MTracey podcast - How Boomers Ruined Everything

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Helen Andrews’ fabulously acidic book Boomers has earned a rousing enough recommendation from me that I decided to feature her as the first guest in the newly revived M. Tracey podcast series, now hosted on Substack. Previously I’d been averse to demarcating political conflict by generational lines, but this book has spicily dispelled any lingering apprehension I had in that regard. There’s plenty of cancellable material in here if you’re inclined to be scandalized — an apologia for the virtues of old-style European empire, a counter-intuitive ode to the savvy of Al Sharpton, numerous bitter pills to swallow on the failures of American imperial hegemony and modern feminism, etc. Mysteriously though, Helen reports not yet having been canceled — which raises the question of whether she’s immunized by dint of already being a hardened conservative, and therefore not susceptible to demands for her to grovelingly repudiate herself. Or maybe it’s just because the potentially-scandalized lack the attention span to get through the book, which would be in keeping with her general thesis of boomer violence upon our collective cognitive faculties. Hope you enjoy the conversation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

Hey, everybody, Michael Tracy here. I am reviving my audio conversations for Substack. And you can subscribe to these via anywhere you get your podcast ordinarily, iTunes, etc., or you can just listen to them directly here on Substack. And the first guest in this excitingly revived series is, is Helen Andrews, who is an editor at the American Conservative magazine and the author of New Book Boomer's, the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster, which I highly recommend reading for reasons that will be explicated in this discussion to follow.

So hope you enjoy. All righty then. So, where to begin? This was an extremely spicy book, I would say. Oh, well, so you actually read it. That puts you way ahead of most Bookshore interviewers. Is that right? So in your experience in doing publicity for this book,

it's very easily discernible that the interviewers have not read it? And I do not blame them at all. As someone who does a podcast for the American conservative, I don't always have time to have comprehensive knowledge of my interviewees accomplishments. So I don't at all blame them. But it's always a treat when the interviewer has actually read the book in question. Okay. Well, I'll try to exhibit.

I don't want you to just take it on faith that I've actually read it. I'll try to exhibit that over the course of our, you know, roughly hour-long discussion here. But at the outset, I would just, you know, encourage readers to, listeners to actually read the book because there is a zinger pretty much, on every page. You know, one, one concept that struck me toward the end of the book that maybe is a nice kind of launching point is in the chapter

on Sonia Sotomayor. And you kind of credit in a perverse way, Sonia Sotomayor for pioneering this vocabulary of therapy and trauma in the context of judicial opinion making. And by the way, I guess before we get too deep, the book is called Boomers,

and it's kind of an indictment of boomers for bringing about the decadence that is now kind of crippling civilization. And when I read that, it struck me because I had more associated this rhetoric of trauma and of therapy and whatnot with millennials or even zoomers. And I guess I had to kind of check myself and reevaluate whether there were like

antecedents for some of this, the style of rhetoric that you now see really promoted by people like AOC and others in that demographic group. So are we underselling the extent to which Sonia Sotomayor and people in her ilk actually were the forerunners of this now lingua franca of trauma and therapeutic health improvement that is now kind of the currency of a lot of political rhetoric? Yeah, the answer to your question of chronology is that the boomers are absolutely responsible for therapeutic language and it's all about me living my truth. This is something that's not in the book, but before I even began this manuscript, I happened

to write and research a piece about Alcoholics Anonymous. And one thing I learned is that there is a huge difference in style between AA and every other recovery group out there. And that the reason is that the AA was started in a pre-boomer era. It is very old-fashioned. And so it's not all about expressing your feelings and I'm a good person. I just happen to have this disease.

You know, the saying in AA is, I used to think I was just a good person who drank too much. But no, that's not actually the case. Whereas in N.A. and all the other group therapy stuff, those were all started by boomers or to cater to boomers. And those are the recovery groups where it's a lot more about self-esteem. So where Sonia Sotomayor fits into this is that. that she was not the first person to pioneer thinking of herself primarily in a narrative of psychological self-affirmation.

