The First Duty of the Ruler is to Sustain the Realm
Editors Note: This is part of a symposium on the Baby Boomer Generation.
Baby Boomers have brought little good and much woe. As I write, the political and cultural establishments of the West are failing. The globalized economy has empowered America’s adversary and weakened our homeland. The American empire is strained by overreach. The green transition has been a fantastically expensive charade. Anti-Western ideologies have gravely weakened solidarity. Feminism and the LGBT juggernaut have undermined functional roles for men and women. Mass migration, legal and illegal, threatens national coherence.
These sorry phenomena were midwifed and encouraged under the leadership of Baby Boomers. This generation—my generation—has rightly earned the disdain of younger Americans. We hired the DEI commissars. It was under our leadership that higher education became a progressive madras. We were in charge when NAFTA was passed, and China was brought into the WTO. We ran the NGOs that funded Black Lives Matter. My generation launched failed wars in the Middle East. We were the top-level Goldman Sachs partners who profited handsomely from the China trade. We designed the 2008 bailouts. We wrote the screenplays that celebrated perversion. It was Baby Boomer elites who quietly conspired to suspend enforcement of immigration laws. In sum, we are the architects of today’s unhappy world.
Younger readers are likely to have a keen sense of the consequences of this mismanagement of our nation’s affairs. But they may not grasp the extraordinary degree to which power was concentrated in the hands of Baby Boomers, especially peak Boomers, the members of my generation who came into adulthood in the 1960s.
Bill Clinton was the first Boomer president. He was born in 1946. George W. Bush followed him. He, too, was born in 1946. Donald Trump was born in 1946. Joe Biden, born in 1944, is technically not a member of the Baby Boomer generation, but his youthful and adult experiences ran along the same rails as those born in 1946.
It’s quite astounding. Aside from Barack Obama, the White House has been occupied by men born at very nearly the same time for the last 33 years.
And Obama is less of an outlier than his date of birth would suggest. Like me, Barack Obama is a trailing Boomer. He was born in 1961. (I was born in the final month of 1959.) I can testify that those of us at the tail end of the Boomer generation grew up under the shadow of our older siblings. They set the tone for youth culture—the long hair, the disdain for suits and ties, the political moralism, the arrogant presumption that youth is uniquely blessed with wisdom. We listened to their music; their values shaped ours.
The same story of Boomer dominance can be told of the titans of Wall Street over the last thirty years (Hank Paulson, 1946; Larry Fink, 1952; Jamie Dimon, 1956). And the tech billionaires like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (both born in 1955). And the media mythmakers: Stephen Spielberg was born in 1946. I could go on, but I won’t. Many historians have detailed the extraordinary power and influence of the Baby Boomer generation, which reshaped everything from fashion to finance. They drove cultural and political changes in their youth, and once they took charge after 1990, they set about to revamp the entire world in their own image.
The most important feature of the Boomer self-image arises from the unique circumstances under which they came of age. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States enjoyed two decades of peak solidarity. The influx of newcomers had been halted by the Immigration Act of 1924. The Great Depression had been a shared experience of national suffering. The subsequent World War provided a shared experience of sacrifice and service. After the war, an intense desire to return to normalcy supercharged a middle-class moral consensus and encouraged church attendance. Radio played the same Top 40 hits; the new medium of TV had only three channels. Aside from the black-white divide and enduring regional differences, the country was strikingly homogeneous.
In this context, Boomers cultivated a spirit of rebellion. They imagined themselves as heroic crusaders against soul-crushing conformity and artificial boundaries. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights: these were sacred causes on behalf of a more open and more inclusive society. At the same time, Boomers railed against what they saw as the cynical and nefarious power of America’s establishment. They protested against the war in Vietnam, lamented “selling out” to corporate America, and bemoaned the ways in which capitalism oppressed workers and destroyed the environment. When Bill Clinton was at Yale Law School, peak Boomers saw themselves as saviors of Western civilization, which could only be accomplished by smashing “the System.”
Therein lies one of the main reasons why Boomers made such a mess of things when they came into power, for the levers of power are enmeshed in the System. As Boomers laid their hands on these levers, their rebellious self-image distorted their judgment. The first duty of the ruler is to sustain the realm. But Boomers saw themselves as agents of transformation, which meant they neglected their primary duty as they pursued a nihilistic idealism.
Let’s use Bill Clinton as an example. He participated in protests against the war in Vietnam. I can’t speak to his convictions at the time, but those protests were imbued with strong statements that painted American military power as a force for evil in the world. In those circles, something similar was said about capitalism.
