EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” (...)
I’ve been fascinated by the fight over the baby boomers. You maybe remember OK, boomer, this dismissal of boomer politics that got popular on the internet for a minute and drove boomers totally crazy. That came, of course, during Donald Trump’s presidency. And it reflected frustration in having our fourth boomer president.
And then it’s not like there was — well, there was a bit of a generational handover, actually. Joe Biden — he’s not a boomer. He’s born a few years before the boomers. But I don’t think that’s the kind of generational handover a lot of young people were looking for, which I think gets to the point of this generational frustration. There is a sense — and not just a sense, a reality — that America’s elder generations have kept a hammerlock on power. (...)
But one thing about it is, it’s not just one critique of the boomers. There’s a left critique that’s more about economics and power, and then a right critique that, at least usually, is more about cultural libertinism and individualism and institutional decay. So I wanted to put these critiques together to see if they added up to something coherent. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of carping millennials. And I say that as an often carping millennial.
Jill Filipovic is a writer, commentator, a lawyer, and she’s the author of the book “OK, Boomer, Let’s Talk How My Generation Got Left Behind,” which is a very nice encapsulation of the economic case for millennial rage. Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of “Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” which is a pretty searing critique from the right. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here we go.
So welcome, both of you, to the show. Helen, I want to begin with you. Why is generational analysis valuable? I mean, we’re dealing with pretty arbitrary time periods. Generations, they contain multitudes. So why are boomers or any other age cohort a useful descriptive category for understanding American society?
HELEN ANDREWS: The clue that first got me thinking that the boomers might be worth analyzing as a generation rather than through historical events that they happened to be around for was that the 1960s was a global phenomenon. A lot of people attribute ’60s protests in the United States to the various issues that they centered around, things like the anti-war movement. But you saw the same kinds of student protests in countries that didn’t have a draft or in countries where they had completely different records in World War II. And the parent-child dynamic was just totally alien to what it was in the United States.
So that got me thinking that the ’60s might have been a product just of the youth generation having such demographic heft, there being just so many more young people around. And that was the reason the ’60s protests took the form they did and were so universal across the civilized world. And then I started following the boomers through their political career. And you saw the same kinds of coincidences across the globe as they came into power in the 1990s. You saw neoliberal triangulators, who were trying to reconcile the left and capitalism, and the same types of leaders like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in different places.
So any phenomenon that is happening in countries that have very different histories and issues sets, but similar demographic bulges, I thought was an indication that generations were worth looking at as generations.
EZRA KLEIN: So I can buy that. So then, Jill, let’s say I’m a boomer who thinks my generation wasn’t really that bad. And I’m tired of everybody yelling at me. I mean, sure, every generation, we make a few mistakes. But ultimately, we boomers, we left the world better than we found it. And the problem is that millennials are just particularly self-pitying, and they just want to blame the fact that life is hard on everyone else. Convince me I’m wrong.
JILL FILIPOVIC: Well, that’s pretty much the same thing that people said about the boomers when they were young, right? There is a whole book written about them called “The Culture of Narcissism.” If you read Helen’s book, it certainly draws on a lot of the descriptions of boomers when they were young people. I think one thing that’s very poorly understood about the boomer generation — and perhaps this is me being slightly defensive of them — is that they’re an incredibly politically polarized generation.
So boomers, much more so than millennials, much more so than the silent generation, more so even than Gen Xers, are really split politically down the middle between liberals and conservatives. And I think what we’ve actually seen and what I hear, especially from liberal boomers, is the sense of, well, wait a minute. We were trying to make the world a better place. And then there were political forces who we didn’t vote for who may have been part of our cohort, who now you’re using to blame our entire generation.
There’s some fairness to that defensiveness. That said, I would say, liberal boomers kind of won the culture. Conservative and more moderate boomers won American politics. And so the generation wide legacy, yes, does have some positives. But overwhelmingly, we’re now living on a planet that’s flooding and burning. So I think it’s a little hard to say that boomers left it better than they found it.
EZRA KLEIN: On the flooding and burning point — and I guess I’ll send this one to Helen, but it’s really for both — one thing I thought about, reading both of your books, is how much the boomers are actually a stand-in for technological change, some of which they generate and some of which they didn’t. I mean, the planet is burning. But the driving of fossil fuels as the way you power economies, I mean, that predates the boomers. And then, obviously, it grows during their heyday.
