by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
<\/em>FrontPage<\/em><\/p>\n Like the hero of Gunter Grass\u2019 novel\u00a0The Tin Drum<\/em>, America\u2019s progressive Baby Boomers chose not to grow up. Why should they? They decided that their development was complete when they graduated from college. All they needed to do was affirm their magnificent, world-historical identity. No surprise, then, that we are currently afflicted by the juvenile politics of the Democratic Party, the policies of which embody the Boomer creed: we all have a right to eat our entitlement and hedonism cake and have it too \u2014 as long as it\u2019s subsidized by the evil rich.<\/p>\n Boomers, of course, had a lot of help in postponing adulthood. The ever-extending length of adolescence partly accounts for this. Post-war affluence made it affordable to prolong further this historically unprecedented time of life between childhood and adulthood. Consumerism took advantage of this new market, one prone to impulse buying and enjoying access to lots of surplus wealth. So they elevated in social importance the transient whims, banal ideas, and foolish desires of a group flush with disposable income. The result was the most pampered, obsessed over, and indulged generation in American history.<\/p>\n As a consequence, the Boomers developed the unearned sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations more typical of spoiled children. And the culture went right along with them and pandered to their juvenile taste, mainly because there was money to be made. The traditional moral limits on materialism and freely indulging one\u2019s appetites had always gotten in the way of profit. Starting in the 50\u2019s, the old taboos about sex, public vulgarity, and drugs all began to be swept away. \u201cIf it feels good, do it\u201d became a new human right as well as a potent source of profit.<\/p>\n Hence the \u201ceerie vulgarity,\u201d to use Nabokov\u2019s phrase, of our popular culture, which has managed to trivialize the \u201cedgy\u201d and \u201ctransgressive\u201d into the dullest of clich\u00e9s, and reduced what was once the sordid practices of rakes and rou\u00e9s into the mass-marketed fashion accessories of pre-teens, and the subject of smutty jokes on prime-time sit-coms. And anyone who tries to stand athwart this locomotive of degradation is dismissed as a fascist square or a religious fanatic who wants to \u201cturn back the clock\u201d to the dark days of sexual oppression and repression.<\/p>\n This cultural debasement was helped along by the destruction of our educational system. The postwar university\u2019s abandonment of traditional schooling in history, language, philosophy, literature, and basic skills created a vacuum filled by leftist ideology and identity politics, both of which debased history into a cheap political melodrama of oppression, institutionalized victim politics, abandoned training in critical analysis, and promoted utopian standards of happiness and justice never to be met in a complex world of flawed humans. Yet chanting the slogans, jargon, and clich\u00e9s embodying these unrealistic goals allowed callow Boomers to preen morally on the cheap, and to justify their destructive politics as earnest idealism. The intensity of feelings and passionately held opinions, not the intellectual or moral coherence of thought or ideas, became the currency of worth and authenticity \u2014 another characteristic of children, one now reinforced and cultivated by figures of presumably adult authority in politics, schools, and the media. Better yet, the privilege of bourgeoisie Boomers was now compensated for by the ostentatious endorsement of \u201csocial justice\u201d for people living two zip codes over.<\/p>\n The worst effects, however, of this indulgence of a whole generation and the failure to educate it can be seen in politics. Traditional political thinking had always been predicated on a tragic view of human nature, one recognizing that what Madison called the \u201cpassions and interests\u201d of human nature impose limits on what governments can accomplish. Loss, failure, disappointment, poverty, injustice, and suffering can never be eliminated from human life, only mitigated at best. Evil is a constant reality battling against the good, sometimes requiring destructive force and suffering for its elimination. Earthly perfection, in short, is a delusion, and utopia nowhere.<\/p>\n This was the philosophy of the Founders, as can be seen everywhere in theFederalist<\/em>\u00a0essays and the assumptions underlying the Constitution. For example, Hamilton in\u00a0Federalist 6<\/em>\u00a0reminds us \u201cthat men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.\u201d In\u00a010<\/em>, Madison\u2019s famous discussion of \u201cfaction\u201d \u2014 the political groups \u201cactuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens\u201d \u2014 likewise reflects a realist view of human nature and the power of \u201copinions\u201d formed by a \u201cfallible\u201d reason and influenced by \u201cpassions\u201d: \u201cThe latent causes of faction,\u201d Madison summarizes, \u201care thus sown in the nature of man.