if you miss the beginning then check out our other virtual events. go to our youtube channel. murder by the book. thank you for watching and have a wonderful evening. >> it's been a pleasure. thank you for having me. . . . e

washington examiner and 2018 robert novak journalism fellow whose writing has appeared everywhere worth reading in the new york times, the review, american affairs. she lives in washington, d.c. with her husband and newborn son and today we are taking on the boomers. i remember 15 years ago i was reviewing a 700 page biography of sam cooke and it gave me a

chance to reflect on the power and their fascination with themselves. and i remember they are not devices to get more money out but a commemorative to their adolescents however extended. they put this in our hands to say this is what my generation is about. listen to this in memory of me. sometimes i wonder if we indulge them a little they will stop talking about themselves. that didn't happen and luckily for us we can start talking about them. here to do that today is someone i toyed with but helen andrews was born into it and so welcome. why don't you tell us a little about your book and then we will do a little back and forth and open up to questions from

everyone else. >> thank you so much. i'm very happy to be doing this event because this is a book about generational warfare as everybody knows millennial's and boomers are national enemies and so it's good to have somebody that's more as a neutral adjudicator between the two sides because this book is written from the perspective of a millennial. it's a book that looks around at the world that we inherited and tries to examine what went wrong from the perspective of the children. however even though this is a book with that subjective perspective, i did my best writing it to be as objective as possible and really examine all of my millennial resentment against the generation to nail

down which things are the boomers fault and which ones are not, which ones were just cases where there generation got lucky and mine was not. i will give three examples from the book of complete that millennial's have and my answer to whether or not to those are fair or unfair and after those we can launch into discussion. first is obviously economics because that is at the top of every millennial's list that they just had it so easy and we have it so tough. they are just a lot more forward compared to the boomers and i don't mean we have less wealth than they do. obviously you would expect people in their 60s to have more than people in their 20s

and 30s, but millennial's are lagging behind the wealth accumulated when they were our age. we are only about 25% as wealthy as they were at the same point in their career. but i always remind my millennial friends who make this complaint that are feeling precarious that they really did have it exceptionally good. they were born into the golden age of the american economy and that is neither to their credit or their fault. they just happened to get lucky. things are tougher today but things back then were about as good as they could possibly be. so the fact that things are harder now is almost inevitable. on the other hand, i do think

that a lot of millennial's economic security is the boomers fault for two reasons. the first is college debt. it was the boomers that said everybody needs to go to college and take on as much debt as you need to to go to the best college that will have you. that is what they drilled into their kids and the result has been a lot of people going to college who maybe didn't need to or wouldn't benefit from a college level education and then to come out on the other side with six figures worth of debt that they will have a hard time paying off and second is the income trap. a lot of millennial's feel trapped in the dual earning households. they would love to have a middle-class lifestyle but they feel like they can't afford it and the reason is the phenomenon that elizabeth warren of all people identified which is women many of them rush into the

workforce in the 70s and 80s thinking that is the only way that they could and ended up only bidding up the price so that now millennial's could be no better off than one income earner households were and now need two incomes just to make it work. the second complaint millennial's have against the boomers is the decline of the family. they are rather proud of their effort on this one. they like to think of themselves that's the architect of the revolution. but in many ways, living in the shadow of that is a lot less fun than actually undergoing it as explained so much in his own book. in this case it was a natural

spring of the pendulum that after so many decades or centuries of oppression it was only understandable that they might air on the side of license but now they say look at the statistics, the divorce rate has gone back down. pregnancy rates have gone back down. this doesn't mean that they forged the path and now their children can find a happy medium. unfortunately once again, the boomers defense is because the only reason that the divorce rate has gone back down is that fewer people are getting married in the first place. it was only in the last five years because of the faithful threshold of the majority of adults over age 16 being unmarried and that is subjectively what i view when i look around i see a lot of

