The great Walter Russell Mead posted yesterday an atypically predictable essay, one that is Against the Boomers.
In his comments, I insist that the problem is the Liberal-Boomers, not the generation generally. As a society we owe everything to the many sane boomers, and as a conservative intellectual I have to admit they taught me just about everything I know. Mead’s response to this kind of gripe is to say that the Liberal-Boomers are the ones who will define the whole generation for history.
He says other good things, but look, if you want to understand “The Boomers” and what their truly Revolutionary past and their present old-age reckoning mean for the rest of us, you need to start reading my Rock Songbook. Time to toot my own horn here. Mead’s whole Blue Social Model idea is key, but you gotta get out of the budget forecasts from time to time and into the Songs. Now is the time to see what we can learn from them…
If you see that little “Search First Things” space up in the right-top corner, you can enter “Rock Songbook” and all of my twenty-five entries will pop up. For “Boomer-Studies,” the most useful ones are #s 1, 6, 9, 16, 17, 21, and 22. #17 is the pithiest of these. Interested book publishers can find my email address on WLU’s site.
Below, I reproduce the best single passage I’ve written on the subject. Keep in mind it’s coming from an unsuccessful and now-conservative Gen-X guy who in his weaker moments does feel much contempt and resentment towards the Liberal-Boomers:
“But what to do now? To simply direct one’s frustration against the liberal-boomers (and especially if one also brings against them those bitter economic complaints we increasingly hear these days) is a temptation that “I Do My Father’s Drugs” suggests is fruitless and deluding. For there clearly was something about one’s own self that drew one into the (circular) paths they had blazed, into assuming the cultural world and political pattern they built was and would remain the norm. Into taking their “drugs.” After all, they could not really see what we X-ers and Millenials had begun to discern by the 80s, 90s, and 00s, and so how can we, with eyes so many of us deliberately made only half-opened, now demand to punish the hands that fed us the “drugs” we asked for? I suppose lifelong conservatives who never fell for the dream, who never wanted to be like Bono, Dylan, or a 60s protest leader, won’t entirely grasp what I’m talking about here. I salute your good sense if you’re among these, and thank you for your patience, but folks like Joe Pug and I have some Issues rooted in all this, in the “60s” and the whole rock kaboodle, that I suppose we’re going to be trying to untangle our whole lives.”
That’s from Songbook #22, on Joe Pug’s contemporary folk-song “I Do My Father’s Drugs.”
November 14th, 2011 | 5:03 pm
I get the feeling when people talk about “Boomers,” they don’t necessarily mean the phrase’s technical definition, which is people born from 1946-64. By that definition, Obama (born 1961) is a boomer and Bob Dylan (born 1941) is not. I think what people usually mean when they talk about “boomers” are people who turned 20 from the late 50s (e.g. Gary Hart) to the early 70s. But that’s just my impression.
In any event, while the energy of the New Left may have come from people who were in their 20s in the 60s and early 70s, I think the movement took most of its direction from people significantly or even a whole generation older, e.g., McGovern, Chomsky, Ginsburg, Mailer, Leary, the parents of the red diaper babies. Also, the success of the New Left was due to the capitulation of the older generation of liberals – a capitulation indicating that something was wrong with the liberal establishment before the “60s” ever got underway. In general, I would submit that the gap between the Old Left and the New Left is vastly exxagerated. Thus, I agree with Carl that the focus on the “boomer” generation is misplaced. There was all along in American liberalism an underlying weakness, a susceptiblity to authoritarian and antinomian impulses, that surfaced in the 60s. The New Left and counterculture movements in which a distinct minority of the young people of the 60s participated was not really a cause but an effect of that flaw in American liberalism. FWIW
November 15th, 2011 | 9:51 am
Thanks for reminding of the distinction between wise and unwise Boomers. I tend to forget that point, which is a horrible crime in that I too have been taught some of the most important things (insofar as I have understood them) from Boomers.
November 15th, 2011 | 11:21 am
Thanks, John, and djf, you’re right about how to use the term.
Mead’s essay has now attracted 180+ comments, which reflects the fact this topic always hits a nerve these days.
My post actually underplays the raw emotions this topic does stir up in me–I detest the never-ending cultural/economic/political dominance of the liberal-boomers, but I try to rein myself in a bit.
But here’s a comment elicited from Mead’s thread, by “Russ” that captures something of my untutored and unexamined feeling:
“And yes, I’m a fully-adult GenXer who, like so many of my cohort, holds the majority of that generation in utter contempt. We the GenX have a lot of failings …but at least, unlike the Boomers, we have come to the realization that OUR poop does actually stink.”
And here’s the other great comment in that thread, by an only semi-repentant liberal-boomer “Skep41,” one I oppose but cannot resist quoting, so revealing it is of a certain mindset these days:
“So you wait till now to tell me this stuff? Instead of going to the wildest party in human history I could have toiled like a drudge under the cruel lash of my responsibilities? That’s nice. I’m sorry for my generational failings because we did indeed get it completely wrong. In the old societies, whose ethics WRM thinks we should have clung to, your rewards were delivered in middle age after a youth spent in earnest and ultimately successful endeavor. But the Boomers were the first generation to have grown up with the new technology that interlinked everything. Youth dominated age for one short moment. They abandoned a Judeo-Christian paradigm that was completely out of sync with the new technology. There is no way that the ideology of a bunch of nomadic sheepherders makes any sense. Or the ideology of 5th Century monks. What replaces the old world is what happens after the coming crash. Enlightenment, Ingsoc, who knows? The Boomers were the bridge between two different worlds. Also, is it not better to have a cool youth, like we did, and a busted pension-plan then a well-funded old age and a bummed-out youth like the Depression-WW2 generation had?”
Most of the comments there are only average, so don’t waste your time, but you gotta love Skep41 as a perfect specimen of and candid spokesperson for what went wrong, whose bad example should remind us pomocons that “It’s the Culture War, Stupid” and why Jesus and Israel remain such scandals.
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