Our Worst Generation

We all know what our “Greatest Generation” was. They rose up from farms, fields, towns and cities to put on uniforms, take up arms, travel halfway around the world, and save humanity from German Nazism and Imperial Japanese militarism. They followed up with the Marshall Plan and the enlightened Occupation of conquered Japan. They thus converted our most fearsome enemies into our strongest and wisest allies and the globe’s third and fourth largest economies (after us and China).

Our Greatest Generation won the most terrible war in human history in a mere four years. They rose from a standing start, untrained, undisciplined, and from a slumbering peacetime economy. Women joined the military effort directly, and millions went to work in war factories as “Rosie the Riveter.”

When the war ended, the US economy was by far the world’s largest. Not only that. It had built mighty factories for warplanes, warships and armaments that had supplied the winning arms caches for the Soviets, who did most of the dying. Under enlightened US leadership, the UN, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (“GATT”), which eventually morphed into the WTO, and the Geneva Conventions (the first-ever attempt to make war “civilized”) all came into play. All the achievements truly deserve the monicker “Greatest Generation.”

But what was our worst generation? It’s never been named specifically. Yet I submit that it’s the very one that followed, the one now passing from the scene, the so-called “Baby Boomers.” Let’s analyze.

Let’s look first at war, our species’ most horrific self-imposed disaster. The US’ direct involvement in WWII lasted less than four years, from December 8, 1941 (the day after Pearl Harbor) to the Japanese unconditional surrender on September 2, 1945. Our longest previous war, the Revolutionary War that gave us our independence from England, had lasted 8.4 years.

Before the Boomers took the helm, we had never had another war that lasted so long. The Boomers broke that record, big time. They waged three unnecessary “wars of choice”: in Vietnam (19.4 years), Iraq (eight years, nine months) and Afghanistan (twenty years). The first and last ended in ignominious debacles—complete routs of American forces. George W. Bush’s reckless Iraq War produced an uneasy stalemate, a divided country, and the rise of organized Islamic extremism and terrorism.

As in war, so in peacetime wisdom. When WWII ended, our Greatest Generation had been fed up to the teeth with war.

They converted the factories that had made tanks and warplanes back to making civilian transport. The great wartime aluminum factories, which the government had built to make warplanes, they sold off to private investors as Kaiser and Reynolds Aluminum. The physicists and engineers that had staffed the Manhattan Project and invented nuclear weapons dispersed into private industry and government basic-research laboratories. Their research produced the greatest flowering of real, tangible new technology in human history: television, transistors, integrated circuits containing thousands of transistors (computer “chips”), medical MRI and CAT scans, space travel, and the digital computer and personal computer, from which the iPhone sprang. (In contrast, much of today’s Boomer “technology” involves writing software to exploit market imperfections, oppress workers as “independent contractors” rather than “employees,” or get rid of personal labor altogether.)

The open secret once driving this world-historical rush of progress and enlightenment was intelligent pragmatism. Smart leaders did what worked. They didn’t dwell on who was right or wrong in the abstract. They didn’t build abstract, theoretical castles in the sand. If something didn’t work and work well, they tried something else.

As our Greatest Generation knew, clashes of simplistic ideology had produced unimaginable horrors. First came the two Russian Revolutions—the second the bloodiest in human history. Next came the catastrophic war between Russian/Soviet Communism and German Nazism/fascism, which left the flower of German and Russian youth decimated and most of Western Russia burnt and broken. Our Greatest Generation lived these horrors and so despised ideology as the last refuge of scoundrels. Our immediate postwar leaders refused to reduce the complexity of human life and history to simplistic ideological mantras.

All that changed with the Boomers, the most pampered, coddled, privileged yet minutely supervised and least personally challenged generation in human history. How it happened is a complex and intricate sociopolitical matter, in which miseducation plays a leading role. It’s worthy of a book of several volumes, not just this short essay. But the outlines by now seem clear enough. I would note three turning points.

The first is the pampering. The Ancient Greeks said it best: “The suffered is the learned.” There is no learning without risk.

The grammar school that I had attended, the teaching-training school at UCLA, once had a huge grass field with a tall, magnificent, multibranched pine tree at one end. We kids spent many a recess hour climbing its generous limbs, sometimes falling and getting scrapes, bumps and cuts. Yet when I revisited that magnificent tree in high school, it had had its great branches pared from ground level up as high as an adult could reach. The magnificent natural jungle gym had been neutered and pillaged in the name of “safety.”

