Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 446 | Blaming Boomers for Millennials' Problems | Guest: Helen Andrews

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Today we're talking to Helen Andrews, senior editor at the American Conservative. Andrews has written a book all about the Baby Boomer generation, aptly titled "Boomers." We discuss the effect this generation has had on America for both better and worse, and Andrews provides insight on what we can learn from our relatively recent history and how not to repeat the mistakes made by the Baby Boomer generation. --- Today's Sponsors: Annie's Kit Clubs help your kids master new, hands-on skills while expressing their creativity. Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 75% off your first shipment! Good Ranchers meat is 100% American! All of their product is individually wrapped, vacuum sealed, and ready to grill (which helps to eliminate waste!) & it's delivered right to your door. Go to GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE to get $20 off & free express shipping! Hunter Douglas & their innovative shade designs help you enjoy a more beautiful, comfortable, & convenient lifestyle. Visit HunterDouglas.com/ALLIE for your free Style Gets Smarter design guide with fresh takes, creative ideas, and smart solutions. --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in, conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed. You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone's having a wonderful day. Today I am talking to Helen Andrews. She wrote a book called Boomers.

And she has a scathing critique of the baby boomer generation and the problems that they pass down to us millennials and even Generation Z. and how we can look at some of their flaws and foibles and failures and learn from them as the younger generations and hopefully leave a better legacy in her argument for our kids and our grandkids. So without further ado, here is Helen Andrews. Helen, thank you so much for joining us. For those who don't know, can you tell everyone who you are what you do? I'm Helen Andrews. I'm a senior editor at the American Conservative, and I've just written the book called Boomers, the men and women, who promised freedom and delivered disaster.

I love it. I was just telling you before this interview that I have laughed several times, reading your book, your description of boomers and kind of what ailed their generation and the ails they passed down to millennials, it's very, you know, it's a little biting. There might be. some baby boomers who are offended by this book. Do you think so? I worry about that. My parents are baby boomers and I didn't want to write anything that they would take personal offense at. But I'm glad that you thought the book was funny. And I think that the humor comes from a combination of on the one hand being pretty angry with the world that the boomers have left us. But on the other hand, being fond of them as well. I don't think you can ever be truly funny about something you just hate. It's got to be a little bit of element of fondness in there as well.

And there certainly is for me with this subject. That's true. And let's talk about that. Tell us about the world that we have inherited from baby boomers and where they went wrong. Had a feeling that the millennial generation, my generation, was a disinherited generation in some spiritual sense. That is that the patrimony of our great American civilization just didn't get handed on

to us, the way it got handed on to us. the way it got handed on the previous generation. Functioning families, functioning churches, functioning schools, all of these seem like basic bare minimums that we just didn't get. Those were not handed off to it. And then I graduated from college in 2008 into the teeth of the Great Recession, and that sense of dispossession became more literal. I realized that millennials are materially disinhabing.

We are materially well behind what the baby boomers had accomplished economically by the time they were our age. And so I started investigating that sense that the millennials were not very well off. And I discovered that the statistics backed me up that in terms of wealth accumulation, millennials have accumulated a quarter of what the boomers had when they were our age. Not that we're 75% where the boomers are right now. were 75% behind where they were when they were in their 20s and 30s. So I tried to trace back where all of these fears of society had gone wrong. What happened to destroy our churches?

What happened to destroy our families and our schools and our economy? And every single thread that I pulled on led me back to the same place, the generation that came of age in the 1960s and was shaped by the 1960s, and then attained the summits of power in the 1990s, the baby boomers. They were behind all of the declines that I investigated. And let's talk about the how just a little bit. I don't want to give away too much of what your book talks about and argues, but I do want you to reveal for us how did they do that?

Because I think that, you know, my parents are baby boomers. I'm also a millennial. And I think about my parents' personal stories coming from, you know, relative of poverty. I mean, they weren't raised with anything extra. Their parents did kind of help set them up for success by working harder and providing a better life for their kids than they had. And so my parents probably feel like they just kind of got the torch pass to them. And they said, okay, I'm going to make sure that I have a life that is better for my kids than the one I had. So yeah, my parents, they, you know, started their own business and they were much more successful

than their parents were and they were able to provide us with opportunities that they did not have. I would say a lot of millennials would say that that is true for them too. So in my parents' own estimation, and probably in the estimation of a lot of baby boomers, they would say, you know, what are you talking about? We created such a better life for you than the ones we had. You guys have it so easy and you're just lazy. And that's why you don't have all the wealth and success that we baby boomers have had. What's your response to that?

