Helen Andrews dissects how boomers’ cultural and economic legacy—from $1.5T in student debt to the collapse of one-income households—crippled millennials, replacing Shakespeare with Madonna studies and The West Wing’s political fantasy with gig-economy precarity. While she praises boomer icons like Jobs (despite his tech-driven instability) and Cat Stevens, she ties their era’s radicalism to institutional decay: mainline churches in "terminal disrepair," education hollowed out by niche obsessions, and a backlash that left no blueprint for recovery. The result? A generation inheriting broken systems with no clear path to fix them. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, now and then for a change of pace, we like to bring on somebody intelligent and talented.
And so we're going to bring on Helen Andrews.
She is a senior editor at the American Conservative and the author of a new book, Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
Helen, thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
So, Helen, how can you look at a beautiful, grandfatherly, gentle face like mine and tell me that my generation destroyed the country?
Give me the thesis of your book.
I've only read the beginning of it, so I want to hear more.
Yeah, and I should say that this is not a boomer attacking book.
My own parents are boomers, and I love them to bitch.
They're wonderful.
So this doesn't mean that there are no good boomers.
But in many ways, millennials and boomers are natural enemies.
And how could we not be since the germ of the book began when I noticed how much harder things are today for my generation than they were for you guys?
I mean, gosh, I would have loved to been able to graduate college without a mountain of college debt, to work off a semester's tuition, you know, a couple nights a week sweeping floors at the chemistry lab.
I would love to live in a family where you could achieve a middle-class standard of living on a one-inch in a one-income household.
Whereas millennials feel like they're trapped in two-earner households and they both have to go into the workforce just to make ends meet.
All of the institutions that were functioning when you were growing up, when the boomers were growing up, the churches, the family, political parties, the education system, just did not get passed down to my generation in a state of good repair.
So the boomers across the board have been institution destroyers.
That's the germ of my case against them.
Oh, sure, sure.
So we destroyed a couple of institutions.
Come on.
You know, it's interesting.
You start out by saying you've modeled this book on Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, which was this attack on several Victorians.
And one of the things that always has bothered me about that book, that book, not your book, but that book, was that Strachey was this kind of loosh, gay guy who like resisted, you know, going into the army and then went out and attacked like Florence Nightingale and Khartoum Gordon, who actually had performed great feats.
Now, the Boomer generation did produce this incredible moment of culture in the 60s and 70s while we were, you know, all right, destroying the institutions, fine.
But we did create the last great works of American art, you know, movies like The Godfather, this kind of, you know, Ken Kesey's work, The One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this moment of real creativity.
And since then, it seems to me, the arts have died.
There is really nothing very interesting happening in the culture.
And there's a way in which I wonder when you attack the boomers, are you attacking them for destroying things or are you attacking them also because you have not managed to bring to the table the kind of insane creativity they brought?
I mean, to give them their due.
We have to give them their due.
And the genuine excellence of so much boomer culture has really been brought home to me recently.
I just had my first child.
And as anyone who's had a newborn in the house knows, you got to play them music.
Music is what soothes a little baby.
And when I go on Spotify to see what I'm going to play to soothe my little three-month-old, it's not pavement or indie bands like I was.
I'm not going to play him the dismemberment plan.
I'm going to play him Cat Stevens.
I'm going to throw on a little James Taylor, maybe a little Beatles.
That's what the music that I go to that I want to pass on.
So I got to admit, that is certainly true.
The boomers created some great culture.
And that's what I discovered as I was writing this book.
I picked six baby boomers who I thought were especially representative of their generation.
And it wasn't the buffoons or the clowns or the villains even that I fastened on as being the most suitable subjects for this book.
It was the people whose very genius, whose very accomplishments led them to cause so much damage.
So the boomers have a lot to their credit, but in many ways, it's the fact that they were so accomplished that caused them to harm society as much as they did.
A less influential, a less genius generation would not have left as much of an imprint.
Well, okay, so give me an example.
You go after Camille Paglia.
Now, I remember Camille Paglia in the 80s, I guess it was, bringing out that book, Sexual Personae, and it just gripped the world.
And the left hated it.
The establishment left just hated that book.
And it was delightful.
It was delightful to watch some of their precious, especially feminist assumptions, which we all knew were wrong.
We knew they were wrong at the time, just get disassembled by this very brilliant woman.