This story is a parable of how the Baby Boomers raised their children as “helicopter parents” with supervised “play dates,” constant, oppressive adult supervision, and absolute prohibitions on wandering around the neighborhood alone or with other kids. In contrast, from the time I learned to ride a bike, my parents didn’t know where I was from the time I got home from school until it got dark and I came home for dinner. I believe that unsupervised, self-directed learning set my course of discovery and exploration for the rest of my life.

As in physical wandering, so in intellectual life. The Boomers had to have a theory for everything. And because it had to be easy for all to grasp, it had to be simplistic. Communism bad, capitalism good. Socialism seems like Communism, so bad. Capitalism exploits greed as a powerful motivation, so greed must be good. Government exists in part to suppress and channel greed, so government must be bad.

There you have the “philosophy” of Ronald Reagan in a nutshell. His first inaugural became famous for the mantra: “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.” That has remained the central tenet of Republicanism to this day. And the untutored still adore him for it.

This sort of patently simplistic ideology permeated the highest reaches of academia. Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his abstruse work on monetary policy, became famous for another proposition entirely, an absurdly simplistic one. He held the notion of “shareholder value,” as the driver of corporate capitalism, responsible for all the discoveries and riches of American industry.

Never mind that greed has been anathema to every organized religion, and to our most thoughtful philosophers, throughout human history. Never mind that a moment’s thought reveals multifarious human motivations having nothing to do with greed. Sports devotees give their all to beat their rivals and improve their performance, regardless of how much they are paid. (You have only to review the history of the Women’s Professional Basketball League to get this point.)

Doctors seek to heal and reduce human suffering. They crave the gratitude and admiration that results. Engineers try to build things that work higher, faster, better and smarter, just for the sake of doing so, with monetary rewards an “extra.” Scientists seek to discover new truths; mathematicians new proofs. (The latter bent their brains for three and a half centuries, for example, finally proving Fermat’s Last Theorem conclusively in 1995. Did they do so for greed?)

Priests, nuns, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders exhort their flocks to suppress greed and help their fellow men and women, relying on our species’ key evolutionary advantage: the ability to communicate in detail and cooperate fully. And what about mothers, fathers and grandparents? Do they save, sacrifice and spend for their progeny out of greed?

As Mark Twain once remarked about his death, the idea of greed as the fount of all human motivation is greatly exaggerated. So the abstract notion of “pure” capitalism, or “shareholder value” as the best or most perfect economic system is fundamentally flawed. Ask the surviving participants in the Manhattan Project what motivated their work on the greatest successful crash technological project in human history, and greed will not even make the list.

And so we come to the last, perhaps most important point: corruption. Our English language uses the very same word for economic corruption and the biological kind, the rotting of corpses. (Compare the line from the Bible, about Jesus, quoted in Handel’s Messiah: “Thou didst not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption” but resurrected him.) And greed-driven economic corruption destroys a society the same way rot destroys a corpse: individual organisms bent on their own ends decompose and destroy the whole. Somehow, the apostles of a capitalism based on personal greed never come to grips with this essential truth of biology, which is now proving itself daily in our faltering, corrupt economy.

There is something truly pathological about the mechanistic and simplistic abstract ideology that gripped our nation in the decades following our greatest national triumph, in WWII and its aftermath. As Milton Friedman’s sick history shows, it has permeated our highest intellectual citadels, our great universities.

I had the displeasure of observing its destructive power personally while a Fulbright Fellow in Moscow in 1993. At the time, Russia was led by the drunken but well-meaning President Yeltsin. He had, two years before, withstood a right-wing Putsch against the Russian Parliament by standing on a tank in front of the Parliament Building. Russia’s leadership and academic elite were then all agog at the prospect of Russia becoming a “normal” country, with normal economic and external relations.

At the end of my four months in Moscow, I was invited to a conference of Russian and German journalists discussing the subject of state secrets. Its Russian participants were eager to learn the American point of view. This was the “window to the West” that Putin slammed decisively shut at the end of the decade, when he dropped his clever deception and revealed himself as the incarnation of the sixteenth-century Czar Ivan the Terrible.

