Just as the Left tried to promote the Cold War as a contest between two morally matched contenders, it has now turned its energies inward, bringing the same handicapping techniques to the culture wars in order to level the field. And so, The Federalist Papers equals the Seneca Falls Declaration equals Ancient Greece equals Tolmec culture… The rolls are, by now, as familiar as they are endless. In Teenagers: An American History, Grace Palladino trots out a brand-new model of equivalence thinking, where gulag Communism and Western capitalism, Chaucer, and Toni Morrison, customarily hang in the balance, Palladino —coeditor of the Samuel Gompers Papers at the University of Maryland—now weighs successive generations of American teenagers and, miracle of miracles, finds them fighting the same battle.

Teen soldiers—who, apparently, never die, they just turn twenty.

According to Teenagers, the essence of teen life hasn’t changed; rather, the changes in adolescent behavior over the past half-century have occurred because of ever-increasing “alternatives and opportunities.” “In a sense,” Palladino writes, “teenagers in the 1970s had won the battle for freedom that high-school students had been waging since the 1930s.”

This “battle for freedom” is the dubious subject of Teenagers, a continuous struggle waged across the decades by teen soldiers— who, apparently, never die, they just turn twenty. Nameless “critics” serve up such notions as “cultural decline” and “permissive parents” to explain the social disintegration that the book documents almost in spite of itself; but these occasional