Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 29, 2021


Ep 446 ｜ Blaming Boomers for Millennials' Problems ｜ Guest： Helen Andrews


Episode Stats

Length

42 minutes

Words per Minute

165.55573

Word Count

7,062

Sentence Count

2


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 hey guys welcome to relatable hope everyone's having a wonderful day today i am talking
00:00:14.960 to helen andrews she wrote a book called boomers and she has a scathing critique of the baby boomer
00:00:22.420 generation and the problems that they pass down to us millennials and even generation z
00:00:28.280 and um how we can look at some of their flaws and foibles and failures and learn from them as the
00:00:37.220 younger generations and hopefully uh leave a better legacy in in her argument for our kids
00:00:44.740 and our grandkids so without further ado here is helen andrews
00:00:48.620 helen thank you so much for joining us for those who don't know can you tell everyone who you are
00:00:58.860 what you do i'm helen andrews i'm a senior editor at the american conservative and i've just written
00:01:06.340 a book called boomers the men and women who promised freedom and deliver disaster i love it i was just
00:01:14.340 telling you before this interview that i have laughed several times reading your book your
00:01:19.200 description of boomers and kind of what ailed their generation and then the ails they pass down
00:01:24.300 to millennials um it's very you know it's a little biting there might be some baby boomers who are
00:01:30.900 offended by this book do you think so i worry about that i my parents are baby boomers and i didn't want
00:01:38.660 to write anything that they would take personal offense at but i'm glad that you thought the book
00:01:43.180 was funny and i think that it's the humor comes from a combination of on the one hand being pretty
00:01:48.960 angry with the world that the boomers have left us but on the other hand being fond of them as well
00:01:54.420 i don't think you can ever be truly funny about something you just hate yeah there's got to be a
00:02:00.540 little bit of element of fondness in there as well and there certainly is for me with this subject
00:02:04.200 that's true and let's talk about that tell us about the world that we have inherited from baby
00:02:09.100 boomers and uh where they went wrong i always had a feeling that the millennial generation my generation
00:02:18.980 was a disinherited generation in some spiritual sense that is that the patrimony of our great american
00:02:26.580 civilization just didn't get handed on to us the way it got handed on the previous generation
00:02:32.300 functioning families functioning churches functioning schools all of these seem like
00:02:38.860 basic bare minimums that we just didn't get those were not handed off to us and then i graduated
00:02:45.800 in from college in 2008 into the teeth of the great recession and that sense of dispossession
00:02:53.060 became more literal i realized that millennials are materially disinherited we are materially
00:03:01.640 well behind what the baby boomers had accomplished economically by the time they were our age and so
00:03:07.980 i started investigating that sense that the millennials were not very well off and i discovered that the
00:03:13.340 statistics backed me up that in terms of wealth accumulation millennials have accumulated a quarter
00:03:21.800 of what the boomers had when they were our age not that we're 75 where the boomers are right now
00:03:27.940 we're 75 behind where they were when they were in their 20s and 30s so i tried to trace back
00:03:36.260 where all of these fears of society had gone wrong what happened to destroy our churches what happened to
00:03:43.240 destroy our families and our schools and our economy and every single thread that i pulled on led me back
00:03:50.260 to the same place the generation that came of age in the 1960s and was shaped by the 1960s
00:03:55.640 and then attained the summits of power in the 1990s the baby boomers they were behind all of the
00:04:02.460 declines that i investigated and let's talk about the how just a little bit i don't want to give
00:04:07.320 away too much um of what your book talks about and argues but i do want you to reveal for us how how did
00:04:14.780 they do that because i think that you know my parents are baby boomers i'm also a millennial and i think
00:04:20.080 about my parents personal stories coming from um you know relative uh poverty i mean they weren't
00:04:26.600 raised with anything extra their parents did kind of help set them up for success by working harder
00:04:33.160 and providing a better life for their kids than than they had and so my parents probably feel like they
00:04:39.000 just kind of got the torch passed to them and they said okay i'm gonna make sure that i have a life that
00:04:43.860 is better for my kids um than the one i had so yeah my parents they you know started their own
00:04:51.280 business and they were much more successful than their parents were and they were able to provide
00:04:55.860 us with opportunities that they did not have i would say a lot of millennials would say that that is true
00:05:01.960 for them too so in my parents own estimation and probably in the estimation of a lot of baby boomers
00:05:08.060 they would say you know what are you talking about we created such a better life for you than the ones