people who would like to extract some commitment from their partners and would like to get launched by settling down but they have a hard time getting over the hump of the economy and of obtaining those markers of adult hood like marriage and kids. so, they didn't just disrupt the nuclear family, they broke it in a way that their children are now still living with. the third example after which we can go to discussion is drugs and it's important. i mention this because i think a lot of people underrate just how responsible the boomers are for the prevalence of drugs in all of our lives. a lot of people don't know that before the 1960s, you wouldn't have found even marijuana on a

college campus. the average middle-class person would be very unlikely unless they were a jazz musician it just wasn't a part of the culture. and it was this 60s counterculture that made it more popular and the way that you know they were responsible before the drug revolution in the second half of the century is that the drugs we identify with in each decade latch on to what drugs the boomers were doing in the 60s they were young and were. when they had a little bit more money the drugs of the decade were cocaine and in the 80s they were focusing on their career so they were all taking valium and then finally in the '90s the drug that i identify with in that decade is real and. this is the reason the drug revolution was the boomers fault and i considered them morally

culpable because that was something they didn't just choose for themselves but they inflicted on their children. they liked finding the answers to problems in a pill but the ritalin adhd revolution was something more than that and something allergic to exercising authority even as parents they love to be the cool mom and dad. but as anyone with a small child knows it is impossible to raise a toddler without exercising authority so the early 90s for the moment when the boomers had young the school-age children sd were frustrated with the tension between having a little hellion in their house and the way they

squared that was by filling their kids with drugs. there are a lot of millennial's who were put on ritalin or adderall and given some kind of psychiatric diagnosis. when they reached their 30s they began to feel a bit of resentment because as the example shows, the motivation was just as selfish as the motivation for drugging themselves in the 60s and 70s so even david crosby, i will end with a quote from him, he's a singer and a confident boomer and he is very rosy on the legacy of the 60s but even he admits that it's bad. he says we were right about the war and we were right about the

environment. we were right about civil rights and women's issues but we were wrong about drugs. as you read the book you will find that i descend from many of the items on the list as things they got right but at least we have the common ground of agreeing on the last one i think your indictment is well aimed and comprehensive than you've outlined just here.

the misery of being ignored with none of the wisdom or virtues and an attitude of self-actualization that amounts to a little more than authoritarian bullying share a little anecdote about richard. >> that is a fun one. as soon i learned about the

anecdote i'm not surprised that you were struck that the baby boomers struck the left because that is a very counterintuitive thing to say. to look at what they call themselves in the 1960s call themselves a new left and the reason to proclaim themselves the new left is to declare independence from the old one which tom hayden wrote is the manifesto of the net young new left it's an extremely disparaging new thing it was a

campground of the uaw. it's a campground for their members because one of the parents works at the uaw. so after having enjoyed the hospitality, they declared the aftermath of the new left takeover of the democratic party really was the total alienation was the liberal party and the two-party system from people who work for a living. you could probably date it to the 1970s convention at the

moment when the democratic party gave it over to the identity politics interests really something that was a consequence of the boomer generation. and the richard branson anecdote that illustrates this there was a moment in the 70s when the people at one of his factories looked at the album cover they were supposed to be printing and said the fascist regime and

richard branson came in and said you will make the record i tell you to make and he ended up prevailing. and i read this anecdote in a book that describes it in celebratory terms. like look at those great workers who couldn't understand the use of the revolution. this is a victory of the free speech is what it is. but i look at that story and i see boxes and cloaked in the language of liberation and freedom and individual rights

and expression. boomer idealism and that really encapsulates to me the takeover of the parties of the democracy by the college-educated and the shutting aside of the non- nonce educated, which is -- if your left-wing party represents the interest but not the interest of the poor and less powerful in society, then i don't think it's fair to call yourself a left-wing party at all so that is what i meant when i said they killed the left. >> thank you for that. i want to remind the audience that they can send questions to jackson woolford at aei.org or tweet aei boomers. meanwhile, while i have you here, i want to talk to you

about the people you chose because if somebody else is writing a book about the boomers they would almost certainly pick bill or hillary clinton or maybe donald trump. maybe someone like tony blair i don't know if he qualifies. but, you picked steve jobs and al sharpton and you made this indictment against this generation but when you have these individuals in your hands, i think you find things to admire about almost all of them and even at times when they were wronged or transgressed by the generation before them or misunderstood by their peers, so