But she was the first person to think that that kind of attitude and that kind of language belonged in a judicial opinion. Right. The particular passage that I start that chapter with is from an affirmative action case, where she said, any attempt to solve. America's race problem in a colorblind way is short-sighted because of the feelings of she gives a litany of examples of minorities who are oppressed by being asked where are you from really no matter how long their family has been in this country blah blah blah and that

that kind of psychological stuff should determine how we interpret the law so that's that was her contribution yeah and I really I mean I hadn't really I realize that she successfully employed emotional terrorism tactics, as you put, or I think emotional blackmail, which are, I mean, they're interrelated concepts. I tend to, I tend to go with emotional blackmail, or rather, I think to go with emotional terrorism, because I think that there's like a tyrannization that this kind of rhetoric enables its users to inflict. but I hadn't realized that she kind of cowed Anthony Kennedy to kind of in a way assent to her dictates. Yeah, and I think people who people who are not themselves court watchers probably don't know this story, but it's shocking.

Anthony Kennedy, for people who don't know, has or had always been a reliable anti-affirmative action vote since he was confirmed. He had a decades-long record opposing racial quotas and racial set-asides. So when Fisher v. University of Texas came up before the court, everyone assumed that he would join the conservative justices in striking down the affirmative action program at that school. And when he joined the liberals in upholding the affirmative action program, everyone was surprised and nobody had an explanation and it was only the legwork of Supreme Court reporter Joan Biscupich that uncovered what had happened and what happened was that Sonia Sotomayor circulated a draft dissent because that's what the justices do they

draft up a throw together a dissent and it circulated around so everybody knows where all the other justices are on any given case and this particular draft dissent included this this flamethrower language about colorblindness being actually secretly racist. And basically, she was threatening to call Anthony Kennedy a big old racist in this blistering dissent if he joined the conservatives in striking down affirmative action. And that caused him to switch his vote. And it later transpired that she repurposed some of that same language for a later dissent. in a different affirmative action case.

And that's why we have seen it today. We still haven't seen what that draft dissent said, but we know enough to know what she did. And the funny thing is, is that when Sonia Sotomayor first was nominated by Obama, there were people who said, don't put her on the court because she's not that smart. And you want somebody who's super smart

because a lot of cases in the next decade are going to hinge on who's more persuasive in deliberations, who can change Anthony Kennedy's mind, and bless her heart. Sotomayor just doesn't have the mental chops to get that done. There were a lot of people saying that during her confirmation battle. And, well, that's a funny irony, isn't it? That, you know, it didn't take clever arguments to change Anthony Kennedy's mind.

All it took was being willing to call him a racist in public. That's what he was most vulnerable to. Yeah, so maybe the mistake was for those critics during her confirmation hearings to, try to undermine her purported smartness when they should have been cognizant of her shrewdness, which are not exactly the same thing, but you need a certain kind of intelligence to know that the employment of those kinds of tactics are going to achieve their desired ends. Yeah, the sad thing is that she took it very personally. She even today, years later in interviews, will complain.

And everybody called me stupid during my confirmation process. Now, can anyone tell me why other than that I'm Hispanic, they might do that. She's still trying to claim that that was a racist attack on her. But these are people like Lawrence Tribe. So, you know, he's certainly not a raging conservative. The conservatives were not upset about her intelligence. We were upset about the wise Latina speech, which is quite a different thing. And probably that those concerns have been amply vindicated.

Yeah, so one kind of recurring theme throughout the book is this idea that I actually have the quote here. So you say that to cover their tracks, the boomers have, quote, stuffed their errors with sufficient pseudo-knowledge to make them feel as though they know enough about the past to judge themselves superior to it. and the kind of propagation of pseudo-knowledge you seem to contend is integral to the way the boomers have made the world in their image and now even the millennials are imitating boomer boomer tactics in a way whether it's through protesting or pop culture or whatnot how do you explain this concept of pseudo knowledge. Is pseudo knowledge one and the same with now the

collapse of all forms of culture into mass commercialized pop culture? Is mass commercialized pop culture? Is that a, is it, doesn't necessarily flow from that that societies become

suffused with what you call pseudo knowledge? It's bigger than that. So, yes, the fact that nobody can sit down and read a book anymore and everybody's brain has been scrambled by TV and then later social media, that's a big part of it. But pseudonology is something you see among boomers across the board. And I'm glad that you brought up that particular quote because it's about people's pseudo knowledge of the past specifically and that having a twisted view of how things were before the boomers came along leads them into all kinds of. errors. Let's stick for the moment with Justice Sotomayor. She throughout her career has repeatedly interpreted things that have happened to her as things that were inflicted on her only because

she's Puerto Rican. So, you know, when people called her dumb during her confirmation, that was because she was Hispanic. When she was a law student at Yale, she was involved in a bit of a kerfuffle that got the intention of Yale Law Administration. Somebody who came to interview her for a job at a law firm, started needling her about affirmative action and saying, well, Sonia, do you think the only reason you've got into Yale law is because you're Puerto Rican? And she reported this law firm to the Yale Law Administration,

and they threatened to ban that firm from interviewing any other candidates on campus unless they apologized. So she running and tattling, I guess, was something that she learned was a very effective strategy. But I love that anecdote because almost exactly the same thing happened to Antonin Scalia. When he was interviewing for a job at a law firm, I think it was Jones Day, they needled him about being an Italian Catholic. I said, well, you're a Catholic.

