Dear Philip: I am new here and subscribed because I saw some ungated, fine writing from you and others. It is my first day reading as a subscriber. However, when I saw the subtitle of this article, I felt uninspirited to read more of the article, though I tried.
The term Boomer is difficult for me. Did you know Biden is not a Boomer? He was born too early. Did you know that last Christmas there were 59-year-old Boomers?
The Substack where I participate most has a host who says, again and again "I'm GenX" - I am not sure he knows that there are Boomers barely his senior. He thinks he is magically different from those folks? At 57 with some Boomers at 59? I feel sorry for the poor guy who fears aging I guess. But what is happeneing is he turns off subscribers aged 59-77. And those can be people with the time, energy funds to subscribe to Substack. This is especially hurtful to "late Boomers"
nowhere near 70. Why say you are so different than them? Why make "Boomer" a perjorative? Because it is normally used that way, just as you did in your subtitle.
Furthermore, I am not differnt from others who were children during the "Hippie days" of the late sixties and early seventies. I was just as scared and confused by hippies as they were. The pretend line about people - how they are supposedly different depeneding upon whether they were born before or after 1965 is ridiculous. If anything, those born about 1950-1970 have a lot in common (children during sex/drugs/rocknroll Hippie days) but even then it is hard to generalize.
I with people would say older, older-generation, middle-aged, younger, adults under 40, over-70s, seniors - there are so many terms that are better descriptions, more in tune with the author's meaning depending on what is being written, than this ridiculous, very devisive, hurtful and indeed insulting idea that we can carve up people into segments about 18 years long and they will all be alike, but those one day older or younger than them will be different. Oh, and those born '46 to '65 should all be slurred as Boomers, all like each other, all stupid and wrong. I think not.
Great article, but just like Linda's comment above, I need to emphasize BIDEN IS NOT A BOOMER. He is in the "Silent Generation." Some think "Silents" were even more privileged than the Boomers. Silents didn't have to fight in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. There were fewer of them, and they got on the 1950s/1960s gravy train at an earlier age than the Boomers.
A man like Biden, a devout Catholic on Sundays, but a fervent pro-choicer and social liberal the rest of the week, isn't someone to be entrusted with high office.
His baseness is revealed in his treatment of his VP, and his Party's candidate, Kamala Harris, once the Democrat grandees forced him to stand aside to make way for her.
Pope Francis is complicit in Biden's deeds. He could probably have prevented Biden's election in 2020 by denouncing him (correctly) as a hypocrite. But instead, was led by his aggrieved hatred of Trump to betray the Catholic Church and lead astray ordinary Catholics.
A sad commentary on human self-righteousness. It is more about the baseness of "the greatest generation" than about the boomers. WW II was not about fighting evil; it was about getting a bigger share of the spoils of battle. FDR was all about becoming the richest generation. He set the stage for governmental growth.
Keep telling yourself lies. FDR got elected on the platform of staying out of the war. Then he din everything in his power to get the Axis to declare war on the U.S. And a lot of things that were not in his power to do, like letting U.S. airmen fight in England, France, and China's air forces, running guns and other war materieles to Axis' enemies, and blockading Axis' access to oil and steel.
The opposite viewpoint has held sway until recently. I don't and never have been a supporter of the Axis, and FDR was a great admirer of the USSR, who had much in common with Fascism. There have been factions in the U.S. who have actively supported totalitarian governments throughout our history, especially so today.
This is a smart and sobering commentary that approaches our shared concerns about spiritual warfare in American politics through the lens of age-groups. I have written about similar thoughts in my Substack. It is true that Biden is actually a member of the "Silent Generation," but he has been largely entangled in the Boomer values of the administrative state, big corporations, much of academia, the media, and the global elite in general. It has become clear that those valuess include staying in power and signaling virtue to as many people as possible for as long as possible. In this sense, it's worthwhile focusing on the Boomers as a cautionary note to younger people who need to value leadership through lenses of faith, human dignity, and the present and future common good.--Bill Schmitt
Thank you for this enlightening post. It's always so weird - but incredibly illuminating - to be reminded how much Catholic radical conservatives - along with other MAGA types up to and including billionaire tech-bros like Elon Musk - project on to "liberals" their own deepest and most savage impulses and desires. In this post, you dismiss Biden as a "Boomer Nihilist." On this point alone, you might want to get your facts straight. Biden is not a Boomer. He was born in 1942. The Boomer generation extends from 1946 to 1964.
