The hard-won proto-woke triumphs of that era look a little more complicated now. The Beastie Boys, when they weren’t fighting for the rights of rich kids from New York private schools to party, were celebrated for ending the rocker tendencies of white suburban youth and opening the door for them to discover Public Enemy and Queen Latifah .

Leaving aside the 2019 questions of cultural appropriation, even the Beasties have to admit that a lot of their beer-swilling party-boy fans were “probably not that far off from Brett Kavanaugh,” as Michael Diamond ( b. 1965 ), or Mike D, told Vice in a video published last year.

It’s a messy question. No matter. We’re used to them. We were born into Vietnam and Watergate and at a time when, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx was burning. We came of age in a decade ravaged by AIDS and crack. Ideologues find that sort of stuff crushing. Survivors, on the other hand, survive.

Maybe this is why, in a country cleaved between blue and red, we tend to shade purple, opting for pragmatism over ideology. On several hot-button issues — immigration, same-sex marriage, government spending — we tend to split the difference between the more conservative boomers and the more liberal millennials, according to Pew.

We are the original “socially liberal, economically conservative” generation, David Rosen, a consultant who focuses on the psychology of politics, recently wrote in Politico Magazine — we were happy to believe that the problems are bad, but their causes are very, very good, as the joke goes. This scrappy, if self-defeating, independent streak, he suggested, was a consequence of our under-parenting. “If you wanted lunch and Mom and Dad weren’t around, all the moral values in the world wouldn’t add up to a grilled cheese sandwich,” Mr. Rosen wrote.

You could take all of that as a negative — once again, here we are in the wrong place at the wrong time, right the middle — displaying centrist tendencies in a political climate that celebrates the extremes.