you know, i would like you to talk a little bit about some of the good side of some of the boomers. you found goodness and al sharpton i think. and the funniest one to me was steve jobs in a way because he has been hailed and worshiped as a great innovator and company man of his generation and then he's been about nominated partly by another subject in your book, aaron sorkin, as a bad dad. but what you seem to like about steve jobs is his paternalism with both his company and his customers. can you talk a little bit, you've given this indictment but what are some of the virtues you find in the characters even when

they stand out from their generation? >> you're absolutely right that i do seem to find things to admire in all of the boomers that i profile. i had someone tell me that it seems like my admiration went on and i admired him most as [inaudible] that is probably roughly accurate as a trendline. but my defense is that i admire about the subject things that are the least boomer and steve jobs is a great example of that. if you were to put the boomers you would say they are institution destroyers.

they tear them down which millennial's growing up in the world without institutions which is not great. but whatever else you want to say about steve jobs, he was an institution builder and wanted to make a company that would last after him he succeeded in doing that because he was an institution builder so that is an example of admiring things that are the least and in steve jobs case, that is connected to the bad dad that you mentioned because i, you know, never met steve jobs, but i get this sense that other people that knew him got the sense that he was so driven to make a mark on the

world and to leave something that he could pass on because he had no sense of inheritance himself because he looked back in his family tree and saw nothing. being adopted and not having that left him driven to do something for his kids at the company so he was unusual in having that sense of continuity because most of the rest of his generation was content to not look behind or forward but to live in the now. >> it's interesting what you do in that chapter and others you don't just talk about one thing with one character. steve jobs is also part of this company that he built and he's with others even at the company including tim cook and his wife.

and they, being more authentic in some ways also have an effect on the world mainly the outsourcing to china and maureen is a hyper liberal philanthropy which is partly underwritten by the chinese spyware. each chapter kind of has these virtues. before we turn to other people in the audience, i want to talk a little bit about al sharpton. you show al sharpton again with a kind of literal connection at the beginning of the story, all the people we know, like all of the literate people, james brown

-- >> jesse jackson, adam clayton powell. >> the chapter is a bit of a meditation on how boomers d institutionalize the liberal politics and the institutionalized civil rights and democratized the civil rights. so you know, give us a little bit of a sense of that. i thought that it was really well drawn. many of them were not actually involved in civil rights in the way that al sharpton got to be involved because he was involved as a child. he was literally at the feet of the civil rights heroes, but he found this beautiful narration of when the southern christian leadership conference comes to chicago and confronts the daley

machine and just tell us a little bit about how that the boomers affect on democratizing the politics. >> i'm glad you liked my telling of the story because i was shocked to learn when i found out about that that the first thing the local black leaders had done when they were announcing they were coming up north to chicago was to hold a press conference and say we don't want you here we have our own system we are doing pretty well. we don't need you coming in and making trouble. but in terms of the legacy it is criminal the way that they've convinced the world that the baby boomers were responsible for the achievement of the 60s because unless you were al sharpton and civil rights activists at the age of ten, which he was, then they have no

credit to claim. one of the most surprising things i learned in the research for this book was something about the civil rights act of 1964. i never knew that at the same time congress was deliberating that act, earl warren at the supreme court was preparing to issue a ruling that would have accomplished essentially the same thing. the supreme court had just heard what was known as the sit in cases where the black activists came to private cafés and restaurants that had white only policies and when they called and said leave my store they shooed them saying this is a violation of the 14th amendment on the same argument as brown the board. the fact that you are a private

establishment makes no difference. so if the supreme court had ruled in favor of this which earl warren was prepared to do, that would have accomplished the same thing as integrating private businesses and cafés. he withheld those decisions and he thought if congress is going to pass this act and take the heat off me, let's wait and see what congress does and of course congress did pass the act and spared earl warren having the issues of the controversy. but that revelation that that is an alternate path of history that could have taken, that really made me confront would that have been better. it would have come down in

february rather than in the summer and that would have been five months of integrated lunch counters and not having the indignity of not being able to eat next to their fellow citizens. so, obviously the supreme court option had that going for it. it would have been faster but i think we would have lost the opportunity to make a democratic statement against segregation as a nation. so even though it took congress five months longer and even though the negotiations with moderates would have called them to water down the bill in some ways it was still worth it in order to have america fix the problem democratically.

