A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

the program required an electorate that cherished consumption above all, was willing to overlook long-term consequences in favor of short-term gain, had no compunctions about stripping benefits from the most vulnerable,

THE BOOMER ASCENDANCY

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. —James Madison (Federalist No. 47)

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.

America over the past thirty-odd years has been a Boomer America.

And Boomer (and thus American) politics will continue to be driven by life cycle, with the Boomers’ desire to maintain old-age benefits overriding all other political concerns.

the awesome size of Boomer voting power and the generation’s demonstrable interest in using that power to promote its own agenda at everyone else’s expense.

As of the early 1980s, when the Boomer revolution really kicked off, the generation represented no less than 42 percent of the voting-eligible population and up to 51 percent, depending on whether one calculates the Boom’s start from 1940 or 1946.

there were roughly as many white Boomers in 1990 as all ethnic minorities, of all generations, combined.

The only comparable equivalent was the enactment of Social Security, which united seniors in 1935 and will serve as the Boomers’ final rallying point.

In numerical terms, the argument had gotten weaker, not stronger, and it was further complicated by the fact that so many Boomers avoided the draft by means legal and otherwise.

For proof, one can just review the catalogue of sex, drugs, and draft dodging during the 1960s, or for the more digitally minded, peruse their own histories on the time machine of Facebook.

It was the fastest approval for any amendment, essentially one hundred days from start to finish.

the guarantee of the franchise for blacks through the Fifteenth Amendment took 342 days, to say nothing of the Civil War and the centuries of slavery that preceded it;

the Nineteenth Amendment’s delivery of women’s suffrage took 441 days...

Boomers was that they were uniquely powerful in contemporary politics and perhaps even especially deserving, which rein-forced their sociopathic predispositions.

The Republican advantage in Boomer votes would grow over time, though it would sometimes be overcome when Democrats offered up a particularly charismatic cogenerationalist like B. Clinton.

The sociopathic personality guaranteed that this sort of pander-pick-and-choose politics would succeed, because there was only one issue that really mattered: the free exercise of Self, as defined by that Self,

As the Boomers moved Rightward, their outsized demographic and other powers pushed the system along toward conservatism.

Fighting for the Right to Party

From Prohibition’s end to 1970, the drinking age in most states had, like the voting age, been twenty-one, and for the same reasons.

And so the Boomers had shaped, by virtue of numbers, a new political landscape, one that permitted them, sozzled and acned, to engage in the solemn duty of selecting the nation’s political destiny.

Measured by raw voting power, the moment of greatest Boomer influence arrived in the Reagan years,

The Boomers achieved the height of effective political power from the late 1980s until the early 2010s,

has coincided with the systematic transfer of wealth to their generation and a set of sociopathic initiatives putting the price to others.

reaching a peak of 79 percent in 2007–2008.

over 70 percent of House seats in the 2015–2016 Congress, a greater share than they had even in the early 1990s.

The 2017–2019 House is set to be 69 percent Boomer, so the generation still maintains supermajority control over the national agenda in the legislature, executive branch, and courts.

Moreover, with most of the sociopathic agenda in place, the Boomers need only to block new legislation, easily accomplished by minority actions like vetoes, filibusters, shutdowns, and litigation.

If the youngest Boomer can do the same—plausible given improvements to longevity, though not competence—we could have a Boomer president as late as 2045.

(making “senator” uncomfortably literal, derived as it is from senex, meaning “old” and also the root of “senile”).

meaning the Supreme Court could not only become entirely Boomer over the next decade, but remain substantially so until around 2050.

The lower courts have already been packed with Boomers.

truly unleashed by the Citizens United decision in 2010 and other expansions of monetary speech condoned by the Boomer Chief Justice—the

of the two major embassies closest to Congress, the first is Canada’s and the second, AARP’s, located a five-minute Rascal-ride from Capitol Hill.

This convergence helped produce striking (and unhelpful) instances of Boomer bipartisanship on matters of prison policy, tax, and entitlements.

Boomers are more conservative than the population overall, and the generation has been drifting Rightward over time.

The sheer size of the generation, combined with the overall Republican tilt in its preference, has dragged the entire white electorate into Republican territory from the mid-1980s onward.

Obama was far more conservative than Richard Nixon,

it was Clinton, not Bush I, who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and declared that the “era of big government is over”;

Shouldn’t Bush II have been the one taking an ax to welfare and Clinton been pushing Medicare Part D?

One of the features of the sociopath is that, lacking empathy for others, he favors only himself.

Only when sociopaths are similarly situated will they vote in similar ways.

the Boomers’ generational unity regarding taxes, debt, inflation, trade policy, and so on, but we can preview one extremely clear example: Social Security.

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

The Roman tribune and jurist Ravilla began his investigations with a simple question: Cui bono? To whose benefit?

So it should be no surprise that a prime theme in the Boomers’ sociopathic ascendancy has been the consistent manipulation of taxes to serve generational ends.

lowering of tax rates that coincided with both the Boomers’ ascent to political power and the beginning of their prime earning years.

the best possible one for Boomer sociopaths would produce tax policies that mirrored Boomers’ progressions through their life cycles—a menu that looks like Appendix B and whose most salient parts are covered in this chapter.

The sociopathic appeal of generally lower taxes to the consumption-oriented Boomers is self-evident.