Tag: Boomers

Boomer or Bust – The War Against Youth

The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation.”

The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers’ spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both.

via Young People in the Recession – The War Against Youth – Esquire.

Our New “Gilded Age”

The Boomers have been a terrible generation of political leaders. As in the case of most revolutionary generations in history, once the initial stab at change in their youth fell to the wayside, the real talent went into business and technology and changed the world–dramatically–for the better. The dregs went into politics and, in the process, have managed to thoroughly discredit it as a career and force for good in our society.

Last time it was this bad in America was those latter decades of the 19th century. The “revolution” then was the U.S. Civil War, and the crew that came out of that crucible was dramatically altered in character and vision and–most importantly–in personal connections. The bonds forged by war led to a lot of follow-on business development during a great and lengthy boom time. But it was an era much like today: frontier integration thanks to a rapidly expanding continental economy, the knitting together of a sectional economy into world-class “rising China” of its age, huge flows of people and FDI into the country–a miniature version of today’s globalization.

And during that age of booms and busts and the early populism that accompanied it, politics became a very dirty profession, so much so that when progressive icon TR decided to step into the fray, his wealthy NYC family begged him not to do so–it was considered such a huge step down from respectable obscurity. Few of us came name any politicians from that era (distant relation Grant being my favorite), but we all remember the industrial-financial titans, whose very names equal wealth: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc.

via Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Globlogization – Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Globlogization.

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