^^Fuck this guy, in particular
My own interactions with baby boomers have convinced me that they are remarkably incapable of seeing things from other peoples’, especially younger peoples’, perspectives. They tend to look out for themselves and have an instinctive aversion to anything that smacks of collectivism. Given that they’ve dominated American politics for at least the past 50 years, this explains a lot.
A few American baby boomers kept the flame of collectivism and solidarity from the old left alive. These people were, unfortunately, the exception, and are widely regarded by their generational peers as extremists. By the later 20th century most had been totally bought off and, by the 2000s, this cohort went more for the Christian Right than any kind of progressive political project. By then they had consigned younger generations living in the world’s imperial core to a future of religious fanatacism, environmental destruction, and eye-popping levels of inequality.
Generalizing about generations doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially because people are born continuously, not in giant cohorts – most of the time. The boomers were a big exception. There really was a spike in the birth rate in the years after WWII, and this cohort moved through the United States’s body politic like a bolus struggling to be shat out.
They started with promise. The antiwar movement of the 1960s, a mass phenomenon by the decade’s closing years, seemed to signify real empathy for people who their own government was brutalizing overseas. This dwindled pretty quickly, though, after Nixon abolished the draft and started an all-volunteer army in the early 1970s. Was it the war, or the fact that they didn’t want to be in the war, that had kept this thing going so strong?
Protests by college students, in the end, did not stop the war in Vietnam. The real work that stopped the war bore no resemblance to the mythical encounters where hippies called soldiers “baby killers.” It was organizing by a small, committed group of far-left activists who talked to soldiers at off-base cafes and got them to effectively mutiny against their commanding officers, to the point where the war couldn’t be continued without destroying the military as an institution. These are the left-wing extremist boomers that the others shunned, and I’m not talking about silly organizations like the Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army.
The mass student protests stopping the war are a myth – Nixon neutralized the bulk of these by instituting a volunteer army. When their own lives weren’t any longer on the line, the student movement more or less vanished, leaving a committed few on the far left to do the actual work of stopping the war.
This is a generational cohort that had access to incredible resources. The years after the second world war were some of the most materially abundant and least unequal times in American history. Adjusted for inflation, the median cost of a house in 1980 – around the time most were in their 20s and 30s – was about half of what it is today. Public education was free in vast swathes of the country that had well funded state university systems. One out of every five workers was in a union, and income inequality was at an all time low, with the Gini coefficient reaching a nadir of 34.7 in 1980.
That’s all gone for younger generations. Instead of using this basis to create a high standard of living for their descendants, the boomers helped to systematically dismantle the government- and union-provided benefits that had allowed them to prosper.
When this cohort was mostly in their 20s and 30s, they elected Ronald Reagan. Reagan smashed the union movement by breaking the air traffic controllers’ strike early in his presidency. The union movement has never recovered, in 2025 union membership now stands at about half of what it was in 1980, and – you’d never guess – air traffic controllers are now some of the most overworked and under-equipped technical workers in the country, causing a historic rise in air traffic accidents in recent years. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
Social benefits were cut via racist messaging about “welfare queens.” America’s foreign policy consisted of terrorizing South America, with the US funding genocidal death squads there, and mass murder in the Middle East (the start of a trend) where we sold chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein to use on Iranians. Thirty years of needlessly killing Middle Eastern people had begun.
But hey, it felt good. Vietnam was over and it was now “morning in America,” and if that meant kicking the shit out of some pissant countries, so be it. (The song “I love a man in uniform” by gang of Four is a great parody of a similar climate in the UK, when Thatcher needlessly went to war with Argentina for similar reasons.)
From the 1980s on, public education was effectively gutted, with state universities facing cuts and charging higher tuition, and urban, predominately black public schools suffering from increasing disinvestment as white boomers fled the cities. Income inequality jumped during this same period as the union movement declined and more and more manufacturing jobs were automated or outsourced.
A lot of baby boomers, reliving the student movement of their earlier days, protested against these policies quite vigorously. But again, they were in the minority! Their generational peers were “moving on” from the dark times of Vietnam and were telling them to “love it or leave it.”
