New Article: Helen Andrews’ Millennial Attack on the “Boomers”: Another Low in Conservative Thought
David Shasha
Helen Andrews’ Millennial Attack on the “Boomers”: Another Low in Conservative Thought
I recently wrote an article on the C-Span Book TV broadcast of a Manhattan Institute program featuring the Black Neo-Cons John McWhorter and Jason Riley:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ocCkHawJzrY
Their very comfortable back and forth dealt derisively with Critical Race Theory, allowing us to see how reactionaries in the African-American community have been dealing with the onslaught of Anti-Racism advocacy that has permeated the corporate world under the influence – and marketing strategies – of people like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Crucial to Riley and McWhorter’s attack was a restatement of the standard – and stale –reactionary rhetoric of other Black Neo-Con figures such as Shelby Steele and Ward Connerly in the toxic tradition of Booker T. Washington now filtered through the abhorrent Clarence Thomas.
I noted in my article that the program was taped a couple of weeks before the Lysol Capitol Insurrection.
C-Span has just broadcast another Neo-Con program, this one featuring up-and-coming Right Wingers Michael Dougherty and Helen Andrews, speaking under the banner of the American Enterprise Institute, inveighing against the Baby Boomer generation:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?508047-1/boomers
The event took place a week after the Insurrection.
Ms. Andrews, senior editor of The American Conservative, has just published a book called Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, which was recently discussed in a New Yorker article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-conservative-case-against-the-boomers
The complete article follows this note.
Before reading the New Yorker article I had never heard of Andrews or her book, and was immediately struck by the overly respectful way in which Wallace-Wells dealt with our friend Ross Douthat and his Catholic reactionary pal Patrick Deneen:
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.
I am not sure how Douthat is “brilliant,” or if he is really the “best columnist of the time,” but it is clear enough that he has boldly pressed his Ivy League elitist bona fides into a Conservative powerbase brand that includes The New York Times Op-Ed page, as well as a side gig reviewing Poptrash culture and blockbuster movies for National Review:
https://www.nationalreview.com/author/ross-douthat/
Andrews’ CV has been even more loaded, as she has compiled a whole mess of articles for publications ranging from the NYT to The Wall Street Journal, all the way into deep Right Wing territory at The Washington Examiner, Claremont Review of Books, First Things, the now-defunct Weekly Standard, and of course NR.
https://herandrews.com/writing-reviews/
There does not seem to be any Lincoln Project in her.
She took on Coates for The Russell Kirk Center:
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-heritage-of-ta-nehisi-coates/
Defended France’s Algerian adventure in The Claremont Review of Books:
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/lessons-of-algeria/
And, like so many Millennials, she enthusiastically praised “Black Panther.” She called it a “fun movie” which avoids “white oppression.”
The article appeared in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/african-fantastic-15730.html
We will of course recall that Tikvah Tablet radical Liel Leibovitz went the same Neo-Con way:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/black-panther-is-a-great-zionist-movie
He was so inspired by Stan Lee’s Zionist Separatism, that he went out and wrote a biography of him:
https://www.jewishlives.org/books/stanlee
I love the way that Andrews ends her review of the movie:
Still, for all that, if you see Black Panther, you will probably enjoy it. If you have seen it, and you did enjoy it, then my exhortation is: don’t let anyone tell you that it’s overrated or that you only liked it out of political correctness. Aside from the hype that has attended the movie’s release, its representation of an alternate history of Africa is intriguing and enjoyable. There is a reason that the continent has exercised a powerful fascination on so many people from the moment they catch their first glimpse of it: Africa is amazing. Western liberals insist that the most interesting struggles in Africa have been born from the issue of race, but that leaves no room for stories like the tragedy of Shaka Zulu, the martyrdom of St. Charles Lwanga, or the plays of Wole Soyinka. Black Panther belongs in this class—an African story about something more interesting than white oppression—and that alone makes it hard to begrudge the movie its hype.
It thus makes perfect sense that she would praise Red Channels and Joe McCarthy in the face of the Me Too movement:
https://herandrews.com/2019/02/26/metoo-vs-mccarthyism/
It is good to know that the men behind Red Channels “respected fairness and due process.”
It is so very reassuring!
