The Boomer Tragedy

 I have spent much of my life among liberal Boomers and I still meet with a group of them on zoom once a week.  Some weeks ago, I remarked on a paradox about our generation.  On the one hand, I think that college-educated Boomers got an excellent education, better than any subsequent generation--largely because colleges forced us to learn a lot about a number of different subjects.  But on the other hand, our major institutions, from higher education to the professions to K-12 education to our political system, have deteriorated on our watch, and it looks as if the most important political figure of our generation will be Donald J. Trump.  What went wrong?

Well, to begin with, most of us put the skills we learned in school at the service of our moral imagination.  This is what Prophet generations--the ones born in the aftermath of a great crisis--tend to do.  That began in the Garden of Eden, when God gave Prophets Adam and Eve everything they could possibly want for their happiness but commanded them not to eat the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil.  Naturally they did so.  In the United States, the generation born under our first four presidents, the Transcendental generation, went on crusades for and against slavery, leading to the Civil War.  As I documented in No End Save Victory, the post-Civil War generation focused on creating a more moral order both at home and abroad.  The Boom generation inherited the most abundant and the most just society in human history, in my opinion, and saw the two next-oldest generations successfully struggle against society's biggest flaw, legal segregation.  But the Vietnam War, for most educated Boomers, proved that their elders were hypocrites and criminals.  To some, who eventually dominated academia, it proved that the nation was irretrievably imperialist and exploitative.  And the Boom generation declared war on two other real evils, sexism and homophobia.

What left wing Boomers still prefer to ignore is that the other side of their political fence--led by such Boomers as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist and William Kristol and George W. Bush--also felt that they knew the only path to justice and happiness for all.  In Generations, written in 1991, Strauss and Howe noted tellingly that the only thing liberal and conservative Boomers now agreed upon regarding the Vietnam War was that their elders had mismanaged it, with the former arguing that we had fought on the wrong side and the latter claiming that we had quit when victory was in sight.  The right adopted moral issues such as abortion from American churches, and built much of its electoral coalition around them.  But the right's real religion was the free market--and the left gradually gave up on the modifications to free market ideology that had given us the relatively egalitarian economy of mid-century.

The tragic flaw of Democratic boomers has emerged, I think, in response to Donald Trump.  Since around 1968, they have convinced themselves that their combination of superior intelligence and superior morality simply must prevail.  The Supreme Court flattered that delusion with certain key decisions like Roe v. Wade--a decision written by a justice from the GI generation that has now been overturned in a decision written by a Boomer.  The left has relied on the federal court system both to secure rights and it to stop many things it opposed on environmental and other grounds.  And when Trump won the election of 2016, Democrats began arguing that such a morally and intellectually inadequate man simply did not belong in the White House and threatened basic American values by his very nature.  They expected American voters to agree with them that the threat he posed was more important than any Democratic failure to address their day-to-day concerns.  Most of them have refused to face that about 50 percent of the electorate--less than a plurality in 2016 and 2020, but more in 2024--evidently disagree with them about this. That doesn't mean that they will applaud everything this administration does, but it does mean that they will not reject this administration based on its very nature.

The emphasis on morality also leads to the conclusion that what the Trump administration  is trying to do--such as deporting illegal immigrants and cutting back the size of the federal government--must be stopped by any means necessary.  That was the war cry of anti-Vietnam protesters sixty years ago and that spirit has stayed alive.  That is why some people refuse to consider that taking away individual federal district court judges' ability to stop national policy around the country might in principle be a good idea.  It is also why some people, including some readers of this blog, think that even a post like this one, that tries to see what is happening objectively and dispassionately, is somehow giving aid and comfort to the Trump administration and letting our side down.

This morning's New York Times leads with a piece by Peter Baker arguing that Trump wants to return to an earlier America. The piece uses many standard progressive arguments, repeatedly suggesting that nostalgia for the 1950s is misplaced because it ignores racism, McCarthyism, and sexism--even though the 1950s defeated McCarthy in ways that we have not been able to defeat Trump, and the civil rights movement was nearing its greatest triumphs.  In the second half of the piece, Baker does much better, recognizing that Trump's policies are realizing conservative programs that have grown up over many decades.  He could have gone even further and acknowledged that Trump's hostility towards windmills and energy-saving lightbulbs reflects the views of the fossil fuel industry, whose power Democrats have never been able to curb.  And Democrats might also ponder, I think, that the federal government that they created, which promoted their values and transferred billions of dollars to institutions that reflected their values such as universities, would inevitably sooner or later fall into hostile hands that resented what it did and wanted to cut it back.  For decades before 1941, Professor Roger Merriman of Harvard taught the introductory history course there, emphasizing that periods of growing centralization and authority inevitably gave way to periods of decentralization and chaos.  Our own period of greater political authority appears to have peaked around 1965, and its decline has now accelerated.  New generations, I think, will have to find new ways to make the values that so many of us care about count.  And eventually things will turn back in the other direction again.