After the tumultuous years of Reagan, this cohort went for Bush Sr, who won on the strength of a racist television ad against his opponent. Bush proceeded to invade Panama, of all places, and, during the Gulf War, bombed Iraq all the way from a middle-income, educated country back to an impoverished failed state. America had to do this – we still had self-esteem issues after Vietnam!
After the cozy paternalism of Daddy Reagan and Papa Bush, the Boomers got to elect their own president – Bill Clinton! This chubby rapscallion was the first Baby Boomer president. Exciting stuff. Now all of the 1960s talk about their generation self-actualizing and taking hold of their own destiny could come true! The 1980s had seen rising poverty and inequality, the financial industry gutting much of the American economy with corporate raiders and leveraged buyouts, and the chaos US foreign policy was creating south of the Rio Grande.
Clinton’s answer to these problems of the Reagan era, was to do all of it even harder than Reagan and his cronies themselves had. The financial industry was given spectacular deregulatory gifts like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act. Corporate raiders were normalized as private equity, and people were expected to compensate for their falling wages by buying and owning “home equity” that was steadily rising in value – what could go wrong!
Many of the gains of the civil rights movement were undone when rising crime rates were “solved” by way of throwing a massive chunk of the black population in jail. Clinton and Joe Biden saw to that with the infamous Crime Bill, egged on by Hilary’s dire invocations of “superpredators” lurking America’s streets.
Rising wealth inequality was dealt with by shoving welfare moms back into the workforce. Get a job, deadbeat moms! All you do all day is… raise the next generation of human beings. And let’s not forget that it was Clinton who started the border wall and militarization of the US-Mexico border in the 1990s. Who cares that we’re throwing El Salvador and Guatemala into total chaos when we can keep The Illegals out? When Trump talks about building a fortress to keep people out, he’s finishing the work that Bill started.
The creation of a mass disenfranchised migrant population with no recourse to fight against abuse by their bosses, a mass incarcerated chunk of the black population that created superprofits for private prisons, more financial pressure on moms, more free reign for large financial corporations – the Clinton administration was “progressive” in the same way that gangrene “progresses” through an injured person.
Under Clinton, what did we do at our peak as a global power? Foreign-policy wise, the US declared itself the global policeman after the fall of the Soviet Union… and proceeded to do nothing to stop a totally preventable genocide in Rwanda, where nearly a million people were hacked to death by their neighbors. Speaking of the Soviet Union, we sent over economic experts from Harvard who privatized their economy so quickly and recklessly that life expectancy dropped by around seven years in Russia during the 1990s, a demographic disaster that hadn’t been seen there since Hitler’s genocidal invasion. And parenthetically, the US continued to make life miserable for Iraqis, killing hundreds of thousands of children with sanctions. The first baby boomer president was not exactly Giving Peace a Chance.
By the time Bush Jr. rolled around in 2000, this generational cohort had turned solidly conservative. This same group of people that had experienced the Vietnam war eagerly shipped off America’s young men to invade Iraq. Many of them, by now, had joined the Christian right and were inveighing against things like abortion or gay marriage. Things like poverty, war, and climate change were small potatoes when compared to what God wanted.
Speaking of climte change – baby boomers were warned about global warming in the late 1980s and did virtually nothing to stop it, making them not only the most obnoxious generation in recent memory, but quite possibly the most destructive generation in human history. Woodstock NY may have been turned into a cesspool after they were through with it, but that was nothing compared to what they did to the planet’s climate.
During the George HW years, James Hanson testified in widely televised hearings that humans were causing irreversible damage to the earth’s climte. Never before has a group of pepole been warned, explicitly and in detail, in a mass-televised hearing, that they were destroying the planet they were living on. The boomers responded by tuning in to “conservative” commentators who assured them that it was all a hoax. These commentators may have been taking their talking points and funding directly form the oil industry, but no ho ho ho, that was not a scandal. Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph and the University of East Anglia’s hacked emails were the real scandal!
