Generation Xer Dana Milbank pretty clearly hates Baby Boomers if his most recent Washington Post column is any indication:
Before the emails start pouring in, let me make clear that this isn’t an indictment of individual boomers, nor of boomers’ contributions to art and science. But as a generation of leaders, they have been disastrous. Boomers seized the White House in 1992 and the House in 1994 and have generally dominated government since. Clinton, like Trump, is a boomer, which guarantees that the generation will control the White House through at least 2020.
And what does this generation have to show for its quarter-century of leadership?
Boomers inherited the sole superpower after the Greatest Generation won the Cold War — and squandered U.S. influence with two long and inconclusive wars.
They gave us the financial collapse of 2008, the worst economy since the Great Depression, a crushing federal debt and worse inequality. They devoured fossil fuels and did little about global warming while allowing infrastructure and research to deteriorate. They expanded entitlement programs and are now poised to bankrupt those programs. Their leadership has led to declining confidence in religion, the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, banks and big business, schools, the media and the police. They may leave their children (the millennials) worse off than they were.
Far be it from me to praise the Baby Boomers. His characterization of them as “idealists” is a stretch. It was obvious to me it was a stretch in the 60s and 70s and it’s obvious now. They were always self-serving. Opposition to the Viet Nam War, for example, wasn’t founded on idealism but in self-interest. “Give peace a chance” was less the anthem of the anti-war protests than “Hell, no, I won’t go!” The draft was the basis of the opposition to the war. Just look how quickly the anti-war movement faded after the draft was abolished.
I would ask a question, however. Were the U. S. senators who voted for the Authorization to Use Military Force mostly Baby Boomers or Silent Generation, those born during the Great Depression through the end of World War II? They were mostly Silent Generation just as the most of the present Congressional leadership is. Of present Congressional leaders only Paul Ryan is a Gen-Xer (John Boehner was a Baby Boomer). Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell are all Silent Generation.
As far as the financial world goes, Alan Greenspan is Greatest Generation, Angelo Mozilo and Bernie Madoff—Silent Generation. In Time’s list of those responsible for the financial crisis about half are Silent Generation and about half Baby Boomers and most of those just barely Baby Boomers, i.e. born in 1946. In other words, it doesn’t really support Mr. Milbank’s case.
He might want to go back and do a little more research with an open mind.
Milbank has a point but takes it too far. There certainly is a lot of Gen-X resentment against the Boomers (and has been for as long as I can remember), not all of it fair…but a lot of it is.
Succeeding generations always treat the contributions of those that preceded them as sunk costs. The Baby Boomers didn’t cause the country to stay in the Great Depression for the entire decade of the 1930s, send the world into war, create the concern about nuclear weapons that still hangs over us today, or start a Cold War that lasted 45 years but they were material in building the economy and sustaining a peace among major powers that’s lasted a very long time.
The Generation Xers need to stop resenting the world as it comes to them.