Boomers Against the World
Some brief thoughts on Boomers, along with two insightful lectures.
These are just some quick thoughts, not an deep dive, on the Boomers, with two different lectures on the subject, one by Dan McCarthy and the other by Christopher Caldwell, that I considered to be very insightful and in my same vein of thinking, at the end.
If there is one thing that the vast majority of people under 45 can agree on (and likely a good number of people older than that) it is a great deal of frustration, oftentimes spilling over into outright animosity, to the Boomers, technically those born between 1946 and 1964, but as the term is used it also encompasses those who are technically older than the Boomers, but still cling on to power.
Of course, I hasten to add, not all Boomers are guilty of the many sins attributed to them (I call those who escape the bad Boomer habits “the righteous among the Boomers”), but as a demographic cohort they are increasingly accused of being completely out of touch with the reality that millions of younger people live every day, and they are also accused, since they have basically been running the show for 30+ years at this point, of all the numerous ills that are afflicting American society, ills that many of said Boomers are either totally or greatly isolated from thanks to their wealth, age, or seniority at work.
To make things worse, many Boomers are not just ignorant of the conditions facing young people, they are actively antagonistic towards them, often accusing them of being lazy, stupid, and entitled. This, understandably, tends to fill younger people with white hot rage who then idly fantasize about the “day of the pillow”, a rather grim imagined day when all the Boomers get smothered to death in their nursing homes by the nurses who can’t speak English that were imported thanks to the Boomer’s mass immigration policies.
One of the most irksome, and either dishonest or truly ignorant, lines that Boomers will pull is to cite Zoomer household income as being higher than it was for their parents at the same age. This is idiotic, because more young people are living with their parents than at anytime since 1940, so of course household income is higher.
Such generational conflict is certainly unhappy, and far removed from the ideal of wise elders passing their accumulated knowledge and wisdom down to the youth. But the Boomers have refused to step aside.
When a generation refuses to retire, or at least transition out of leadership, to the point they appear to be having age-related mental health issues in office (Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden), maintaining office while literally in a nursing home (Kay Granger) and dying in office (Diane Feinstein) they naturally get saddled with the blame for the problems that have accumulated during their decades in power.
This has also meant that younger people, especially from Gen X, were denied chances to gain experience to one day lead in their own right. Many people suspect there won’t ever be a Gen X president.
At the same time, even if Boomers were more willing to hand over power and transition out of leadership, the sad fact is that they are generally completely out of touch with what life is like for younger people, especially those under 35, meaning that their wisdom is frequently out of date and useless. Some of this cluelessness is due to the extremely rapid technological change that has happened in the past 30 years, most notably the internet coupled with the smartphone, which has obliterated the past highly gate-kept system of information dissemination and control. A Boomer getting all their news from Fox News and a Zoomer getting all their news from social media and YouTube/Twitch might as well as be living on separate planets.
This divide is especially true when looking at the job market, where Boomers have no conception at all what an absolute hellscape getting a job has become. And it is also very true for the housing market, where the price of homes, as measured by median income, has increased enormously since the 1980s.
The median age of a home buyer right now is 59, with first time buyers being 40. Contrast this with how things were in the 80s.
Now add in what percentage of 30 year olds are both married and homeowners
On the Boomer’s watch one of the most basic aspects of the American Dream, getting married and owning a home, have become out of reach for vast swathes of young people, even those who did everything “right” in terms of listening to their elders, studying hard, and going to college to get a serious degree.
Now young people with college degrees have higher unemployment than people who didn’t go to college at all.
Boomers are often characterized as being a generation of nihilists who desire to burn everything down before they depart this mortal coil. Only 20 percent expect to leave any inheritance at all to their children, despite owning over half the wealth in the entire country. This is not normal behaviour.
I would add that much of this wealth is in the form of housing, hence why Boomers often oppose new construction. A reduction in housing prices is literally against the Boomer’s economic self-interest, leaving the country stuck at an impasse until the Boomer’s political power has sufficiently waned. And don’t make me laugh at the idea of Boomers making any collective sacrifice on behalf of the nation, it won’t be happening.
But this nihilism is not by any means limited to only godless commie pinko leftists who were blasting their brains with drugs at Woodstock.
I intend to write a longer piece addressing this POV, but AEI recently gave an award to the 92 year old historian Gordon Wood. Wood used the opportunity to declare that America is a creedal nation, which one could interpret in a number of different ways. However, Woods made his position very clear by going on and on about how America does not have an ethnicity, so therefore anyone can be an American.
On the surface this may seem unobjectionable. Many different people from different groups have come to America and integrated. But that is not what Woods means. He does not think that anything like an American people exists. He concludes his piece stating “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
This line is so nihilistic and goes against so much human anthropology that I was literally left fulminating about it for several days and made the mistake of expressing my discontent on Facebook.
My displeasure there caught the eye of a very prominent Boomer in the conservative/libertarian legal movement, who no doubt has done many good things. But his worldview on the subject only plunged me further into despair at the state of Boomer intellectualism. This person declared that “America is an idea, a set of basic ideals” and that anyone who holds these ideals is American. He then went so far as to declare that “There are true Americans who have never been lucky enough to set foot here; there are native-born Americans who have abandoned their American identity.”