Doesn't that mean you're pretty reactionary on social issues? You must believe in blue laws and that stores ought to be closed on Sundays. Do you support those? and he was the only Catholic at the table when they started needling him about that during a prospective partner's dinner. And he gave as good as he got. You know Scalia, he loves a good scrap.

So he just jumped into it. The reason why law firms do these things in interviews is to see how you respond under pressure. It has absolutely nothing to do with anybody's race or being Hispanic. So Sotomayor has this vision in her head of how things were for white males and that they had the way smoothed for them on the ladder up through life and that no white male ever had any adversity or any problems. It was all just rosy and it's all a big conspiracy to keep women and minorities down. That's a good example of what I mean by pseudonology.

only believe that this law partner asked her those questions because she was Puerto Rican and he was a racist, if you have literally no accurate idea of what the world was like before the 1960s. And is the prevalence of that pseudo knowledge largely attributable to sources of information about the past being concentrated in these mass commercial mediums, would you say? Definitely. I think you, the picture that people have in their minds of how things were comes from TV. There's a chapter in the book about Jeffrey Sachs. And in it, I talk a lot about empire because I think there are a lot of parallels.

I was going to get to that, yes. Well, yeah, and that's a good example, right? Because Jeffrey Sachs has bought into this popular line that everybody in academia and in the media accepts today, which is that empires of the 19th century, things like the British Empire and the French Empire, were run by racists who hated brown people, and that's why they did everything they did. They barely thought Africans and Indians were human beings. And you can only think that if you have never actually read something that these old imperialists wrote. The experience of opening a book written by one of these imperialists that are today so villainized, would cure anyone instantly

of the caricatured version of imperial history that exists today. So it's only by making people today incapable of sitting down and reading old books in terms of their own attention spans. And then also secondarily clearing out these old books from school curricula that allows people to get away with having ridiculous caricatured versions of the past. I'm going to channel what the standard rebuttal to you on that point would be, just to cover my tracks. I don't want to get you canceled, man.

I'm amazed I haven't gotten canceled. I don't know how I do it. I mean, thankfully, substack has rendered me uncancelable, although that probably predated my transition to substack. So if the cancel brigades want to come after me, they're more than welcome. Usually actually, ironically, results in additional subscriptions and financial contributions.

So it's actually not so bad. That's the very little secret of cancellation. So, you know, what one would say in response to what you just laid out there is, isn't the inference that if these colonial powers thought that they had some right to rule over lesser peoples, isn't that evidence enough of some belief on the part of those colonial powers in the inherent inferiority of those peoples, which is kind of by nature related to some kind of perceived racial disparity in terms of human worth? Right.

I would acknowledge a perceived superiority. I would dispute that it was in any way racial. I remember being in South Africa, actually, and talking with somebody about the history of that country and the tribes of Southern Africa and Zimbabwe and being caught out or caught out for my use of the word primitive. My interlocutor said, Helen, don't you know the word primitive has been totally debunked?

I said, okay, I am willing to give up the use of the word, the word primitive, but then I would like you to give me another word I can use to describe a civilization which has not developed the written word or plow agriculture or the wheel or beasts of burden. What word would you like me to use for a culture that has no written records and no money and, you know, primitive, in a morally neutral sense, seems like that's the situation that that word was invented to describe. So I do not at all blame people for having a realistic assessment of the advantages of, for example, agricultural and industrial civilizations over nomadic ones.

You know, that seems, I mean, we can have a fight about whether or not those two things, one is more advanced than the other, but I'm pretty secure in thinking that one is. You're more seasoned in this history than I am, but I think if I were to spend a week in the archives sifting through correspondences of various, you know, British or French imperial rulers or, you know, functionaries,

I could probably compile a fairly persuasive body of evidence that they maybe it wasn't overt racial animus in every instance but they had because they're of their time I would suppose that you could probably find quotes where they are denying the agency say of certain local peoples on account of their inferiority that is connected to their race? Like, would I, in other words, would I not be able to find such evidence if I looked? You would.