She also chose to deify Phyllis Schlafly in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/conservative-women.html
In her new book attacking the Boomers she does not display much intellectual heft, preferring instead to go for a breezy tone when dealing with iconic targets like Aaron Sorkin, Rev. Al Sharpton, Camille Paglia, Jeffrey Sachs, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Steve Jobs:
https://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Promised-Freedom-Delivered-Disaster/dp/0593086759#reader_0593086759
Her conversation with AEI’s Dougherty presented us with some real head scratchers.
She began the program with a recitation of three basic propositions that characterize her understanding of the Millennial case against the Boomers: the issue of Economics, the breakdown of the Family, and the scourge of Drugs.
It is interesting that she chose to leave out what is perhaps the most pressing issue these days: Education.
I addressed the vexing issue in my article on Diane Ravitch’s attack on Progressive Education in her 2000 book Left Back:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5nq6euk-KpK4V_mudVJjg_V21rm5VALNRL_eYtcKCQ/edit
It is likely that Andrews sidestepped the Education issue because of how her beloved Conservative school movement, recently under the black thumb of the corrupt Trumpist Betsy DeVos, has eviscerated public education and sought to promote a stratified, privatized system in the vaunted Neo-Con way:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/betsy-devos-trump-republicans-education-secretary
In the larger sense, the Education problem is part of a much more general attack on government and its institutions since the benighted age of Reagan:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/15/education/is-public-education-a-casualty-of-reaganomics.html
Young people today are dumber than they ever were, but this does not seem to be a problem for Conservatives, who continue to berate the value of a college education, as their market-driven privatization mandate is forcing costs to go through the roof:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/get-out
It is therefore quite interesting to note that a central tenet of Andrews’ attack on the Boomers has to do with their purported dismantling of American institutions.
In this sense, it is curious that she chose to mention Tom Hayden and the SDS Port Huron Statement during the course of her many diatribes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement
Hayden, like his fellow New Left radical Angela Davis, is a particularly bad example of an anti-institutionalist, because he eventually embraced electoral politics and ran for public office:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hayden#Career_in_electoral_politics
Indeed, after her acquittal in the Soledad Brothers affair, Davis found herself moving into academia and a life of writing and peaceful, if still radical, activism, rather than illegal Separatist violence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis#Later_academic_career
Would that John Lennon could have seen it!
https://www.popmatters.com/john-lennon-2496108495.html?rebelltitem=4#rebelltitem4
It is unclear to me why Andrews did not speak of Abbie Hoffman and his YIPPIE Party, or the notorious Weather Underground; the latter being central to Philip Roth’s excellent critique of 1960s radicalism in his penultimate novel American Pastoral:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KtEjPfnAF8Gn9N60-cOHo1g1pKVE1cKoa-OJ_OL8fKc/edit
Here is how Roth puts it there:
How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low – now to her “capitalist dogs.” There wasn’t much difference, and she knew it, between hating America and hating them.
Unlike Roth’s perspicacious analysis, which examines the conflicting generations in a thoughtful and critical manner, Andrews remains implacably hostile to varying points of view, and of looking clearly at the different political factions in a way that would provide some historical context for the Civil Rights Movement and its struggle to attain social, political, and legal equality.
As with McWhorter, Andrews is all about ideology and not history or culture.
In recounting Al Sharpton’s activism, she and Dougherty discussed MLK’s trip with the SCLC to Chicago, which was part of the Poor People’s Campaign that focused on Fair Housing in the larger context of economic issues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Freedom_Movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign
The dynamic duo chose to defend and support Mayor Daley’s corrupt political machine rather than King’s Christian movement:
https://chicagodetours.com/chicago-politics-history/
Andrews insisted that the local Black community leaders, echoing the detritus of racist Confederate battles against “Northern Invaders” at the same time, did not want MLK coming to their community:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/how-mayor-daley-outfoxed-martin-luther-king/1902225/
Indeed, Andrews ignored the unfair housing practices of White America as represented by the Daley machine, instead affirming that such corrupt political machines were an accurate barometer of our democratic system.
More than this, it is important to note that in the discussion there was no real attempt to pick apart the mainstream SCLC from the splinter movement initiated by Stokely Carmichael, with his Black Power Separatism:
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/stokely-carmichael
Carmichael, like Abbie Hoffman, rejected democratic and non-violent methods, preferring instead to promote Hate America values and armed struggle against the System.
