Dennis Prager Show - Helen Andrews: Is the Greatest Generation at Fault for the Boomers
Aired: 2021-02-03
Duration: 05:59


=== Boomers And The Legacy Of Narcissism (04:04) ===

[00:00:00]  So, I asked you a challenging question, which I have thought of a lot.
[00:00:05]  I fully acknowledge the damage my generation has done to this country and continues to do.
[00:00:12]  Joe Biden is a boomer.
[00:00:15]  And the question arises, did the generation that raised them, or does the generation that raised them, which is called the greatest generation, do they bear any responsibility?
[00:00:28]  This is a question that I get a lot, and I suppose it's only fair.
[00:00:32]  I've written a book where the millennials blame the boomers for their problems, so it's only fair to ask whether we can put a little bit of the blame for the boomers on the people who raised them.
[00:00:44]  But my answer is that really, you can't.
[00:00:47]  The blame stops with the boomers, and I'll tell you why.
[00:00:52]  The reason why the boomers are the way they are...
[00:00:57]  It's not so much how they were raised, but a product of the demographic fact that the boomers are an exceptionally large generation.
[00:01:09]  I mean, it's right there in the name, the baby boomers.
[00:01:12]  It was a birth boom, which meant that from the moment they came of age in the 1960s, the boomers have been the most numerous consumers, music listeners, voters.
[00:01:26]  Anybody who wanted their project to be a success would target it to the boomers and their desires.
[00:01:34]  If you were a politician and wanted to win, you would court the baby boomers simply because there were so many of them.
[00:01:41]  The consequence of that was that it gave the baby boomers the idea that the world revolved around them.
[00:01:48]  So much of the boomer legacy is a product of their narcissism.
[00:01:56]  Spoiled them when they were coming up.
[00:01:58]  It was because of this demographic fact, which has had just a lot of follow-on consequences.
[00:02:04]  Is there a repeat of this?
[00:02:07]  I just vaguely recall reading that there's a, I don't know if it's a baby boom, since a lot of people are not having babies, but Is there some sort of repeat in the staggering number of either Millennials or Generation X or Z or whatever?
[00:02:25]  Or is that wrong?
[00:02:28]  Very recently, we crossed the threshold point where Millennials now outnumber.
[00:02:34]  Baby boomers, mainly because so many baby boomers have, you know, driven themselves into an early grave through misdeeds of one kind or another.
[00:02:43]  And it is true that the millennials are also a pretty big generation demographically because they are the baby boomers' children.
[00:02:52]  And so the main consequence of that, unfortunately, has been that the generation between them, Gen X, So often gets sidelined, because there just are not so many of them.
[00:03:05]  So you'll talk to a lot of Gen Xers who feel kind of left behind and left out, and that's the reason behind that, that there were a lot of baby boomers, and their kids are the millennials, and so there are a lot of them too, but the Gen Xers just get caught in the middle.
[00:03:18]  So you chose a number of people.
[00:03:21]  Oh, by the way, I think I should answer, give you my theory as a baby boomer, because I was...
[00:03:29]  Already speaking when I was in my 20s, so I recall audience reactions, and I recall what I said publicly.
[00:03:38]  And I used to say to audiences, obviously these were the, this was the greatest generation, as they say, audience, the people who went through the Depression in World War II. And I say, you know what?

=== Millennials And The Boomer Legacy (02:10) ===

[00:03:49]  You say you're going to give us everything you didn't have, meaning...
[00:03:56]  Material wealth, security, and so on.
[00:04:00]  And that's great, but you didn't give us what you did have.
[00:04:04]  And that was religion and love of this country.
[00:04:10]  So I do hold them unintentionally responsible.
[00:04:15]  They were so preoccupied with giving my generation security and wealth.
[00:04:23]  I don't mean large sums of money, but material items that they forgot to give us what made America great for all its years.
[00:04:34]  How does that strike you?
[00:04:37]  That sounds absolutely correct.
[00:04:39]  One of the great resentments that I have as a millennial is that it's against boomer hypocrisy.
[00:04:47]  They were the ones who taught us that America was a terrible country.
[00:04:53]  And, you know, had been racist from its very founding.
[00:04:55]  And I think older people sometimes don't appreciate that for millennials, that line that America is terrible isn't something that we heard from the occasional dissident faculty radical.
[00:05:07]  That was orthodoxy.
[00:05:09]  That was what we were taught in our mainstream public school history classes.
[00:05:13]  And, of course, the natural response from the millennials is, okay, if America is so terrible, what is good about our country?
[00:05:20]  And the people who were teaching us said, well, America started being good around the time of the 1960s.
[00:05:27]  But if you think about it, what that means is that the baby boomers took love of America and replaced it with love of themselves.
[00:05:39]  So once again, the baby boomers' narcissism put themselves at the center of, according to them, the only good story to be told about the United States.
[00:05:49]  And it's certainly my hope that millennials can be the generation of backlash against that.
[00:05:54]  God willing.
[00:05:56]  I've got to take a break.
[00:05:58]  Helen Andrews.