I would certainly admit that there were white supremacist tracts written in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the thing that struck me most when I started researching empire as a topic, because I, of course, was raised to believe in, you know, my 12 schools, 12 years of public school education had taught me that empire was bad and all the imperialists were racist.

And the thing that surprised me as I started reading them was that the closer you got to actual imperial power, the closer to the coal face, as they say in Britain, that is the people who were on the ground as officers of empire. The closer you got to the front and to being on the ground, the less racist they were. that it's very easy to find people who were commentators, who were writing tracts about the rising tide of color and blah, blah, blah, blah. But the people who were willing to give their lives to live in remote parts of Africa, which is not a super fun place to live if your other option is, you know,

19th century London, which is the most advanced city in the world, people willing to sacrifice a first world standard of living to go out there and live among Africans or Indians, actually did so because they loved the people that they saw themselves as guardians of, and they were least likely to be racist. The one that I would recommend anybody curious to go read, if you want a sort of confirmation of what I'm saying, is an administrator known as Lord Lugar.

And he, the moment that I started to really like him was when he said, you know, what we see in Africa today is no. different than what England had and our woed painted ancestors. You know, the Saxons painting themselves blue in the times of the Romans. He said, you know, the Romans civilized us and we are now simply doing, we are repaying that debt. So he's, it would be, yeah, he's a good place to start, if you want an example of an imperialist who was not contemptuous of people who had a different skin color than himself. Yeah, and what's particularly interesting about that chapter on Jeffrey Sachs is it leads to

an exploration by you about how the United States was critical in essentially crippling the older empires, namely the British. And in doing so, the United States, like the stewards of American hegemony, continued to carry out imperialistic ambitions, but without any of the virtues that you ascribe to the older empires. And

you, you, you, I think you coined a term for this, which is a virginal imperialism. And that led me to kind of reflect on a sentiment that I'm detecting increasingly on the right, or at least kind of the

you know, reactionary intellectual right. You often hear them discussing variations of this theme in clubhouse rooms nowadays. But it seems like a lot of younger right wing people are fairly sour on the American experiment at this point. They, you know,

and that's kind of indicated in a way in the favorable contrast that you give to the British Empire with, you know the iteration of American Empire post-World War II. Do you find, I mean, so you mean, you're a quote-unquote millennial. I mean, I guess I'm kind of buying into these generational demarcations now, even though I previously had sort of an irrational aversion to them. Do you find that kind of younger conservatives are fairly black-pilled on this whole notion now of American Empire, the American Empire, the American Imperial?

project because it's sort of untethered to the moral bearings that would need to exist for them to be able to convincingly mount any kind of defense of it? Yes, and apologies if anyone's listening and hears baby noises in the background. That's my little six-month-old. I've got him here. He's helping Mama with her interview. So apologies for any background. I think everybody is actually cheered by the wholesome background noises of baby chirping. and certainly in the years in the age of lockdown any parent out there can certainly sympathize yeah it's as i stepped back from the 20th century and tried to re-evaluate it with fresh eyes which is

what i tried to do with this book the thing that struck me was that you know you a lot of people talk as if america's great geopolitical accomplishment in the 20th century was the end of the cold war winning the Cold War. But actually, all we did there was destroy an empire that had existed for half a century, for a few decades, which is not all that long in the scheme of empire. What we did after World War II was to destroy and dismantle the French and British empires, I mean, basically Suez and after. And those were empires that had existed for all, for a lot longer. And so for America to overturn them in the course of a few decades was a much, much more significant achievement than winning the Cold War and destroying the Soviet Empire.

As to why millennials are sour on the American Empire that stepped in to fill the vacuum created by the end of the British and French empires, it's because millennials are the ones fighting the wars in the Balkans and Afghanistan. And my position is that it would be one thing if America wanted to act like a proper empire. And if you want more feminist governance in Afghanistan, the way to do it is to go in and govern it and hopefully teach them to treat women more according to Western standards.

If that's what you want, in Afghanistan, you've got to go in and govern it and make it happen. But instead, the American... So you can't rely on Laura Bush, occasionally issuing press releases about, you know, the, how please she is by, like, obscure advances in women's literacy? I remember an episode of Seventh Heaven all about women's literacy in Afghanistan. Yeah, no, I don't think that's going to cut it. And more importantly, you can't keep laundering your imperialism through local proxies. And even the British understood that ruling through local lords and chieftains was usually more efficient because you got to have local buy-in, as we would say today.