You then go on to rant about the trinity of "ness's" that illustrate Biden's "nihilism." His transgressiveness, his shamelessness, and his vindictiveness. Your proof of his "transgressiveness" is his decision to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia, the idea being that in a fit of pique Biden acted unilaterally, with a decision risking nuclear war, merely because it felt "good," that it was a giant "fuck you" to the world for insufficiently appreciating him.
Biden then illustrates his "shamelessness," we learn, by preemptively pardoning his son, Hunter. Was this a good decision? Who knows? The assumption is that Biden did it because his son had suffered sufficiently and because the Trump administration was likely to go to the ends of the earth to destroy him. Would you deny that?
You then refer to Hunter Biden as, "by all accounts, a vile individual." I'm always impressed by the sweeping generalizations without a parcel of substantiation, that otherwise intelligent people embracing the post-liberal label casually leech into their arguments. We’ll just conjure our enemies from thin air, tar them with a nasty boy Catholic brush, and then crow about it. "Ooh, I'm a post-liberal ... so edgy and transgressive am I." As I’ve written elsewhere, with you guys it’s all about demonology. You love what you hate. I don’t know what catalog of virtues you subscribe to, because none of them are evident in your post.
I'm certainly familiar with the "shameless" trope, having been tarred with that label myself and viewing it as a badge of honor. I also appreciate that it's a throwaway that the radical right invokes as if the term justifies its own use and can't ever be refuted. Which makes sense because "guilt" is one thing and "shame" is quite another. Shame bores into one's soul. It is an ineradicable stain. You might apply the label to yourself sometime and see how it feels.
Of course, being from Ireland, you may not be familiar with the uses and abuses of the presidential pardon power, which extend to the earliest days of the nation. No matter that Trump intends to pardon most, if not all, of the January 6 insurrectionists on his first day in office.
As for Joe Biden using Hunter to launder his ill-gained billions - again the projection of the embedded impulse of MAGA types to grift and graft their way to power - I mean, seriously? I'm no big fan of Joe Biden's. And I'm not going to defend Hunter Biden, but you know as well as I do that this campaign to destroy Joe Biden by first destroying his son - has every sign of the transgressiveness and shamelessness of Donald Trump in his incarnation as Pennywise the Clown.
Donald Trump, whose entire life has been defined by lying, cheating, sexually assaulting, and generally acting like a "vile" 5-year old at every turn as he's amassed his pile of ill-gotten gains. See what I mean? More projection. More insincerity. More disingenuousness. The proof being that were Donald Trump an old witless Democrat like Biden, you'd be balls to the wall to destroy him. Just as it's true that if the January 6 seditionists had been "Black Lives Matter" or "Antifa," - ooh, so scary - you wouldn't have blinked twice when the cops started shooting. The dishonesty, the lack of self-awareness, is gob smacking.
Finally, the "ness" of the vindictive. The logic you apply here to explain the energy crisis in Europe is equally pretzeled. There may be many forces at work in the economic destruction of Europe, but to assign the major cause to the vindictiveness of Joe Biden is laughable. As compared, say, to Russia's decision to wage war on Ukraine, which is immensely more Hitlerian than anything Biden has done.
But given your apparent fondness for Russia and Putin, I guess I can see why you might want to shift responsibility elsewhere. And who better to target than the shuffling, inaudible 82-year old president of the United States. Of course, he's the vindictive one. Not Trump or Kash Patel or Russ Vought or Stephen Miller, who are all about the savage lust that saturates the bloodletting and the payback.
Radically right-wing Catholics generally focus on the motivations and behaviors of individuals, on their personal sins, and their status as either "good" or "evil." And I know you guys all love the "natural law," and from that love flows your instinct to label people and behavior as either "natural" or "unnatural." “Ordered” or “disordered.” But people are complex. We all are many things at once. We are all capable of great evil and great good. And we are all subject to the random physics of nature - which knows no good or evil - but which can buffet and tilt us mercilessly.
Climate change, global warming, species destruction, the poisoning of the earth, scaling inequality - these are the real issues you should attend to if you care about "life." But one reason you not only fail to see this true reality bearing down on "all created life" in this misbegotten, broken world (thanks, Mr. Abrahamic God, for this clusterfuck) - and actually deny this reality and abuse those scientists and policymakers and activists who actually understand the accelerating effects of nature's profound disharmonies - is that you reject the essential complexity of "nature."
Your natural law - filigreed and recursive as its logical syntax may suggest - is flawed at the root because its premises deny this complexity. Your moral frame is inherently reductionist and naive, and hence also brutal and punitive. But medieval Catholic notions of a "common good" to be forced down everyone's throat as a form of metaphysical waterboarding will solve none of our problems. Your understanding of God's nature is entirely at odds with "nature" and the "natural world" as most of us experience it. Indeed, your notion of God’s nature is at war with the natural world.