00:05:13.940 we had you guys have it so easy and you're just lazy and that's why you don't have all the wealth
00:05:19.840 and success that we baby boomers have had what's your response to that that's absolutely something
00:05:25.720 that i hear a lot so many baby boomers say you kids today you have iphones you don't know how good
00:05:31.400 you have it i never could have had an iphone even if they had existed when i was in my early 20s
00:05:35.940 and so it's important to clarify exactly what i mean when i say that millennials are economically
00:05:42.460 not very well off one complaint that a lot of millennials have is that it is no longer possible
00:05:51.300 to attain a middle-class lifestyle on one income so if you're in a millennial couple and you're married
00:05:59.540 maybe you have a kid uh both parents now need to go into the workforce in order to attain just a
00:06:08.580 basic standard of living and that was just not the case in the 1950s in the 1950s you could have
00:06:13.300 a house big enough for a family and all of the middle-class amenities on one income and you'd have
00:06:19.600 a husband working and the wife could stay home if she chose to the baby boomers are responsible
00:06:26.520 for the difficulty that millennials have in making ends meet as a middle-class couple
00:06:33.040 because they were the generation that sent women into the workforce on mass just as a statistical
00:06:40.560 reality very few families were dual earner families in 1960 and nowadays most of them are and so that
00:06:48.060 switch happened over the course of the baby boom generation but elizabeth morin coined the term the
00:06:53.900 two-income trap for what happened when women flooded into the workforce in the 70s and 80s which is that
00:06:59.920 they simply bid up the price of a middle-class living so nobody was actually economically better
00:07:08.300 off because all the women entered the workforce at the same time and so the two-income trap means that
00:07:16.980 the cost of a middle-class lifestyle now requires two incomes where it didn't before and so in terms
00:07:23.060 of consumer spending if you're a millennial yeah you may have you know pocket money to spend on
00:07:27.960 things like an iphone you may be materially well off in that sense but if you can't afford a middle
00:07:34.140 class living on one income and your grandparents could i think it's perfectly fair to say that you
00:07:39.160 are poorer than they were in a deep and fundamental sense and moving beyond just the economics of it do you
00:07:46.860 also think there was a failure to pass down the values that a lot of greatest generation and silent
00:07:52.580 generation parents had and maybe passed down to baby boomers it almost seems like there was this
00:07:57.720 growth of hyper individualism that happened sometime when baby boomers were coming of age that they then
00:08:03.880 passed down to their kids that the kind of disintegration of the family unit the de-emphasis of
00:08:11.300 mom staying at home and being the primary influence over their kids that does seem to have at least become
00:08:17.660 more and more popular in the 80s and 90s and less of an influence on family togetherness and family values
00:08:25.360 and more of an emphasis on um on okay you just follow your dreams and climb the corporate ladder and make
00:08:34.420 a lot of money and that's all that life's about do you think that that shift in values had any effect
00:08:40.200 on on what millennials are experiencing right now i think a shift in values is exactly the right way to
00:08:47.520 describe it because it's a running theme that you see across the board from the baby boomers they
00:08:54.100 believe that individual choice is the highest value which has led them to be institution destroyers
00:09:01.540 because that's the thing about institutions there's something bigger than the individual which means that
00:09:05.940 an institution constrains individual choices you know you sign up to be part of a family you make certain
00:09:12.600 commitments suddenly your individual choices are not as free as they were anymore that's kind of the whole point
00:09:18.440 of an institution and the boomers knocked down the family churches anything uh traditional
00:09:27.320 because they held individual choice to be the highest value the irony of that is that their success
00:09:35.940 in destroying institutions has now resulted in a world where millennials have fewer choices
00:09:42.440 the whole point of elizabeth warren's calling the two-income trap a trap is that nowadays there are
00:09:49.800 actually lots of millennial women who say it's great that women are able to enter the workforce if
00:09:54.640 they want to go feminism but i would like to stay home the problem is that i can't because the shape of
00:10:02.320 the economy has changed so now it's an economic requirement my house can't make ends meet if i
00:10:07.240 don't go into the workforce so even millennials who want to choose to stay at home now discover that
00:10:14.220 they can't so in maximizing individual choice and destroying institutions the boomers ended up
00:10:20.120 actually constraining the choices of their children that's that those kinds of ironies
00:10:24.720 pop up all over the place once you start studying the boomer
00:10:27.600 and it's a little bit of a vicious cycle i think with millennials because i think that in some ways
