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visit booktv.org or consult your program guide. >> hello, everyone. here here today because helen andrews has written the book of the year in myman, boomers, the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster. i've known helen for about 15 years now. helen is senior editor at the american conservative -- editor now -- previously managing editor of the washington changer and a 2018 robert novak journalism fellow. he writing has appeared everything were worth raved, "new york times," first thinks, claremont review of books, hedgehog review. lives in washington, dc with her husband and newborn son and today we are taking on the

boomers. i remember just 15 years ago, i was reviewing a 700 page biography of the soul singer sam cook, and it gave me a chance to reflect on the power of boomers and their fascination with themselves, and i remember today's box sets are not devices to get even more money out of gullible parents but a come enemy raytive to their adolescence, however extended. they shove the pleasant music in hour hands hands and this is why generation is about. listen to this. in memory of me. sometimes i wonder if we endull knowledge them a little they'll stop talking about themselves. that didn't happen. and luckily for us, we can start talking about them. and here to do that today is

someone who was -- i just toyed with antiboomerrism, but helen andrews was born into it. helen, welcome. why don't you tell us about your book and then we'll do a little back and forth between us and then open it to questions from everyone else. >> all right. thank you so much to michael and aei. i'm very. they be doing this event with michael because this is a book about generational warfare as everybody knows, millenials and boomers are natural enemies and so it's good to have somebody who is more -- gen-x present as a adjudicator because this book is written woman the perspective of millenial. look around at the world that we inherited and tries to examine what went wrong from the

perspective of the boomers' children. however, even though this is a book with that subjective perspective, i did my pest writing it to be as objective as possible, and really examine all of my millenial resentment against the boomer generation, to nail down which things are the boomers' fat and which ones -- fault and which ones are noting cases where their generation got lucky and mine was unlucky. so i'll give three examples from the book of complaints that millenials have against boomers, and my answer to whether or not those complaints are fair or unfair. and after those three complaints we can launch into a discussion. the first is obviously economic because that's at the top of every millenial's list of resentments, that the boomers just had it so easy economically

and we have it so tough. the millenials are just a lot poorer compared to the boomers, and i don't just mean we have less wealth than they do. obviously you would expect people in their sicks no have more wealth than people in their 20s and 30s, but millenials are lagging behind the wealth that the boomers had accumulated when they were our age, we're only about 25% as wealthy as they were at the same point in their careers. but i always remind my millenial friends, who make this complaint, because they're feeling unwealthy or economically precarious and trapped in the gig economy, that the boomers really did have it exceptionally good. born into the golden age of the american economy in the 20th 20th century, and that's

neither to their credit or fault. just happened to get really lucky. yes things are tougher for millenials today but things back then were about as good as the could possibly be. so the fact things are harder now is almost inevitable. on the other hand, i do think that a lot of millenial economic precariousness is the boomer fault for two reasons the first is college debt. the boomers who said, everybody needs to go to college, and take on as much debt as you need to, to to good do toe at the best college that will have you. that was the boomers mexico jim and the result has been people going to college who maybe didn't need to or wouldn't benefit from a college level education and who then come out on the other side with six figures worth of debt that they will have a hard time paying off. and the second reason is the two income track. a lot of millenials feel trapped

in dual earner households. they would love to have a middle class lifestyle with one earner but they feel like they can't afford it and the reason is the phenomenon that elizabeth warren of all people identified which is that women, many boomer women, rushed into the work force in 70s and 80s thinking that was the only way they could be self-actualized as human beings and ended up only bidding up the price of middle class amenities so that enough millenial now need two incomes just to make it work. the second complaint that millenials have against the boomers is the decline of the family. the boomers are rather proud of their record on this one. they like to think of them. s as the architect of the sexual revolution but in many ways

living the shadow of the sexual revolution is a lot less fun than actually undergoing it as michael put -- explains so well to his own book, my father left me ireland. and in this case, the defense of the boomers is that n their sexual revolution was a natural swing of the pendulum, that after so many decade even centuries of oppression it was only understandable that they might err on the side of license, but now they say, look at the statistics, the divorce rate has gone back down. teen pregnancy rates have gone back down does this not mean the boomers forged the path and now the millenials, their children, can find a happy medium? well, unfortunately once again the boomers defense is meretricious because the only reason that the divorce rate has bon back down is that fewer

