Everyone’s fed up with the baby boomers. Younger progressives charge them with a form of generational hoarding—of titles and power but mostly of money. The richest generation in the history of the world, the story goes, has squandered its wealth on vanity purchases and projects while leaving younger Americans with a debased environment and crazy levels of debt. During the Presidency of Donald Trump—a boomer himself, who drew some of his strongest support from other boomers—the generation’s long-standing optimism seemed plainly misleading. Why did anyone think that things were always bound to turn out all right?
But for bleakness, scope, and entropic finality, the progressive critique of boomers has nothing on the Catholic social-conservative one, which measures the generation’s sins not just in rising debt ratios but also in the corruption of souls. In the view of an increasingly prominent cohort of Catholic intellectuals, Americans have, in the long span of the boomer generation, gone from public-spirited to narcotized, porn-addicted, and profoundly narcissistic, incapable not only of the headline acts of idealism to which boomers once aspired, such as changing the relations between the races or the sexes, but also of the mundane ones, such as raising children with discipline and care. That the arguments over the boomer legacy quickly become fundamental—that they bring up the question of national decline and the fate of liberalism—suggests that the generation has so fully suffused cultural memory that, when we say “boomer,” we might simply mean “American.”
The more nakedly selfish and frankly pornographic American that society came to seem during the Trump years, the more influence accrued to the scolds. Much of this had to do with the singular presence of Ross Douthat, a brilliant Catholic conservative intellectual and the best columnist of the time. But even the optimists were seeking a darker palette, and the Catholic conservatives were there to supply it. In 2018, Barack Obama let it be known on Facebook that he had been reading “Why Liberalism Failed,” by the Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, whose writing is suffused with a thistle-chewing pessimism. The project of liberalizing markets and culture, Deneen argued, had made everyone feel rootless, and was behind the yearning for a strongman that helped give us Trump.
Deneen made a certain amount of sense as a despair thermometer. The latest impressions left by the boomers in that moment suggested that everything had gone terribly wrong: Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, the racism and stupidity of the Trump Administration, and the spectre of the religious grass roots in thrall to a man who had not only allegedly cheated on his wife, with a porn star, shortly after she gave birth but who had also imposed his adult children on the world, most notably a daughter obsessed with the sheen of prosperity and a son who broadcast brutality from a twitching mouth. So much seemed morally repugnant. How had we, as a liberal society, become so fond of corruption—and so gross?
The Catholic intellectual right issued a correction, as quick and snappy as a nun’s rap across the knuckles: you are looking for a different word, they said. Not “gross,” but “decadent.”
In the midst of all this ferment, an editor at First Things had a good idea for a young Catholic conservative writer named Helen Andrews: she should write a book of biographical sketches of significant boomers, and through them define the generation’s responsibility for the decline of liberal culture. In the preface to “Boomers,” the book that this project produced, Andrews writes, “I forgave my editor for elaborating on my suitability for the project by saying, ’You’re like Strachey; you’re an essayist, and you’re mean.’ ”
Andrews’s view is that wealthy boomers have accomplished a kind of bait and switch, promising liberation for everyone but meaningfully delivering it only for the entitled. Women’s liberation may have paid off for the “atypical woman,” who had the means and talent to thrive as an educated professional, she writes, but typical women have been robbed of “the choice that was making most of them happy”: homemaking. (Here she cites Elizabeth Warren’s observation that the entry of women into the workforce en masse bid up the cost of housing and education, until two incomes became necessary to get by.) She also notes that one in five white women is on antidepressants. On the political left, she argues, unionism was deëmphasized, in favor of “boutique interests”—a phrase that makes dismissive reference to a wide array of identity-based liberation movements. She believes the expansion of college education did less than it might have, because universities dispensed with traditional liberal education and built a supercilious, intolerant educated class intent on imposing its values on everyone. Narcotics proliferated, both literal and metaphorical (television). Sardonically, she sums up the boomer legacy: “Drugged up, divorced, ignorant, and indebted, but at least they did it out of idealism.”
