no distinction between left utopianism and old-fashioned holy rolling—both, in his mind, are expressions of the same self-obsessed irrationalism. In Wolfe’s analysis, class consciousness had become a joke by the 1970s; the New Left always was one. The utopian politics of the previous decade—of the previous century—had just been the comedic setup for the punchline of the New Age. It’s not an uncommon view. From the standpoint of secular liberalism, utopian beliefs—whether in a worker’s paradise or the Kingdom of God—all flow from the same cracked pot. Religion, despite the supposed Great Awakening of the 1970s, has been in steady decline for sixty years. Marxism strikes many Americans as, at best, an embarrassing anachronism, not much different from believing in spirit mediums or psychics. And yet wages are more or less the same as they were in 1978; income inequality is on the rise; young generations enjoy far worse financial prospects than their parents; the list goes on. Most Americans have discarded the idea of paradise, and yet we’ve come no closer to achieving it here on Earth.