It’s common to slap all the blame on Boomers, but it’s not really fair, though they certainly did plenty of harm. (Yes, some Boomers, elites are more to blame, yadda, yadda.)
But it wasn’t just the boomers. The so-called Reagan Republicans included a ton of GI Generation and Silents. The issue is that the people who created the FDR system weren’t GI Gen, they were Lost and Missionary generation. GI Gen and later lived in the economy created by those generations, but they didn’t really understand how and why it worked because they weren’t adults during the 1920s, so they didn’t get what it was reacting against or what it was trying to fix and avoid a recurrence of.
GI Gen and Silent leaders looked at all the rules FDR and co had put in place and they didn’t really understand why they existed: the rules looked stupid, there seemed to be tons of them, and they figured “we’re smarter than they were, we won’t do stupid things and life will be a lot easier with less regulation.”
Well that was the rationalization: the other issue was simple enough. Getting rid of the rules let a lot of people become rich and even the middle class thought they’d benefit (and many did, with rising housing and stock prices and lower taxes.) The rules had, quite explicitly, been intended to make sure there couldn’t be another Gilded Age nor another roaring twenties — no stock bubbles, no super rich.
But, of course, a lot of people, especially with power, wanted to become super-rich, or at least richer and getting rid of the rules that were meant to stop that was a no-brainer. Enough middle class people were convinced to go along, and enough racists also joined in (Reagan and Nixon ran heavily on racism.) So a coalition was created which destroyed what had come before.
This started before Reagan, as someone will chime in to tell us, but Reagan was the formalization, the big break.
It happened because people wanted unearned wealth, and because the old system had broken (oil spikes, end of Bretton Woods, end of gold money, staglfation, and no one knew how to fix it (or no one anyone was willing to listen to) because the architects were all old or dead.)
So when offered “you can get rich or at least affluent without work and stick it to the niggers too” a lot of people took that deal. It wasn’t just the Boomers—Silents and GI were key to it, more key than the Boomers in the early years. It’s just that they’re all dead now so we blame the Boomers. Gen-X was complicit, but were still children when the key changes were made.
Boomers get all the blame, but they didn’t start the fire that burned down the old order, they simply threw fuel on it (Clinton, especially) when they could.
This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.
dsj
The Boomers don’t deserve all of the blame for burning down the old system but I do believe they hold 100% of the blame for political lock that has prevented any alternative new system from being born. They’ll die fighting any true political change even while the last wealth in the system is brazenly looted beyond any laws.
Dan Lynch
Ian said “GI Gen and later lived in the economy created by those generations, but they didn’t really understand how and why it worked because they weren’t adults during the 1920s, so they didn’t get what it was reacting against or what it was trying to fix.”
Exactly! You are describing my dad (b. 1928). By the time dad entered the teenage job market all the prime age men were off to war so there were plenty of jobs. Then he joined the army just in time to qualify for the GI bill and get a free ride through college, but the fighting ended by the time he finished training so he never saw combat. After college, he entered the job market in a boom era when anyone with a college degree was virtually guaranteed a good job. He worked in vital industries that exempted him from being called up to fight in Korea. Toward the end of his career in the Reagan era, as the manufacturing boom was over and offshoring was already underway, dad;s job quality and security did decline, nonetheless he retired with a generous private pension in addition to SS — something hardly any private sector workers enjoy today.
Because of his personal experiences, dad sincerely believed that the Great Depression never really happened, that unemployment was caused by lazy people who would rather be on the dole. He and I discussed this many times over the years and his opinion never wavered.
My economic experience was the opposite — entering the job market in the depths of the Volker recession when even crap jobs were scarce, then later Reaganomics, then the Bush the Elder recession, then the dot com bubble bursting, and then the housing bubble bursting. For me, it’s been a constant struggle with zero economic security, and I totally relate to how cruel capitalism can be, how “success” depends so much on luck, not hard work, and as the saying goes “it’s not what you know it’s who you know.”
Eric Anderson
Here’s the issue as I see it:
The printing press was invented in 1440 and freed humanity from intellectual enslavement.
