Diatribes of Jay: The Generational Seesaw

For the national nightmare likely to ensue if we can’t dis-elect Trump, click here. For reasons why we should task Los Alamos with making nuclear energy safe, click here. For a review of Pete Buttigieg’s good qualities and his prospects for vice-president, click here. For a brief review of the second and anticlimactic Detroit debate, click here. For a morning-after view of the first Dem Detroit Debate, click here. For initial reaction to the first Detroit debate, including criticism of CNN, click here. For a discussion of how the US can arrest its decline by rebuilding its labor unions online, click here. For suggestions how to fix, not trash, America by adjusting corporate law, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For an analysis of reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

What is it about our species? When we are under existential stress, whether in war or natural disasters, we can be heroic, selfless and smart. We can sacrifice for our families, our neighbors and our nations. Yet in “good” or “easy” times we can be astoundingly selfish, lazy and stupid.

The war and postwar history of the United States illustrates this paradox. During World War II, some five million farm boys and city workers rose as one to confront the menace of Hitler. Some were drafted, but many volunteered. About half a million didn’t come back. The rest silently endured unspeakable hardship for up to four years. They did or saw horrible things that they didn’t talk about for the rest of their lives.

Their courage and endurance didn’t stop there. They repeatedly elected leaders who, after winning the war, paid big money, under the Marshall Plan, to put our defeated enemies back on their feet. Not only did this give the “West” a leg up in the coming battle with Communism. It also converted two of the most energetic cultures on the planet—Germany’s and Japan’s—from fierce enemies into peaceful friends. Our Marshall Plan was noble, selfless and smart.

We called the men and women who did all this the “Greatest Generation.” The next generation we called the “Baby Boomers.” The term comes from the “boom” of births that followed nine months after returning troops reunited with their spouses.

Conceived in the joy of long-delayed reunions, the Boomers just didn’t measure up. In fact, they are proving to be the most self-indulgent generation in American history so far.

Jack Kennedy didn’t live long in office, but he was a good president. He helped spare the world a nuclear holocaust, and he put us on track toward the Moon. In his brilliant inaugural speech, he challenged Americans to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

But the Boomers didn’t elect JFK. With the voting age at 21 then, they were too young to vote until four years after his assassination. They were still too young to vote for LBJ when he ran on his own in 1964.

The Boomers’ presidents were Nixon and Reagan. Nixon resigned under impeachment and threat of removal. Reagan was their idol and exemplar.

Now Reagan was a professional actor with world-class charm. In my favorite Reagan story, a big Republican donor had a bee in his bonnet and went to see Reagan in the Oval Office. Reagan offered him some jelly beans from the famous jar that he kept on his presidential desk. Then Reagan launched into droll stories.

Walking out of the White House, the big donor felt nothing but joy and love for Reagan, until he realized he hadn’t even mentioned what he had come to say. That’s charm.

Unfortunately, Reagan’s intellect didn’t match his charm. He didn’t even have the curiosity to ask his generals about the likely consequences of nuclear war until his second term. When they told him several hundred million people would die, Reagan had an epiphany. He turned his legendary charm on the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a wise and like-minded leader. The result was legendary progress on nuclear arms control.

Yet Reagan was hardly a brilliant political strategist, especially in domestic affairs. A decent actor, he read the lines his writers gave him to speak. He was just smart enough to understand one thing: voters would like him if he encouraged them to be selfish.

So Reagan took that lazy way to victory. “It’s your money!” he told voters, pushing them to cut taxes and keep more of their own pay. “Government is the problem, not the solution,” he told our people. He said this about the institution that had invented nuclear power and nuclear weapons, won the war, made the peace that followed, and established a rational world order that would keep the peace among major powers for seventy-five postwar years and counting.

The Boomers ate this selfishness and stupidity up. Their parents had sacrificed during the Great Depression, during the war years (with rationing), and during the Marshall Plan (to rebuild Europe). The Boomers, not so much. They liked the idea of having more of their own, regardless of consequences.

Who wouldn’t? It was an easy sell, and Congress followed. The top personal tax rate went down from 92% under Eisenhower, 91% under Kennedy and 70% for the next two decades; by the end of Reagan’s two terms, it had plunged to 28%. Not surprisingly, Reagan, who charmingly had given the people permission to be selfish, became very popular.

Reagan’s erstwhile VP, Daddy Bush (George Herbert Walker Bush) was a much more experienced pol of the old school. He understood that you need money to run a decent government. He also needed money to mount an effective response when the dictator Saddam Hussein overran Kuwait and threatened the supply of Middle Eastern oil, on which the West then depended even more abjectly than it does today.

Bush followed Colin Powell’s expert military advice and observed the so-called “Powell Doctrine:” he used overwhelming force, maintained a clear and limited mission, and had a clear exit strategy. Together Bush and Powell produced the most brilliantly successful—and the shortest!—major war in US history. It took five months to position our troops in the theater, but winning the war and freeing Kuwait and its oil took only two.

Daddy Bush actually raised taxes—not surprisingly, since Reagan’s top rate had been the lowest since 1932. In so doing, Bush violated his own rash campaign pledge: “Read my lips; no new taxes.” Pundits blamed that reversal for his loss to Clinton, but it probably had more to do with Ross Perot, the strongest independent candidate since Teddy Roosevelt, siphoning off Republican votes.