During and after my fellowship, reform-minded Russia’s chief concern was what to do with its industry. All of it had been government owned and run, in keeping with the old Soviet Communist system of entirely nationalized production. Somehow, a then-little-known Harvard economist named Jeffrey Sachs captured the apparatus of USAID, insofar as Russia was concerned. I never met the man, but it soon became clear that he had a mechanistic and simplistic view of “converting” Russia’s state-owned industries to capitalism. He advocated a form of “shock therapy,” in which shares of these firms would be put on the market to the highest bidder(s), financed in part by American capitalists.

Never mind that, under Communism, it had been over seventy years since any of Russia’s ordinary citizens had owned any stock or shares in any of Russia’s productive firms. Never mind that, for all the intervening time, Russia’s media had propagandized capitalists, including share owners, as evil exploiters of the working classes. The “shock therapy” and stock-and-asset sales went forward, with significant American financing. Unsurprisingly, the buyers all turned out to be insiders, i.e., the very Soviet Commissars who had run the companies by Soviet fiat during the preceding decades.

In other words, Jeffrey Sachs’ simplistic and mechanistic approach to economics created the Russian Oligarchs out of whole cloth. They included the oligarchs who now meekly follow Putin’s imperial dictates and run his businesses, cementing his economic and secular power. They also include the few, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who resisted and were jailed and ultimately exiled. To my knowledge, after an AI search, Professor Sachs knew and knows nothing of Russian history and does not speak Russian.

Let us give this dismal tale its coup de grace with the story of Joseph R. Biden. By now, the recent book of reporting has revealed all: Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.

President Biden’s staff and his wife Jill conspired to keep the public from knowing and reacting naturally to his increasing mental and physical decline. Then they let Kamala Harris loose with too little leeway and no power to address the one issue amenable to a quick fix: the public perception of open-door immigration. I need not outline the ensuing history; it’s too deeply embedded in recent memory to erase. I would only add that it mirrors the similar history of President Woodrow Wilson’s massive stroke while in office, after which his wife, with the aid of his staff, reportedly served, for over a year, “essentially, [as] the nation’s chief executive until her husband’s second term concluded[.]”

After this hidden debacle, Wilson’s Republican successor, Warren G. Harding, won by a landslide. He was noted for the Teapot Dome corruption scandal that occurred on his watch and for leading the nation headlong into the Great Depression with all the wrong economic policies, including the leadup to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, which passed in his Republican successor’s very first year.

Technically, President Biden is not a Boomer, whom the US Census Bureau defines as someone born between mid-1946 and mid-1964. He was born during WWII, not after it. But he was three when it ended. In my view, he partook, like all born in the era, of all that uniquely characterize that cohort.

So let me get to the bottom line. The Boomers took a nation that the Greatest Generation had preserved and advanced, against incredible adversity, by being smart and doing what works. The coddled Boomers on the right gave it a simplistic, counterfactual, fairy-tale ideology that ignores all the complexity and glories of our species and presumes to turn greed and corruption into advantages. The coddled Boomers on the left and in the center failed to counter this nonsense narrative effectively. Instead, they apparently relied on their fellow travelers of their own generation, without any effective effort to educate or attract the young. They let the greed-is-good narrative survive, if not thrive, by negligence and inaction. (To see this narrative in all its modern glory, take a look at how many readers’ comments to this op-ed, apparently submitted by people of all ages, assume without questioning that running corpporations for the sole benefit of their shareholders is the best way to maximize human welfare.)

Despite all this nonsense, the Boomers on both sides have held on to power, apparently out of sheer ego, for far too long, well into their senile declines. Although vastly different in policies, intelligence and practical impact, both Biden and Trump fit this dismal description.

So it’s now long past time to take away the keys. If it were up to me, I would have the Democratic Party purge from leadership everyone over 65, and specifically every member of Biden’s cabinet and campaign team, regardless of age. Only then will it have a chance of preserving, let alone advancing, what remains of our nation’s greatness. Restoring that greatness requires a new intellectual approach and an enthusiasm and vitality that few, if any, entrenched and grizzled elders possess. Most of all, it requires an innate sense, foreign to the aged, that youth really matter.

Legions of Zohran Mamdanis can’t rise to replace our Boomers quickly enough. Sure, they will make mistakes and have to change course as they see what works and what doesn’t. But, so far, they show no sign of trying to pack our nation’s greatness, and its future, into a box of simplistic nonsense that treats greed as good, or to suggest, like both Biden and Trump, that only their dismal experience, including three terrible, useless wars, can fix what’s broken. In that regard alone, our youthful contenders already surpass many of our Boomers, let alone the two principal players.

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