That's absolutely something that I hear a lot. So many baby boomers say, you kids today, you have iPhones. You don't know how good you have it. I never could have had an iPhone even if they had existed when I was in my early 20s. And so it's important to clarify exactly what I mean when I say that millennials are economically not very well off. One complaint that a lot of millennials have is that it is no longer possible to attain a middle class lifestyle on one income. So if you're in a millennial couple and you're married, maybe you have a kid, both parents now need to go into the workforce in order to attain just

a basic standard of living. And that was just not the case in the 1950s. In the 1950s, you could have a house big enough for a family and all of the middle class amenities on one income. You would have a husband working and the wife could stay home if she chose. the baby boomers are responsible for the difficulty that millennials have in making ends meet as a middle class couple because they were the generation that sent women into the workforce on mass. Just as a statistical reality, very few families were dual earner families in 1960, and nowadays, most of them are. And so that switch happened over the course of the baby boom generation. But Elizabeth Warren coined the term the two-income trap for what happened when women flooded into the workforce in the 70s and 80s, which is that they simply bid up the price of a middle-class

living. So nobody was actually economically better off because all the women entered the workforce at the same time. And so the two-income trap means that the cost of a middle-class lifestyle now requires two-income where it didn't before. And so in terms of consumer spending, if you're a millennial, yeah, you may have, you know, pocket money to spend on things like an iPhone. You may be materially well off in that sense.

But if you can't afford a middle class living on one income and your grandparents could, I think it's perfectly fair to say that you are poorer than they were in a deep and fundamental sense. And moving beyond just the economics of it, do you also think there was a failure to pass down the values that a lot of greatest generation and silent generation parents had and maybe passed down to baby boomers. It almost seems like there was this growth of hyper individualism that happened sometime when baby boomers were coming of age, that they then passed down to their kids, that the kind of disintegration of the family unit, the de-emphasis of mom staying at home and being the

primary influence over their kids, that does seem to have at least become more and more popular the 80s and 90s and less of an influence on family togetherness and family values and more of an emphasis on on okay you just follow your dreams and climb the corporate ladder and make a lot of money and that's all that life's about do you think that that shift in values had any effect on on what millennials are experiencing right now I think a shift in values is exactly the right way to describe it because it's a running theme that you see across the board from the baby boomers. They believe that individual choice is the highest value, which has led them to be institution destroyers. Because that's the thing about institutions. There's something bigger than the individual,

which means that an institution constrains individual choices. You know, you sign up to be part of a family. You make certain commitments. Suddenly your individual choices are not as free as they were anymore. kind of the whole point of an institution. And the boomers knocked down the family, churches, anything traditional because they held individual choice to be the highest value. The irony of that is that their success in destroying institutions has now resulted in a world where millennials have fewer choices. The whole point of Elizabeth Warren's calling the two-income trap a trap is that nowadays there are actually lots of millennial women who say, it's great that women are able to enter the workforce if they want to, go feminism, but I would like to stay home. The problem is

that I can't because the shape of the economy has changed. So now it's an economic requirement. My house can't make ends meet if I don't go into the workforce. So even millennials who want to choose to stay at home now discover that they can't. So in maximizing individual choice, and destroying institutions, the boomers ended up actually constraining the choices of their children. Those kinds of ironies pop up all over the place once you start studying the boomers. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day

and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. And it's a little bit of a vicious cycle, I think, with millennials, because I think that in some ways we have been taught that it's not a good choice or not a successful choice to stay home as women,

that we are betraying our gender. We're betraying feminism and all the people who fought for us to be liberated from the shackles of just being this miserable housewife. And so there is also this, I think, these competing desires in a lot of millennial moms that, yes, maybe I want to stay home like my mom did, for example, my baby boomer mom did stay home at the same time. I was certainly taught the importance of a career and the importance of being educated and following your dreams and all of that, which, you know, I'm thankful for. But there's a competition of desires, I would say even in me and in a lot of young Christian conservative millennial women that, okay, if I stay home, am I giving up all of the opportunities and everything that my baby boomer