Bill Clinton didn’t follow Reagan in encouraging voters to be selfish. But he did the next laziest thing. Instead of using his win and his self-evidently superior intelligence to enact bold new policies, Bill “triangulated.” That is, he moved to the right in “reforming” welfare (making it harder to get) and jumped on the bandwagon of banking deregulation—a step that ultimately helped bring on the Crash of 2008.

At that time Newt Gingrich was the counterpart of Mitch McConnell today, but in the House, not the Senate. He was a GOP icon in love with his own power and able to change colors like a chameleon in the hope of growing it. Newt went Reagan “one better,” converting public antipathy toward government into a desire to destroy it. Starve the beast of revenue, he advised, so we can drown it in a bathtub.

Bill Clinton drove Newt crazy by cleverly co-opting his proposals and making them the Democrats’ own. Of course Bill’s versions were neither as stupid nor as destructive as Newt’s. Bill reveled in crushing Newt politically with superior tactics and strategy. Bill even raised taxes a bit, using for political “cover” Daddy Bush’s having done so after having promised not to.

So Bill, who was our first Boomer president, didn’t lower taxes to win elections. But he did the next laziest thing: he chased the GOP to the right, so far as to help bring on the greatest financial panic since the Great Depression. He didn’t teach voters to be selfish, but he took the lazy and stupid way out. For a Rhodes’ Scholar of Bill’s self-evidently superior intelligence, it was an astounding performance, a breathtaking lack of moral leadership.

There followed, under Barack Obama, an interlude of eight years of intelligence, grace, self-restraint, and freedom from scandal. For the Boomers, it was a lull in the battles that define them, as well as a respite from the selfishness, laziness and stupidity that seems to have characterized their generation.

Now Trump, too, is a Boomer president. His selfishness is off the scale. Whatever it may be, including the recent tragic mass slaughter in El Paso, it’s all about him.

Many think he has a narcissistic personality disorder. As for stupidity, what can you say about a guy who, until recently, thought people in a country whose products are assessed tariffs in the US pay those tariffs? And laziness? He doesn’t read his briefing papers, and he spends far more time than his predecessor did playing golf. But he does stay up in the wee hours watching Fox and Tweeting. To me, that qualifies him as selfish, lazy, and stupid, more than any other leader in my 74 years.

Do you see the trend? Since World War II, we’ve lost ground slowly but steadily as a nation because our people have become selfish, lazy and stupid, at least as compared to the Greatest Generation that won the war and its aftermath. It’s hard not to see this as a consequence of Boomers being the most pampered and self-indulgent generation in American history.

The most astonishing thing is how even evangelical Christians love Trump. You’d think they might have learned something about sacrifice and its benefits from the example of Jesus. But their “mega-preachers” tell them that “Jesus wants you to be rich.” Like Reagan, they say it’s OK to be selfish. (I guess I must have missed that part of the New Testament. Silly me, I always thought it focused on crucifixion as a voluntary self-sacrifice and the ensuing resurrection.)

The simple fact of life is that, if you want to win at anything, you can’t be selfish, lazy and stupid, at least not all the time. You have to tighten your belt, work hard and think smart, at least some of the time.

Maybe we Americans just shot our wad of sacrifice, hard labor and brilliance during World War II and its aftermath. Maybe we’re just suffering the law of averages now. Or, as a conservative from Nebraska named Roman Hruska once put it, maybe we’re just now allowing mediocrities to have their representatives, too.

But it’s hard to escape the feeling that we Boomers brought all this down on ourselves, and that salvation lies with younger generations. If that’s the case, then young people had better get involved in politics, register and vote, the sooner the better.

Their own futures, not to mention the planet’s, will depend on their doing so. For the Boomers, like our current president, aren’t out to save anybody but themselves. And they’re not getting any younger.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For the national nightmare likely to ensue if we can’t dis-elect Trump, click here.
For reasons to task Los Alamos with making nuclear energy safe, click here.
For a review of Pete Buttigieg’s qualities and prospects for vice-president, click here.
For a critique of the Dems’ anticlimactic second debate in Detroit, click here.
For a morning-after view of the Dems’ first Detroit debate, click here.
For an analysis CNN’s role in privatizing the news and history of the first Detroit Dem debate, click here.
For an intital reaction to the first Dem Detroit debate, click here.
For a discussion of the importance of labor unions and how to rebuild them online, click here.
For a recipe for fixing America by adjustment, without revolution or extremism, click here.
For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here.
For brief analysis of the House’s resolution censuring the President, click here.
For good reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here.
For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves and how to make the reparations work, click here.
For three things the Dems must do to win the White House, click here.
For an assessment of how the second debate propels the Dems toward losing, click here.
For suggestions on how to improve multi-candidate debates, click here.
For a more general discussion of how to improve debates, click here.
For a review of the first Democratic Debate, click here.
For a third, simpler look at why Trump won in 2016, click here.
For seven reasons not to make war on Iran, click here.
For discussion of Warren’s ability to defend science, and why it matters, click here.
For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
For analysis of the disastrous effect of our leaders’ failure to take personal responsibility, click here.
For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Diatribes of Jay

14 August 2019

The Generational Seesaw

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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