Why is she so evil?
Oh, I remember reading Sexual Personae in college, and it was electrifying.
It's a brilliant book.
She's a brilliant mind.
And she's another case where it's a tragic and almost ironic harm that she's done.
Camille Paglia's number one accomplishment in her career in the 90s had nothing to do with her quite entertaining sallies against the PC scolds.
It was her elevation of pop culture.
Before she came along, you would never have seen, say, a university press publish a biography of a pop culture figure or somebody with a PhD in English and a professorship at a university write a paper on Madonna.
And it was Camille Paglia who said, no, pop culture and Hollywood is just as worthy a subject of academic inquiry as Milton or Shakespeare.
And in her case, that worked out very well because she had that grounding in the great books.
However, the consequence of Camille Paglia's elevation of pop culture as a worthy subject of academic inquiry has been a subsequent generation that does not have her grounding in the great books.
And pop culture is all that they know.
I see so many millennial academics of whom that is true.
They just do not have Paglia's erudition and education.
And that's a decline in standards that now the rest of us have to live with.
It really, it really is terrible.
I speak to English majors now who do not read Shakespeare.
And I think like if you haven't read Shakespeare and they give you a degree in English, they've really cheated you.
They've lied to you, essentially, and you've read some obscure black or Puerto Rican author who may be very good.
It has nothing to do with that, but is not foundational to the culture that you're actually living in and the thoughts you actually think.
And that was a real mistake my generation made.
I saw it in action.
I saw it while it was happening.
And it really did deprive you of an education.
Obviously not you, but you probably worked very hard.
I mean, an education can still be hunted down if you try very hard, but they don't give you an education.
You know, just before we came on the air, we were chatting about Aaron Sorkin, and I was reminiscing that I saw Sorkin's first play.
I think it's called A Few Good Men.
Is that the one that became the Tom Cruise movie?
And it was a play.
That's right.
Yeah, and he was unknown, but it was a hit play.
And I went to the play, and I remember thinking, sitting in the theater, about this unknown writer.
This is a very talented writer who is incredibly shallow.
This is an incredibly shallow man with an amazing gift for writing dialogue.
And he has played that into, made that into a fortune.
It's amazing.
So what evil deed has he committed?
What does he represent in the boomer generation's path of destruction?
Well, he brought that shallowness to a show called The West Wing, which is all well and good as entertainment, but it's a little bit troubling that people watched that show and then decided to go into politics.
A lot of people my age who are millennials decided to move to Washington, where I live, because they wanted to be West Wing characters.
So the shallowness of that show has sort of infected the entire city and our ruling class.
It's very disturbing the way that they see themselves as West Wing characters.
The irony is that there is one subject on which Aaron Sorkin is not at all shallow, on which he has deep, sincere, very thoughtful beliefs.
And that subject is the entertainment industry, the influence of television.
You'll notice that Aaron Sorkin has made four TV shows in his career.
Only one of them is about politics.
All of the other three, Sports Night, Studio 60, and the newsroom, are behind-the-scenes dramas about a TV show.
Because Aaron Sorkin has an almost grandiose sense of the moral heft of the dilemmas faced by TV show producers and actors and directors and writers, because that's the industry he knows best and he knows where its faults and vices and responsibilities lie.
And it's almost his tragedy that his audience keeps wanting him to write about politics.
You know, when he made Studio 60, everybody said, that's dumb.
Give us another political show.
And so he had to make the newsroom when really politics is not what gets Aaron Sorkin's blood moving.
It's TV.
And that's something where he actually does have something serious to say.
But what is the problem?
You know, if you said to me, oh, you wrote this TV show and it encouraged young people to go into politics, why would that be a bad thing?
Because in the West Wing, things always work out for the best.
And the characters are brilliant and technocratic and omni-competent and they have no faults and situations always work out just as they're supposed to in a way that's not true to life.
And you can see it in individual plot lines.
Anyone who remembers the Clinton administration watching the first four seasons of The West Wing will be able to pick out plot lines that are ripped from the headlines, as they say on Law and Order.
But the difference is that the West Wing version of any plot always has a happier ending than the real one of the Clinton years.
And I think that's a distorting view of reality, if that's how you think things are in the real world.
Yeah, it is interesting how leftism thrives in places that don't have to test their ideas against reality like Hollywood and the Academy.