This line was lapped up by a number of other Boomers (and younger people who are still operating on the Boomer paradigm, having failed to realize that the world is in the midst of drastic change). However, I do not think people realize what a radical, and dangerous, idea this is. It is nihilistic to the extreme. It is ultimately declaring America to be a revolutionary state that exists outside of history, on par with the Soviet Union and Revolutionary France.
And I can tell you that it is completely rejected by vast swathes of younger Americans, especially those on the right. Can anyone blame them for thinking that greedy Boomers are happy to sell the country down the river and screw them over by importing tens of millions of foreigners, not caring if they integrate or not, in order to keep wages low, while simultaneously limiting the construction of new housing in order to keep property values elevated to the Moon?
And if a Zoomer dares to complain about this state of affairs, well, by-golly-gee they aren’t even a real American, so who cares if they lose their job to a foreigner, who is a much better American than them anyway!
What a convenient system the Boomers have rigged!
The image of Saturn Devouring His Son truly deserves to be the symbol by which the Boomers are remembered, not only for their nihilistic material selfishness, but for their ushering in the abortion slaughter that killed 10s of millions of children in the womb. The Boomers literally slaughtered their younger demographic competitors, killing an estimated 24.5 million Millennials, and another 26 million Zoomers, conveniently allowing them to hold onto power until they keel over on the job.
The above is by no means an in depth look at the Boomer issue, but these thoughts were prompted by two recent lectures that touched on the subject.
The first is an episode of the Modern Age podcast with Dan McCarthy.
Dan makes numerous good points, and avoids becoming a partisan for one side or the other, trying to promote some mutual inter-generational understanding. A key point he touches on are how globalism has totally transformed America and obliterated many of the aspects of American society that Boomers took for granted and created conditions for personal success. He also uses the Mad Max films as an excellent metaphor to address how so many Gen Z feels desperate and insecure, and therefore very uninterested in ideological shibboleths about constitutional governance or liberal norms and niceties (a point I recently also made in my Law & Liberty piece addressing the increasing appreciation of Car Schmitt).
A key point of this insecurity stems, Dan points out, from the fear of the loss of social mobility and that one will be constrained to the perpetual underclass, and effectively a serf for the class of people who have secured assets before the great immobility hit. The advent of AI and the fear that it will leave millions of people as superfluous in the job market only heightens this fear.
I certainly identify with this fear of being relegated to a perpetual underclass, even though I am self-employed and do well enough for myself. The thought of taking out a mortgage on a home fills me with dread at being saddled with debt for at least 15 years, if not 30. Rapidly changing times requires one to be nimble and able to react to the changing circumstances, whereas debt chains one down. I am at the point where I am increasingly considering moving overseas as a “digital nomad” somewhere where the dollar goes very far and one can escape the ever inflating cost of living here (and also far away from America’s demoralizing slow moving collapse and decay).
I suspect that younger people can tell that our institutions are collapsing, and leading to world where the strong will prey upon the weak even more than usual. Even if this does not extend to South Africa levels of dysfunction, we can still expect cronyism and corporatism to get worse and worse, leaving those without government connections more vulnerable and immobile.
Another important point Dan makes is that many Zoomers often look around at the carnage they are living in and ask “what have conservatives conserved?” while the Boomers are flummoxed by this question and think they are sitting high on the field of victory from their younger days. Another clear point of disconnect that seems mostly impossible to surmount.
The other talk was by Christopher Caldwell.
Caldwell also makes a lot of great points, in particular emphasizing that the Boomers have had an immense amount of political power owing to their being a very large demographic block that eclipsed their elders and their immediate successors, Gen X. However, now their power is coming to an end by virtue of them departing this earthly life.
Caldwell points out two major Boomer flubs that blew up the credibility of the Boomers, and our institutions, in the minds of the youth; the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis. Both of these severely undermined the trust that youth have in authority. I would add that the Covid lock-down disaster (of note, Fauci was 79 in 2020, yet another Boomer who won’t leave go of the steering wheel) is also another huge event that will have negative social implications for decades to come. I have observed many times that it is fairly easy to track a young man’s political leanings based on how old he was when the lock-downs happened.
Caldwell also notes the immense generational divide over Israel, saying that while there is much more support for Palestine among the youth, an even bigger amount of young people just don’t really care one way or the other, signaling more and more focus on the deteriorating home front.
Finally, Caldwell’s most intriguing point is his view that the second enough Boomers die off and therefore become politically weak enough, he expects there will be a major revision of the social security system. Thinking about it more, this makes a great deal of sense when one considers the fact that Gen X is smaller than both Millennials and Zoomers, so they will be rather powerless to stop reforms, ranging from benefit cuts to privatization or even abolition. Woe unto Gen X, a perfect example of the strong doing what they will, while the weak do what they must.
I recommend listening to both lectures, as my short summaries don’t do them justice.
I again add that the gripes about Boomers are not true of every Boomer. Neither my parents nor my grandparents are Boomers, but I have a number of Boomer relatives in my extended family and they do not really fit the evil Boomer stereotype at all, for which I am very thankful. I also have a number of Boomer friends who similarly don’t fit the pattern. However, I think it is clear that the larger trend is very real.