500 years later #TV was invented and we obligingly refastened shackles.
They won’t come off again until we stop consuming the #billionaire priest’s #propaganda.
You’re right. It’s not per se the boomers. It’s the generations raised on billionaire propaganda spewed at them 24/7/365 from birth. The rise of the screen generations that allowed the one way propaganda to be disseminated.
The rise of the screen generations also marked (i) a downturn in reading, (ii) in critical thinking skills, (iii) in socializing among peers where the face to face information was exchanged.
History will look back on the rise as the screens as the ignominious death of the intellectual freedom born from the invention of the printing press.
It’s billionaire addiction control technologically injected directly to the frontal lobes of democracy.
Plain as the nose on everyone’s faces. Breaking that control means entirely breaking from the elite controlled addiction devices.
It’s no longer about socializing the “means of production.” It’s about socializing the means in information dissemination.
mago
Thank you Ian. I’ve been meaning to address this issue for a while now, but you of course said it better than I ever could.
spud
THANK YOU IAN!!! i first ran into its the boomers fault back in the late 1990’s on alt.politics.economics.
i have studied free trade and the depression, since the mid 1960’s, and knew full well what worked, and what did not work.
so i saw carter, reagan, and especially clinton from many miles away.
clinton was a minority president twice. a majority voted against him. the youth vote put in obama twice, and biden once.
i do not blame the youth however.
today a sizeable chunk of the voting public, now understands voting is worthless.
i blame those who are sick with greed and their enablers.
blaming the boomers is a divide and conquer strategy, that the rich are using to raid and plunder social security and medicare.
bruce wilder
Ever read one of Mario Savio’s speeches, given during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley? Born in 1942.
It is very libertarian rhetoric. Not unlike Milton Friedman’s rhetoric in many ways. Also roughly of that era. It was convincing because it was convenient, not because it was at all realistic, let alone wise.
The thing about libertarian rhetoric that is most seductive is that it flatters the intellect — you understand, you see the problem, the problem can be solved so easily . . .
The real world is usually too complex to fully understand and there are no ideal solutions to be had.
I think Adam Curtis in his HyperNormalization had it right: in the 1970s, in choosing “neoliberalism” as the common ideology of right and left, the body politic of all then living generations were choosing to give up on dealing with reality as it is, in favor of an essentially fake theatre set “reality” to which we inexplicably agree “there is no alternative”.
Bob
I think it’s a conceit that the general public is at all involved in decisions about how things are run and operated. People have been led by propaganda to believe that they have a say. So it’s possible to accuse this or that group of powerless people of being arseholes (am I allowed to say that?).
We’re all just mindless drones (except for me and my smart buddies of course). Even the ruling class have no say in what’s going on. Like, who can imagine the rich sods ever reflect on their roles?
Occasionally some member of the ruling class has a think and even tells some truth but it has no influence, they are powerless as individuals, just like the rest of us.
They should still be dealt with severely, if the chamce should arise, I’m not letting them or us off the hook.
But the system is the god here.
Jan Wiklund
It’s stupid to blame a generation for whatever. They don’t act together, there is always elite and ordinary people in every generation.
The decline can be blamed on the rentier capitalists who took over the power in businesses from the industrialists in the 60s and 70s. It whas they who focused on the quick dollar and were uninterested in long-term investments.
bruce wilder
@Bob: “the system is the god here”
Indeed. I think that’s the essential nature of western politics after the neoliberal dispensation of the 1970s — the world on autopilot.
we know “the system” doesn’t quite work but no one is allowed to do anything about it. that was the essence of Adam Curtis’s film — the political abdication in favor of “the market” or more generally “the system”
I don’t know many rich people anymore and none of the mega-wealthy, but I don’t imagine they have their individual claws on any better levers than a pigeon in a Skinner cage. the system is reinforcing their behaviors mightily, training them how to behave, but not educating them to take responsibility
the screams from the liberals — “that’s not normal!!” — tells you they, too, are on autopilot
Jefferson Hamilton
“It’s stupid to blame a generation for whatever. They don’t act together, there is always elite and ordinary people in every generation.”