00:10:43.760 we have been taught that it's not a good choice or not a successful choice to stay home as women that
00:10:49.340 we are betraying our gender we're betraying feminism and all the people who fought for us to be
00:10:54.520 liberated from the shackles of just being this miserable housewife um and so there is also this
00:11:01.340 uh i think these competing desires in a lot of millennial moms that yes i maybe i want to stay home like
00:11:08.240 like my mom did for example my baby boomer mom did stay home at the same time i was certainly taught
00:11:14.140 the importance of a career and the importance of being educated and following your dreams and all
00:11:20.420 of that which you know i'm thankful for but there's a competition of desires i would say even in me and in
00:11:25.920 a lot of young christian conservative millennial women that okay if i stay home am i giving up all
00:11:32.420 the opportunities and everything that my baby boomer parents gave me should i be outside of the home am i
00:11:38.660 wasting my life um and i don't really worry about this but a lot of people do am i wasting my life
00:11:44.460 by just being at home that wasn't a concern that wasn't really a thought it seems like 50 years ago
00:11:50.920 so that's what i'm talking about with this vicious cycle that yes there are you know a lot of
00:11:58.060 millennials say that they want the economy to change so that one parent can stay at home at the same time
00:12:03.360 they don't really want to stay home because they're afraid that they are betraying you know
00:12:09.840 feminism the opportunities they've been given or their self you're absolutely right i grew up also in
00:12:19.160 a cultural world where i was taught that to stay home was a waste of a college education and that a
00:12:26.540 woman is somehow giving up her chances of self-actualization if she chooses to stay home and raise children
00:12:32.420 and in the research for this book i decided to investigate the origins of that concept because
00:12:38.700 it's really astonishing anyone who's ever met a stay-at-home mom would not immediately come to
00:12:44.560 the conclusion that she was not self-actualized they're wonderful people right my favorite people
00:12:49.220 in the world are stay-at-home moms and i discovered that it was the feminists of the 1960s who really had
00:12:56.360 an active campaign against women staying home and i also discovered that a lot of them in pursuit of
00:13:04.220 that propaganda lied betty friedan is famous as the author of the feminine mystique and she supposedly
00:13:12.980 based that book which is a tirade against staying at home on the results of an alumnae questionnaire
00:13:21.060 that was sent to her graduating class of smith college and all of the women who had graduated
00:13:27.720 with her the survey asked how they were feeling you know a decade after they graduated or 15 years
00:13:32.840 she wrote in her book that the results of that survey showed that so many of these women were
00:13:39.260 squandering their gifts at home and they felt stifled and oppressed and you know all the women who
00:13:44.080 graduated from smith and then became stay-at-home moms were miserable well uh after that book came out
00:13:50.380 scholars then went into the archives to find the actual results of that survey and they discovered
00:13:56.260 that the respondents of that survey most of them who stayed at home and didn't have jobs said they
00:14:02.680 had never been happier they said i love staying at home i feel like i could go out and get a job if i
00:14:07.460 wanted to the reason i haven't is that i don't want to the betty friedan misrepresented the whole basis of
00:14:14.360 her book and you see that again and again with the boomers they they have a propaganda point they want to
00:14:19.200 push and they won't let the truth get in the way of the point they want to make do you think both
00:14:25.220 conservative and liberal boomers alike are responsible for these problems um or do you think
00:14:31.580 it's more of the kind of hyper individualist liberal activist boomers who are to blame for a lot of these
00:14:40.740 problems
00:14:41.280 not every baby boomer is a progressive that's absolutely true but the baby boomer legacy
00:14:50.500 is a progressive one and i think that the reason why that is the case is that the baby boomers who
00:14:59.620 were more conservative chose to focus on economic freedom that's true and that's true kind of kind of
00:15:07.960 let the social stuff slide they figured you know we we got to fight our battles where we can win them
00:15:12.640 and we think economic freedom is more winnable and i love economic freedom and i think it's extremely
00:15:17.220 important i think capitalism is great i'm glad the ussr is gone but completely ignoring social issues
00:15:24.860 for so many decades has now resulted in a world where those battles are so completely lost
00:15:30.200 that the liberals have seized the entire field so yeah the the boomer not every boomer is a progressive
00:15:35.920 but the boomer legacy is a progressive one you know i think i'm thinking about how the
00:15:41.200 conservative boomer is represented and i think about ronald reagan who certainly himself i would
00:15:46.300 say was a social cultural conservative obviously he was against abortion he would say that he was
00:15:51.020 very profoundly but when you look at his legislative priorities or the policies that he proposed