\u201d That\u2019s why the Constitution codifies the separation and balance of powers, so that faction will block faction from threatening the freedom of the whole citizenry. As John Adams said, dismissing the notion of human perfectibility given the permanent human passions like envious rivalry: \u201cEmulation next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions, and the balance of a well-ordered government will alone be able to prevent that emulation from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n With progressive Boomers, though, this traditional American political wisdom was corrupted by utopianism, a childish belief that perfect justice, perfect equality, absolute freedom, and a world without losers or violence would come about just because we desired it so. Unrealistic standards of state behavior and goals alien to the tragic truths of human nature became the touchstone of political virtue. At the same time, government has to grow more and more powerful in order to accomplish lofty goals like eliminating poverty, discrimination, or war, in the process threatening political freedom and personal autonomy. This demand for absolute personal freedom and greater government power to achieve unrealistic goals reflects the incoherence typical of childish reasoning.<\/p>\n This is the world the Boomers have created. Popular and \u201cserious\u201d culture alike reflect a highly polished mediocrity, its stale and questionable ideas and creaking clich\u00e9d plots and characters \u2014 psycho white guys, CIA agents, corporate CEOs, repressed Christians \u2014 given a patina of technical high finish and spurious innovation. Our politics embodies a juvenile utopianism expressed in bumper-sticker bromides \u2014 \u201cHope and Change!\u201d \u2014 dangerous in a world of hard men, conflicting goods, tragic limits, and fanatical evil. These are all the expressions of an over-indulged, badly educated teen-aged mind.<\/p>\n But the ultimate blame for this generation\u2019s pathologies lies with bad ideas birthed long before 1946 and spread by grown-ups who should have known better. Romanticism midwifed the cult of feeling and solipsistic individualism. Positivism popularized the notion that science and technology could liberate us from suffering, want, and failure. Communism, socialism, and progressivism all pursued the impossible dream of perfect equality and justice and eternal universal happiness. Secularism and the decline of faith empowered pseudo-scientific substitutes like psychology and sociology. All these diseases of modernity slumbered in the body politic, infecting mostly the intellectual and artistic elites, until they broke out into an epidemic nurtured by post-war wealth and mass media, eventually leading to the presidency of Barack Obama, a walking symptomatology of the progressive Boomer disease. And here we are today, like Livy\u2019s Romans so far gone that we can stand neither the disease nor the cure.<\/p>\n \u00a92013 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Like the hero of Gunter Grass\u2019 novel\u00a0The Tin Drum, America\u2019s progressive Baby Boomers chose not to grow up. Why should they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,187],"tags":[72,1025,845,165,1023,624],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1tX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4096,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/slouching-toward-geezerhood\/","url_meta":{"origin":5701,"position":0},"title":"Slouching Toward Geezerhood","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com This year the oldest Baby Boomer cohort turns 65, the first of 79 million people who promise to be the whiniest and most annoying crop of geezers in history. Not all of them, of course. Just as many in the Greatest Generation weren\u2019t so great,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":171,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss\/","url_meta":{"origin":5701,"position":1},"title":"A Nation of Takers Hurtles Toward the Fiscal Abyss","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The on-going negotiations over avoiding the tax hikes and spending cuts we call the \u201cfiscal cliff\u201d are simply the latest act in a farce of self-serving political denial. For decades now both parties have overseen and nurtured the expansion of the entitlement state all the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6939,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eating-our-young\/","url_meta":{"origin":5701,"position":2},"title":"Eating Our Young","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 28, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort \u2014 the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6856,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-reality-is-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":5701,"position":3},"title":"The Progressive Reality Is Here","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The Republicans are feeling confident these days. The slow-motion debacle of Obamacare promises to keep that albatross around the necks of the Democrats at least through next year\u2019s midterm elections. The IRS, NSA, and Benghazi scandals are still simmering, and any day new information\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":616,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/aurora-fort-hood-a-tale-of-two-massacres\/","url_meta":{"origin":5701,"position":4},"title":"Aurora & Fort Hood: A Tale of Two Massacres","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine The murder victims of James Holmes, who slaughtered 12 and wounded 50 at the\u00a0Dark Knight Rises\u00a0movie premier in Aurora Colorado, were still sprawled in the theater when ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross on-air tried to link the killer to the Tea Party \u2014 without\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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