I really should have watched “Mad Men” when it first came out on AMC (2007-2015). It is first and foremost an ethics show, and it covers—pretty accurately, I have decided—the two decades I believe are the most important in U.S. cultural history, the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. But the series’ episodes on the Crazy Years, 1967 through 1971, are weirding me out, man.
I had forgotten how many friends and acquaintances I had regarded as smart, stable, well-educated and raised with strong values and common sense suddenly showed up one day with wild hair, in tie-dyed T-shirts and tinted granny glasses, flipping peace signs, getting stoned constantly, talking about “pigs” and “doing your own thing.” It was like a horror movie. On “Mad Men,” one previously sane young woman leaves her husband and child to be permanently drugged out at a commune. Another once normal wife spends too much time in California and starts sleeping around in threesomes. The responsible adult daughter of a single mother turns up one day pregnant by a wandering musician, “out of bread” and dressed like a character in “Hair.” Everyone is chain smoking one substance or another and spouting hippie lingo like an idiot. In real life, I ran into my old high school girl friend three years after graduation and she was hooked up with a pompous Amherst grad Communist, quoting Jane Fonda, and she told me she was pregnant and moving to a cabin in the woods to make rustic furniture. And she did. I hardly recognized her.
Ethics Alarms 
I might say that society is suffering a relapse, that it never truly recovered from the ills of the 60’s and 70’s. Instead, the illness went into remission for a time. But that would start an inquiry into whether the illness of the 60’s and 70’s was itself a relapse of an illness that plagued us a generation prior to that, and so on.
Human civilization as a whole seems to be able to right itself in the very long run. Chock it up to divine providence or just the nature of our species. It’s kind of like how the stock market is farily stable long term.
But…
Those shocks and tremors can be brutal short term. Bad ideas take a long time to play out because many human beings operate ahistorically and have to learn things for themselves. Call it the great woke mind virus or something else.
I think much stems from a misguided sense of compassion. You can show compassion to people who are transgender and still not agree with biological men in women’s sports. You can even be pro trans while doing so. There is a position that advocates for using people’s pronouns (not by force but by politeness) while also acknowledging this giant game of pretend does have limits and deep down acknowledging a trans person is in their own weird category rather than an actual man or woman. You also definitely don’t teach this kind of stuff to kids and NEVER trans any kid. Gender drugs and surgery can be outlawed until 18 or 21.
Same with open borders. If the left really wanted to help the “good immigrant” while also caring about border security, some kind of loose amnesty program for those who haven’t been convicted of any major crimes may be an option WHILE ALSO completely shutting down the open border and only allowing people in who have followed the rules for all future immigrants. That position would show some kind of fair-mindedness to it.
There’s an old theory that civilizations tend to oscillate between hyper conservative and hyper permissiveness. The hyper conservatives can be too harsh so it leads to people wanting to loosen things up. Humans, inevitably, will usually push the rules a little past where they currently are, so loosening continues all the way down into madness. The madness then causes people to be so exhausted that they want strict order. Perhaps we are in the downward madness spiral now and strict order is coming in the future.
Like you said, we are still living with the 60’s. My generation (the millennials) are the part of the reason why all these crazy positions have been mainstreamed. We all went to college and got indoctrinated by a bunch of hippies because we were told college is full of the smartest people and we should all go.
So, the millennial indoctrination and Gen Z apathy also have to play themselves out. We’ll see where that lands us in the long run. I assume it will get worse before it gets better, but I sincerely hope I am wrong. Gen Z has some weird conservative tendencies that could help us right the ship.