To be clear, I also agree liberalism is likely spent. But let’s attribute it to entropy, rather than the evils of the “deep state” and the evils of the decadent, cosmopolitan urban elite, and the evils of the hapless Joe Biden. We are entering a "post-liberal" world, which for you guys is really a back-to-the future medieval moment, but which is actually more of a three-body problem moment, with forces at work that your metaphysics and your politics can barely comprehend, and against which your "morality" can only stumble into a passionate embrace with the most degenerate, unstable, stupid, authoritarian, transgressive, shameless, and vindictive leader in the history of the United States. We've had some truly awful presidents. But in this case, with Trump, no one comes close. He is truly the dark unicorn of your millennial dreams, the "strange attractor" through which the chaos of our age enfolds and renews and ultimately consumes itself.
This is how you close your screed. "Replacing the positive ideals that we hope our leaders hold about the countries they lead is a rage-filled vindictiveness that aims only at distributing cruelty and suffering for no other reason than to bring twisted pleasure to those that partake in it. This is as aimless as it is evil and sadistic."
I don't even know what this means. It means nothing, because it doesn't apply to Joe Biden (whatever else you want to say about him), but it fully applies to Donald Trump and his sheep-like minions. For this reason, it's just word salad. Seriously. This is the best you guys can do?
I'm not inclined to be too hard on you, Philip, but Patrick Deneen, Edward Feser, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pippin and the other self-righteous, smug First Things bros participating in this triumphalist shitshow of a debacle really need to take a hard look in the mirror. Because they all got what they wanted in November, perhaps the only thing they've ever wanted. Which is power. And now they fully own what happens next.
Be fucking careful what you wish for.
Sincerely,
Peter Schwartz
PS: Feel free to reply and give me your best shot.
Dear Philip: I am new here and subscribed because I saw some ungated, fine writing from you and others. It is my first day reading as a subscriber. However, when I saw the subtitle of this article, I felt uninspirited to read more of the article, though I tried.
The term Boomer is difficult for me. Did you know Biden is not a Boomer? He was born too early. Did you know that last Christmas there were 59-year-old Boomers?
The Substack where I participate most has a host who says, again and again "I'm GenX" - I am not sure he knows that there are Boomers barely his senior. He thinks he is magically different from those folks? At 57 with some Boomers at 59? I feel sorry for the poor guy who fears aging I guess. But what is happeneing is he turns off subscribers aged 59-77. And those can be people with the time, energy funds to subscribe to Substack. This is especially hurtful to "late Boomers"
nowhere near 70. Why say you are so different than them? Why make "Boomer" a perjorative? Because it is normally used that way, just as you did in your subtitle.
Furthermore, I am not differnt from others who were children during the "Hippie days" of the late sixties and early seventies. I was just as scared and confused by hippies as they were. The pretend line about people - how they are supposedly different depeneding upon whether they were born before or after 1965 is ridiculous. If anything, those born about 1950-1970 have a lot in common (children during sex/drugs/rocknroll Hippie days) but even then it is hard to generalize.
I with people would say older, older-generation, middle-aged, younger, adults under 40, over-70s, seniors - there are so many terms that are better descriptions, more in tune with the author's meaning depending on what is being written, than this ridiculous, very devisive, hurtful and indeed insulting idea that we can carve up people into segments about 18 years long and they will all be alike, but those one day older or younger than them will be different. Oh, and those born '46 to '65 should all be slurred as Boomers, all like each other, all stupid and wrong. I think not.
edit for typo
Great article, but just like Linda's comment above, I need to emphasize BIDEN IS NOT A BOOMER. He is in the "Silent Generation." Some think "Silents" were even more privileged than the Boomers. Silents didn't have to fight in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. There were fewer of them, and they got on the 1950s/1960s gravy train at an earlier age than the Boomers.
Should anyone over 70 be allowed to run for office ?
The old have so little to lose.
A man like Biden, a devout Catholic on Sundays, but a fervent pro-choicer and social liberal the rest of the week, isn't someone to be entrusted with high office.
His baseness is revealed in his treatment of his VP, and his Party's candidate, Kamala Harris, once the Democrat grandees forced him to stand aside to make way for her.
Pope Francis is complicit in Biden's deeds. He could probably have prevented Biden's election in 2020 by denouncing him (correctly) as a hypocrite. But instead, was led by his aggrieved hatred of Trump to betray the Catholic Church and lead astray ordinary Catholics.