00:15:56.400 not just nationally but abroad he was very focused on economic freedom i mean one of the things
00:16:02.900 that he writes about that he really believed that the more we exported capitalism to somewhere like
00:16:07.740 china the freer they would become the happier they would become well we exported capitalism and imported
00:16:13.600 some communism into america so that didn't necessarily work i think we a lot of baby boomers
00:16:20.020 and ronald reagan who is not a baby boomer but he kind of represents a lot of the political views of
00:16:25.920 baby boomers believed that economic freedom and economic prosperity and the capitalist dream of
00:16:32.700 owning your own business and being an entrepreneur and just making a lot of money would kind of solve
00:16:37.720 all of the other problems too now i grew i did grow up in the church i grew up in the southern baptist
00:16:43.160 church and so we were culturally socially theologically conservative and there was a reckoning in the 1980s in the
00:16:50.140 southern baptist convention to get away from kind of this hyper individualism and and liberalism uh that
00:16:56.620 was happening inside the church and so that certainly happened they helped reagan get elected they helped
00:17:02.800 george hw bush get elected they kind of helped go after bill clinton because of you know his moral
00:17:10.740 improprieties and so there is also a large segment of baby boomers who were culturally conservative who did
00:17:18.140 in their own minds try to pass down conservative good you know so-called family values down to
00:17:24.860 millennials like do you put those people off to the side as a caveat in your book or do you think that
00:17:29.620 they also are part of the problem no i think those people valiantly fought against the way the tide was
00:17:38.080 turning as the baby boomers kind of achieved their ascendancy and it is a pity that the people that
00:17:45.580 you're talking about happened to lose but i think it is a matter of history that they did lose that
00:17:51.500 the moral majority turned out not to be much of a majority at all or even in the cases where they
00:17:57.380 were in the majority being in the majority didn't matter because the left was playing dirty and
00:18:03.200 accomplishing its goals not through the democratic process but through the court that's another side of
00:18:09.060 the boomer story that one reason the progressives within the boomer generation were so all-conquering
00:18:16.080 and triumphant was not that they were especially persuasive or that they convinced everybody to agree
00:18:21.940 with them it's that they learned to operate uh and impose their views by long march through the
00:18:29.080 institutions by conquering the courts and using them to override democratic outcomes so yeah they played
00:18:35.920 dirty and that's why they won can you talk about why you chose to dedicate chapters to the people
00:18:44.000 to the baby boomers that you did you talk about steve jobs aaron sorkin jeffrey sacks camille pig uh
00:18:50.680 paglia al sharpton and sonia sotomayor um why did you pick these people and how did they kind of prove
00:18:58.780 the point that you're making that baby boomers did not set millennials up for success
00:19:02.880 i read a lot of books about baby boomers in the preparation for writing this one
00:19:10.700 and i was consistently frustrated by books that talked about the whole generation
00:19:16.920 in in broad generalization because i thought it was just too vague and abstract i really wanted when
00:19:26.640 it came to writing my book to ground it in the concrete so i thought the best way to do that
00:19:32.260 would be to take individuals and tell their personal stories and i chose one baby boomers
00:19:39.660 not just who were really influential although they clearly were somebody like steve jobs has changed
00:19:44.660 the the face of the world i mean you might even make an argument that no one has influenced the way
00:19:50.500 the world looks today more than steve jobs has but i more than that wanted people whose individual
00:19:56.380 stories represented something about the baby boomer tragedy these are all people who have elements of
00:20:03.920 greatness and who embarked on their lives with very good intentions and so they were people who were
00:20:10.960 undone by the flaws of their generation and in that sense tragic rather than simply villainous i'm interested
00:20:20.940 in particular to hear you talk about camille paglia and al sharpton and the ways that you think that
00:20:27.780 they represent and their lives and their mission um represent some of the flaws with the baby boomer
00:20:33.920 generation so if you can start with camille paglia and um just some of in in your view some of the
00:20:40.400 erroneous ideas that she has pushed to the detriment of the current younger generations
00:20:46.440 camille paglia is someone who a lot of conservatives actually really like yeah because it's got
00:20:55.600 interesting things to say oh i and i love her she's definitely of of all the people that i profile i
00:21:02.480 think i probably like her the best yeah i really enjoy her writing and i i admire her a lot but in the
00:21:09.260 1990s when she was you know a valiant warrior in the original pc wars and she was standing up against