Though Conservatives like Andrews continue to bemoan activists like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, their institutions still remain tied to our socio-political process and to democratic norms.
Her debased attack against Justice Sotomayor opened yet another avenue of demented perfidy, as she entered into the crooked world of Federalist Society “originalism” and Antonin Scalia.
Indeed, the very first audience question in the program came from the late justice’s son Christopher:
http://yeshiva.imodules.com/s/1739/2-yu/index.aspx?sid=1739&gid=17&pgid=1832&cid=3597&ecid=3597
We will recall that Scalia fils did a program in tribute to his father at the Center for Jewish History with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik under the banner of his YU Straus Center:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJN8GYpbYpQ
The matter of Law was discussed as Andrews relentlessly sought to demonize the Warren Court for what she wrongly sees as its destruction of the Constitutional tradition:
https://www.americanheritage.com/legacy-warren-court
The Yale Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar discussed the matter in the following article:
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/5119/
But even here she curiously mentioned the fact, which I cannot seem to locate anywhere on-line, that Warren held back a critical decision on Civil Rights in order to free himself and his Court from the pressures of the ongoing controversies; preferring instead to allow Congress to do the heavy lifting.
The Warren Court’s Civil Rights legacy, anchored in Brown v. Board of Education, has been well-documented:
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2476&context=nlr
Warren, a Republican appointed by President Eisenhower, has long been the bete noire of the Right, and a hopeful sign of how some Conservatives can still have a heart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren
https://www.csmonitor.com/1983/1117/111761.html
It did not take long for Andrews to get from the hated Warren to Sonia Sotomayor.
Her vicious attack on Sotomayor relies on the questionable contention that our first Latina Justice has significant “gaps” in her understanding of the Constitution, which causes her to become “enraged” and make bad decisions!
It is only in the rulings of giants Scalia and Samuel Alito that truly proper Constitutional decisions have been made.
But the attack on Sotomayor was topped by deeply offensive statements in defense of the Capitol Insurrectionists, as we were told that they were deprived of their institutional integrity and were acting out on their frustrations – caused by the Boomers.
And, as we have seen earlier, Andrews is very much a supporter of European Imperialism.
In an attack on the Liberal Economist Jeffrey Sachs, she accused him of being worse than the 19th century Imperialists, because his work in the Developing World is just as intrusive, but that he hypocritically excoriates his predecessors – who, Andrews claims, had more “love” for the countries they brutally colonized, and more knowledge of their history.
But she conveniently forgot to recount the fact that those “loving” European racists brought armies with them in order to subjugate the native peoples in the places that they so venerated.
I have not heard anything about Sachs controlling a violent military in his work with the countries in the Developing World!
In her discussion of the academic firebrand Camille Paglia, Andrews wavers between admiration for her anti-PC attacks on Feminism and her promotion of sexual libertinism and pornography. The Sexual Revolution is one of the rare points that Andrews is able to succeed with.
The destruction of the nuclear family since the Countercultural revolution of the 1960s is something that should be taken seriously, as too many Millennials have been raised in a world of shattered homes and human dysfunction.
But it is also worth noting at this juncture, that Andrews’ attack on the Drug Culture is deeply misguided, given the largely bipartisan attempts to decriminalize drugs and dismantle the draconian sentencing regime of the notorious 1994 Crime Bill:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act
There continues to be a lot of work to erase the toxic effects of that bill:
https://www.colorlines.com/articles/94-crime-bill-25-years-later-its-time-reckoning-op-ed
Drugs are not a criminal problem, but a social one; the dystopian age of Nancy Reagan came to an end a long time ago, even if Andrews does not apparently want to acknowledge it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No
There was certainly a racial element to the “Just Say No” campaign, which has been largely absent from the current opiod crisis:
https://eji.org/news/racial-double-standard-in-drug-laws-persists-today/
But more than all this, Andrews fails most spectacularly when she discusses Economics and the Millennial generation.
Another of the more embarrassing moments in the program is when Ronald Reagan’s name finally gets mentioned – but as a sop to the Boomers, rather than as a foil to their Liberal values.
According to both Dougherty and Andrews, in a stunning act of political misprision, Reagan was actually not Conservative enough. It is their claim that he gave the Boomers the economy that they wanted, but that he was for Amnesty for illegal immigrants, and that he was a pro-Abortion advocate.