I think it’s a bit stupid but only because I don’t think anyone of the judging generations would have done any differently if they’d been born in those shoes. I realized what seems like a long time ago, now, but was surely less than a decade in the past that almost none of the “socialists” then crawling out of the woodwork would have given a tinker’s damn about their supposed principles if they didn’t think they were getting screwed. Maybe the previous generations didn’t “act together,” but they sure as hell didn’t give much of a thought about the consequences of their actions, did they? And almost no one who’s alive today and judging them would have, either. Almost everyone is selfish to the core.
Feral Finster
If only it were so easy. “Boomers” “Illegals” “Woke” “MAGA” or whatever.
Like & Subscribe
I agree, Baby Boomers is way too broad of a category. Plenty of poor people were and are Baby Boomers. They didn’t choose this‚ the poor Baby Boomers, and they certainly didn’t benefit from it and in fact were some of the victims of it. Who directly chose it and benefitted from it? Cui bono? The elite, that’s who.
Let’s determine an economic cutoff where a net worth above a certain amount makes you an elite and below that amount, you’re not an elite. Those who are above the line and thus are elite, well, they’re to blame dead or alive. Those elite who are alive must no longer be alive and those who have died, their remains if they exist should be desecrated in a ceremony to be celebrated every year.
Ian Welsh
No, everyone isn’t selfish to the core. Way too pessimistic. People are good when their groups and leaders encourage it, and bad when they encourage that, with a hard core of people who are good or bad no matter what the circumstances. (That core is may 5% at each end.)
If FDR had been in charge in the 70s would he have done the same thing as these folks did? Of course not. If Hitler had been in charge of America in the 30s, would it have turned out how it did?
People matter, for good or ill.
StewartM
But it wasn’t just the boomers. The so-called Reagan Republicans included a ton of GI Generation and Silents. The issue is that the people who created the FDR system weren’t GI Gen, they were Lost and Missionary generation. GI Gen and later lived in the economy created by those generations, but they didn’t really understand how and why it worked because they weren’t adults during the 1920s, so they didn’t get what it was reacting against or what it was trying to fix and avoid a recurrence of.
I would also add at the of Reagan, the oldest Boomers were maybe mid-30s and the youngest still in high school. What? High schoolers and college students ruined America? In fact, one of the “pulling up the ladder behind us” things that the GIs and Silents, who really DID get all the guv’mint goodies, did was to raise education costs on their own children and grandchildren. University education started costing more in the 1970s and has accelerated since. I saw it, and moreover government assistance programs for students did not rise with costs.
The Cult of Ayn Rand was particularly strong among Silents. Also, the “Archie Bunker” types were generally speaking, Greatest Gens. Their backlash against “liberals” was based almost entirely upon identity and “culture wars” issues, as real wages were peaking at that time. Part of the problem, as Micheal Moore has alluded to, is that US workers (at least unionized ones) were so well-paid and had such good benefits they forgot the struggle their parents and grandparents had to undergo to obtain that pay and those benefits, and started to identify with the rich and not their poorer fellows. I saw all these things and more as they happened while young.
StewartM
Dsj
They’ll die fighting any true political change even while the last wealth in the system is brazenly looted beyond any laws.
Even though more Boomers now are in poverty than any other group?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2025/09/09/seniors-rising-poverty-data-why/86061030007/
Jefferson Hamilton
I said ALMOST everyone. I once believed as you do, that most people are just weathervanes with no animating principles of their own, but I’m no longer so sure. Perhaps you’re right, but that’s not a lot better of a world than the one where most people are selfish, is it. Also, the last time I checked, neither FDR nor Hitler were “generations.” I’m not sure how much people DO matter, really. A little, maybe, but the times they live in matter a lot more.
different clue
If most people are selfish, then the key is to educate and inform those people well enough and in enough detail to where they can practice well informed reality-based selfishness. Some would call it “enlightened self-interest”.