00:21:17.760 the school marmish second wave feminists and against the politically correct relativists who said that
00:21:25.200 the western canon was dumb and oppressive you know a lot of people asked her back then camille paglia
00:21:30.200 aren't does that make you a conservative and she would always say that she's not a conservative
00:21:35.080 because her favorite things in the world are prostitution and pornography she she calls herself
00:21:42.180 a sex positive feminist and that was what differentiated her from the school marmish feminists
00:21:48.620 who were complaining about date rape and whatnot the trouble is that i genuinely think that historians
00:21:58.200 of the 24th century when they talk about our current era if they only have a paragraph to give to what
00:22:07.240 the world was like circa 2020 they will mention ubiquitous pornography it's just completely different than it was
00:22:16.360 even 20 or 30 years ago i think millennials know better than anyone else what streaming video has done
00:22:21.980 to the pornography landscape and so for camille paglia to be so blithe you know as as if pornography were
00:22:30.480 still a matter of you know playboy centerfold as they were in the 1970s for her to say that pornography
00:22:35.900 is a thing to be celebrated because she's so sex positive i find that deeply naive and in a very boomerish
00:22:44.420 way because the baby boomers were the ones who were the architects of the sexual revolution and who thought
00:22:49.300 that just unleashing individual sexual desire would lead to a paradise would lead to sexual fulfillment
00:22:54.040 and they learned or should have learned very very quickly that that is not what happens when you
00:23:01.200 unleash everybody's sexual desires in fact what you get is a glimpse of the dark side so camille paglia
00:23:08.180 failed to learn some important lessons right so she represents kind of taking some of the ideas of the
00:23:14.300 sexual revolution that were fanned into flame in the 1960s and then passing that flaming baton on to
00:23:21.100 the next generation through ideas that sound very liberating sex positive i mean no one wants to say
00:23:26.980 that they're sex negative um being liberated well no one wants to say that they're trapped and oppressed
00:23:31.860 um it makes it sound very good without actually understanding like you said the repercussions of the
00:23:38.400 objectification of something like prostitution and pornography and what it actually means to human beings
00:23:43.960 and that really goes back to a much larger conversation about the world view of a lot of
00:23:48.860 these people how they view human nature where they believe we come from what they believe humans are
00:23:54.160 and are here for where does morality come from all these questions that i would argue that baby boomers
00:24:00.640 in some ways obviously not all of them didn't do a good job of answering in the midst of so much
00:24:07.900 postmodern confusion in the 1960s and then helping baby boomer or helping millennials understand those
00:24:15.020 questions would you say that's part of why millennials are so stuck in this postmodern chaos that we find
00:24:22.120 ourselves in today and that's one of the great frustrations that i've had in debating this book
00:24:29.120 with baby boomers they say you know materially the millennials are quite well off as a generation
00:24:34.800 and i say well you know i have my quibbles with whether or not that's true but even granting
00:24:39.340 that that were true that the millennials were materially very well off and very prosperous from
00:24:45.360 the perspective of history none of that really matters considering that we are the least married
00:24:51.560 generation in american history just we're not something's not coming together and we're not forming
00:24:57.360 partnerships we're not forming families uh religion used to be a fundamental part of american
00:25:04.060 society and today the protestant mainline churches i mean the episcopalian church i would not lay money
00:25:09.220 on it still existing in 100 years right it is moribund it's dying these churches are dying so if you live
00:25:16.880 in a world where nothing matters except the pursuit of pleasure it really doesn't matter how economically
00:25:23.860 well off you are so the boomers themselves came of age at a time when religion was still functioning civil
00:25:30.760 society was still functioning and they were the ones who threw off religion and said i don't care about
00:25:36.420 churches i don't care about marriage so they got the best of both worlds yeah they got the grounding
00:25:41.460 in that stability that was still existing when they were growing up and then they failed to pass it on to
00:25:47.520 their children so they had the stability and then the liberation whereas millennials did not inherit
00:25:53.880 that stability we just inherited chaos and i think it's hard for boomers who grew up at a time when
00:25:59.800 things were more stable to really appreciate what that chaos has been like
00:26:03.940 and this really helps us understand why there are so many millennials that have taken to socialism
00:26:19.820 um it might be that lack of stability that was given to a lot of people uh from the family from churches
00:26:27.260 from institutions and now people are looking to the states people are looking for someone to tell them