But, you know, sometimes your proxies just fall down on the job. And when push comes to shove, you need to be able to go in and say, fine, we're going to do this ourselves. Keeping up the pretense that we are only there to assist the government of Kosovo or wherever. and not actually there to govern. We're just there to be struts and supports. That pretense makes the whole enterprise totally idiotic and insupportable. And the reason why America goes through that pretense in the first place is because we cannot admit to ourselves that we are an empire because we have convinced ourselves that empire is per se a bad thing.

So that's the reason why I care so much about vindicating old bearded British men from the 19th century. It's not that I think they're so cool and glamorous. It's that rehabilitating them then has policy implications now. If empire is not actually the worst thing in the world, then maybe people might actually do it, as opposed to doing it in a half-assed worst of both worlds way. that makes it probably better for us not even to try to have any kind of empire at all if we're not going to do it properly.

Yeah, I guess the pessimism, though, that I detect particularly amongst younger people on the right, even goes a bit deeper beyond beyond, you know, the wastefulness of American interventionism, and that's almost a given at this point. And beyond the effectiveness of this, kind of bastardized version of empire that America has enforced around the world. But I kind of think, it often seems as though that there's a very deep skepticism

that the very kind of basics of the American constitutional order are conducive to implementing the kind of society that they want to live in. I mean, maybe this is just sort of the, kind of almost in a way, an emotional reaction to the previous election or something, and it's sort of transient and it will pass. But it seems, I don't, I get the impression that a lot of young conservatives

are just blackpilled on America per se, and their distaste for its management of empire is only one kind of manifestation of that. Yeah, the one word, explain it answer to your question is China, right? For the last half century, Americans have believed that the reason all of the Africans and Latin Americans said such nice things about American constitutionalism and democracy when we went to their countries was that they really believe the American political system was super great and the best means of achieving human happiness.

Well, it turns out that the reason why third world people flattered us when we went to their countries was because America was the richest and most successful country in the world. And so if your own country is not that great, you know, you look at the people who have lots of money and who seem to be successful on a global scale. You say, well, they must be doing something right. now if you live in eastern Africa, if you live in Kenya, you look at the United States and then you look at China and you think, well, which of these two countries seems more able to get things done? Which of them is building more things in my country? Who's acting like a winner? Who seems to be the coming power? And it is not at all clear that a person, living in the third world today, faced with those two options, would say that America still looks like a winner. So, yeah, we thought it was that we had such beautiful ideas. And actually, it was just because we were super rich and powerful. And if we ceased to be those things, and if China seems more competent than we are, then nobody's going to care all that much about our beautiful

ideas anymore. So, yeah, we don't look that great to the rest of the world now. So I'm not at all surprised that there are people living here in this country on the right who think we don't look that great anymore either. And there are some specific figures throughout history who learn the limits of what paying homage to the American founding ideals could get them in terms of foreign benefits, right? I mean, Ho Chi Men famously invoked the Declaration of Independence and then see how that turned out for it. And I think at some point the culpability has to lie with America too that we were foolish to believe that applying the American Constitution

to third world countries would work for them, even if they tried it. I mean, every Latin American constitution in the 19th century was modeled on ours, and the result was not two centuries of peace and stability and manifest destiny and prosperity. It was civil wars and military coups and instability. And yeah, it did not work out well. Simply applying constitutionalism did not suffice. So you have another chapter on Al Sharpton, which is very, very interesting. And that's kind of framed through this prism of transactional politics versus transformational politics.

And the idea being that boomers became fixated on this notion of transformational politics, meaning the politics of moral injunction and societal upheaval, innately being preferable to the old machine style politics of the past. you know, emblematized by, you know, Richard Daley of Chicago, for example.

And you seem to put forward a qualified defense of the transactional notions of politics as better suited to bring about maybe kind of more incremental change

that accounts for a pluralistic diversity of opinion and complicated, especially urban, urban areas, And, you know, one thing that came to mind when I was reading that chapter is, okay, where does the current president fit into that? And I double-checked his date of birth.

He is actually not a boomer. He's three years older than the cutoff. But it seems like Joe Biden is not, he's very much different from Barack Obama, at least if you look at the totality of his political career in that, I mean, nobody ever looked really to Joe Biden for transformational inspiration. really? I mean, Joe Biden is, if anything, kind of just a coalition manager for the Democratic Party. It wasn't as though he had spent days laboring away and trying to fashion an intellectual

underpinning for what his governing priorities would be. So I kind of wonder if maybe Joe Biden, in a way, is kind of satisfies this this craving for a return to transactionalism that you lay out in that chapter? He would if he were still driving the bus. Unfortunately, based on what I've seen in the last first weeks of his administration, I don't think he's in charge.

