One of the better episodes of Star Trek: Voyager involved the ship's holographic doctor awakening on a distant planet, in a future hundreds of years from when Voyager was supposed to have taken place. The doctor--or to be precise, his holographic transmitter--was an artifact discovered by an alien race who were trying to reconstruct the role that the USS Voyager played in their planet's history. He spent most of the episode telling his hosts how badly they were misrepresenting Voyager's history.

Because liberalism dominated culture--especially pop culture--for the majority of the 20th century, it's interesting to note how key events have been forgotten by reporters, journalists and historians.

Last year, Rod Dreher wrote a superb article on the yin and yang of God and American politics: that even as the press was reporting on "the Religious Right", they completely ignored how the left largely abandoned religion, and became, as Dreher dubbed them, "The Godless Party".

In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg comments on the New York Times' latest discovery: that many young people are now (gasp!) conservatives!

In order to reach that conclusion, Goldberg notes that the Times has forgotten that there have been plenty of young conservatives--and they've been (or at the least became) a pretty diverse bunch:

The fact is there have been several waves of young conservatives between William F. Buckley Jr.'s founding of National Review and today. After all, Mr. B. is 78 years old and he founded the magazine five decades ago. George Will was a whippersnapper when he started writing for NR. Pat Buchanan was a teenager when National Review was founded and Bill Kristol wasn't even born yet (though we all know he was plotting the overthrow of Iraq when he was but a mere twinkle in Irving's eye). And all of those guys are old fogeys compared to most of us at National Review (and The Weekly Standard, and Reason, and even the Wall Street Journal editorial page) these days. Rich Lowry, for example was 31 when he took the helm at NR (though some people believe that he's actually pushing 90 and that old man in the painting in his office isn't Randolph Bourne but actually a Dorian Gray deal). And, more important, there is very little you can determine about the views of, say, Kristol, Will, Krauthammer, Brookhiser, Frum, Barnes, Lowry, Steyn, Bork, Kesler, O'Sullivan, Ponnuru, and/or whoever else belongs in your own personal pantheon of conservative heavyweights, from their dates of birth.

One of the great points that David Frum made in his terrific recent book on the 1970s, How We Got Here is that it was really the seventies that codified much of the stranger elements of today's society, and that the weirdness of the 1960s--the hippies, drugs, pyschedelia, protests, occurred in much smaller numbers than we normally think of, but history remembers those elements as making the sixties...the sixties.

But there was another side of the 1960s as well, which history virtually ignores: the launch of the modern conservative movement. As Jonah writes:

Did you know that conservatives had a "youth movement" all their own in the 1960s? You don't hear too much about it because those who control the commanding heights of the popular culture were involved in the other youth movement. The Left's youth movement, typically, was obsessed with itself. For example, the quintessential statement of the Left's youth movement was the Port Huron Statement. It begins, "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." The authors go on for over 25,000 words, whining about their angst, their worries, their concerns — all of which are rooted less in the merits of their argument and more in the urgency of their feelings. Two years before the Port Huron statement, however, young conservatives gathered to draft the Sharon statement. It begins, "In this time of moral and political crisis, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths." The Sharon Statement, by the way, runs 368 words.

That's something to keep in mind as we all go about vacuuming our fingerprints off in a fit of intellectual thumb-sucking about the "new meaning of conservatism" in the 21st century. A movement dedicated to eternal truths shouldn't stray too far in pursuit of new meanings. The 1960s in many respects represented the failure of conservatism to win in the battle of ideas. And that failure caused conservatives — young and old — to reaffirm their commitments to eternal truths. Surely the successes of conservatism — including the defeat of the Soviet Union — do not give us more license to denounce those eternal truths. Yes, change is inevitable in a free society and conservatism must adapt. But adaptation is a very different thing than reinvention and the young folks bent on reinventing the wheel should understand that if it's not round, it ain't a wheel and if it is round, you haven't really done any reinventing.

For more about the other youth movement in the 1960s, which eventually laid the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution, check out this Nick Gillespie piece on a 1998 book by John A. Andrew III, called The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics.

as John J. Miller noted in National Review:

When Barry Goldwater spoke to the American Political Science Association two months before the 1964 election, he almost didn't have an audience: A University of Chicago professor tried to organize a boycott. It bombed, at least on that day. The doomed Republican drew a crowd and even some applause (from "a distinct minority" of his listeners, wrote a New York Times reporter who was there). Yet the boycott appears to have succeeded in another way: Ever since then, academics have chosen to ignore Goldwater and what he represented. Looking for a book on the New Left in the 1960s? Libraries overflow with volumes celebrating everything from the Stonewall riots to Malcolm X. Want something on modern conservatism during its formative years? Good luck. There isn't much readily available, apart from a few sneering accounts of McCarthyism.

In the historical scholarship of the recent past, conservatism is simply a black hole. This is partly because so few historians are themselves conservative. Many despise conservatism. Just as most biologists don't want to specialize in slime molds, hardly any modern historians want to spend their careers examining a subject they find so distasteful. They would much rather write about the Port Huron Statement, antiwar protesters, or the 1968 Democratic convention-in other words, the interests and activities of the Left. By turning their gaze away from the Right, however, they have succeeded in missing one of the most important developments since the end of World War II: the rise of organized conservatism as a political force in American life.

Hopefully, as the post-bias era continues to take shape, there will be more articles that show the another side of recent history. It may not be as sexy as the Sgt. Pepper-side of the 1960s, but it's equally important to how we got here.