The offspring of my generation (I'm towards the end of the baby boom) and those after have only known the post Reagan world, and that's quite a different world than I grew up in. Reagan ushered in an era of increased use of government propaganda to manufacture consent not only for wars (as was traditional) but for policies that sought to dismantle America as we knew it. He initiated a long range program to restore what his sponsors saw as the rightful balance - one more in line with the gilded age, where wealth and corporations ruled and weren't put upon to share their gains with their workers, or to fund things like welfare state programs. A parallel effort has sought to cement the idea that government can do no good nor serve any useful purpose - very convenient, since government was what had "upset" the desired balance to begin with...
These concepts have permeated our culture completely after 30 plus years of being reinforced and presented unchallenged in the completely co-opted corporate media. One way this has manifested itself, as polls have shown, is in young "liberal" adults having a distrust in government social/welfare programs.
Younger people have also grown up in a world where labor has been under constant attack and benefits are scarce. It's gotten to the point where employers aren't even obliged to provide enough work or pay for people to live on. The days of working one's entire career for a company, maybe one owned locally, with increasing pay, benefits, and a good pension, are a fading memory. Worker pay and benefits have been reduced so the boss can keep more of the money.
This is all a result of government and government policy having been turned against the masses in favor of the wealthy, which was accomplished by massive propaganda being deployed to convince people that these things were good. That having been achieved, the propaganda has now shifted to reinforcing these changes and presenting them as inevitable and normal. Our very culture has been co-opted in this effort.
Nixon's silent majority - the fearful and conservative people who weren't ready for the changes the 60's brought - provided the support, and Reagan, who was able to evoke a time before all that scary change, was the perfect symbol to unite the fearful. Fear of change was enough of a lever to get a majority of Americans to vote in people who sold our country out from under us.
People reaching their 30's in current times have never known anything different. They've spent their entire lives in the "you're on your own" version of America, and their entire adult and political lives in the era of the republican hissy fit, where republicans continue to angrily resist changes long since accepted by everyone else in the world. These "30 somethings" are the people who will increasingly become leaders, and who have the potential to perpetuate Reagan's accomplishments (or not).
Today's young people can't help but reflect the conditions and realities which make up the world they live in, and they don't have the context of anything different to compare to.
One must assume this was the ultimate goal. The VRWC has endured long enough that it will begin to outlive popular memory of what existed before and truly become the new normal. The republican war on progress has been going on for decades now. Is it possible through education to reverse any of these conditions, or will it be necessary to learn all the lessons of the 20th century over again the hard way?