A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Blaming the Boomers might be more provocative, but after decades of dysfunction under Boomer leaders and the grotesque spectacle of recent elections, which force us to endure more of the same, provocation may be necessary. For those readers who are Boomers, or have parents or grandparents who are Boomers, it may be of small comfort that this book does not argue that all Baby Boomers are sociopaths. Rather, the argument is that an unusually large number of Boomers have behaved antisocially, skewing outcomes in ways deeply unfavorable to the nation, especially its younger citizens.

The goal of American politics has been, until the advent of the Boomers, the creation of a “more perfect Union” and the promotion of the “general Welfare” to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”4 The Constitution promises as much, and over time America generally made good on that promise, first to a few, then to many.

Since the Boomers’ ascension to power, America has accomplished far too little, and in many important ways, has slid backward. A “more perfect Union” is hard to measure, but the economy and the well-being of the middle class are not. These latter items can be reduced to numbers, and what the numbers show is not reassuring. A family with a statistically middling income can no longer afford the trappings of an actual middle-class life: the nice house, college tuition, decent cars, the annual vacation, appropriate health care, some prudent savings, and perhaps a little left over to pass as a legacy. That life would require something like $100,000–150,000 in annual family income, depending on geography and taste, but actual family income was just $70,697 in 2015.

The difference between what is and what could have been is substantially the product of Boomer mismanagement and selfishness. Had America pursued more reasonable policies, it might have continued the pattern of growth of the golden years after World War II and before the arrival of Boomer power. Family income in 2015 could have been around $106,000 to $122,000 (or $113,425 to be misleadingly precise). In other words, the actual middle class could afford genuinely middle-class lives. Editorialists would never have had to switch adjectives from “comfortable” to “struggling” when discussing the midriff of the income distribution.

As a fraction of gross domestic product (GDP), debt owed by American families has roughly doubled since 1980, and in nominal terms is over $14 trillion. Government has done the same—indeed, this is a primary Boomer tactic to ensure their benefits flow while expenses pass to others. The national debt has almost tripled as a fraction of GDP since the mid-1970s, so that the nation’s debt is now slightly larger than the nation’s total annual product, approaching $19 trillion by the end of 2015, and that figure is set to grow ~3 percent annually, more or less indefinitely. The proceeds from that expanding pile of debt have been used to consume, not to invest, and so growth, already slow, will get slower still.

Sociopathy is characterized by self-interested actions unburdened by conscience and unresponsive to consequence, mostly arising from non-genetic, contextual causes.

The creation of a large, well-educated, prosperous middle class, where position could be earned rather than inherited, was in large part a result of programs like the GI Bill and civilian educational grants. These helped the Boomers’ parents earn and pass down wealth, and would help the Boomers themselves avoid the sort of crippling debt they forced their own children to incur.

After a brief war in Korea, peace prevailed, and in the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower set about building much of the national infrastructure on which the United States still depends, systems the Boomers have cheerfully neglected.

Eisenhower demanded American autobahnen and got them. Construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) began in 1956 and concluded in 1991, fifty thousand miles in all, carrying about a third of the nation’s traffic. Since then, the IHS and other midcentury infrastructure projects have been decaying, victims of Boomer neglect. But during its heyday, America had the best infrastructure in the world, especially the roads that opened up the country and made possible the Boomers’ comfortable suburban childhoods.

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 supplemented the GI Bill, pouring money into colleges, with particular emphasis on producing more scientists and engineers. The combined effect of these educational policies increased college enrollment from about 1.5 million in 1940 to over 3.6 million in 1960 and 8 million in 1970 (or in percentage terms for college-age populations, from 9.1 percent to 22.3 percent and then 32.6 percent).

All of these programs would confer enormous benefits on the Boomers, at a cost disproportionately borne by their parents—a pattern the Boomers inverted and then inflicted on their own children.

At the time it was conceived in the 1930s, Social Security was a program for the relatively small number of very old retirees. The official name of the legislation was the “Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Act,” which hinted at the rather limited category of people that legislators expected would collect. Life expectancy in the 1930s was just over sixty-five years and benefits kicked in, perhaps not coincidentally, around the same time.*,16 The demographic data meant that old age benefits were originally designed for the catastrophe of extreme age, rather than nearly universal assistance to cushion years and then decades of retirement. Those who did collect were often in severe need, as elderly populations in prior decades were particularly prone to poverty (a situation that no longer applies today, when elderly poverty is quite low while youth poverty remains quite high).

In 1966, Medicare debuted, providing funds for senior health care, so the elderly were supplied with both a modest income and a certain minimum level of medical care and insurance against catastrophic illness. As part of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, funds were also extended regardless of age to poor populations for both health care and income assistance—welfare, in short.