But you are right that Joe Biden is not a boomer. He's a pre-boomer, which means that we may well have seen our last boomer president ever, which would be fantastic. I think if we never have another boomer president again, it'll be too soon. But I would offer even more than a qualified defense of Mayor Daly. I think that the first Mayor Daly of Chicago was one of the greatest American politicians of the 20th century.

I think the moment that surprised me most in researching that chapter on boomers and race relations. was discovering that when Martin Luther King announced that he was coming to Chicago and in order to lead a campaign to show America that racism was not just a southern problem, but a national problem, that there were local black leaders in Chicago who held a press conference and told him, thank you very much, Dr. King, we respect you immensely, but we don't need you. Please do not come to Chicago. Your style, your methods are not needed here. We're doing perfectly all right without you. And I wanted to know more about who these black leaders were,

and why did they say that? Were they just Uncle Tom's? Were they fronts for some white power machine? And the more I researched, the more I discovered that no, actually, Mayor Daly had built a machine, a democratic machine in Chicago that specialized in assimilating new migrant minority groups. So, you know, the Irish built the machine, and the Italians came in, and they were assimilated, and you got the Polish and the Ukrainians and people from the Balkans, like the parents of Rod Blagojevich,

and there was a place made for all of them in the mosaic that was the Cook County Democratic operation. And Daly thought it was only fair to do the same thing, for African Americans of the Great Migration who are coming up the railroads from Mississippi and moving into the South Side. And of course, being integrated into the Democratic machine meant playing by its rules.

That is, it meant waiting your turn and moving slowly and laboriously up from Ward Healer to city councilmen to assemblymen to wherever. and so things weren't going to happen overnight. But it brought real tangible benefits. I cite a dozen quotes. I cite you so much evidence that the Chicago machine was actually working and was favored by the people on the ground.

There's a reason why black Chicagoland voted so many times for Mayor Daly. And that was going to be disrupted by this transformational style, which is what Dr. King, used, which was highly effective in a situation like Selma, but perhaps not so appropriate for the kinds of problems faced by black families on the South Side in Chicago. So that was the mystery that I set out wanting to solve. How could it possibly be that any serious black leader in Chicago could say no thanks to Dr. King? And I think transactional politics is the reason why. It was the answer. Yeah, yeah, that was definitely interesting,

and that was some history that I hadn't been immediately aware of either. Are there any examples today contemporaneously of politicians attempting to kind of revitalize that transactional method that come to mind, or is it now obsolete in the kind of boomer paradigm has reigns supreme such that it's just no longer tenable? It is obsolete and I'm very angry about that. The truth is that American politics has become judicialized. Nobody bothers wanting to pass a local ordinance anymore. It's all about getting a test case to the Supreme Court.

And that's what will actually make a difference. So, yeah, no, transactional politics is no longer. worth it. And you saw this in the career of Barack Obama. Before he went to law school, as everybody knows, he was a community organizer. And so that meant working within this Chicago world of ward healers and deal brokers and compromisers. And, you know, the very most that he managed to accomplish was what getting asbestos removed from one tenement building, you know, he did not come away from his time as a community organizer with a whole hell of a lot to show for it. Then he went to law school, came back, sued Citibank for racial discrimination in lending practices, and got fat five-figure

payouts for his clients. So if that's the comparison, why would anybody bother community organizing? We can just sue somebody and get a fat check. So that's emblematic of a broader change that has affected American politics in the course of the boomers rule. You know, actual democracy no longer means very much. It's all just lawsuits. Yeah, you mentioned that we now might have had our final boomer president. And if that's the case, then the final boomer president would have been Donald Trump, which I don't know how neatly that fits into your thesis.

But, you know, are there, are there aspects? of boomer excess that he embodies per your kind of analytical framework here or because you know Trump is kind of not doesn't feature much at all in the book which was you know refreshing in a way but I wonder if that is maybe an excessively glaring omission given the historic role that he may may occupy as the last of the boomer American rulers Yeah, something about Donald Trump seems very pre-Boomer to me. So it's the classic boomer president is Bill Clinton. And there's something about Donald Trump that makes me think he identifies with his father's generation.

