A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Under the Boomers, Right and Left, adjectives and qualifiers have started to return, and the moral arc has begun to reverse. Felons had long faced voting restrictions, but these restrictions were of limited numerical impact until the Boomer justice system started mass-producing millions of felons, starting with Bill Clinton. If poll and literacy taxes were out, proxies like voter ID laws could be employed, and have now become something of a vogue with Boomer legislators. You still have to be able to read and to cough up money to get, say, a driver’s license, though since these filters are applied at the DMV instead of at the voting booth, they don’t count as poll taxes or literacy tests. To take another example, many states have no explicit provisions that require employers to provide paid leave to vote, so a stagnating economy also serves as a filter, one that can favor older people, who are either retired or are senior enough to have flexible jobs.