For mainstream Boomers, childhood through early adult years shared the important commonality that things were both good and getting better; in the event circumstance or chance put prosperity out of reach, the state would ensure that individuals could only fall so far. This was even the case for blacks, who experienced the largest and fastest gains in equality since the Civil War and Reconstruction, though progress was uneven and often marked by violence. These conditions were all provided for by the Boomers’ elders, who worked and saved to ensure that the fiscal house was in reasonable order when it was passed down. Doing so required older generations to tax themselves at rates that no politician today, however far Left, would dare propose.

Thus, the psychology of the Boomers formed during a period of America ascendant, master of the world and even, by 1969, of the moon. As the Boomers reached adulthood, they inherited a richly endowed and functional society, one that, despite some flaws, protected and provided for the Boomers better than it had for any preceding generation. And yet, the Boomers emerged as radicalized adults, rejecting so many of the policies that had given them so much, replacing a successful model with an antisocial failure.

Older Americans perceive the arrival of computers and the Internet as sudden and pervasive, but these newer technologies have nothing on television, adopted at astonishing speed and scale. RCA began mass production of televisions in 1946. Before then, almost no American homes had televisions. By 1960, 90 percent had TV. In contrast, the first Internet connections were established in 1969, but access didn’t become a household staple until the late 1990s, and even by 2012, more than a quarter of American households still lacked a broadband connection.

Data compiled in 2015 shows that TV consumed more than 50 percent of Americans’ free time, against just 13 percent for socializing and functionally 0 percent for pleasure reading (e.g., for teenagers, 8 minutes per weekend day).12 In a very serious way, from the Boomers’ childhoods onward, TV is what Americans do.

While the many studies of TV have occurred over decades in which programming varied widely, the consensus has always been the same—always negative.

Television is also mimetic, spurring viewers to imitate behaviors seen on-screen, and the behaviors the industry wants to foster are consumptive. There’s plenty of dense academic literature on this subject, but nothing speaks louder than the enormous ad budgets devoted to TV, stoking the already robust sociopathic appetite. At least parents today understand the dynamic, and since the late 1970s, with the introduction of affordable VCRs and purchasable content like DVDs and downloads, they have been able to reduce or eliminate the number of conventional ads their children see (somewhat undone by the rise of product placement).

By the 1980s, as Boomers achieved political power, broadcasters were freed to dispense with even the modicum of balance that guilt previously induced them to provide. In 1987, FCC chairman Marc Fowler—himself a (Canadian variety) Boomer, and so oblivious that he dismissed TV as “a toaster, with pictures”—formally abolished the Fairness Doctrine.17 The elimination of the Doctrine permitted the rise of ideologically driven channels, preaching to their respective choirs, a project completed in the 1990s when Fox News and MSNBC were disgorged by their parent companies. Dialogue became diatribe aimed at an agreeable audience in the same period that Boomers consolidated their control of governments. Boomers, who were adults by this time and also the heaviest consumers of news programming, therefore spent many hours with a device that would not challenge their worldviews.

The warping effects of all these problems, from the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine to the limitations of TV and its presentation of the news, could be seen in the Boomers’ avatar Donald Trump. Like many of his generation, Trump relies heavily on TV news, and expects his preferred channels to cater to him first and reality second (if at all). When even the hermetic world of Fox proved insufficiently fawning, Trump tried with some success to conform the news to his preexisting conceits.

Reading comprehension and math performance all suffer when TV viewing is relatively heavy; children who watch a lot of TV are also more aggressive than light watchers (regardless of whether the programs themselves are especially violent).

Unlike their parents, who faced a great challenge and left the world better for their participation, the Boomers confronted a minor conflict and found ways to make it substantially worse.

In other words, the bottom third or so provided about four-fifths of the manpower. Senator John McCain, who otherwise holds a fairly untroubled view of Vietnam, thought this was the war’s true injustice: “Those who were better off economically did not carry out their obligations, so we forced the Hispanic, the ghetto black, and the Appalachian white to fight and die. That to me was the greatest crime and injustice of the Vietnam War.”32 When a revanchist Republican, one who adorned his hawkish presidential campaign with a wingnut governor of a distant province, provides voice for the “ghetto black,” you know something morally troubling went down. With deferments, it could not have been otherwise. Even though college was cheaper in the 1960s, it was not entirely free, and it required students to forgo years of full income while they studied. Students who deferred had at least some means, and richer students were better prepared for college in the first place. Therefore, the deferment system almost automatically favored people higher on the socioeconomic ladder (three of whom would be president).

All conventional draft avoidance tactics required money and a certain knowledge and savviness about the system simply not available to less advantaged groups. The net effect was that college deferments became an exercise of class privilege, and, given the overrepresentation of minorities among the poor, of racial discrimination. It was not unlike the hiring of substitutes during the Civil War, during which a draftee could simply pay another person to take his place, but with the government itself managing the transaction in the case of the Vietnam draft. At least during the Civil War the substitute got a cash bounty from his sponsoring civilian—it was, in a sense, a cleaner transaction.