A sad commentary on human self-righteousness. It is more about the baseness of "the greatest generation" than about the boomers. WW II was not about fighting evil; it was about getting a bigger share of the spoils of battle. FDR was all about becoming the richest generation. He set the stage for governmental growth.
WW II was about fighting the Axis powers, which had declared war on the USA.
Keep telling yourself lies. FDR got elected on the platform of staying out of the war. Then he din everything in his power to get the Axis to declare war on the U.S. And a lot of things that were not in his power to do, like letting U.S. airmen fight in England, France, and China's air forces, running guns and other war materieles to Axis' enemies, and blockading Axis' access to oil and steel.
There was very little FDR could have done to prevent volunteers from the US fighting for (or supplying) the Allies.
It was the duty of any US President to prevent oil and steel from reaching the Axis powers.
The Japanese weren't compelled - except by their own criminal lunacy - to attack Pearl Harbor.
Hitler's decision to declare war on the US was an unforced error on his part.
That's the official story, but it's not convincing.
Only if you hate FDR or love the Axis.
The opposite viewpoint has held sway until recently. I don't and never have been a supporter of the Axis, and FDR was a great admirer of the USSR, who had much in common with Fascism. There have been factions in the U.S. who have actively supported totalitarian governments throughout our history, especially so today.
Tony, your version of "Why do you hate freedom?" is not convincing.
This is a smart and sobering commentary that approaches our shared concerns about spiritual warfare in American politics through the lens of age-groups. I have written about similar thoughts in my Substack. It is true that Biden is actually a member of the "Silent Generation," but he has been largely entangled in the Boomer values of the administrative state, big corporations, much of academia, the media, and the global elite in general. It has become clear that those valuess include staying in power and signaling virtue to as many people as possible for as long as possible. In this sense, it's worthwhile focusing on the Boomers as a cautionary note to younger people who need to value leadership through lenses of faith, human dignity, and the present and future common good.--Bill Schmitt
Dear Philip,
Thank you for this enlightening post. It's always so weird - but incredibly illuminating - to be reminded how much Catholic radical conservatives - along with other MAGA types up to and including billionaire tech-bros like Elon Musk - project on to "liberals" their own deepest and most savage impulses and desires. In this post, you dismiss Biden as a "Boomer Nihilist." On this point alone, you might want to get your facts straight. Biden is not a Boomer. He was born in 1942. The Boomer generation extends from 1946 to 1964.
You then go on to rant about the trinity of "ness's" that illustrate Biden's "nihilism." His transgressiveness, his shamelessness, and his vindictiveness. Your proof of his "transgressiveness" is his decision to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia, the idea being that in a fit of pique Biden acted unilaterally, with a decision risking nuclear war, merely because it felt "good," that it was a giant "fuck you" to the world for insufficiently appreciating him.
Biden then illustrates his "shamelessness," we learn, by preemptively pardoning his son, Hunter. Was this a good decision? Who knows? The assumption is that Biden did it because his son had suffered sufficiently and because the Trump administration was likely to go to the ends of the earth to destroy him. Would you deny that?
You then refer to Hunter Biden as, "by all accounts, a vile individual." I'm always impressed by the sweeping generalizations without a parcel of substantiation, that otherwise intelligent people embracing the post-liberal label casually leech into their arguments. We’ll just conjure our enemies from thin air, tar them with a nasty boy Catholic brush, and then crow about it. "Ooh, I'm a post-liberal ... so edgy and transgressive am I." As I’ve written elsewhere, with you guys it’s all about demonology. You love what you hate. I don’t know what catalog of virtues you subscribe to, because none of them are evident in your post.
I'm certainly familiar with the "shameless" trope, having been tarred with that label myself and viewing it as a badge of honor. I also appreciate that it's a throwaway that the radical right invokes as if the term justifies its own use and can't ever be refuted. Which makes sense because "guilt" is one thing and "shame" is quite another. Shame bores into one's soul. It is an ineradicable stain. You might apply the label to yourself sometime and see how it feels.
Of course, being from Ireland, you may not be familiar with the uses and abuses of the presidential pardon power, which extend to the earliest days of the nation. No matter that Trump intends to pardon most, if not all, of the January 6 insurrectionists on his first day in office.
As for Joe Biden using Hunter to launder his ill-gained billions - again the projection of the embedded impulse of MAGA types to grift and graft their way to power - I mean, seriously? I'm no big fan of Joe Biden's. And I'm not going to defend Hunter Biden, but you know as well as I do that this campaign to destroy Joe Biden by first destroying his son - has every sign of the transgressiveness and shamelessness of Donald Trump in his incarnation as Pennywise the Clown.