He's just, he is excessive in some ways. But he does not have this Clinton-esque self-indulgence. So he's, he just doesn't seem very boomerish to me. I think there are some who might dispute the idea that Donald Trump has never engaged in any self-indulgent behavior. He's a teetotaler, which means he's, you know, more self-control than I do. If he can not drink. Maybe so.

But, you know, he did develop a pretty chronic Twitter addiction before that was taking away, taken away for him so unjustly. He was devoted to his art. Yes. The man was a craftsman. I miss that man. I miss that man. Yeah.

So anyway, you sort of conclude the book with a brief discussion of the potentially long-lasting implications of the riots of last summer. and as you may know, I spent a lot of time covering those riots because there was a gaping void in the media and kind of doing basic journalism and chronicling what occurred in the country. And the indefensibility of that lack of coverage was kind of reinforced to me in reading that section because, I mean, you speculated that the 2020 riots could be ultimately much worse than anything that happened in that. 1960s because circa 2020, we lack what you say, what you call the civilizational cushioning that enabled,

you know, boomers back in the day to, to run rampant and engage in riotous activity in it not also destroy civilization. So, you know, in light of that, the fact that we still don't really have

anything close to, a comprehensive kind of record of, of those riots, again, it's just even more, more amazing in hindsight. And so, you know, that's why I tried, I thought it was probably wise to at least do what I could to fill in those gaps. But, but, you know, if, if that, that hypothesis that you lay out there is true, is that, I mean, are we teetering on the verge of kind of something really historic in terms of, I don't know, a collapse, So how would you kind of characterize the risk now that we we face in terms of some kind of bonafide dissolution of the of the American experiment?

Or is it just, you know, going to be, you know, gradual and tedious and not kind of culminate in some kind of climactic, climactic event that a lot of people in the more fevered parts of the internet sometimes conjure up in their imaginations? It's not going to be a dissent into civil war. It'll be more like a long, slow slide into third world crappiness. I think that's, if you want to know what the future of American politics looks like, look at Latin America. I think that's that that style of politics is what we have to look forward to. But I'm glad that you brought up your, what I think will be your contribution to history,

because there weren't a lot of other people documenting those riots. And that makes a very neat comparison to the 1960s, because in the 1960s, you had the opposite problem, which is a very small number of people staging. flamboyant riots in the streets, people like Abby Hoffman or Bill Ayers, getting vastly disproportionate media attention because they happened to be friends with or appealing to the people who worked in the media. So they got a lot more journalistic coverage than they deserved as opposed to what we saw last year, which was a media blackout, in both cases. is due to simply the cultural prejudices of the people who work in journalism.

But in the 1960s, the consequence of the media's blowing the protests out of proportion was that people forgot about the silent majority. And that's what happened when Richard Nixon was elected after the summer of 1968. We all had our fun in the streets of Chicago. and then very soon after Richard Nixon was president because there were still enough people in the United States voting who believed in law and order instability. Flash forward to today and the millennial replay of Chicago 68,

and you saw even after the riots had led to millions of dollars in property damage and deaths and people being shot and people being burned, and all kinds of mayhem. Polling still showed wide majority support for these protests, these mostly peaceful protests. And that's what brought home to me that the silent majority that was out there in 1968 isn't out there anymore. And there are no, the Nixon cavalry is not. not coming to save us. So yeah, that's one of the things that I mean when I talk about

civilizational cushioning. Other things are like that the boomers who processed it and rioted in 1968 graduated into a very tight job market and a wealthy suburban adulthood. You know, they had prosperity waiting for them on the other side. That is not what is waiting on the other side of millennials dabbling in Antifa. They are not going to graduate into a rich life in the suburbs, they're going to graduate into the gig economy and continued immiseration. So that is also not a recipe for social stability. And that's the reason why I think things will probably get pretty bad in the next couple of decades. Yeah. And I think that relates to a fairly drastic misconception that I often saw in certain corners of the right when those riots

were taking place, which is that they thought that this was inevitably going to redound to the benefit of Donald Trump, Republicans were at large, and maybe, I guess you could make an argument that it might have around the margins in certain areas. But I thought that misconstrued where the median American political opinion had shifted to. And the analogy to 1968 was no longer apt for the reasons that you laid out. Well, sometimes I think that, that the people, the actual voters, sitting at home, are still of a mind to vote for the modern equivalent of Richard Nixon if only one had come along. But the trouble is that it's the leaders of the segments of society that would previously have been categorized as conservative,