For those without college deferments or the means and education to exploit alternatives like CO, only two strategies remained. If called, the first option was to serve, which most did. The second was to take advantage of a “moral disqualification,” a status routinely provided to those in prison, on parole, or awaiting trial. Indeed, even if a person were presently free, a criminal record of any kind was perceived to exempt its holder from service. So while many privileged students went to college, some of their poorer counterparts turned to crime. Several studies confirm the relationship between a rise in crime in the 1960s and the draft, with avoidance as a causal explanation.35 This was particularly the case for blacks and people of lower socioeconomic status, but not the case for wealthier whites (probably not because they were inherently more law-abiding, just that they had better options).

Once shoved into uniform, Boomer behavior deteriorated further. The force deployed in Vietnam was perhaps the worst fielded in the modern era, plagued by indiscipline, drug abuse, insubordination, desertion, and war crimes, with occasional helpings of outright treason and murder. Draft armies tend to be less orderly than volunteer forces, but the Boomer-heavy force operating in Vietnam was vastly worse than the draft armies that fought in Korea or the World Wars, in predictably sociopathic ways.

Younger generations divorce less frequently and seem to be saving more. They do have sex somewhat earlier, but they are less promiscuous overall and significantly more responsible, with rates of teenage and unwanted pregnancies declining (the exception being in some minority communities for reasons beyond this book’s scope).

Whether we call it “empiricism” (which I will for lexical ease), or “reason,” or “science,” or “causal studies,” the core principles are always the same: the collection of perceptible data and the testing of theories against them using careful thought. This way of thinking had been the dominant mode in the West since the late seventeenth century. In the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s summary, that system requires that “all statements with claims to truth must be public, communicable, testable—capable of verification or falsification by methods open to and accepted by any rational investigator.”*,2 Nothing could be less helpful to the short-sighted gluttony of sociopathy than this explanatory system of evidence and causality, one that happened to undermine the deceit of which sociopaths are so fond. Vastly better suited to the sociopathic enterprise are feelings—guaranteed to align with the needs and desires of the moment, because they supply them in the first place.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the story of the past forty years has been the substitution of sentiment for science, of fact for feelings. That doing so deviated from centuries of practice that drove the greatest expansion of human knowledge and welfare ever seen mattered nothing to the revolutionary Boomer personality.

The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous.

The pre-Boomer establishment devoted itself to science and technology, eagerly importing the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, understood then to be the foundations of prosperity.

Almost 250 years before Senator James Inhofe brandished his snowball on the Senate floor as full and definitive proof that global warming does not exist, data be damned, the Founding Fathers were personally expanding the frontiers of science and technology.5 Jefferson, David Rittenhouse, and Franklin were all famous inventors and discoverers; Franklin was, if anything, as famous in Europe for his scientific work as his political activities. As foreigners observed, this scientific inclination was only to be expected, because the practical and the rational were (then) the natural frame of the American mind.

Merely refocusing the few existing institutions was not enough; the United States required a comprehensive network of universities, and this meant federal resources. To accomplish this, Senator Justin Morrill, a founder of the Republican Party, proposed massive federal intervention (a rather different sort of radical Republican agenda than we see today). Morrill wanted the government to contribute land whose sale would fund colleges to, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics… teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts… [and] promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”7 The Morrill Act of 1862 provided over seventeen million federal acres for those purposes, an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia. The act was successful: many state colleges like Ohio State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, and University of California, Berkeley had origins as land-grant institutions, as did some prominent private universities including Cornell and MIT.* The first Morrill Act passed only after Southern legislators seceded; they had opposed the Act ostensibly on constitutional grounds but substantially because higher education didn’t fit with their conservative, religious, anti-industrial, plantation mentality.

The South never embraced land-grant universities, and its culture didn’t value reason, science, and inquiry, or the institutions that promoted them in the same way the North’s did. The trajectories of the two regions therefore provide a rough experiment in the different outcomes varying cultures can produce.

The stature of science and technology peaked in the two decades following World War II. In the American mind, the victories of science were literal and existential, with triumph over the Axis due in no small part to the contributions of the scientific and technical establishment, especially the Manhattan Project. Not only had science brought victory, but material plenty besides, and America returned the favor in lavish federal funding. Sputnik prompted the United States to redouble its efforts, enormously expanding government funding to address perceived gaps in science and technology and strengthening relevant curricula at all levels of education. President Kennedy called on the nation to put a man on the moon, and NASA engineers and astronauts were celebrated as Lindbergh and Edison had been.

The world’s more than seven billion people are fed by scientific, high-yield agriculture and sustained in old age by modern drugs. The moral case for technology can be reduced to the simple fact that without it, billions of people would not exist in the first place, and hundreds of millions of others would die prematurely—far more than those harmed by improper uses of technology.

