A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

The choices in November 2016 were only about how bad the following years would be. Would the already sizeable debt balloon by another $3–5 trillion or by $5–15 trillion, the proceeds expended on projects either somewhat dubious or mostly self-defeating; would the disabling legal scandal emerge as civil litigation over prior frauds or as a ginned-up impeachment by a Boomer Congress; would the cronyism be only significant or completely outrageous; would the earth simmer or would it roast; and in what ways would the rule of law be undermined by presidential arrogance?

Not only did television reach more homes more quickly than the Internet, use was very intense from the start. The degree of American preference for television appears most vividly measured as a percentage of leisure hours, because when given the choice, Americans greatly prefer TV. 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. Leaving aside for now the considerable body of research showing that television negatively affects childhood development, reasonable people can immediately see the problem: It’s just not healthy to spend the majority of one’s free time immobilized in front of the box.

TV’s essential characteristics make it the perfect education for sociopaths, facilitating deceit, acquisitiveness, intransigence, and validating a worldview only loosely tethered to reality. As a breeding ground for dissembling, television almost cannot help itself, because unlike older media, it inherently operates on a minimum of two levels, the visual and audio, sometimes supplemented by a third level of text. These concurrent streams make it easier to achieve multiple meanings, allowing for divergences between what is said, what is seen, and what is meant. Televisual irony trains viewers to hold otherwise inconsistent views simultaneously, and it is no coincidence that in an era where TV is the most profound cultural influence, the trend has been from earnest to ironic. It’s not that television makes lying easier per se, but that television encourages a layered approach to reality in ways that other media do not.

The defining trait of all previous societies had been that they were social—a body of people more or less united by common goals and values. The individual was subordinated to the group or, as the other great midcentury Spock put it, “the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, or the one.” A social imperative doesn’t require socialism itself, whose practical instantiations anyway tend less toward collectivist paradise than military oligarchy. It does, however, require a broader view, in which individual liberties balance against general welfare. Unfortunately, sociopaths are antisocial by nature, and their lack of empathy and foresight consigns them to view society only as a restraint on individual freedom of action or a conduit for unearned treats, rather than a font of general betterment.

The Boomers’ relativist and romantic agendas posed challenges to the culture of the expertise and elites generally, core functions of which are providing guidance, leadership, and the occasional restraint on mass will. The authority of such groups derives from their competence and knowledge and the social trust those abilities should create, especially regarding complicated matters beyond the scope of the average person or too time-consuming for lay study. 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.

Burke held that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites,” continuing that “society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”29 For the true conservative confronted with a sociopathic electorate, the correct strategy was more experts, more voting of conscience, less catering to the passions of the masses; no Boomer was putting “moral chains” on his “appetites.” But contemporary neoliberal culture demands a “responsive government,” greasing the skids of disaster. In the sociopathic marketplace politics has become just another service, and quality is measured by doing what a plurality of voters want in the moment, rather than what’s best for everyone in the long run.

The seemingly least likely choice was what actually happened, a heterodox revolution that took the worst elements of older programs and combined them into a bizarre “neoliberal” agenda that featured an economy simultaneously laissez-faire and heavily dependent on state spending and occasional federal bailouts; a conservative government, yet one with radical ideals; a rhetoric of probity, but a policy of total fiscal and other indiscipline; Republicans overseeing government bloat while Democrats promoted free trade and the “end of welfare as we know it.” It was ideologically incoherent and it didn’t work particularly well, not for many Americans. But—the critical “but”—it did work well for one group, and that group would be the most powerful voting constituency during neoliberalism’s long reign: the Boomers.

while Carter was smart enough to diagnose the cause, he failed to appreciate the real implications of his message. The very people exhibiting the sociopathy he described were the ones least receptive to his prescriptions. More savings, less consumption? More trust, more family, less individualism, less self-interest? Hard work? Carter didn’t fully understand the deep changes to the American demographic the Boomers had wrought, nor did he count on the emergence as a serious political figure of Ronald Reagan, the actor whose sidekick Bubbles the Chimp had been replaced by Art Laffer and his Magic Curve. Reagan (or, at least, the public’s version of him) was tailor-made for the sociopathic electorate. Never again would the Boomers be told to save, or adjust the thermostat, or define themselves other than by their material possessions, to work on their families, to trust a meddlesome government, to abandon the pursuit of unrestrained individualism, or to undertake an “all-out effort” of any kind. All problems would be resolved by neoliberalism, for once the decks had been cleared of encumbering regulation and the human bilge discharged from the holds of the welfare state, things would take care of themselves: growth, jobs, inflation, consumption, all of it.

What establishes the Boomers as a political generation is that the Boomers’ overriding policy ambitions have been defined not in conventional terms like race or gender, but by age and life cycle. This has been the case from the very start. The Vietnam draft was, obviously, age based, as were the domestic responses, like lower thresholds for voting and drinking. 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 true power of the Boomers has been partly disguised by the nominal political divisions within the Boomers and also by the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which provided colorful headlines but rarely distracted the Boomers from pursuing the many economic policies on which they agreed, and, given their strength, achieved. Appreciating the vast scope and influence of Boomer power is essential to understanding that the events of the past few decades have not been an accident, the product of grand consensus across many groups, or the anti-democratic perversions of a plutocratic cabal, but rather the generally democratic expression of a uniquely influential generation and its self-serving priorities.