parents gave me? Should I be outside of the home? Am I wasting my life? And I don't really worry about this, but a lot of people do. Am I wasting my life by just being at home? That wasn't a concern. That wasn't really a thought, it seems like, 50 years ago. So that's what I'm talking about with this vicious cycle that, yes, there are, you know, a lot of millennials say that they want the economy to change so that one parent can stay at home at the same time. They don't really want to stay home because they're afraid that they are betraying, you know, feminism, the opportunities they've been given for their self. You're absolutely right. I grew up also in a cultural world where I was taught that to stay home

was a waste of a college education and that a woman is somehow giving up her chances of self-actualization if she chooses to stay home and raise children. And in the research for this book, I decided to investigate the origins of that concept because it's really astonishing. Anyone who's ever met a stay-at-home mom would not immediately come to the conclusion that she was not self-actualized. They're wonderful people. My favorite people in the world are stay-at-home mom. And I discovered that it was the feminist of the 1960s who really had an active campaign against women staying home. And I also discovered that a lot of them in pursuit of that propaganda lied.

Betty Friedan is famous as the author of the feminine mystique, and she supposedly based that book, which is a tirade against staying at home, on the result of an alumni questionnaire that was sent to her graduating class of Smith College. And all of the women who had graduated with her, the survey asked how they were feeling, you know, a decade after they graduated her of 15 years. she wrote in her book that the results of that survey showed that so many of these women were squandering their gifts at home and they felt stifled and oppressed. And all the women who graduated from Smith and then became stay-at-home moms were miserable. Well, after that book came out, scholars then went into the archives to find the actual results of that survey.

And they discovered that the respondents of that survey, most of them who stayed at home and didn't have jobs, that they had never been happier. They said, I love staying at home. I feel like I could go out and get a job if I wanted to. The reason I haven't is that I don't want to. So Betty Friedan misrepresented the whole basis of her book. And you see that again and again with the boomers. They have a propaganda point they want to push

and they won't let the truth get in the way of the point they want to me. Do you think both conservative and liberal boomers alike are responsible for these problems? Or do you think it's more of the kind of hyper individualist liberal activist boomers who are to blame for a lot of these problems? Not every baby boomer is a progressive. That's absolutely true. But the baby boomer legacy is a progressive one. And I think that the reason why that is the case is that the baby boomers who were more conservative,

chose to focus on economic freedom. That's true. And kind of let the social stuff slide. They figured, you know, we got to fight our battles where we can win them. And we think economic freedom is more winnable. And I love economic freedom. And I think it's extremely important. I think capitalism is great.

I'm glad the USSR is gone. But completely ignoring social issues for so many decades has now resulted in a world where those battles are so completely lost that the liberals have seized the entire field. So yeah, the boomer, not every boomer is a progressive, but the boomer legacy is a progressive one. You know, I think I'm thinking about how the conservative boomer is represented. And I think about Ronald Reagan, who certainly himself, I would say, was a social, cultural conservative. Obviously, he was against abortion. He would say that he was very profoundly. But when you look at his legislative priorities or the policies that he proposed, not just nationally but abroad, he was very focused on economic freedom.

I mean, one of the things that he writes about that he really believed that the more we exported capitalism to somewhere like China, the freer they would become, the happier they would become. Well, we exported capitalism and imported some communism into America. So that didn't necessarily work. I think a lot of baby boomers and Ronald Reagan, who is not a baby boomer, but he kind of represents a lot of the political views of baby boomers. boomers believed that economic freedom and economic prosperity and the capitalist dream of

owning your own business and being an entrepreneur and just making a lot of money would kind of solve all of the other problems too. Now, I did grow up in the church. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. And so we were culturally, socially, ideologically conservative. And there was a reckoning in the 1980s in the Southern Baptist Convention to get away from kind of this hyper-individualism and liberalism that was happening inside the church. And so that certainly happened. They helped Reagan get elected. They helped George H.W. Bush get elected.

