Sixty years ago, rebellion meant growing your hair long, smoking a joint, and screaming "Make love, not war" while the Beatles got banned in Bible Belt high schools for daring to let their bangs touch their collars.
Today, the most rebellious thing a 22-year-old can do is cut his hair short, put on a suit, kneel at a Latin Mass, marry his college sweetheart at 24, and start having babies before 30.
The counterculture has been eaten by its own success. The revolution won so completely that nose tusks, face tattoos, and pronoun announcements are now as shocking as a beige cardigan. You can't épater la bourgeoisie when the bourgeoisie itself has rainbow hair and a "he/they" badge on their Starbucks apron. The only way left to scandalise the machine is to opt out of the entire degenerative script and choose… order. Discipline. Faith. Family. Sobriety. Monogamy.
In other words: the new punk is trad.
Look at the numbers and you'll see the pendulum isn't just swinging; it's whipping back with centrifugal force.
Gen Z drinks 20–30% less alcohol than Millennials did at the same age.
Marijuana use is flat or declining among teens for the first time in decades.
The share of high-school seniors who have never had sex is the highest since the survey began in the 1970s.
The explosive growth of "detransition" stories and the sudden collapse in youth identifying as trans (down over 30% in some liberal European countries once clinics stopped auto-affirming) shows even the gender frontier is being quietly abandoned by the young.
Church attendance among under-30s is still low overall, but the growth segment is explosive: traditionalist Catholic parishes and serious Reformed/Evangelical churches are packed with 20-somethings while the rainbow-flag mainline congregations look like geriatric wards.
Walk into a Novus Ordo English Mass on Sunday and you'll see twelve gray heads and a guitarist murdering "Gather Us In." Walk into a Traditional Latin Mass twenty minutes later and you'll trip over baby strollers, toddlers in smocked dresses, and young dads in suits who actually know how to genuflect. The average age drops thirty years in the space of one parking lot. These aren't boomer nostalgists; these are Zoomers who have never known a world without TikTok choosing Gregorian chant over whatever algorithmic slop the culture is pushing this week.
Why? Because the old rebellion became the new conformity. When every HR department celebrates "queer polyamory," being a queer polyamorist is about as subversive as owning an iPhone. When the CIA recruitment ads feature pronouns and the U.S. Army marches in red high heels for Pride, "sticking it to the Man" no longer means burning your draft card; it means refusing to burn your life down on the altar of instant gratification.
The new radicals figured something out: real rebellion today isn't self-destruction disguised as liberation. It's self-mastery disguised as square.
It's cheaper, too. A chest piece of tattoos that says "NO REGERTS" costs four grand and looks like a melted Sharpie by 40. A well-fitted suit costs three hundred bucks and still looks sharp at your daughter's wedding. Laser removal hurts worse than the original ink, and nobody wants your infected septum piercing when you're applying for a mortgage, and Ozempic can't fix the soul rot that comes from a decade of hook-up apps and OnlyFans.
So the kids are logging off, sobering up, pairing off, and showing up. They're reading Augustine instead of Andrew Tate, Aquinas instead of AOC. They're learning dead languages, deadlifting heavy, and (most shocking of all) getting married while they still have functioning reproductive systems. They're having four, five, six kids and homeschooling them because they looked at public school and said, "Hard pass."
The culture calls it "far-Right." The kids call it sanity.
And nothing terrifies the aging apostles of 1968 more than a 24-year-old who prays the Rosary on his knees, refuses to cohabitate before marriage, and can quote Chesterton better than they can quote Chomsky. Spit on him in the street and he'll smile and offer a "God bless you." That's the ultimate punk-rock move now: radical charity in a civilisation that runs on rage clicks.
This isn't a nostalgia trip. It's a jailbreak.
The old guard still controls the institutions, the HR departments, the universities, the legacy media. But the kids have the numbers, the future, and increasingly, the fertility. Every bassinet in a Latin Mass parish is a wave goodbye to the entire post-1965 settlement.
The Summer of Love is over. The Winter of Disenchantment has begun. And spring belongs to those who refused to swallow the poison.
Call it the Great Awokening: waking up from woke.
The new drop-outs aren't tuning in and turning on. They're logging off, kneeling down, and building civilisations that might actually last.
And the old hippies? They're the ones clutching their pearls now.
Turn on, tune in, drop out? No. Wake up, clean up, stand up.
That's the new counterculture. And it's winning.
https://johnklar.substack.com/p/tradical-radicalism-conservatism