people are getting married in the first place. it was only in the last five years that we controlsed the fateful threshold of a majority of adults over age 16 being unmarried, and that certain i subjectively what i see when i look around at my millenial peers. see a lot of people who would like to extract some commitment from partners who would like to get lunch on the adult lives by settling done but who just have a really hard time getting over the hump of the tinder economy and obtaining to the markers of adulthood like marriage and kid so the boomers 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 one because i think 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 would not have found even marijuana on a college campus. the average middle class person would be very unlikely to encounter even as soft a drug as pot in their day to day lives unless they were a jazz musician. wasn't part of the culture and it was the 60s counterculture that made it more popular and the wayow in the boomers were responsible for the drug revolution in the second half of the 20th century is that the drugs we identify with each decade map on to what drugs the boomers were doing. in the sixes in they were young and poor, so they were doing marijuana-a little more money me 70s the drug cocaine.

the 80s buckling down, focuses ago careers and all taking valium. and then finally in the nine nines the drug i identify with that decade is ritalin, and this is the reason why the drug revolution was the boomers' fault and i consider them morally culpable because that was something that they didn't just choose for themselves but that they inflicted on their children. the boomers like drugs, they like finding the answer to problems in a pill, but the ritalin, adhd overdiagnosis revolution was something more tan that and something more bomberrish. boomers are allergic to exercising authority, even as parents. they love to be the cool mom and the cool dad, but as anyone with a small child knows it's simply

impossible to raise a toddler without examiner saying authority so the neal nines in were the moment when the boomers had young schoolingage children and were frustrated with the tension between wanting to be the cool parent and having a little hellion in their house who did need some discipline. and the way that they squared that circle was by filling their kids with drugs and there are lot of millenials who were put on ritalin or adderall and given psychiatric diagnosis in their teens have just kept -- [loss of audio] -- reach their 30s and begin to feel a bit of resentment because as the adhd exam shows, the boomers motivation in drugging up kids were just as selfish as their motivation for drugging themselves in the 60s and 70s. so even david crosby, i'll end

with a quote from him. the singer from cross by stills and nash and himself a consummate boomer, and he is very rosy on the legacy of the 60s. even he admits that the drug revolution was bad. he says we were right about the war, we were right about the environment, we were right about civil rights and women's issues, but we were wrong about drugs. now if you raved this book you'll find i dissent from many of the items on david cross by's lift of things they boomers government right but a at least we have the common ground of agreeing on the last one. with that i'll kick it to michael. >> helen, thank you so much for that, and i want to begin by talking about the structure of the book is six profile pieces of boomers. we have steve jobs, al sharpton,

sonia sotomayor, cam peel, -- camille, jeffrey and i think your indictment of the boomers is well aimed, and comprehensive, more comprehensive than you have even outlined just here. you talk about a sexual ethos that led to misery of being used and the misery of being completely ignored. and an approach to the third world that has all the real and all the imagined vices of imperialism with none of the wisdom or virtues of actual imperialism. an attitude of self-actualization and activism that amounts to little more than authorize tarean bullying -- authoritarian bullying, but what -- two things interested me the first is you accuse the

boomers of destroying the left and i was wondering if you could expand upon that at bit. as well also share the great little an neck domestic but -- anecdote but richard branson. >> that is a fun one. i'm so glad that caught your eye. i knew i had to put it in the book. but i'm not surprises you were struck by my argument that the baby-boomers killed the left because that is a very counter-intattoostive thing to say. the boomers their most left wing generation in history and even conservative baby-boomers are left wing. but in some ways it's equally true to say that none of the baby bammers were truly liberal and all you have to do to realize that is to look at what they called themselves. the baby-boomers in the 1960s called themselves the new left.

and the whole -- the rope to proclaim. thes the new left was to clear dire independence from the old one. you look at the port huron statement which tom hayden wrote in the 60s also the' sort of manifesto of the young new left it says extremely disparaging things about unions, calls them retrograde dinosaurs who have no answer to the modern world which was ironic because port huron was a camp ground of the uaw and tom hayden and the sps was allowed to use the united auto workers cam ground for members because one of their parents worked for the uaw. so after having enjoyed their hospitality the s sdk clay deeder the unions stupid and obsolete and the aftermath of the new left to takeover of the

democratic party of alienation of what was the liberal party in a two-party system, from people who are work for a living. you could do it it to 1972 convention that nominated mcgovern as the penalty when the democratic party gave its soul over to identity politics and niche interests, rather than representing the poor and dispossessed which is what they were supposed to be for. you see the same thing happening in all of the western democracies, which is why it wasn't just awork of committee decision, the dnc made in 1971 but something that was a consequence of the boomer generation and the richard branson anecdote that i love is that he ran virgin records, and there was a moment in the late

