As David Frum wrote in his 2000 book How We Got Here
For half a century, Americans have been asked to choose
between two myths about their country's recent past. In one, the
heroes are the parents; in the other, the children. In the parents'
myth, the middle years of this century were a time of peace and
prosperity, the well-deserved reward for enduring the Depression,
defeating the Nazis, and resisting communism. In the children's,
those same years were a dark epoch of of racism, sexism, and
homophobia, when Hollywood liberals flinched every time the doorbell
rang, fearing it was the FBI come to tell them they couldn't write
screenplays any more. In the children's myth, Americans huddled
frozen and miserable (like Pepperland under the dominion of the Blue
Meanies in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine) until the brave, joyous
protesters of the 1960s liberated them. In the parents', a golden age
of patriotism and duty was wrecked by draft-dodging, pot-smoking,
hippie-turned-yuppie lowlifes. It is like the extinction of the
dinosaurs: One minute giants are walking the earth, then
suddenly--CRASH!--a comet smacks the planet and the giants are
replaced overnight by tiny rat-like creatures.
This sums up a classic generational-gap, in which the parents see all that was good about their youth being undermined by all the their children see as being good about their youth.