But a lot of the things that I think they get tagged for come from scientific advances that they weren’t even the ones to necessarily create. I mean, a lot of the sexual politics changes come from the pill. A lot of — and this is a theme of your book, Helen — a lot of social changes come from television. I mean, how much are boomers, Helen, simply the generation that happened to be largest and then in power when a lot of the electricity revolutions innovations came into full flower?
HELEN ANDREWS: I don’t think you can blame technology for the way the world is today and the wreckage that the boomers left us. For example, when we talk about the world today being a lot tougher for millennials than it was for the boomers, one of the things we’re talking about is the loss of power on the part of the working class. Their wages are not growing the way that they used to in the days of the boomers. A one-income family can’t make it the way that they could in the time of the boomers.
Some of that is attributable to technology, but a lot of that is due to changes in what the boomers did to the left. That is, the boomers were the generation of the new left. And the reason they called themselves that is because they were rebelling against the old left. They deliberately wanted the left-wing party in the western democracies not to stand for working class people and unions, but rather to stand for identity politics type interests. The hinge moment in America for that is the reforms to the Democratic National Convention in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.
The way that delegates were chosen was then tilted toward or to favor identity politics. So the boomers made a choice to have their left-wing party champion identity politics, rather than working class people and unions. And so that’s the reason why the working class was then so vulnerable to these technological changes. The technological changes would have happened either way. But I think they would have had better defenders in the left-wing parties if the boomers hadn’t replaced the old left with their new left.
EZRA KLEIN: Is this what you think they did wrong? I mean, my understanding of your take on the boomers is that they unleashed a kind of cultural reckoning on America. And you do talk about the new left questions in the book, but you’re a Trump supporter. He’s not a huge fan of unions himself. Or is it your view that we should go back to a much stronger union and redistribution style politics? Is that the politics you want to see return?
HELEN ANDREWS: No, I would like to see the Republicans become the working class party of the future. Because I don’t think the Democratic Party as currently constituted is going to turn around and start championing their interests. And so I think there’s room for Republicans to be a little bit nicer to labor and to unions as a part of that realignment.
But realistically, Republicans protecting working class interests may have a different issue set than it did when the old left was championing unions in the 1940s and ’50s. It may look like having different positions on things like trade and immigration, which are actually areas where Trump and the working class were quite together.
EZRA KLEIN: Jill, give me your economic critique of the boomer legacy.
JILL FILIPOVIC: Yeah, so it’s interesting hearing what Helen says because it just strikes me as entirely ahistorical and the kind of polar opposite conclusion that I came to in researching my book. If you look at the political decisions that were made that really did gut the American middle class and working class, yes, Democrats are certainly not innocent parties here. But many of those decisions and many of those huge changes came about when boomers field the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and then again in 1984.
So you had Reagan who came in, increased tax havens for corporations, refused to increase the federal minimum wage, which we’re still arguing about, which has certainly damaged working class earning power, gutted union power and union membership. When you look at the ways in which the American economic landscape has changed, comparing boomers to millennials, one of the biggest differences is that when boomers were young, they saw their future as invested in.
So, when boomers were young adults, the federal government was spending $3 in investments into the future, things like infrastructure, education, research for every dollar it spent on entitlements. Now that’s flipped. So the federal government is spending $3, and as soon as boomers all are retired, that number will have ticked up to closer to $5 for every dollar it spends on future investments. So as boomers have gone through the course of their lives, they’ve seen the government work for them. Millennials really haven’t. We’ve been the ones stuck footing the bill.
And when it comes to this gap between the middle class and the working class and the degree to which working class earnings have really seen the bottom fall out, which is what’s happened over the past several decades, that’s been a pretty direct result of a systemic dismantlement of the kind of L.B.J. Great Society policies, of F.D.R.’s social welfare policies, of strong protections for unions. I mean, a tax on union memberships and right to work laws are not Democratic inventions. Those were coming from Republicans, and often boomer Republicans.
So, from my view, it really is this shift to conservatism among baby boomers, and sort of Reagan conservatism in particular, that was then bolstered by this kind of ’90s Clinton era centrist Democratic Party that really saw it, I think, to compete on the cultural issues that Republicans made salient and did kind of cede ground on a lot of the most important economic issues that Americans needed to thrive.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times (Transcript - Ezra Klein Show Podcast) | Read more:
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