70s when the people at one of his record factories looked at the album cover they were suppose told be printing and said, hu, god save the queen the fastie regime? they saw the desdesecration of the queen and said, okay, too far is too far we the workers like the queen and we consider this album something very close to treason so wore going to refuse to have anything to do with the production of this sacra lidge just punch artifact and richard branson came, in stormed 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 described it in celebratory terms like look at those retrograde workers who couldn't

understand the youth and punch revolution, victory for free speech but i three-quarter story and see bosses triumphing over workers, and cloaking it in the language of liberation and freedom and individual rights and expression. boomerrish i idealism and that really encapsulates the takeover of the left wing parties of the western democracies by the college educated and the shoving aside of the noncollege educated, which is -- if your left wing party represents the interests of the wealthy and educated and not the interests of the poor and the less powerful in society, then i don't think it's fair to call yourself a left wing party at all. so that's what i meant when i said the boomers killed the left.

>> thank you for that. i want to remind the audience they can send questions to jackson wolford, jackson.will tornado at aei.org or quiet them at #aeiboomers. meanwhile, while i have you hear helen, i wanted to talk about the people you chose. if somebody else was writing a book about the boomers they would pacific bill or hillary clinton -- pick bill or hillary clinton, maybe donald trump, maybe someone like tony blair, who i don't know if he qualifies but you picked steve jobs, and al sharpton and camille paglia and you have 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 times when they were wronged or transgressed ethe general rigs above them or misunderstood by their peers. so i'd like you talk a little bit about the good side of some of these boomers. you found goodness in al sharpton, i think, and the funniest one to me was steve jobs in a way because steve jobs has been hailed and worshiped as the great innovator and great company man of his generation, and then he's been abominated partly bit another subject in your book, erin sorkin, as a bad dad and one of-under complaints

about the boomers is they were bad parents and particularly bad dads. what you like about steve jobs is his paternalism with both his company and his customers. so, can you talk a little bit -- you have given us this indictment but what are the virtues you find in these characters, even then when they stand out from their generation. >> you're absolutely right i see see things to admire inle the boomers i profile. had someone tell me it seems like my admiration -- [loss of audio] -- went on that i admired jobs most -- [loss of audio] -- as the book moves forward. i don't know if that's true or noter but probably roughly accurate as a trend line. but my defense is that i admire most the things about the

subjects that are the least boomerrish and steve jobs is a great example of that. if you were to put the boomers in a sentence, you would say they are institution destroyer. they hate institutions and think they constrain individual choice and they tear them down and which leaves millenials growing up in world without institutions which is not great. but whatever else you want to see about steve jobs he was an institution builder. wanted to make a company that would last after him; that would still bear the imprint of his personality and his genius even when he was gone, and he succeeded in doing that. apple is i still today steve jobs eye company. the world we live is in shaped by steve jobs pause he was an institution builder. that's an exam of me admiring

thing that are the least boomerrish and in steve jobs' case that's connected to the bad dad michigan you mentioned because -- myth you mentioned because i -- never met steve jobs bus i get the sense -- and other people who 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 inherentans himself because you -- inheritance because you look back in this family tree some saw michigan. being adopted and not having a sense of inheritance left them driven to leave something for heir skiffeds or metaphor cal kids at the company. so, steve jobs was unusual for a boomer in having that sense of continuity because most of the rest of the generation was content to not look behind and not look forward but to live in the now. >> what interesting and what you

do not that chapter ands, you don't just talk about one thing and one -- with one character. steve jobs is also part of this company that he built, and he is with other boomers even at the company, including tim cook, and his wife, and they, being more authentic boomers in some ways, also have an affect on the world, namely tim cook's outsourcing to china and lauren powell jobs' form of hyperliberal felony notify which is partly under -- philanthropy which is partly underwherein by chinese spy ware. these chapters have their virtues and before we concern to other people in the audience i want to talk about al sharpton.