So . . . if the Lower Class Majority were intelligent in their selfishness, they would all try to beat, torture and terrorise the ruling classes into re-designing society to be of general benefit to the lower classes in general.
I think the problem is different. Within America, several tens of millions of people are spiteful, hateful and vicious towards other people in their same social class boat and just want to make those other grouploads of people suffer. Much of the Trump vote was a spitred and hatred vote. ( Spitred is to spite as hatred is to hate. If spitred isn’t a word, it should be).
There is a joke illustrating that principle told in many forms with many characters. I read this particular version in a little speech given by Herman Kahn ( author of Thinking the Unthinkable and other political-analytical thrillers). It was designed to teach about the Revenge Culture to people not-of-that-culture who have a hard time understanding that culture.
Ready? Here’s the joke. One day God decided he wanted to teach Giorgos the Greek about Loving his Neighbor. So He came to earth and made Giorgos the following offer with one condition. God said to Giorgos: ” I will give you anything or even everything in the world which your heart desires. Just know that whatever you wish for, I will give twice as much of it to your neighbor Abdul the Turk.” And without even stopping to think, Giorgos the Greek said: ” Put out one of my eyes.”
Revenge Culture. ” I am your Retribution” motivated tens of millions to vote for Trump. They knew exactly what they were voting for. They were voting to release the Leopards to eat someone ELSE’s face. It is only just, fair and right that the Leopards have circles back and are eating the faces of those who voted to Release the Leopards.
There. See? I can do Revenge Culture too, when it is rightly and justly called for.
mago
Self absorption is an almost universal trait along with nihilism and full immersion in negative emotions.
Antidotes are available in authentic spiritual traditions.
Self help books/podcasts/whatever might point you to the promised land but won’t bring you there.
It’s a long and lonesome journey and you’ve got to take it by yourself.
With a little help from your friends of course.
Dan Kelly
‘US workers (at least unionized ones) were so well-paid and had such good benefits they forgot the struggle their parents and grandparents had to undergo to obtain that pay and those benefits, and started to identify with the rich and not their poorer fellows.’
If they forgot the struggle then the struggle wasn’t ritualized and reinforced enough.
Eric Anderson
Dsj: “Even though more Boomers now are in poverty than any other group?”
This is THE defining result of “the bezzle.”
dara fox
Eric Anderson
there’s a lot of truth to what you say about the advent of screens, and if you’ve never read it (although i presume most people have), amusing ourselves to death by neil postman is great on this, although coming from a different angle than yours.
however, a couple of caveats. whenever a new tech comes along there’s always panic about how it will destroy everything. a lot of elites were sure print would destroy civilization because of the unfettered spread of crazy ideas. to some degree they were right, there was a witch-burning boom in the years afterward. but also because the saturation of a million texts would leave people unable to focus on individual texts, and to hone rational skills. sound familiar? and in the 19th century, the fact that mostly women read novels was seen as confirmation that they were over-emotional and unable to think critically. etc.
secondly, you suggest that a screen-based culture automatically led to oligarchy, but didn’t concrete policy play a role as well? the end of the fairness doctrine in particular led to right wing talk radio and fox, which have had monumental impacts.
i’m a child of print, not tv, so instinctively i agree with your take, but i think it’s good to problematize a bit.
paintedjaguar
I’ve never tried to confirm this as fact, but I do remember reading at the time it happened in 1980, that it was Gen-X voters rather than the older generations, who had actually tipped the election in favor of Reagan. That stuck in my mind because it seemed surprising that a younger cohort would go that way.
Like & Subscribe
paintedjaguar, that is not possible. In 1980 the oldest Gen Xers were 15 years old and in 1984 when Reagan won his 2nd term, the oldest were 19 but most Gen Exers were not old enough to vote. So no, Gen X had no part in tipping the election to Reagan.
