ABSTRACT
The American dream offers the promise that each generation will live better than the one before, although ironically that can be a source of conflict between parent and child. The American military, government and media claimed they were protecting South Vietnam from the invading army of North Vietnam. The Vietnam Era cultural and political clash in the United States approached that of Weimar Germany, but it never quite reached that level of intensity, primarily because the country did not collapse. The liberal mainstream establishment included many of the very people who orchestrated the Vietnam War, but they changed their mind when they decided it was not winnable, too costly and no longer in American interests. As in Weimar Germany, the New Left’s rejection of the American militaristic capitalist empire’s wars, economics, politics and environmental negligence was joined by hippies, cosmopolitan bohemians who saw themselves creating a counter-culture.