In a 2014 survey, a majority of Boomers did not know that humans descended from earlier forms of animal. Americans also had difficulty answering how long it takes the earth to revolve around the sun, which shouldn’t surprise given that around 24 to 30 percent of Americans fifty-five to sixty-four and older believed that the sun revolves around the earth, instead of the other way around—and let’s not even get into their views on the origins of the universe.20 (Heliocentrism, the Big Bang, etc., conflict with the sociopath’s world-began-with-and-revolves-around-me solipsism; it’s at least internally consistent.) Older Americans also have the weakest grip of the principles of scientific inquiry. Younger generations do relatively better, though the absolute level of scientific facility among all age groups dwells at unsettling lows.21 At least majorities of younger groups are more familiar with evolution and heliocentrism.

But Americans, especially older Americans, cannot be bothered to even learn (or anyway, remember or believe) the basics. Hence the regular spectacle of Boomer lawmakers beginning addresses on science policy with the phrase “I’m not a scientist” (which is where the speeches should end) and then proposing laws that fly in the face of scientific consensus.

Fortunately for the Boomers, the arrival of doctrines like relativism and the debasement of epistemology provided means to dispense with distasteful realities. In a crude, and for the Boomers, useful, form, relativism posits that different people can have different truths.

The problem, as public policy goes, is that feelings grant each person access to purely personal truths, about which there can be no real debate and therefore no social consensus. Each person becomes an infallible pontiff on any matter that might provoke emotion. Questioning the legitimacy of those feelings is both a hopeless enterprise and bound to provoke offense, which seems to have been an increasingly common emotional state from the Boomers’ college years onward.

In a complex world, deference to experts should be rising instead of, as has happened, falling. But in a system where feelings were paramount and science was diminished, why defer to experts at all? Every person, in the Boomers’ Reformation of Feelings, had access to personal truth, making every man an expert, every woman an omnicompetent elite of one.

Many evangelical churches became less vehicles for Christian ministry than political action committees organized by political ideology.

Brandishing the Constitution, Goldwater informed the American people that programs like Social Security, farm regulation, and labor relations appear nowhere within the Constitution, and asked for a mandate to abolish them all. As for taxes, anything beyond the amounts necessary to fund “legitimate” operations were to be eliminated. What taxes did remain, Goldwater believed, should be flat instead of progressive (i.e., everyone should pay the same percentage, rather than higher earners paying a larger fraction).10 Even the infrastructure programs and modest welfare programs Eisenhower presided over were “disappointing” in their profligacy and extent, to say nothing of what Johnson proposed.

The senator’s message didn’t resonate, at least, not with most of the electorate, not at the time. Johnson trounced Goldwater in 1964, with 61 percent of the popular vote to 39 percent, capturing every region of the country except Goldwater’s home state and—this would be crucial—the deep South.

If the Boomers had been just another generation, their sociopathy would be merely lamentable, but demographics and history granted Boomers the power to reshape the nation in devastating ways. No other American generation had been as large and enduring, and no other generation had origins as homogeneous, or ambitions as focused, as the Boomers. Nor has any other group, or even combination of groups, of comparable size and cohesion yet risen to oppose the Boomers. America over the past thirty-odd years has been a Boomer America.

By the 1980s, the Boomers already represented a substantial fraction of Congress, and by 1994 they accounted for more than half of the House, reaching a peak of 79 percent in 2007–2008.*,19 Boomers remain powerful, with over 70 percent of House seats in the 2015–2016 Congress, a greater share than they had even in the early 1990s. At the start of 2016, they controlled 86 percent of governorships.

The entire country has moved to the Right since Reagan’s election. This is notwithstanding the fact that from Carter to Obama, Republicans and Democrats have evenly split time in the White House. Equal time in the Oval Office doesn’t matter so much as the actual policies pursued in that office, because the net drift Rightward in the white Boomer electorate has freed conservative politicians to move further to the Right while politicians on the Left have also moved Rightward to remain viable. Except on certain social matters, Obama was far more conservative than Richard Nixon, for example, and this has been the Democratic story since Boomers started voting en masse.

Social Security is a policy defined explicitly by the age at which benefits are paid, and therefore for the purposes of uniting the Boomers, the only thing that matters is that Social Security holds together long enough to pay off the majority of the generation. The median Boomer was born in 1952, and for those alive today, they can expect to live to roughly eighty—i.e., until 2032. The Social Security Trust Fund is expected to be exhausted between 2030 and 2037, with 2034 being the frequently forecasted date of depletion. Again, not a coincidence.

It is economic interest that frequently unites the Boomers as a generation, it is their sheer size that allows them to determine policy, and it is their shared sociopathy that struck off the restraints that once fettered other generations.