They kind of helped go after Bill Clinton because of, you know, his moral improprieties. And so there is also a large segment of baby boomers who were culturally conservative, who did in their own minds try to pass down conservative good, you know, so-called family values down to millennials. Like, do you put those people off to the side as a caveat in your book, or do you think that they also are part of the problem? No, I think those people valiantly fought against the way the tide was turning as the baby boomers kind of achieve their ascendancy.

And it is a pity that the people that you're talking about happened to lose. But I think it is a matter of history that they did lose, that the moral majority turned out not to be much of a majority at all. Or even in the cases where they were in the majority, being in the majority didn't matter because the left was playing dirty and accomplishing its goals, not through the democratic process, but through the court. That's another side of the boomer story that one reason the progresses within the boomer generation were so all-conquering and triumphant was not that they were especially persuasive or that they convinced everybody to agree with them. It's that,

they learned to operate and impose their views by long march through the institutions, by conquering the courts and using them to override democratic outcomes. So yeah, they play dirty, and that's why they won. Can you talk about why you chose to dedicate chapters to the people, to the baby boomers that you did? You talk about Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton and Sonia Sotomayor. Why did you pick these people? And how did they kind of prove the point that you're making that Baby Boomers did not set millennials up for success? I read a lot of books about Baby Boomers in the preparation for writing this one. And I was consistently frustrated by books that talks about the whole generation in broad generalizations. Because I thought it was

just too vague and abstract. I really wanted when it came to writing my book to ground it in the concrete. So I thought the best way to do that would be to take individuals and tell their personal stories. And I chose one, baby boomers, not just who were really influential, although they clearly were. Somebody like Steve Jobs has changed the face of the world. I mean, you might even make an argument that no one has influenced the way the world looks today more than Steve Jobs has. But I more than that wanted people whose individual stories represented something about the baby boomer tragedy. These are all people who have elements of greatness and who embarked on their lives with very good intentions. And so they were people who were undone by the

flaws of their generation. And in that sense, tragic rather than simply villainous. I'm interested in particular to hear you talk about Camille Paglia and Al Sharpton and the ways that you think that they represent and their lives and their mission represent some of the flaws with the baby boomer generation. So if you can start with Camille Paglia and just some of, in your view, some of the erroneous ideas that she has pushed to the detriment of the current younger generations. That is someone who a lot of conservative actually really liked. Yeah. Because she's got interesting things to say. Oh, and I love her.

She's definitely, of all the people that I profile, I think I probably like her the best. Yeah, I really enjoy her writing and I admire her a lot. But in the 1990s, when she was, you know, a valiant warrior in the original PC wars, and she was standing up against the school, Marmish, second-weight feminist, and against the politically correct relativists,

who said that the Western canon was dumb and oppressive. You know, a lot of people asked her back then, Camille O'Haglia, does that make you a conservative? And she would always say that she's not a conservative because her favorite things in the world are prostitution and pornography. She calls herself a sex positive feminist. And that was what differentiated her from the school marmish feminists who were complaining about date rape and whatnot. The trouble is that I genuinely think that historians of the 24th century, when they talk about our current era, if they only have a paragraph to give to what the world was like circa 2020, they will mention ubiquitous pornography. It's just completely different than it was even 20 or 30 years ago. I think millennials know better than anyone else what streaming video has done to the pornography landscape.

And so for Camille Paglia to be so blithe, you know, as if pornography were still a matter of, you know, playboy centerfold as they were in the 1970s. For her to say that pornography is a thing to be celebrated because she's so sex positive. I find that deeply naive and in a very boomerish way because the baby boomers were the ones who were the architects of the sexual real. revolution and who thought that just unleashing individual sexual desire would lead to a paradise, it would lead to sexual fulfillment. And they learned or should have learned very, very quickly that that is not what happens when you unleash everybody's sexual desires. In fact, what you get is a glimpse of the dark side. So Camille Pahlia failed to learn some important lessons. Right. So she represents kind of taking some of the ideas of the sexual revolution that

were fanned into flame in the 1960s and then passing that flaming baton onto the next generation through ideas that sound very liberating, sex positive. I mean, no one wants to say that they're sex negative. Being liberated, well, no one wants to say that they're trapped and oppressed. It makes it sound very good without actually understanding, like you said, the repercussions of the objectification of something like prostitution and pornography and what it actually means to human beings. And that really goes back to a much larger conversation about the worldview of a lot of these people, how they view human nature, where they believe we come from, what they believe humans are and are here for, where does morality come from, all these questions that I would argue that baby boomers, in some ways, obviously not all of them, didn't do a good job of answering in the midst of so much postmodern confusion in the 1960s and then helping baby boomer or helping millennials.