Duality: Bernie Sanders vs. Bob Dylan
Bernie Sanders and Bob Dylan were both born in 1941, and are slightly too old to be considered proper “boomers.” They tell you a lot about boomers, though, because one was a selfish prick through and through and is idolized by boomers, and the other has spent a lifetime immersed in activism and is mostly reviled by them.
Funny enough, it was seeing Timothy Chalamet’s Bob Dylan movie that solidified, for me, the fact that the baby boomers are, as a whole, probably the most odious generation of people in modern history. Dylan had come out of a long line of folk musicians. They had a strong collectivist mentality and supported each other. They were deeply involved in the civil rights struggles of their day, and many had left wing politics going back to the CPUSA and CIO’s glory days of the 1930s, and were consequently dragged in front of McCarthy-era witch trials in the 1950s. This was a thread in American politics and culture that wasn’t mainstream by any means, but it was there nonetheless, and musicians who were part of it were part of something bigger than just their own careers.
Can’t have that! When Dylan “went electric” at the famous folk festival in 1965, he symbolically severed this thread that tied younger people to the old left, the old left that musicians like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie had belonged to. I can’t for the life of me understand why documentaries about the 1960s make this out to be such a bold and adventurous step forward – it’s not like electric guitars were a new, unheard of technology in 1965. This is about as obnoxious as bringing a turntable to a classical music festival and declaring that you were shaking things up for the sake of progress. It was pretty much no more than a dick move, a middle finger to older, more socially aware people with bigger perspectives – the ones who’d been fighting for a more equal society their entire lives. Bob Dylan’s own career and personal gratification were -- of course! -- more important.
Anyway, fuck Bob Dylan specifically.
Boomers on the more liberal side were mobilized for one, final, hurrah in the late 2010s and early 2020s… to shoot down Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for Democratic nominee. Sanders was a political candidate who sought to undo the damage that had been done over the previous 30-40 years, and his candidacy was systematically stomped to death (twice) by these older voters and the Democratic machine they supported.
Bernie was born in 1941, just before the Baby Boom, and was an old-school fighter for civil rights and against America’s foreign wars. Unlike most baby boomers, he kept it up well past the 1960s, working hard to fight for his pet causes and becoming a local politician and mayor of a small city in the 1980s. Bernie instituted a social-democratic compromise between the businessmen and the rest of the people of his city as mayor, and wanted to bring that to the rest of the country by way of single-payer healthcare and legislating the labor movement back into life with stronger union protections.
Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns are when the term “boomer” as a derogatory slur and an online meme really took off. The boomers screeched about this being far-left socialism when it really wasn’t. Socialism is when workers expropriate the capitalists. What Sanders was selling was basically a peaceful compromise between capital and labor, the same kind that existed before Reagan. Being able to afford a home and basic medical care sounded good to younger people, but to the baby boomers who had all of these things as youths, it somehow sounded like instituting Soviet-style Gulags right here in the United States. When Bernie won another victory during teh 2020 primaries and looked like he had a real shot, Chris Matthews reacted by shouting about how Bernie would start to have mass executions of billionaires in central park. This was truly risible, delusional commentary but it worked to scare enough elderly voters.
There are, as I’ve mentioned, many honorable exceptions to this generation’s by and large horrid politics. There are the left-wingers who fought for workers’ rights and the civil rights movements, and warned the weather underground that what they were doing was extremely stupid. There’s David Buckel, a lawyer who, in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, set himself on fire to protest our destruction of the planet via CO2 emissions. There’s honorable mentions in the film industry would include Danny Glover and Oliver Stone, who remained antiwar activists well past the 1960s even as they enjoyed successful careers and could have just rested on their laurels. Amy Goodman started what looked like a quixotic media project deacdes ago, that has brought under-reported and relevant news to people every day for many years. Many still fight the good fight. Those are just the famous ones!
It’s a good thing that their admirable qualities are noticed by younger people, because their deeds so often fall on deaf ears within their own age group, who are now busy posting on Facebook about how the Covid vaccine kills people, or are making sure that the adjuncts at their universities don’t get tenure like they did when they were younger. Can’t have people climbing the same ladder of public health and job security and that you did!
P.S. rap *is* real music, fuck off