Donald Trump, whose entire life has been defined by lying, cheating, sexually assaulting, and generally acting like a "vile" 5-year old at every turn as he's amassed his pile of ill-gotten gains. See what I mean? More projection. More insincerity. More disingenuousness. The proof being that were Donald Trump an old witless Democrat like Biden, you'd be balls to the wall to destroy him. Just as it's true that if the January 6 seditionists had been "Black Lives Matter" or "Antifa," - ooh, so scary - you wouldn't have blinked twice when the cops started shooting. The dishonesty, the lack of self-awareness, is gob smacking.
Finally, the "ness" of the vindictive. The logic you apply here to explain the energy crisis in Europe is equally pretzeled. There may be many forces at work in the economic destruction of Europe, but to assign the major cause to the vindictiveness of Joe Biden is laughable. As compared, say, to Russia's decision to wage war on Ukraine, which is immensely more Hitlerian than anything Biden has done.
But given your apparent fondness for Russia and Putin, I guess I can see why you might want to shift responsibility elsewhere. And who better to target than the shuffling, inaudible 82-year old president of the United States. Of course, he's the vindictive one. Not Trump or Kash Patel or Russ Vought or Stephen Miller, who are all about the savage lust that saturates the bloodletting and the payback.
Radically right-wing Catholics generally focus on the motivations and behaviors of individuals, on their personal sins, and their status as either "good" or "evil." And I know you guys all love the "natural law," and from that love flows your instinct to label people and behavior as either "natural" or "unnatural." “Ordered” or “disordered.” But people are complex. We all are many things at once. We are all capable of great evil and great good. And we are all subject to the random physics of nature - which knows no good or evil - but which can buffet and tilt us mercilessly.
Climate change, global warming, species destruction, the poisoning of the earth, scaling inequality - these are the real issues you should attend to if you care about "life." But one reason you not only fail to see this true reality bearing down on "all created life" in this misbegotten, broken world (thanks, Mr. Abrahamic God, for this clusterfuck) - and actually deny this reality and abuse those scientists and policymakers and activists who actually understand the accelerating effects of nature's profound disharmonies - is that you reject the essential complexity of "nature."
Your natural law - filigreed and recursive as its logical syntax may suggest - is flawed at the root because its premises deny this complexity. Your moral frame is inherently reductionist and naive, and hence also brutal and punitive. But medieval Catholic notions of a "common good" to be forced down everyone's throat as a form of metaphysical waterboarding will solve none of our problems. Your understanding of God's nature is entirely at odds with "nature" and the "natural world" as most of us experience it. Indeed, your notion of God’s nature is at war with the natural world.
To be clear, I also agree liberalism is likely spent. But let’s attribute it to entropy, rather than the evils of the “deep state” and the evils of the decadent, cosmopolitan urban elite, and the evils of the hapless Joe Biden. We are entering a "post-liberal" world, which for you guys is really a back-to-the future medieval moment, but which is actually more of a three-body problem moment, with forces at work that your metaphysics and your politics can barely comprehend, and against which your "morality" can only stumble into a passionate embrace with the most degenerate, unstable, stupid, authoritarian, transgressive, shameless, and vindictive leader in the history of the United States. We've had some truly awful presidents. But in this case, with Trump, no one comes close. He is truly the dark unicorn of your millennial dreams, the "strange attractor" through which the chaos of our age enfolds and renews and ultimately consumes itself.
This is how you close your screed. "Replacing the positive ideals that we hope our leaders hold about the countries they lead is a rage-filled vindictiveness that aims only at distributing cruelty and suffering for no other reason than to bring twisted pleasure to those that partake in it. This is as aimless as it is evil and sadistic."
I don't even know what this means. It means nothing, because it doesn't apply to Joe Biden (whatever else you want to say about him), but it fully applies to Donald Trump and his sheep-like minions. For this reason, it's just word salad. Seriously. This is the best you guys can do?
I'm not inclined to be too hard on you, Philip, but Patrick Deneen, Edward Feser, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pippin and the other self-righteous, smug First Things bros participating in this triumphalist shitshow of a debacle really need to take a hard look in the mirror. Because they all got what they wanted in November, perhaps the only thing they've ever wanted. Which is power. And now they fully own what happens next.
Be fucking careful what you wish for.
Sincerely,
Peter Schwartz
PS: Feel free to reply and give me your best shot.