This is John Batchel, a conversation with Professor Stephen Hayward of Pepperdine University, writing for Civitas Outlook, about the end of apocalyptic environmentalism.

Apocalyptic world is going to die if we don't get organized and stop with the fossil fuels.

That also speaks to a larger story of the

discouragement that the liberal elite in this country experienced in the 1960s. Where did

liberalism become gloomy? Limits must be enforced. There's only so much. And we're poisoning the air. Where did that

gloomy moment come from? Stephen identifies it very carefully in the 60s. Here's Stephen.

There are positives here. There are positives coming out right now in the 21st century.

But here is Stephen's identification of where the gloom started, from the sunniness of Jack Kennedy's election to the gloom of the

1970s. More of this tonight.

Right. Well, I think it, I mean, the 60s was a decade when everything went wrong against

expectation of liberals, right? They started the decade thinking we had a bright, promising

future. And by the end of the 60s, an awful lot of leading liberals were, the discouraged would be,

to put it mildly. A lot of them were saying they were now ashamed. A couple of them said, a leading

liberals would say, of what had happened to the country and of what they had once believed,

and they were rethinking their views. So, you know, just to pick a few examples, the Democratic Party

had been internationalist, strongly anti-communist, and, you know, the Vietnam War, which was the Liberals War, remember,

had gone so badly that they became an anti-war party, reflexively so, much less anti-communist

than they had been in the past. And then social policy was a disaster. So civil rights,

long overdue, trying to do something for the cities, a good idea.

But they all backfired.

The problems of poverty got worse.

We had wave after wave of riots in the cities.

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