00:26:33.480 what's right and wrong that they're going to be taken care of that all of their needs are going to be met
00:26:38.740 these kind of safety nets and sense of security that we used to be able to find in institutions
00:26:43.920 outside of the state i think for millennials they felt like they were unstable like they disintegrated
00:26:49.320 that all you were encouraged to do was to get rich and to follow the capitalist dream and i think what a lot of
00:26:56.760 young people are finding is that well that's not completely satisfying that's not completely secure
00:27:03.040 what about these other needs that i have like and of course you and i as conservatives we both know
00:27:08.600 that socialism promises to meet those needs and never actually does it always just ends in misery
00:27:13.880 but you can kind of understand for people who say who look back and they say okay well yeah maybe my
00:27:20.440 parents gave me better economic opportunity but uh the failures of capitalism has actually ended us or
00:27:26.900 brought us to this place of misery and despair and i need to look a different direction for my security
00:27:31.560 it kind of helps us understand why people like aoc and bernie sanders are so appealing to the millennial
00:27:38.820 generation that lack that sense of security that you're talking about
00:27:42.160 i look at people my age who join movements like antifa or who get super into woke politics
00:27:51.140 and at some level i sympathize with them my heart goes out to them because it seems to me like in a
00:27:59.360 lot of cases what they're looking for is community they are growing up atomized and alienated and they
00:28:05.680 don't have anywhere to go to find i mean it used to be that you would go on sunday to church and you would
00:28:11.560 have a community there a community would be ready made for you in the church that you attended and
00:28:17.040 that's just no longer even on their radar so they're clearly looking for something that institutions
00:28:23.940 like churches used to provide which they can now only find in crazy left-wing politics but i think the
00:28:30.640 conservatives really need to take a lesson from that they need to say well if you want young people
00:28:36.380 to be conservative you need to give them something to conserve you need to have them feel like they
00:28:42.580 have a stake in their society so i think that's the number one lesson that we need to have just
00:28:46.520 tattooed on our foreheads going forward give people something to conserve and then maybe fewer of them
00:28:52.960 will be crazy woke socialists and you know as you're talking i'm realizing that i'm not really sure that
00:28:58.840 right now um young conservatism if you could call it a movement is really doing that i actually see
00:29:06.080 a heavy emphasis on what baby boomers emphasized which is only economic freedom which of course you
00:29:13.100 and i agree is very important and should be emphasized the differences in capitalism and socialism and why
00:29:20.240 capitalism is fundamentally better and more compassionate and fairer than socialism is however it's clearly not
00:29:28.160 enough because that's what the baby boomers only tried to conserve too in a lot of ways there has to
00:29:33.960 be something more and i and i think that a long a lot of young conservatives are scared to say hey we need
00:29:39.780 to conserve the family or we need to conserve faith because they're afraid that they're going to make the
00:29:45.620 tent too small they're not going to be able to get you know questioning or politically agnostic people
00:29:52.640 onto our side if we hammer on the social issues i just i think that we've already seen though that we
00:30:00.840 can't separate economic freedom or economic conservatism from social and cultural conservatism
00:30:07.600 because economic conservatism is fundamentally it doesn't work and it's unsatisfying outside of the
00:30:15.940 institutions and the value centers of family of church of other forms of community that we used to
00:30:25.120 hold dear and now we don't do you agree with that there's a reason why social liberalism's greatest
00:30:32.780 victories in the last three decades have all been in the supreme court and that's because when you
00:30:40.320 fight it out in the democratic arena social conservatism wins because social conservatism
00:30:46.780 is popular because people care about their families and traditions that's what really matters to them
00:30:52.700 that's what hits them where they live that's what gets them motivated to go out to a ballot box in the
00:30:57.060 campaign for a candidate the things that they're passionate about so one of the greatest faults of the
00:31:03.960 baby boomers is their refusal to relinquish power a lot of baby boomer flaws are things that you know
00:31:12.200 weren't necessarily their fault and they were mistakes that they made when they were too young to know
00:31:16.380 better but this one is really on them this is really i i've i've faulted them for not moving on and
00:31:24.360 letting younger generations move on and one of the consequences of that is that the things that were
00:31:29.680 important to them in the 1980s are still important to them now because it's really hard for an old dog to
00:31:35.100 learn new tricks and so any political movement needs to respond to current circumstances that's the
00:31:41.620 whole point of being relevant you know that's the essence you respond to changing circumstances