I am not sure what any of that means in the context of his Far Right political record, but the sad reality – not discussed in the program – is that Reagan began the process of dismantling the New Deal and Great Society social safety net programs, and re-aligning the American Economy in order to subvert the working class and discourage domestic manufacturing, in favor of opening up the Wall Street investor class and rapacious money managers.
It was Reagan who was responsible for beginning the process of government deregulation and tax breaks for the wealthy, and in doing so served to undermine working Americans and helped exacerbate the ever-widening wealth gap:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2019/jun/06/socialism-for-the-rich-the-evils-of-bad-economics
Millennials who are sinking under college debt have Reagan to thank for his economic nihilism, and for his destruction of government and public institutions:
Good jobs are hard to find because of the history of corporate downsizing, labor restructuring, union-busting, and contempt for the Middle Class.
The corrupt Trump years, when the swamp was aggressively re-swampified, was not discussed at all by Andrews, as she and Dougherty looked to the Left rather than themselves for the problems we now face. It was the same Neo-Con strategy that we saw from Riley and McWhorter.
Young people are dealing with a precarious job market and crushing debt because colleges and corporations have become unaccountable to the public and to our political and legal systems; spurred on by Congress and an out-of-control SCOTUS:
And it is institutions like AEI that have spearheaded the movement:
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/15/us/institute-plays-key-role-in-shaping-reagan-programs.html
In the end, it is just more hypocrisy and crocodile tears from the reactionary Conservatives, who lament what is happening to the Millennials even though it is their ideology and political agenda that has been the primary cause of the problem.
The scapegoating is just more hot air projection.
Baby Boomers certainly have their narcissistic and indulgent faults, but it was not their advocacy that served to undermine our democracy and economic system.
It is high time that Conservatives, those who scream the loudest when it comes to Personal Responsibility, take responsibility for the mess they have made of our country.
David Shasha
The Conservative Case Against the Boomers
By: Benjamin Wallace-Wells
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 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.”
The insistence of incredibly powerful people that they are really outsiders, the optimism so grandiose it verges on predestination—this probably sounds recognizably like the boomers to you. But it also might more simply sound perfectly American. Untangling these two identities, boomer and American, isn’t much of a problem for Andrews, who seems convinced that both the country and the generation are headed for the Bad Place. Separating the two isn’t especially hard, either, for many on the left, who have little time for either generational or national exceptionalism. For liberals, it’s trickier. In material terms, the boomer legacy is exactly what progressives mean to fight against: too much wealth for older people; too much debt for the young; too little commitment to changing the conditions of the future, from climate to public health. (Right before the 2020 election, the Federal Reserve reported that boomers still held fifty-three per cent of the country’s wealth, compared with 5.1 per cent for millennials. When boomers were as old as millennials are now, they held more than twenty per cent.) On the other hand, no one in American public life right now sounds more like the “Think Different” ad than Joe Biden.
It is hard not to see some prejudice in this. I also see misapprehension. The many hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated for civil rights were not conjured by Sharpton or Jackson—their demands for change were real. Liberation, here, wasn’t an entitled fantasy but a popular demand. Andrews believes in the strength of traditional institutions—the church, the nuclear family, the big-city political machine—and argues that American decline tracks with our abandonment of them. But if the traditional family could not accommodate the desire of some women to have fewer babies and a professional life, and the traditional church could not tolerate the range of human sexuality, then these were not really very strong institutions, after all. You don’t need to have an uncomplicated view of Al Sharpton to realize that the desire of Black people for equality and self-determination was just not going to be satisfied by Daley’s Chicago machine.
At the end of her chapter on Steve Jobs, Andrews mentions Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, from 1997, which Jobs seems to have conceived as a corporate, and perhaps even a personal, manifesto. Andrews quotes the script: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.”
The real tensions of the new Administration, which began with a twenty-two-year-old old Black poet offering wisdom to a seventy-eight-year-old white President, are generational. Was American liberalism contingent on boomer optimism, and was that contingent on a once-in-human-history sequence of prosperity? There are plenty of ways to define Biden’s agenda, but one is that he is trying to apply a politics built on boomer optimism to an era in which that optimism has faded. At his Inauguration, Biden said, “We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have acted together.” Maybe he, too, has mistaken a generation for the country.
From The New Yorker, January 28, 2021