that went lined up one by one in support of Black Lives Matter. I mean, when NASCAR went full-on BLM or when the NFL did, I thought, well, gosh, that's it. Didn't Roger Goodell tweet out a photo of him kneeling, himself kneeling? Yeah, and so that if people don't have leaders who actually believe the things that they believe and want their beliefs, the beliefs of the ordinary conservative American to triumph, then it doesn't matter how many people are having silent majority type thoughts. They're never going to be an organized, effective political force. That for me has, I mean, the never-trumper's are absolutely execrable, and there's, you know, every single one of them, I just, based on their behavior, I have learned

to have considerable contempt for many of them. But I am grateful to them for having written memoirs of how the Republican Party left me because that proved that the people who were supposed to be leading the conservative party in America's two-party democracy were not themselves at all conservative. You know, the things that actually animate their voters, they never believed in. So, yeah, it's a, I no longer feel so betrayed by the Republican Party. You know, it's, it's with these kind of people running things, it's no surprise. So, yeah, I don't know.

If you can't have an effective populist movement if your leaders hate the people that they're supposedly leading. So we'll see whether or not we can build a Republican Party that doesn't hate the people that it's trying to lead. Yeah, we'll find out. Yeah. Yeah, it's another black pill to swallow. Just to close out, what are some of the common misapprehensions of your book that you've encountered thus far? I mean, you mentioned that many interviewers don't have the maybe cognitive capacity or attention span to read it or maybe the time, although I don't know what else they have to do under current circumstances with, you know, the last stages of lockdown here. How has it been misinterpreted or anything?

What do you have to correct, if anything, in your public discussions of it? My biggest frustration is that nobody has even tried to cancel me. I mean, there are so many cancelable opinions in this book. It makes me think that people haven't even read it. They're not attacking me. So hopefully maybe some of your listeners can read it and get outraged and come after me on Twitter or something. But the only misconception that I have to correct, that is people coming away with a wrong impression of the book, as opposed to just not reading it or not getting it, is the chapter

on Aaron Sorkin. And there are lots of people who thought that I meant it as some kind of takedown. When I have to confess, and I really thought this would have come through in the chapter, but apparently not. I am an Aaron Sorkin fan girl. You know, I am, I love the West Wing. I love the newsroom. I love Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I have seen everything he's ever done.

I will see everything he ever makes in the future. I think Aaron Sorkin is the greatest genius working in Hollywood right now. I just happen to think that some of the... I might have to cancel you just to believe it. Yeah, no, that's probably, if I end up getting canceled for that, I will consider that just and fair. But I just happen to think that he is a perfect example of a lot of really damaging boomer pathologies.

And in fact, that's something, it's a running theme in all of my chapters. It's the fact that these people, Steve Jobs, Camille Paglia, whoever, even Al Sharpton in his way, were geniuses that makes them so exemplary as boomers and as, as, as, as, as, as, as, boomers who harmed future generations, who wrecked American society and American culture. They were able to do that because they all had the elements of greatness. So, yeah, I do not hate Aaron Sorkin. That's the one thing I want to get properly on the record. Yeah, if people do read it, I mean, there's plenty of fodder for cancellation.

I can verify that. I mean, the rousing defenses of, you know, Victorian social mores. you know, hot pro-British Empire takes and so forth. I mean, not lacking material there, but again, it gets to the issue, gets to the problem of whether people are so hobbled by their addiction to pseudonology if they can't sit and read a book anymore. Well, you know, I've written articles in defense of the female campaigners against women's suffrage, and I didn't get canceled for that.

So I don't know what does a gal have to do to get canceled around here. I'll keep trying. I don't know. I mean, you're a conservative or an unapologized conservative. So I think in a way that renders you unable to be canceled, I mean, I think those who are subject to cancellation are those who are deemed like heretics in some way, you know, or who deviate from what would have been expected of them in terms of conformity to a left liberal consensus.

And you were just never, you were never kind of captured by the consensus in the first place. therefore, you know, what's there to cancel? I think you're on to something there. I think they know that if they came at me trying to say, look at this chick, she says empire is good. I would shrug and say, yeah, what of it? As opposed to trying to apologize and convince everyone that I'm actually, I'm still a good liberal or a good leftist as some people foolishly attempt to do.

Yeah, I have a hard time imagining you, you know, solemnly disavowing anything. Yeah, I don't do disavowals. All right. Well, thanks for taking out some time to chat about the book. Again, I ready to reiterate my recommendation for people to purchase and read it. And maybe we can chat again sometime. Excellent. Look forward to it.

Thanks a lot. All right. Take care, Helen.