It always seems like it's the people who actually have to go and build a business who suddenly think, you know, this doesn't really work so well.
Steve Jobs' Legacy00:02:31
One more, Steve Jobs, because Steve Jobs is a hero to many on the right and certainly a weirdly iconic figure because he took the place that used to be held by artists.
Steve Jobs replaced people like Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, guys who used to be iconic artists just by making things.
What's the negative side of Steve Jobs?
It's funny comparison.
He's almost the last masculine hero Steve Jobs was.
Now, that's a very good way of thinking about him.
I wanted, actually, when I wrote the chapter, I set out not with the intention of attacking Steve Jobs, but with the intention of defending him against a charge that's often leveled against him that I thought was unfair.
And that charge is that his hippie persona was just an act.
You know, there are a lot of people who just don't have a lot of patience with his vegan diet and his John Lennon glasses and his pilgrimage to India, whatever that was all about, because those things genuinely did shape how Steve Jobs approached his company.
When he came on the scene, IBM was the typical computer company.
And it was, you know, any given computer in an office would be supervised by a priest-like cast of technicians.
And it was Steve Jobs who said, that's not right.
My vision for technology is one person, one computer.
I want computers to be in individual hands.
And I want it to be so easy to use that anybody could do it without reading a manual.
Because he believed that computers could liberate human creativity.
And it's a testament to his genius that the computer industry today looks the way it does because he succeeded.
One person, one computer is the model we still follow.
The problem came from his very success.
If you're a millennial, the fact that everyone's got a computer in their pocket hasn't meant for you the liberation of human creativity.
What it's meant is an uberized economy and being trapped in a gig economy job rather than something more stable and long-term.
It means ubiquitous pornography.
It means addiction to video games.
So I think the ubiquity of smartphones from the millennial perspective has been very much a double-edged sword and maybe on net more bad than good.
Hope Amid Boomer Destruction00:03:17
I have to ask this last question.
You made a comparison that is very dear to my heart.
I made the exact same comparison a long time ago in a City Journal of my generation to the Romantic generation, the English, really the English Romantic generation.
The comparison is almost uncanny if you take one as tragedy and one as farce maybe.
But they had the French Revolution and bliss was it in this time to be alive and to be young was very heaven.
And we had the 60s and we were, you know, it was the age of Aquarius.
It was followed in England by a conservative reaction in America by the Reagan generation.
And then even though they had that conservative reaction, the unfolding of rebellious and revolutionary thoughts continued.
And guys like Wordsworth who said, you know, we kind of made a mistake following this French Revolution, a lot of people getting beheaded, they were excoriated.
I mean, Wordsworth was absolutely pummeled.
There are famous poems written about what a terrible guy he was when really he was obviously in the right.
However, however, at the end, and this is one of the reasons I never lose hope, at the end of the Romantic generation, which was a generation of radicalism and rebellion, you had the Victorian era, which I'm a big fan of.
I mean, it was a time, obviously it was a troubled time, but it was a time of real reform, of genuine liberalization, and of England, the best of the European countries, becoming the master of the world.
Do you think there is an ending to this boomer, a happy ending possible, to this boomer destruction that we've brought upon you, where you can now use some of the stuff that we destroyed and some of the stuff that we created to build a better America and a new American century?
I wish I could hold out hope, but unfortunately, I'm pessimistic.
And I'll tell you why.
It's true that millennials have learned some lessons from the baby boomers.
We are in a perfect position to see the mistakes that the boomers have made and to realize that we need to make better choices than they did.
The problem is that the damage the boomers have done has been systemic.
Young millennials, we know, based on the boomers' example, that religion is not some dispensable thing as they treated it, but something vitally important in a culture and for an individual life.
But the boomers took over the Protestant mainline churches and have left them in a current state of terminal disrepair.
I mean, I'm not sure that some of the mainline churches are going to even make it out of the disrepair that the boomers have left them in.
So even young millennials who want to become more religious, turning to the churches, find them still in boomer hands and wrecked by the boomers in a way that's maybe not that easy to repair.
So even when we know we need to make better choices, sometimes those better choices are just no longer available thanks to the damage the boomers have done.
Wow.
Yeah.
Never ask a conservative if she has hope.
Helen, you're an excellent writer and obviously a very smart lady.
I hope you'll come back.
It's really interesting talking to you.
The book is called Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.