understand those questions. Would you say that's part of why millennials are so stuck in this postmodern chaos that we find ourselves in today? And that's one of the great frustrations that I've had in debating this book with baby boomers. They say, you know, materially, the millennials are quite well off as a generation. And I say, well, you know, I have my quibbles with whether or not that's true. But even granting that that were true, that the millennials were materially very well off and very prosperous from the perspective of history. None of that really matters considering that we are the least married generation in American history. Just we're not, something's not coming together and we're not forming partnerships. We're not forming families.

Religion used to be a fundamental part of American society. And today, the Protestant mainline churches, I mean, the Episcopalian Church, I would not lay money on it still existing in 100 years. It is more abundant. It's dying. These churches are dying. So if you live in a world where nothing matters except the pursuit of pleasure, it really doesn't matter how economically well off you are. So the boomers themselves came of age at a time when religion was still functioning, civil society was still functioning, and they were the ones who threw off religion and said, I don't care about churches, I don't care about marriage. So they got the best of both worlds. Yeah.

They got the grounding in that stability that was still existing when they were growing up. And then they failed to pass it on to their children. So they have the stability and then the liberation. Where millennials did not inherit that stability, we just inherited chaos. And I think it's hard for boomers who grew up at a time when things were more stable to really appreciate what that chaos has been like. And this really helps us understand why there are so many millennials that have taken to socialism. it might be that lack of stability that was given to a lot of people from the family,

from churches, from institutions, and now people are looking to the states. People are looking for someone to tell them what's right and wrong, that they're going to be taken care of, that all of their needs are going to be met. These kind of safety nets and sense of security that we used to be able to find in institutions outside of the state, I think for millennials, they felt like they were unstable, like they disintegrated, that all you were encouraged to do was to get rich and to follow the capitalist dream. And I think what a lot of young people are finding is that, well, that's not completely satisfying. That's not completely secure. What about these other needs that I have? And of course, you and I,

as conservatives, we both know that socialism promises to meet those needs. It never actually does. It always just ends in misery. But you can kind of understand for people who say, who look back and they say, okay, well, yeah, maybe my parents gave me better economic opportunity, but the failures of capitalism has actually ended us or brought us to this place of misery and despair, and I need to look a different direction for my security. It kind of helps us understand why people like AOC and Bernie Sanders are so appealing to the millennial generation that lack that sense of security that you're talking about. I look at people my age who join movements like Antifa or who get super into woke politics. And at some level, I sympathize with them. My heart goes out to them

because it seems to me like in a lot of cases, what they're looking for is community. They are growing up atomized and alienated and they don't have anywhere to go to find. I mean, it used to be that you would go on Sunday to church and you would have a community there. A community would be ready made for you in the church that you attended. And that's just no longer even on their radar. So they're clearly looking for something that institutions like churches used to provide, which they can now only find in crazy left-wing politics. But I think the conservatives really need to take a lesson from that. They need to say, well, if you want young people to be conservative, you need to give them something to conserve. You need to have them feel like they have a stake in their

society. So I think that's the number one lesson that we need to have just tattooed on our foreheads going forward, give people something to conserve. And then maybe fewer of them will be crazy woke socialists. And you know, as you're talking, I'm realizing that I'm not really sure that right now, young conservatism, if you could call it a movement, is really doing that. I actually see a heavy emphasis on what baby boomers emphasized, which is only economic freedom, which, of course, you and I agree, is very important and should be emphasized. The difference is in capitalism and socialism and why capitalism is fundamentally better and more compassionate and fair than socialism is.