you show al sharpton again with a kind of paternal connection at the beginning of his story where he has these three surrogate fathers, all of them people we know, like all of them people -- literary people know. james brown, -- jacker jesse yackson and adam clayton powell. >> yes, the chapter is a bit of a meditation on how boomers deinstitutionalized liberal politics and deinstitutionalized civil rights and in effect dedrastickized civil rights. give us a little sense -- if there was really well-drawn in -- the boomers -- many weren't actually involved in civil rights in a way al

sharpton was involve because he was a child preacher, at the feet of civil rights heros buts you have this beautiful anywheration of when the southern christian leadership conference comes to chicago and confronts confronts the daley machine, and just tell us about that, how that -- the boomers affect on dedemocratizing our politics. ... we are doing pretty well under the daley machine we don't age it coming in to make trouble, we are all good.

but in terms of the boomers legacy, it is criminal the way they have convinced the world that the baby boomers responsive for the great civil rights achievements of the 60s. unless you are al sharpton, and at the age of ten, which he was, then the boomers have no credit to claim for the civil rights revolution. one of the most surprising things that i have learned in the research for this book, was something about civil rights act of 1964. i never knew that the same time congress was delivering that act, earl warren at the supreme court was preparing to issue a supreme court ruling that would have accomplish essentially the same thing. the supreme court had just heard what was known as a sit

in cases where black activists came to private cafés and restaurants that had white only policies, were evicted with the owners called the police, and these to the owners of those private restaurants saying this is a violation of the 14th amendment on the same argument is brown people were pretty the fact that you are a private establishment makes no difference. of supreme court had ruled in favor of the sit in cases, when she was prepared to do, that would've accomplished something as a civil rights act of 1964 integrating private businesses and private cafés. and he withheld those decisions because each adult with the court court into trouble if he didn't have to. he thought if congress is going to pass this act and take the political heat off me , let's wait and see what congress does. and of course congress did pass the act and spare award

have to issue a controversial ruling. but that revelation that the alternate path of history that could have where the act is never passed on their integrated by supreme court decisions, that really, with that of been better? on the one hand it would've come down in february rather than the summer. that was five months of integrated lunch counters and people not having the indignity if not being able to eat next to their fellow citizens. so obviously the supreme court often had that going for it. 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 than it would've taken horn to integrate lunch counters.

even though the negotiation with moderates cause them to water down the 1964 bill in some way it was still worth it in order to have america fix its race problem democratically. and that is what has been lost under the boomer of civil rights. they have preferred to sort out these problems into the courts. and through transsexual compromising theorists, that democracy and legislative wrangling entailed. and i think that is a lot. i think we lost something by kicking civil rights completely over too these undemocratic fruits back it's kinda beautiful and goes along with your chapter in some ways, and that the daley machine for all, and away the transactional -ism discuss

boomers. is not idealistic. but also because he transsexual as a model of politics in that city machine has accountability which boomers can't stand. and so the daley machine, if you you come, and if you represent someone significant often finds a way to make the resources go where they are needed. and go the people one them ultimately. and make the bargains between different sections of chicago. and what happens afterward at the civil rights revolution and the boomer preference for grand moral statements kind of issue from olympus and enforced on people who are

willing to abide by them or not to seek growth of public interest lawyers, the growth of civil rights advancing not bite democracy but by lawsuit, the threat of lawsuits and ultimately the shakedown. which is where we are at now. one more thing i will ask for the questions are turned to me from the audience, is jeffrey zach's, this is you know in a way one your more provocative feces. and the theme and your work is that jeffrey got involved in this new field of development economics i'm basically going to third world or post- soviet

bloc and trying to get these countries back on their feet economically. integrated. i would like for you to talk about this. since it jeffrey zach's has the boomer -ish distaste for hatred of imperialism, i think you find this a little bit of what he practiced. >> there is an anecdote that i love that i did not include in the book because the only citation i could find was a secondhand story pretty fairly convinced the source is reliable. it's a story from steven s : the russia scholar who died just a few months ago actually he said he was once on a plane on the way to moscow and happen to be setting next to him. and he asked them what books he was reading to prepare for his journey. because that's what you do when you go to a foreign