00:31:45.920 that's what shows that your ideas are flexible that you're responding to reality rather than just
00:31:51.240 ideology and it's really difficult for boomers to do that individually and the movement would be able to do
00:31:57.240 that better if they created space for younger leaders to start coming up and i think it's really
00:32:03.640 really a flaw of the boomers that they have not done that can you talk to me i have two more questions
00:32:09.320 for you can you talk to me about al sharpton why you chose to write about him and uh how he represents
00:32:15.540 some of the problems that we're talking about
00:32:17.160 well al sharpton he's just a compelling character isn't he he's been he's got a longer career than just about
00:32:26.600 anybody in the civil rights arena his first big case was in the 1980s so he's just been going on
00:32:32.900 and going on and going on he's got longevity so there's clearly something to him whether you agree
00:32:39.340 with him or disagree with him the reason why i chose him is as a rebuttal to the baby boomers primary
00:32:47.180 defense most baby boomers if you start reciting to them their flaws and the terrible things that the
00:32:54.040 boomers did will say yeah yeah maybe that's true but don't forget we did civil rights and doesn't
00:33:00.200 that just trump all other circumstances and of course that is the biggest con that the baby boomers
00:33:07.420 have ever pulled because no baby boomer was responsible for the golden age achievements of
00:33:14.400 civil rights in the 1960s yeah they wasn't pretty young right yeah unless unless you were freedom
00:33:20.260 writing at the age of three and a half you baby boomers were not there at selma you were not voting
00:33:25.980 for the civil rights act in 1964 the era of civil rights that the baby boomers were responsible for
00:33:32.520 was the darker more violent more manipulative era that's represented by al sharpton uh he's a
00:33:40.200 hope sure he's a fomenter of riot there's a very good argument to be made that al sharpton has blood on
00:33:46.980 his hands is directly responsible for individual death so that's the when we think of boomers and
00:33:54.120 civil rights we should think of that we shouldn't think of marching at selma and 1964 and dr king
00:33:59.500 we should think of tawana brawley and the crown heights riot and the other things that are
00:34:04.600 checkered in al sharpton's career
00:34:06.740 yeah and obviously baby boomers are not um they're they weren't created in a vacuum obviously their
00:34:23.480 parents had an effect on them whose parents had an effect on them the parents so baby boomers according
00:34:29.460 to pew research they start in 1946 and the last baby boomers were born in 1965 a lot of their parents
00:34:37.320 were part of the silent generation which were my grandparents born in the 1930s but some of their
00:34:42.400 parents were the greatest generation we know them as the greatest generation they fought in world war ii
00:34:47.820 whether they were at home or whether they were abroad everyone was contributing to the effort we think
00:34:52.980 of that as the height of patriotism and really you know a lot of people are nostalgic for that time in
00:35:00.180 our history where it seems like our institutions were intact and things mattered the way that they
00:35:04.980 were supposed to not perfect of course as far as equality and civil rights and things like that
00:35:08.880 but in a lot of ways that we see that as america's glory days how do we go from the greatest generation
00:35:17.540 to the baby boomers and some of the chaos that you're talking about so quickly like what happened
00:35:24.200 during those couple of decades
00:35:26.060 in some ways it was the greatest generation's fault they were one of the you know as the name says one
00:35:35.840 of the greatest generations in american history their achievements are unquestionable but going through
00:35:42.700 the great depression and then world war ii caused these men and women to want to give their children
00:35:50.840 the easy life that they hadn't had they thought i suffered through those great national traumas and
00:35:57.860 made those sacrifices so that my children could grow up in peace and prosperity and they succeeded in
00:36:06.840 doing that america was enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and unparalleled social cohesion
00:36:12.280 in the 1950s when the baby boomers were growing up the problem is that that then gave the baby boomers the idea
00:36:20.360 that peace and prosperity was the natural order of things and that america would always be that way
00:36:26.960 and even if they rebelled against the institutions that they inherited and acted out and were selfish and
00:36:33.380 narcissistic and didn't put in any sacrifices of their own to match the sacrifices that their parents had made
00:36:40.460 that things would still always be basically okay that's a common mistake in in human history people
00:36:47.640 assuming that prosperity and peace is the natural order when really it takes generation after generation
00:36:54.380 of maintenance and sacrifice to uphold it so in some ways the greatest generation is responsible
00:37:02.780 for the baby boomers having the mentality that they do because so many of the baby boomers mistakes