However, it's clearly not enough because that's what the baby boomers only tried to conserve too in a lot of ways. There has to be something more. And I think that a lot of young conservatives are scared to say, hey, we need to conserve the family or we need to conserve faith because they're afraid that they're going to make the tent too small. they're not going to be able to get, you know, questioning or politically agnostic people onto our side if we hammer on the social issues. I just, I think that we've already seen, though, that we can't separate economic freedom or economic conservatism from social and cultural conservatism because economic conservatism is fundamentally, it doesn't work and it's unsatisfying outside of the institution. and the value centers of family, of church, of other forms of community that we used to hold dear and now we don't. Do you agree with that? There's a reason why social liberalism's greatest victories in the last three decades have all

been in the Supreme Court. And that's because when you fight it out in the Democratic arena, social conservatism wins. Because social conservatives. is popular because people care about their families and traditions. That's what really matters to them. That's what hits them where they live. That's what gets them motivated to go out to a ballot box in the campaign for a candidate, the things that they're passionate about. So one of the greatest faults of the baby boomers is their refusal to relinquish power. A lot of baby boomer flaws are things that, you know, weren't necessarily their fault and they were mistakes that they made when they were too young to know better. But this one is really on them. This is really, I've faulted them

for not moving on and letting younger generations move off. And one of the consequences of that is that the things that were important to them in the 1980s are still important to them now, because it's really hard for an old dog to learn new tricks. And so any political movement needs to respond the current circumstances. That's the whole point of being relevant. You know, that's the essence. You respond to changing circumstances. That's what shows that your ideas are flexible, that you're responding to reality rather than just ideology. And it's really difficult for boomers to do that individually. And the movement would be able to do that better if they created space for younger leaders to start coming up. And I think it's really, really a flaw of the boomers that they have not done that. Can you talk to me? I have two more questions for you. Can you talk to me about Al Sharpton, why you chose to write about him? and how he represents some of the problems that we're talking about. Oh, I'll Sharpton.

He's just a compelling character, isn't he? He has a longer career than just about anybody in the civil rights arena. His first big case was in the 1980s. So he's just been going on and going on and going on. He's got longevity. So there's clearly something to him, whether you agree with him or disagree with him. The reason why I chose him is as a rebuttal, to the baby boomers primary defense.

Most baby boomers, if you start reciting to them, their flaws and the terrible things that the boomers did, we'll say, yeah, yeah, maybe that's true. But don't forget, we did civil rights. And doesn't that just trump all other circumstances? And of course, that is the biggest con that the baby boomers have ever pulled, because no baby boomer was responsible for the golden age achievements of civil rights. in the 1960s. Yeah, they wasn't a pretty young, right? Yeah, unless you were freedom writing at the age of three and a half, you baby boomers were not there at Selma.

You were not voting for the civil rights in 1964. The era of civil rights that the baby boomers were responsible for was the darker, more violent, more manipulative era that's represented by Al Sharpton. He's a hopisher. He's a fomenter of riot. there's a very good argument to be made that Al Sharpton has blood on his hands, is directly responsible for individual's death. So that's the, when we think of boomers and civil rights, we should think of that.

We shouldn't think of marching at Selma and 1964 and Dr. King. We should think of Tawanna Brawley and the Crown Heights Riot and the other things that are checkered in Al Sharpton's career. Yeah, and obviously baby boomers are not. They weren't created in a vacuum. Obviously, their parents had an effect on them, whose parents had an effect on them. The parents, so baby boomers, according to Pew Research, they start in 1946 and the last baby boomers were born in 1965. A lot of their parents were part of the silent generation, which were my grandparents born in the 1930s.

But some of their parents were the greatest generation. We know them as the greatest generation. They fought in World War II, whether they were at home. or whether they were abroad, everyone was contributing to the effort. We think of that as the height of patriotism. And really, you know, a lot of people are nostalgic for that time in our history where it seems like our institutions were intact and things mattered the way that they were supposed to. Not perfect, of course, as far as equality and civil rights and things like that.