country find a couple books, whatever but you read a book. and jeffrey apparently told steven cohen, i am not reading anything. i don't feel a need to get up to speed on russia as russia. i am an economist. everywhere i go i have the finance telling me you don't understand our country is different. they're all different exec of the same way economics is economics. i don't need to know about russia as a less traditional me the numbers. and i love that story that was the answer to every because that really does reflect the attitude of all development economists. the things that annoys me most about it is the actual imperialist and in the 19th century frenchman say how's they are not at all alike the

white man's burden air imperialist. kipling would never said that about india. who never would've said i don't need to know anything about it justice does justice to better where you are. they had a love the countries that they supervised. it's funny, i have had people criticize me and this book for it not being sufficiently respectful of elders, it's not not a conservative virtue? too not show a little more respect your elders people are coming from with that but the reason why i have a gripe with the boomers is they were the people that decided it was not a virtue should care about anymore. they invented dismissing their elders for they all hate their elders. and that is the fault that annoys most about jeffrey zach's.

what he does is show obviously imperial. perfectly the what the french imperialist did. then it seems deeply offensive, underhanded, arrogant and wrong for him to then say that imperialist or bunch of terrorist old white men who did never anything good. i know there are a lot of people on the left and the right to criticize for being so imperial. that's not my complaint with him if he wants to go around within imperial mission he can probably do a lot of good that way. i just wish he would stopping such a hypocrite about it in his attitude to the people whose tradition he is carrying on. >> it would not be surprised of being a boomer that he desired not to do the homework to get full credit for his good intentions anyway, he

seems the type. i have a question that has come in from chris scull alia for helen. i wonder with the many shortcomings of the boomers as parents and otherwise suggest about their own parents? the members of the greatest generation. for all the virtues of the greatest generation, was their parenting to blame for the worst of the children's? >> guest: that's a great question chris. the short answer is no. [laughter] is a sense in which the greatest generation spoiled the boomers. as you might understand, if you had grown up in the great depression and world war ii, of course she would want to give your children the easy life that you never had. the boomers group with indulgent parents who wanted to give them an easy life. an exceptional prosperity and peace at home.

and so they were a bit spoiled by the parents of that way. but more important than any of those factors was the fact that the boomers were so demographically huge. there were a lot of them. and so that's simple demographic fact splines a lot about the boomer character. because basically from the moment they turn 16 they have been the most numerous consumers. for advertisers to cater to their tasty been the most numerous voters so politicians have quoted their votes. basically through sheer demographic tests they were able to make the country revolve around their desires which led them to be the awful narcissist that they are. so all of that would have been true even if the greatest generation headed spoiled them

a little bit. admittedly they did. but the demographics is a much bigger factor. >> wright, we have seen that you can kind of trace that throughout your book. some things like we ourselves, gen x or the millennial's can trace it through our lives that in effect the story of the country, of the nation. of governance in our lives has mostly been the story of boomers changing needs as they get older. and part of that we saw with the emphasis in the response to the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 was to save 401ks, which boomers have been investing in. and not to save jobs that millennial's and desperately needed at the time. and maybe we are even seeing it now with covid-19 where the emphasis is on locking down to

protecting the elderly. and to hell with the economy that everyone else is going to have to inherit. you know, i want to turn to come until we get more questions, which i hope will come soon, remember you can send those to jackson. woolford@ai.org or tweet them at ai boomers. i was wondering if we could talk a little bit about camille pod brea. you use her life as an academic and kind of one of the very few, it may be the only, in our lifetimes academic kind of rock stars. she is a figure you see in popular magazines and unpopular television, network

television even. and it's a way for you to explore both the sexual revolution and the transformation of academia itself. and like what is worth studying. and worth communicating to the next generation. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about, who seems to admire admire her on the one hand for un- sentimentality. willingness to scrape, her actual learned nest, the education she was given. and what that gives her. but you fault her for never being able to learn as well, right? in a sense the sexual

revolution affects which she notices never caused a real second thought or second thinking. so tell us a little bit about camille. >> guest: i'm so glad that my affection for her came through. i really do i love reading i love watching her she's a great intellectual and i just say they're not that many great public intellectuals left kicking around right now. but a lot of conservative, she was so tough on the feminists. and so you will today see a lot of conservatives to think of her as being as liberal as she his, somehow on their side. and it is true she did have a point in her war with the campus feminists in the 1990s. this was the era of take back the night marches and when feminists were being adamant

that the sexual assault crisis should never be blamed on women. so we should never, ever, ever cautioned women against behaving recklessly by going to a frat party getting super drunk. to even mention things that women can do to modify their behavior is to change their behavior that the sexist. sensibly with the hard nosed or admire so much about her set i'm as much of a feminist as anybody paid but fugate that drunk at a frat party way things going to happen? and the irony is, as clear eyes as she was looking at the feminist position, camille has not been so clear i'd about her own position. she's always characterized herself as a pro- feminists.

