SANTA CLARITA, CA - In 1975, as the Hart High Class of 1975 stepped into the world, the country itself was in upheaval. Nixon had resigned the year before in disgrace. The Vietnam draft had ended in 1973, and by April 1975 even draft registration was suspended. The Equal Rights Amendment was at the center of political debate, promising women a new era of equality. We were graduating into a nation already redefining itself.
Fifty years later, we gathered again. At the front of the hall stood a memorial table with twenty photographs, though the truth was harsher. Of our 500 classmates, at least fifty are gone—one in ten erased by cancer, heart disease, drugs, or despair. The glossy pictures reminded me of the newspaper spreads of young Marines killed in combat—faces frozen in vitality, now reduced to symbols of fragility.
The reunion itself was a microcosm of America. About 150 of us, mostly white, married suburbanites in our late sixties, gathered at Hart & Main, a once-industrial space turned mid-century modern event hall. The air conditioning faltered, so fans spun on the tables. The smell of beer from the bar mixed with carne asada from the taco grill. “LGBTQ-friendly” signs around the venue whispered the cultural politics of the present. Looking around, everyone seemed so tall. Or maybe I had shrunk.
From a political scientist’s eye, three great truths stood out: women’s cultural dominance, the collapse of blue-collar whites, and the corrosive impact of affirmative action.
1. Women’s Cultural Dominance
The women—and the room’s only black classmate—organized the reunion. In that moment he was both the token minority and the token man. Their imprint was unmistakable. Hand fans were scattered across tables, a taco bar offered lettuce-heavy plates with nonfat toppings, and a dance floor sat unused. The rooftop bar gathering the night before had replaced the old masculine rituals: no golf outing, no cigar truck, no gleaming vintage cars polished by 68-year-old owners. Instead, the LGBTQ-friendly branding of the venue stood as a quiet emblem of what mattered most now.
This mirrored a national transformation. Women today earn the majority of bachelor’s and graduate degrees and hold most white-collar jobs. They dominate teaching, healthcare, human resources, and household spending, all of which shape culture far more than formal boardroom power. At our reunion, this dominance wasn’t measured in statistics. It was simply the atmosphere: orderly, restrained, designed to please everyone. It showed how far the pendulum had swung from 1975.
2. The Class Divide
The missing faces told another truth. The blue-collar classmates—once destined for factories, garages, or retail—were largely gone. National data confirm it: working-class whites without college degrees have been ravaged by “deaths of despair”—alcohol, opioids, and suicide. Their absence was louder than any speech.
Meanwhile, those who thrived clustered in comfortable security. The teachers, government administrators, and aerospace retirees were easy to spot. They had pensions, second homes, and the assurance of stability. They had been preserved by unions, bureaucracies, and Cold War defense contracts.
One classmate, tooth gaps marking decades of neglect, grinned as if fresh from prison and told me every single friend he’d had in high school was already dead. His confession hung in the air as a verdict on class division.
Charles Murray described this in Coming Apart: the split of white America into two worlds—one stable, professional, educated, and the other sinking into family breakdown and despair. Our reunion was the proof. No drunken antics, no acting out. The addicts and alcoholics had already been buried. The survivors carried themselves with the quiet reserve of people who had endured, but without joy.
3. The Impact of Affirmative Action
The third truth cut deepest. Affirmative action reshaped opportunity—and erased merit. Nationally, surveys show whites increasingly see themselves as disadvantaged; one Harvard Business School study found 11% rated anti-white bias at the highest level, compared with just 2% for anti-black bias. I didn’t need surveys. I lived it.
In high school, I was the prodigy: the highest PSAT score in the school, three track records, the graduation speaker, and a newspaper columnist who learned early how to use words to gain influence—even once trying to use it to get out of a traffic ticket on prom night. (That gambit failed, but it showed how early I was experimenting with power.) I earned a Ph.D. at Cornell. My dissertation later won a national award as the best in my field. Yet the same year I was honored, Williams College stripped me from the tenure track, citing the “low quality” of that very thesis. The real reason was simpler: I was the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong faith.
Meanwhile, the lone doctor at the reunion was Hispanic and on his third wife. That, too, told the story of where opportunity had been redirected. The aerospace and government retirees understood affirmative action well; many had implemented it themselves. They knew the price was borne by the poor but talented kids who should have climbed the ladder. My story was only one among millions.
4. Immigration, Crime, and Declining Results
Hart High itself has become another microcosm. In 1975, our class was overwhelmingly white. Today, the school is nearly two-thirds Hispanic and barely one-quarter white. The results are visible. California’s own data consistently show that white students score far higher than Hispanic students in English and math. If Hart High were still majority white, its test scores would place it among the very best schools in Los Angeles County. Instead, overall averages are dragged downward, not because the teachers suddenly got worse, but because the demographics changed. The academic excellence that once propelled so many of my classmates into STEM careers and aerospace has been diluted.
The same is true for crime. Common sense tells us—and national crime data confirm—that violent crime rates are significantly lower for non-Hispanic whites than for Hispanics. Back when Santa Clarita was overwhelmingly white, crime was so rare we hardly locked our doors, and murder was virtually unheard of. Today, the sheriff’s blotter is busier. Santa Clarita remains safer than Los Angeles as a whole, but it is not the all-white suburb I grew up in. The “deaths of despair” among our white working-class classmates were tragic enough; adding in higher baseline crime from mass immigration has left the community doubly weakened.
Conclusion: Rescued, But Too Late
The night ended as it began, with the memorial table. My classmates remembered me as I had been at 18: funny, compassionate, ambitious, a boy with promise. They weren’t wrong. I had been that young man. But government oppression knocked him down again and again until only the scarred man stood in the room.
And yet, America has finally admitted the truth. The students who died did not live long enough to see Donald Trump and the Supreme Court push back against woke ideology and anti-white reverse discrimination. Their entire lives were lived under a system that denied them fairness. Trump proved there was always a better way. He built his rise on our pain. But for us, the Class of 1975, the rescue came too late.
I listened to their praise of my 18-year-old self with objective distance. It was as if they were describing an idealized boy who was now dead too, lying in spirit alongside the fifty classmates whose photographs glowed on the table.
The Class of 1975 was Santa Clarita’s promise. And we were betrayed.