we lost this compromising spirit of the democracy and the sort of legislative wrangling and detailed. and i think that that is a loss. we lost something by keeping the civil rights completely over. >> the chapter is kind of beautiful and goes along with your chapter on the daley machine for all discuss boomers because it isn't idealistic but also the transaction model of politics has accountability that they cannot stand so the daley machine is going to ask who do

you represent. and if you represent someone significant, it often finds a way to make the resources go where they are needed and go where the people want them ultimately and make the bargains between the different sections of chicago and what happens afterwards with the civil rights revolution and the boomer preference for grand moral statements and enforced on people who were willing to use the growth of public interest lawyers and civil rights advancing just the threat of lawsuit and the shakedown which is where we are now.

questions that are turned to me by the audience jeffrey sachs because in a way this is one of the more provocative thesis that jeffrey sachs got involved in this new field of development economics and basically going to the third world or the post-soviet block trying to get these countries back on their feet economically and integrated into the west i would like you to talk about this.

there's an element that i did not include in the book because the only citation i could find was a secondhand story but i'm fairly convinced it's a story from stephen cohen the russia scholar who died just a few months ago actually but he said that he was once on a plane on the way to moscow and happened to be sitting next to him. that's what you do when you go to a foreign country. you read a book to get you and apparently he told stephen cohen i'm not reading anything. i don't feel the need to get up to speed on russia.

they tell me i don't understand, our country is different. and they are all different in exactly the same way. economics is economics. i don't need to know about russia, just show me the numbers. and i love that story because it does reflect the attitude of all. they were not at all like the white man's burden era imperialist. kipling would never have said that about india. i'm just going to go in and justice is justice no matter where you are. they had a love for the country that they supervised.

i've had people criticize me and this book for not being is that not a conservative virtue should you not show a little more respect for your elders and i think where people are coming from with that and the reason i have a gripe is they were the people that decided that it wasn't a virtue that we should care about anymore. they invented dismissing their elders and so obviously perfectly analogous it seems deeply underhanded and arrogant and wrong for him to then say.

that isn't my complaint if he wants to go around and fulfill the mission i think he probably could do a lot of good that way. just not a hypocrite about it in his attitude to the people whose traditions he's carrying on. he desired not to do the homework but get good intentions anyway. it seems the type. i have a question that's coming from chris scalia. i wonder with the many shortcomings as others suggest about their own and of the members of the greatest generation for all the virtues

was the parenting to blame for the worst excesses of their children's generation? >> that is a great question. the short answer is no. there is a sense in which the greatest generation spoiled the boomers. if you had grown up in the great depression and world war ii of course you would want to give your children the easy life that you never have. and also the period of prosperity and peace at home. the fact that they were so huge there were a lot of them so that a simple demographic fact

explains a lot about the territory. basically from the moment they turn 16, they've been the most so advertisers catered to their taste. basically through sheer demographic tests they were able to make the country revolve around their desires to the awful narcissists that they are. all of that would have been true even if the greatest generation hadn't spoiled them a little bit and admittedly, they did. but the demographic was a much bigger factor. >> we have seen that and you can kind of trace it through your book. we can trace it in effect that the story of the country, of the nation and the story of

governance in our lives has mostly been a story of boomers changing the needs as they get older. part of that we saw on the emphasis of the response to the financial crisis in 2000. it was to say the 4o1k and not to save jobs that millennial's desperately needed at the time. and maybe even seeing it now with covid-19 where the emphasis is on locking down and protecting the elderly and to hell with the economy that everyone else is going to have to inherit. until we get more questions, and remember you can send those to