But in a lot of ways that we see that as America's glory days. How do we go from the greatest generation to the best generation to the base? baby boomers and some of the chaos that you're talking about so quickly. Like what happened during those couple of decades? Some ways it was the greatest generation's fault. They were one of the, you know, as the name says, one of the greatest generations in American history, their achievements are unquestionable. But going through the Great Depression and then World War II caused these men and women

to want to give their children the easy. life that they haven't had. They thought, I suffered through those great national traumas and made those sacrifices so that my children could grow up in peace and prosperity. And they succeeded in doing that. America enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and unparalleled social cohesion in the 1950s when the baby boomers were growing up. The problem is that that then gave the baby boomers the idea that peace and prosperity was the natural order of things and that America would always be that way. And even if they rebelled against the institutions that they inherited and acted out and were selfish and narcissistic and didn't put in any sacrifices of their own to match the

sacrifices that their parents had made, the things would still always be basically okay. That's a common mistake in human history, people assuming that prosperity and piece is the natural order when really it takes generation after generation of maintenance and sacrifice to uphold it. So in some ways, the greatest generation is responsible for the baby boomers having the mentality that they do because so many of the baby boomers' mistakes were from this misconception that no matter how badly they acted out, everything would always be okay. Yeah. Every generation obviously is going to have its imperfections and its flaws. I mean, we're finite people. So we have this inability to see how the choices that we're making today are going to have a long-term effect on

generations to come. Maybe we can understand how it'll affect our children directly. But most people, when they're taking a job or choosing a career path, they are thinking about themselves. They're thinking about maybe their spouse and the people and directly in their circle. But they're not thinking about the larger sociological long-term impacts that their impact that their choices may be making. So eventually, though, everyone has to kind of take responsibility for their own generations, foibles, and failures. Yes, we can look back to the baby boomers and the silent generation and the greatest generation. But we also, I think you would agree, have to give some grace to realize that a lot of them were doing exactly what they thought was

best at the time, even though now we see in hindsight that, okay, you could have done a better job. Millennials are the same way. Yes, we have inherited some bad things from baby boomers, but we've also got some stupidity and some bad choices that we've got to own on our own by yourselves. And so what are some tips that you can give to us as millennials to make sure that we don't repeat some of our parents' generations' mistakes? And also to start thinking in a way of, okay, what kind of legacy, what kind of world do I want to leave the future generations? So someone is at writing a scathing review of me and my generation, which I think probably will already happen to millennials.

you know, hopefully I won't be the subject of a chapter in a book about how terrible millennials are. Yeah. I'm sure it'll happen. I'm sure it will. I think in many ways, the tragedy of the millennial generation is that on the one hand, nobody knows better than us that we need to make better choices than the boomers did. We are in a lot of ways the victims of their mistakes. So we are well positioned to see those mistakes and to, learn from them. And I think a lot of millennials have. The tragedy lies in the fact that because the boomers' damage has been so systemic, a lot of times those better choices that we know we should make are not available to us. Religion is a good example. If you are a millennial, you are very likely to have

come to the conclusion that the indifference to religion that the boomers propagated was a wrong turn. And that America needs to maybe make its way back to having a little bit more respect for faith, especially in the public square. The problem is that the churches, especially the Protestant mainline churches, have been run by boomers for a couple of generations now. So if you go down the street to your local Episcopalian church, it's not going to be the same church that existed there in 1960, and it's maybe not going to be something that's worth giving your life to.

So the institution of the family is in disarray. the two-income trap. That's another example of millennials not having choices available to them even when they know they should make it. So the mission that millennials need to set ourselves is not just to learn from the boomers' mistakes, but to repair the damage that they did to institutions. There's some rebuilding that's going to need to happen first before we can start making those better choices. And we need to do that for ourselves and now for our own kids. Yep, absolutely. Millennials are no longer college students. I think some people, maybe

Baby Boomers, boomers, they think that all young people are millennials. The oldest millennials are turning 40 this year, I believe. The youngest millennials were born in 1996. And so all of us are adults. We're out of college. We got mortgages. We got kids. And maybe it's time for also millennials to realize that, that we are in a place of responsibility. And we do have the ability to rebuild and to lead in a different way than maybe we were led. And so I hope that your book encourages people to do that and kind of gives us some context and understanding of why we are, where we are, but not wallow and self-loathing and victimhood, but take those lessons and change them while we have the ability to do so.

Can you tell everyone where they can buy your book and how else they can support and follow you? You can find me and a lot of other great writers at the Americanconservative.com. On social media, I'm mostly on Twitter at H.E.R. Andrews. The book is Boomers, The Men and Women Who Promise Freedom and Delivered Disaster, and it's available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever else the books are sold. Awesome. That is great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. Thank you.

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