This story, at least the way Andrews tells it, is about the establishment of a new aristocracy, and she structures it through six stories of prominent boomers: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. Her view is top-down: these people engineered the boomer revolution, and their mistake was confusing their own wants and desires for universal ones. In particular, Paglia, a feminist and sex theorist, earns Andrews’s intellectual admiration and moral contempt, for defending pornography as virtuous and for telling an interviewer, “One cannot make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography. . . . Michelangelo was a pornographer.” Fine for Michelangelo, and good for the pornographers, Andrews writes, but perhaps not so good for the “men under forty who were developing erectile dysfunction at unprecedented rates from watching too much Pornhub.” Andrews quotes Paglia, who notes that she sometimes sees prostitutes while walking to work. “ ‘Pagan goddess!’ I want to call out as I sidle reverently by.” What a boomer Paglia is, Andrews thinks: “Individual disillusionments pile up, and still her basic optimism is untouched.” Andrews goes on, more judgmental still: “Paglia has dabbled in decadence as if it were a game.”
Andrews sees boomer optimism and self-certainty as sometimes indulgent and sometimes flatly imperial, as in her account of the development economist Jeffrey Sachs. Andrews’s version casts him as an update on an imperial type—crashing about the globe, from Bolivia to Poland to Russia, giving the same bad advice to economic ministers dealing with varied economic and political circumstances, who politely ask him to please take his feet off their tables. It’s a good parable, particularly when Andrews lights on the story of Andrei Shleifer, a more junior economist who worked with Sachs in the mid-nineteen-nineties, as part of a Harvard-affiliated project offering advice to liberalizing economies. Shleifer and his wife turned out to be “investing in Russian companies whose fortunes Shleifer was in a position to determine.” Andrews writes, “Imagine ordinary Russians’ fury, then, when they learned that the Harvard advisers in Moscow were not only arrogant and insensitive but actually corrupt.”
Pretty fun! But also oddly distant. Most of Andrews’s subjects are still alive and very active, as are thousands of interesting people who know them, and yet her endnotes do not mention a single interview with any one of them. Her approach is a sort of caustic pattern recognition from secondary sources, which makes it seem as though these figures are more historical, and their legacies more cleanly settled, than they actually are. Sharpton, Sorkin, Paglia—these aren’t exactly shrinking violets, and their allies and enemies range from comfortable with publicity to microphone-addicted. Why not talk to them? The sharpness sometimes seems like it is there instead of familiarity, rather than because of it. Andrews cites a newspaper article quoting an anonymous appellate clerk about Sotomayor: “Not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench.” (Andrews quotes someone else identifying Thurgood Marshall as intellectually unexceptional. Standards are high!) The anonymous clerk may or may not have been right, but what the meanness misses about Sotomayor is the human part—how she turns ideas into power. How does she occupy a room, and how does she make people feel about themselves? When she compromises, why does she do it?
Because the boomers’ market power has been so real, their cultural power so celebrated, and their political power so doggedly enduring, it can be tempting to see them as a generation detached from history, flying solo. But, whatever it is that Americans now are, we have been becoming it for a long time. The dream of shaping the world to individual desire isn’t new to the boomers—it’s a central theme of “The Great Gatsby.” Nor is faddish religiosity—we started out by burning witches. Trump’s gold-plated penthouses quote the Gilded Age. If we hadn’t always been at least a little bit druggy (and equally sanctimonious about sobriety), we wouldn’t have needed Prohibition. Scan American history and the element that is most unique to the boomers’ experience is their prosperity. By the nineteen-sixties, the standard of living was doubling each generation, a rate that had probably never been reached before, anywhere in the world—and in the United States has not been reached again since. The generational optimism and hope for change may have less to do with anything so nebulous as culture; it may, more simply, be the product of getting suddenly and phenomenally rich.
Andrews reaches the civil-rights movement, in many ways the epicenter of the boomer experience, later in her book, in a chapter on Sharpton. Her view of integration seems to be that it was rushed and hasty, and created a predictable and unnecessary backlash. She is with the teachers whose newly integrated schools had “tenth graders who couldn’t write their own names and sixth graders who couldn’t find Washington on a map.” She wishes that political leaders had “met white parents’ concerns about school discipline with enforcement measures that would have ensured their children could use playgrounds without getting their heads kicked in.” Her portrait of Jesse Jackson, a major figure in this chapter, describes him as holding businesses hostage and using members of the “the South Side’s most notorious gang to intimidate grocery store owners into cooperating with him,” to push for racial change that couldn’t yet be achieved at the ballot box: “Jesse Jackson’s career—indeed, the whole civil rights movement after 1970—has been dedicated to circumventing that democratic system.” In her case study of Chicago, she suggests that the real path to political fulfillment for Black Americans lay through the political machine of William Daley: “The Chicago Freedom Movement has gone down in history as a failure for the civil rights movement, but the real lesson was for the average black citizen of Chicago, Daley’s method of politics simply had more to offer.”