jackson dot aei.org. i was wondering if we could talk a little bit about camille because you use her life as an academic and kind of one of the very few, may be one of the only in our lifetime academic kind of rock stars like a figure that you see in popular magazines and on popular network television even. a way for you to explore the sexual revolution and the transformation of academia is self that is worth studying and worth communicating to the next

generation, so i wonder if you could talk a little bit about you seem to admire on the one hand for the mentality and willingness to her actual education she was given and what that gives her. but you fault her for never being able to learn. the revolution affects which she notices never cause a second thought were second thinking. so tell us a little bit about camille. >> i'm glad my affection came through because i do love reading and watching her. she's a great public

intellectual. a lot of conservatives joined in the '90s because she was so tough on the feminists and so today you will see a lot of conservatives who think of her as being as liberal as she is, somehow on their side. and it's true that she did have a point. this was the era of the take back the march when they were being adamant that they should never be blamed on women and so we should never caution. to even mention things women can do to modify the behavior is to blame the victim.

very sensibly and with the great sort of realism that i admired so much about her said i am as much of a feminist as anybody, but if you get that drunk at a party what do you think is going to happen, there is a place. and the irony is that as clear eyed as she was looking at the feminist position, she has not been so clear eyed about her own position. she's always characterized herself as a pro- sex feminist. she says i love prostitution, pornography. michelangelo was a pornographer, she said. which is rather less conservative of her. but i, as a conservative hearing her say those things want to echo against and say to her you

know, you celebrate and deliver deliberate. speaking of someone as the generation of the movement, you know, what i see as a result of what you are proposing in the same words that you said what did you think was going to happen. and especially about things like pornography. >> we have more questions from i'm going to kind of combine two of these questions. one from scott and another from dennis morgan. scott writes it seems we are on the verge of a transfer of influence as we continue to age out of the positions of

authority and what is the transition look like. what do we need to correct the access of the boomers like the machine politics responsive to on the ground concerns or is the genie out of the bottle. >> in many ways the genie is out of the bottle. but in answer to the first question what does it look like the answer is we don't know because we haven't seen it yet because even millennial's are still trapped in the boomer mindset it's quite tough and never more than continuing to define ourselves by the standards. the millennial's idea is still based on what they thought was cool in 1960.

i was writing the conclusion to the book over the summer with the riots going on in the cities burning and hearing a lot of people asking is this the 60s all over again. my answer as i scrolled through was yes it is. millennial's still think that the greatest moment in american history was the 60s and people marching in the streets, partly because the people who taught us american history were boomers who decided that their great moment was the great moment of the country and everything before that was a terrible reactionary nonsense. so it is a bit natural that we would then say that was the only good moment in american history, then that is the moment that we will reenact. and i don't know what it will

take to shake the millennial sound of that to have them declare mental independence because even now that they are nearing retirement age, we still haven't seen it yet. the nobel prize is still going to bob dylan. >> you mentioned it actually actually rightat the top of yous paragraph that i will quote a little bit from before the renaissance would be rediscovered of aristotle were sometimes told by zealous churchmen that anything written before christ was in so fast so not worth rediscovering. this is approximately how the boomers feel about themselves. any suggestion that the western world might not be altogether better off for their influence using the indignant litany and all the segments of humanity that previously labored in a sad state of abject nonperson would

be for coming along. and i find this to be true. it was how my primary and secondary education went. you basically learned okay there was this sort of prolapse time of slavery and world war ii and that is kind of lumped together so then that is cleared out of the way and there's the march of history onward which begins with elvis and then ends with i don't know friends on nbc. you end up alleging that it's an

event of cultural destruction and disruption on par with the protestant reformation that sounds like a sauropod -- at the end of the book i had to agree with you because at the end of the book they have destroyed the left, by the institutionalizing it. maybe we saw some of their handiwork last week at the capitol. i mean, this is working people that lack political institutions that to give them the leadership instead turned towards the media. we have a crisis of the family where young people just are not even getting married, not having

children and the obsession with pop culture, this kind of artifact of the middle-class has destroyed our connection to the culture and has left us with kind of nothing and also the failure to pass on religion and in many cases to even understand it has left people were left. i want to turn to a question from brian penn who says aren't you talking about a particular subset of boomers that also fought in vietnam and voted for ronald reagan and like any group are not a monolith. how do these others fit into the picture?