Again, I don’t wish to speculate about young Bill Clinton’s views. But it seems very likely that attaining the presidency of the United States led to inner difficulties. As President, Clinton was commander-in-chief of the most powerful killing machine in human history. And his administration oversaw a capitalist economy that had expanded dramatically during the 1980s. We should not be surprised, therefore, that he and his generation of Boomers embraced and promoted an End of History vision of globalization. American wealth and power would be repurposed toward promoting the global common good!
I don’t wish to suggest that Clinton, Bush, or Obama lacked patriotic sentiments. In the 1990s, the global order was constructed to serve American interests, particularly in finance and tech. Rather, the problem lay in their uneasiness with assertions of America’s interests. After all, some had linked arms with those denouncing “Amerika.” Others, like George W. Bush, steered clear of these associations. But he and Boomer conservatives felt the pinch of their generation’s sharp criticisms of American power. This fact about Boomers encouraged them to cultivate and advance globalist ideologies to cover their nakedness. Over time, those ideologies attained great influence.
The green transition is catnip for Baby Boomers. It provides a great cause, one that mandates the transformation of the economic foundations of the West. Life is not about making money! We need to save the world!
Another problem with Boomers rests in their relation to America’s establishment. The role of an establishment is to anchor a society and impose authority when necessary. But in their youth, Boomers had bumper stickers: “Question authority!” Again, when they attained positions of power, which is to say positions in America’s establishment, they were hobbled by double-mindedness. Those in positions of power naturally wish to perpetuate their dominion. But Boomers imagined themselves to be agents of transformation. As a result, they refashioned establishment institutions, making them into patrons of revolution. The upshot is the paradox that was clearly visible in 2020, when huge corporations, venerable universities, museums, and other pillars of the establishment embraced Black Lives Matter.
2020 represents just one instance. In the future, histories of the final decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st will chart the remarkable trajectory as America’s leading institutions. As Boomers came to power, they renounced the usual role of leadership, which is to steady the ship of state and even the keel of culture. Although they did not go to the barricades—that’s not an option for someone who occupies the White House and unseemly for the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art —they gave tenure, grants, and awards to those who did. Today’s anti-American pedagogy in schools, our disintegrated moral culture, the toleration of social disorder, and the celebration of transgression stem from Boomer patronage of revolution.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay not unlike this one: “Cursed by the Boomers.” I ended with a quote from Charles Péguy: “We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.” Most Baby Boomers cannot see what they see. They suffer from invincible ignorance. (The term comes from Catholic moral theology, and it refers to the condition in which a person is incapable of grasping the truth.)
Because Boomers grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, they took for granted the coherence of the country, the foundations of prosperity, and the enduring influence of middle-class morality. Put differently, Boomers inherited a great deal of social capital. Thus, as they spent down that capital in projects of inclusion, eroded it with economic globalization and foreign wars, and allowed it to be undermined by mass migration, they simply could (and still cannot) see the realities of America in 2025. Boomers are forever urging our “uptight” and “nativist” country to be more open, more accepting, more inclusive. They are blind to the evident facts. 100,000 people a year are not dying of drug overdose because of an oppressive, patriarchal, and “white” culture. The reason is otherwise: The moral fiber of America has been disintegrated.
The economic foundations for middle-class prosperity have also disintegrated, largely because of the globalization sponsored by Boomers. The spiritual and mythic foundations of national solidarity have been decimated by the activists and academics sponsored by Boomers. The culture of marriage, motherhood, and paternal duty has been severely damaged by the feminism and LGBT ideologies that have flourished under Boomer patronage.
MAGA has been derided as nostalgic for “white America.” That’s not been my experience. Rather, the citizens of this country (and quite a few non-citizens) have opened their eyes. They see what they see, which is a country damaged by more than thirty years of Boomer leadership.
I think of my fellow Boomers. Those in high places are well-educated. They cite studies and elaborate theories. Most animated by good intentions. Aren’t we blessed, not cursed by such an intelligent, engaged, and idealistic generation? Then I recall a story about Saul Bellow. An undergraduate in Chicago, he brought some friends with him to have dinner with his aunt. They debated the finer points of Marxist doctrine. After Bellow’s friends left, and he was helping his aunt clean up, she said, “Saul, dear, your friends are so, so smart, but so, so stupid.” I feel the same way about my fellow Boomers.
