All I have to say is...baby boomers. while you served, they sowed. You came back to the land and are reaping the harvest. It is a shallow and weeded harvest.
Boomers are the generation that slowed the left, and started the country swinging back to the right.
The boomers came out of the chute voting Republican, and they helped bring to a halt most of the worst of the radicalism of 1935 to 1975, by the late 1980s to 1990s as the boomers started gaining power, it was clear that conservatives finally had something of a voice again in America.
Today as boomers range from a young leader's age of 46 to a powerful leader's age of 64 we have a much more powerful and effective, conservative movement than we did in the 1950s and 1960s.