A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

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count on the emergence as a serious political figure of Ronald Reagan, the actor whose sidekick Bubbles the Chimp had been replaced by Art Laffer and his Magic Curve.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.