>> i really wanted to write about individuals in this book precisely for the reasons the questioner identified because so much writing about generations in general ends up very vague and unsubstantial so i wanted to anchor things and it's true that there were those who did not share the characteristics of their generation, but i hope that those that i picked will be recognizable in some way or another. if i could answer the little bit for you in some ways being who they are having this kind of gravitational effect on all of

american life it means that in a sense they elicited the most results from a presidency that you could have gotten like even at the time imagining a much more conservative presidency than they got so what they got is what they wanted at the time if you can speak of them as a collective which is economic growth. a. >> and a little bit of stability after where maybe things got too out of hand. >> i've had people ask me whether this book was inspired by christopher's book last year and the answer is no. i thought his book was great, probably the best book i read last year and in fact when i opened it up and read it i started to feel like i was on the right track with this volume

but this was written before i read caldwell's book. but he makes an argument in his book about the 60s which in many ways is about the baby boomers. there wasn't really a lot of essential difference between the liberals of the 1960s and the conservatives of the 1980s. they were both about liberating the individual. so there is something, not backlash, but if you look at it in the 1970s, a boomer candidate was torpedoed and

ronald ragan was a candidate that then passed amnesty in his presidency without the promised enforcement so you've got the kind of parental style even though he was the figure of an older generation and a kind of figure you've got the permissiveness of amnesty and you never got the promised structure that would come later. next week you will finish your homework every night before we have ice cream again and it was never to be. i think we are beginning to wrap up, but i just want to ask you is there anything as a host that i've missed.

we didn't cover everyone in the book. maybe a little thing about sonja that is one of the fun chapters in the book and i didn't really get into her but kind of what is it about soda -- >> that is what i was most apprehensive about undertaking because i am painfully aware that the law is a profession and there is a reason why they make you go to school for three years before you can practice it. in some ways it is a specialized field and i was venturing into dangerous territory trying to talk about it as a layman but the truth is you can't talk about the legacy without looking at the war on court and what it's done to the constitutional law and the more i got into it and more than that but it's looks like in the last 50 years

the more i came to realize the tradition to talk about it and particularly to talk about the most important thing about it, the argument of that chapter which is the court broke the constitutional law. not everybody has to be an originalist but you can't just say there are no rules and that is what the court did. the problem is that it's very hard to stand up and say it's lost all meaning. the emperor has no clothes because the very professionals that know that the best still have to get up and go to work in the morning. you can have the revelation privately that this entire discipline has gone completely off the rails but you can't argue a case on those grounds. you can't keep it at the front

of your mind that it's just become a disgrace. every once in a while on a rare occasion somebody within the field of the law and state how bad things have gone. i think that the example where he said i thought we lived in a democratic republic and today it is clear that we do not. we live in an oligarchy and i think even justice alito said in opinions of his that the constitutional law has suffered deep irreparable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors so my position allows me to foreground this important fact that in that world they can only mention under special circumstances

periodically and this is a great example of that because she's in the successive generation. the pioneers had been educated under the old regime and still had a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitution of their personal placing. somebody of this generation does not have that, just as no limits on her sense of what she can get away with as an interpreter of the constitution so that is about a product of a revolution rather than an architect of 11 thing that it revealed and i think that it could be summed up in kind of the foreshadow to say that the fall of millennial's

themselves as the portrait reveals someone who when she comes upon challenges in her life or gaps in her knowledge, failures of her educators really, her insecurity suddenly flashes out and then along with that comes bullying and self-assertion where there isn't knowledge there is at least you can fall back on personal offense and indignation and maybe that explains a little bit about what we have seen in our politics in 2020 and going ahead into the future. ..

>> you have done in your service to the ages with this book. and what's great about it is it's not just full of these great anecdotes and portraits come also just a lot of fun with a friend conservative book we haven't had one in a long time so thank you for that especially. to everyone who joined us, thank you for taking time

out of your day stuck in your personal covid era prison cells hope to see you on the other side in real life. take care >> i