Reagan won for a number of reasons, but in large part he won because all of the dirty tricks Nixon trial-ballooned were actually formalized as Ian says and put into practice. See Lee Atwater. Politics was always messy and dirty to an extent, but with the election of Reagan, it became an entirely untamed off-the-hook beast and it’s actually gotten worse with each passing election cycle.
This is why I say, we are well past the point of electoral politics, as we now know it and as it is now practiced, solving this conundrum because it is a large part of the conundrum.
If you could choose one person who must die for these sins, who would it be?
I’ll start. Larry Fink.
Of course, as you must know by now, many more should die for these sins and some of them or all of them are obviously guilty on the face of it meaning no performative tribunal is even necessary, Jan. Stephen Miller, for example. He presents the case against himself every live long day and the list of his crimes against humanity are likened to a scroll at this juncture. No tribunal necessary. He is guilty as charged on the face of it so sentencing is all that is necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60psYSeQoK8
Keith in Modesto
paintedjaguar said thusly,
“I’ve never tried to confirm this as fact, but I do remember reading at the time it happened in 1980, that it was Gen-X voters rather than the older generations, who had actually tipped the election in favor of Reagan.”
If you google Gen X, you’ll find that it’s generally regarded to have started in 1965, so the oldest Gen Xers would have been only 15 when Reagen was first elected in 1980. Even for his re-election in 1984, only those Xers born in 1965 or 1966 could have voted. Blaming Reagan on Gen X is really stretching, to put it mildly.
Like & Subscribe
If they forgot the struggle then the struggle wasn’t ritualized and reinforced enough.
Indeed. Let’s replace the feckless Labor Day with Sacco & Vanzetti Day.
I love me some Zinn. Here is an excellent article. The Elite have been murdering in the cold blood the unwashed seemingly forever but when you suggest the tables should be turned, those who deign to talk for the unwashed tell us that tribunals are a waste of time and effort and all that is needed is to preclude these murderous demons from power as if that is a solution. Donald Trump and Stephan Miller were precluded from power for four years during Biden’s term only to be back in power once the Biden administration and the Dem Party overall abdicated to the Project 2025 cabal.
https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/sacco-and-vanzetti/
Dan Kelly
FDR lied to the people about war. He promised on multiple occasions that he would not send the kids off to war.
Of course, he did leave himself the out of ‘unless we’re attacked’ and that’s where it gets interesting because there is evidence that it was a case of ‘let it happen on purpose’ – LIHOP – in order to bring the country into war.
FDR’s wartime adviser was Bernard Baruch who was also the ‘point’ financier and mover and shaker for Woody Wilson, who I know spud has written was almost as bad as the loathsome Billy Clinton.
They gave old Woody the ‘peace prize’ all the way back in 1919 for ‘his efforts at ending the war’ he himself had started after promising multiplee times- likie FDR – not to go to war.
It’s funny because Tom Lehrer said Kissinger’s peace prize was the end of all satire and apparently Lehrer never performed again after it was given.
But what about Woodrow Wilson Tom!
Anway, Bernard Baruch made a fortune before and during WWI on what I’ve always been led to believe was an exclusively WASPY Wall Street at the time.
He financially mobilized the lead-up to the war and the war itself as chairman of the War Industries Board.
Baruch then made a larger fortune shorting the stock market crash before getting to work once again mobilizing and coordinating for FDR’s war.
I support Social Security and some of the other things FDR did structurally but he did not and should not have to taken the country to war.
—
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc ]
—
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch
‘In the early 1930s, Baruch urged the stockpiling of rubber and tin, which are necessary items for war. Baruch anticipated that the United States would be involved in World War II and constantly urged our government to build up the armed forces.’
‘During the Korean War, Baruch called for an expansion of the Voice of America to counteract the enemy propaganda.’
https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/bernard-baruch
https://anumuseum.org.il/blog/bernard-baruch/
—
Baruch Attacks Britain for Not Admitting Jews to Palestine; Also Blames U.S. Government
https://www.jta.org/archive/baruch-attacks-britain-for-not-admitting-jews-to-palestine-also-blames-u-s-government
Please remember that the Balfour Agreement – which was presented by the UK to ‘Lord Rothschild’ of the same family intimately inviolved with the Epstein network – this agreement said absolutely nothing should be done to disturb the native population of Palestine.