00:37:08.100 were from this misconception that no matter how badly they acted out everything would always be okay
00:37:14.720 yeah every generation obviously is going to have its imperfections and its flaws i mean we're finite
00:37:20.920 people so we have this inability to see how the choices that we're making today are going to have a long-term
00:37:27.460 effect on generations to come maybe we can understand how it'll affect our children directly
00:37:32.220 but most people when they're taking a job or choosing a career path they are thinking about themselves
00:37:38.060 they're thinking about maybe their spouse and the people and directly in their circle but they're not
00:37:42.140 thinking about the the larger sociological long-term impacts that their impact that their choices
00:37:50.900 may be making so eventually though everyone has to kind of take responsibility for their own
00:38:01.560 generation's foibles and failures yes we can look back to the uh baby boomers and the silent generation and and the
00:38:09.960 greatest generation but we also i think you would agree have to give some grace to realize that a lot of them
00:38:15.180 were doing exactly what they thought was best at the time even though now we see in hindsight that okay you could
00:38:21.740 have done a better job millennials are the same way yes we have inherited some bad things from baby boomers but
00:38:28.500 we've also got some stupidity and some bad choices that we've got to own on on our on our own by
00:38:35.140 ourselves and so what are some tips that you can give to us as millennials to make sure that we don't repeat
00:38:43.560 some of our parents generations mistakes um and also to start thinking in a way of okay what kind of legacy what
00:38:51.780 kind of world do i want to leave the future generations so someone isn't writing um a scathing
00:38:59.460 a scathing review of me and my generation which i think probably will already happen to millennials but
00:39:05.140 you know hopefully i won't be the subject of a chapter in a book about how terrible millennials are
00:39:10.740 yeah oh i'm sure it'll happen i'm sure it will um i think in many ways the tragedy of the millennial
00:39:20.100 generation is that on the one hand nobody knows better than us that we need to make better choices
00:39:26.980 than the boomers did we are in a lot of ways the victims of their mistakes so we are well positioned
00:39:33.140 to see those mistakes and to learn from them and i think a lot of millennials have the tragedy lies in
00:39:39.300 the fact that because the boomers damage has been so systemic a lot of times those better choices that
00:39:48.100 we know we should make are not available to us religion is a good example uh if you are a millennial
00:39:56.020 you are very likely to have come to the conclusion that the indifference to religion that the boomers
00:40:01.540 propagated was a wrong turn and that america needs to maybe make its way back to having a little bit more
00:40:08.580 respect for pay for faith especially in the public square the problem is that the churches especially the
00:40:16.180 protestant mainline churches have been run by boomers for a couple of generations now so if you go down
00:40:21.860 the street to your local episcopalian church it's not going to be the same church that existed there
00:40:26.660 in 1960 and it's maybe not going to be something that's worth giving your life to so the institution of
00:40:32.500 the family is in disarray um the two-income trap that's another example of millennials not having
00:40:39.460 choices available to them even when they know they should make it so the mission that millennials
00:40:43.620 need to set ourselves is not just to learn from the boomers mistakes but to repair the damage that
00:40:51.860 they did to institutions there's some rebuilding that's going to need to happen first before we can
00:40:59.140 start making those better choices and we need to do that for ourselves and and now for our own kids
00:41:04.180 yep absolutely millennials are no longer college students i think some people maybe baby boomers
00:41:10.260 boomers they think that all young people are millennials the oldest millennials are turning
00:41:15.060 40 this year i believe the youngest millennials were born in 1996 and so all of us are adults we're
00:41:23.300 out of college we got mortgages we got kids and maybe it's time for also millennials to to realize that
00:41:30.100 that we are in a place of responsibility and we do have the ability to rebuild and to lead in a
00:41:35.380 different way than maybe we were led um and so i hope that your book encourages people to do that
00:41:41.060 and kind of gives us some context and understanding of why we are where we are but not wallow in self
00:41:46.740 loathing and victimhood but take those lessons and change them while we have the ability to do so can you
00:41:55.700 tell everyone where they can buy your book and how else they can support and follow you
00:42:01.380 you can find me and a lot of other great writers at the american conservative.com
00:42:07.060 on social media i'm mostly on twitter at her andrews the book is boomers the men and women who
00:42:13.940 promised freedom and delivered disaster and it's available at amazon barnes and noble and wherever else
00:42:19.140 the books are sold awesome that is great thank you so much i really appreciate you taking the time
00:42:25.380 time to come on thank you