More than anything, Boomer influence is a story of sheer numbers. 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 1946.2 Under either analysis, the Boomers have been by far the most important political group for several decades—e.g., there were roughly as many white Boomers in 1990 as all ethnic minorities, of all generations, combined.3 The Boomers’ numerosity meant that even a modest tilt in any one direction (self-serving sociopathy, as a pointed example) influenced outcomes profoundly. In matters where the Boomers identified themselves by generational interests, as they often did, their power would be overwhelming, allowing Boomers to set policy essentially by themselves, without any of the usual coalition building, compromises, or concessions to other interests. It has been an extraordinary situation in American democratic history.*

a prime theme in the Boomers’ sociopathic ascendancy has been the consistent manipulation of taxes to serve generational ends. There were two major mechanisms by which Boomer enrichment (and national impoverishment) was achieved. The first was straightforward, a general lowering of tax rates that coincided with both the Boomers’ ascent to political power and the beginning of their prime earning years. The second mechanism required constantly adjusting specific tax policies to favor the interests of Boomers as they moved through their financial life cycles, lowering income taxes during periods where Boomers labored for wages, reducing capital gains taxes as Boomers became stockholders, and limiting and even briefly abolishing estate taxes when Boomers expected to inherit. However, taxes did not always move downward. When Boomers perceived tax hikes to be in their interests, some rates (like Social Security and Medicare taxes) were allowed to rise, though only enough to benefit Boomers, many of whom can expect to retrieve more from the system than they put in, before the system falls apart as the Boomers die off.

Whether or not public medical costs are driven by private improvidence, any attempt to interpose reason gets ugly. Boomers of all parties melt down over the same basic issue—rationing—whether costumed as “death panels,” inequity, whatever. Of course, in a finite world all resources are rationed. Perhaps if the Boomers had subsidized medical education, there would be more and cheaper gerontologists; if they had generously funded the National Institutes of Health, better medicines; if their neoliberal doctrine had permitted negotiations with drug companies, cheaper therapies. But they did not. Anyway, Medicare itself is rationing, one that discriminates based on age—over sixty-five, the government will help, under sixty-five and nondisabled, your ration is usually zero.50 What kind of medical care should the public provide to seniors and others? Already, 5 percent of health-care users consume almost 50 percent of health-care resources, and a plurality of these are poor or elderly—i.e., beneficiaries of public programs.51 The public is entitled to ask whether (a) it wants to spend this money, or (b) the money can be better spent improving the welfare of a vastly broader and more productive population. But a tedious combination of sentimentalism, anti-empiricism, and self-interest prevents this dialogue.

The American justice system has always had its biases, against minorities and the poor, and these are not the Boomers’ creations. What Boomers are responsible for is the explosion in the prison population, vastly increasing the numbers of those exposed to institutional injustice while providing no real path for these prisoners to become self-sufficient on release. As ex-convicts bleed into the probation system and then the general public, the costs will be disproportionately borne by current and future taxpayers, not the Boomers who presided over mass incarceration in the first place.

While progressivity is important, the point many have missed is that excessive focus on collections from just the richest risks further social distortions, from the perspectives of the Left, Right, and what remains of the center. Populists should keep in mind that a system that is already disproportionately funded by the rich will become ever more captive to them as taxes increase. The rich will become even more interested in tax policy, while the government will become ever more dependent on the well-being of a tiny class of individuals and cater to them accordingly; if you have only one goose laying golden eggs, the goose had better be happy. Overtaxing the rich also encourages other unhealthy dynamics. Those who pay tend to feel they own; those who do not cannot feel quite the same. After a certain point, extreme progressivity defeats the social purpose it seeks to achieve, reducing society to oligarchy versus mob, with the oligarchy feeling entitled to govern at whim and emotionally justified in evading a burden others do not really share.

Every interest group in the world has plans to reform taxes, and no one person can understand the millions of words of federal, state, local, and agency taxes and fees, or the various glosses on them provided by the lobbying industry. No one person—no one voter or reader—has to. All that has to be appreciated is that the scale of the problem defies any cheap fix and that essentially all taxes must rise for some time. My personal hope would be for the state to recede from its role as manager of perpetual financial crisis, concentrating instead on effective regulation and limiting itself to the various things it does best, like building roads, and schools, and funding basic research, with taxes scaled down to lowest reasonable need. After we repair damage to the system, we should consider a return to lower taxes. That point is many years away.

Returning to a thoughtful, empirical culture will also make it easier to persuade the population of another general conclusion: that society has considerable positive value. After many chapters slogging through the sociopathic wreckage of the past decades, readers may despair of convincing enough voters of that fact, yet there are reasons to hope. Younger groups already have the most prosocial outlooks, even though they have been deprived—courtesy of the Boomers—of direct experience with a really flourishing society. These views can be encouraged through reasoned debate and rerunning an old political experiment: investing for the general welfare and promoting the interests of society. It has, after all, worked before. There is no guarantee that it will work again, but the toxic results of the present experiment commend some other course, and we may as well choose one that enjoys both a history of success and normative justification.