But the Zionists – of which Baruch claims here he wasn’t but his behavior was certainly that of a Zionist – the Zionists, both labor and likud, wanted to create an exclusively Jewish state and so needed lots of Jews.
And the US allowed many many Jewish people in over many waves goiing all the way back to the late 1800’s.
So this is a lie.
Bernard Baruch – prominent adviser to many presidents including FDR and Wilson – Baruch was an integral and powerful individual within the business-war machine who profited off his own promotion of wars and then had the audacity to turn around and publicly assign blame to others for conditions he himnself was intimately involved in creating.
spud
Dan Kelly:
you have to remember, japan coveted siberia long before WWII. in fact they tried in 1920.
so by the 1930’s, japan really had no interest in s.e. asia and the pacific, they wanted siberia and mongolia. but when they lost against Georgy Zhukov, forcing them to head south.
if the soviets had lost, japan would have gained much of siberia and mongolia, it would have kept them very busy. once it was apparent japan was heading south after the defeat, anyone with any sense would have started preparations for the onslaught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_border_conflicts
so the Philippines stood in the way of the oil fields of dutch Indonesia, and british burma.
to neuter the Philippines, meant taking out Hawaii.
Carborundum
I would agree that this isn’t as simple as the Boomers being solely responsible for Reagan. The seeds were sown by some very diligent and extended political and ideational work over the prior two decades (if not longer).
The thing that I find really striking about Boomer support for Reagan is the change between elections. Boomers broke against Reagan I reasonably strongly, but they were about baseline for Reagan II, with younger demos breaking slightly for Reagan. The “Reagan movement” did a terrific job of creating and selling a political identity – probably the most substantive thing they did. That shifting of perspectives most strongly seen within the Boomer demographic drives and helps justify the narrative.
Regarding Gen X, the original boundaries for the generation were a bit earlier than came to be generally accepted. However, this would be mainly relevant for Reagan II, not Reagan I.
different clue
And even after the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the US declared war on the Empire of Japan, Congress declined to declare war on Nazi Germany at that moment.
Hitler declared war on America out of sympathy and support for his Ally Japan. Then the US declared war on Germany. If Hitler had not declared war on America out of sympathy and support for Japan, would the US Congress have ever declared war on Germany?
An interesting counter-factual to ponder.
Dan Kelly
spud,
And the Zionist connection here – there always seems to be one, no? – the immediate Zionist connection is Jacob Schiff who financed Japan’s imperialism.
You don’t even have to go to an unz.com to read about this, rather it’s on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff
Jacob Schiff and Bernard Baruch were close personal friends and Schiff was also a major funder of Woodrow Wilson.
We are getting into that ‘conspiratorial’ territory here, no?
Woodrow Wilson sent people to die on behalf of his financiers in a theater that was actively promoted before, during and after as ‘World War I’ – a monstrosity so horrific it led the most highest decorated US marine of the time to write a book entitled ‘War is a Racket’ which describes how the sick game works.
Stepehn Kinzer tells the same story.
Neither Kinzer nor Butler mention Zionism unfortunately.
—
‘The following complimentary notice of Mr. Bernard Baruch, who is now spending some time at Hobcaw, on Waccamaw, his winter home, is taken from a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal: “There are two happy men in Wall Street over President Wilson’s present prospects for a second term. These are Jacob Schiff and Bernard Baruch, warm personal friends and active supporters of President Wilson. Both men stand for honor above wealth.’
https://www.postandcourier.com/georgetown/community/view-from-the-past/article_101955e6-19ea-5b85-83fd-dfdae648a8b1.html
‘Both men stand for honor above wealth.’
LMAO.
These are the men Wilson and everyone’s beloved FDR were listening to. These are the most prominent, integral people within the ‘inner circle’ all these psychos inhabit.
https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/MC006_c05803
https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/collection/data/879214776