she says i love prostitution i love pornography. michelangelo was a pornographer she has said. which is less conservative of her. but i as a conservative hearing her say those things almost want to echo her complaints against the feminists. i want to say to her, camille, you celebrate you liberate everybody's libidos. speaking of someone of the generation of the "me too" movement, what i see as a result of what you are proposing is sexual assault and sexual harassment. in gosh, camille, and the same words that you said to the feminists, what did you think was gonna happen? as naïve as a feminist where then she is not even her own way now. especially things like pornography. >> that is fantastic. we have some more questions.

from i'm going to combine to their close and save one from scott corbin and another one from scott morgan. seems a generational transfer of influence will lead out of positions of authority what is a successful transition to post boomer life look like? and dennis morgan's asks what can we do to correct the excesses of the boomers like the destruction of machine politics, but sponsored to on the ground concerns or is the genie out of the bottle? in many ways the genie is out of the bottle per bit in answer to the first question was a post politics look like customer the answer is we don't know because we haven't seen it yet. because even millennial's are trapped in a boomer mindset.

this is a book is quite tough on's as well as boomers. never more so than for their continuing to define ourselves by the boomers standard. the idea what's cool distilled based on but the boomers how school the 1960s. i was writing the conclusion to this book over the summer with the riots going on in cities burning. and hearing a lot of people asking is this is 60s all over again? and my answer was yes, yes it is. while millennial's still think the greatest moment in american was the 60s and people march in the street. partly because of the people who taught us american history were boomers who decided their great mama was a great moment

of the countries. and every thing before that was mercifully overthrew. that's a version of american history millennial's have inherited. submit natural that we would then say it's only good moment in american history. that's the moment we will reenact. and i don't know what it will take to shake millennial's out of that, to have them declare mental independence of the baby boom generation. because even now that the boomers are nearing retirement age we still have not seen it yet. the nobel prize is still going to bob dylan. becky mentioned right at the top of your book, and the paragraph "a little bit, before the renaissance would be discovered or sometimes told by zealous churchmen that anything written was not worth

rediscovering. and this is proximally have the boomers feel about themselves. any suggestion that the western world might not be altogether better off for their influences immediately met with the segments of humanity who previously labored in a state of abject person before the boomers came along and broke the chains. i actually find this to be true in the sense that was how primary and secondary school education went. basically learned there was a pre-lapse area in time when slavery in world war ii. that lump together so the slave early, hitler and that his third out-of-the-way. and then there's the march of history onward. which begins with elvis and

then ends with i don't know, we gave you friends on nbc. you know, you end up alleging that the boomers, the boomer generation themselves are an event of cultural destruction on par with the protestant reformation. which sounds like sort of a pod lien overstatement to sell books, which anyone would forgive you for. the end they've destroyed the left bite d institutionalizing basically baby we saw some of their handiwork last week

instead turned toward media. we have a crisis of the family for young people are not even getting married. not even have all the that boomers told them would be so great, not having children and boomer obsession with pop culture this artifact of the middle class has destroyed our connection to, i just sit full coach and high culture. it has left us with nothing. it also the boomers failure to pass on religion, and many cases even understand it is people bereft two. want to take a question from bryan penn.

aren't you talking, helen, about a particular subset of elite boomers? boomers also fought in vietnam and voted for ronald reagan. boomers like any group are not a monolith. how do these other boomers fit into the picture? >> i really wanted to write about individuals in this book. precisely for the reason the question identifies. because so much writing about generations in general ends up being very vague and insubstantial. so i wanted to anchor things. it's true there were boomers who did not share characteristic vices of their generation. but i hope the six i picked will be obviously recognizable

as typical boomers in some way or another. i can answer a little bit for some of the way boomers having a gravitational effect on all of american light must boomers results in a reagan presidency and they imagine a much more conservative reagan presidency than they got. boomers got was what they wanted at the time if you can speak of them as a collective which is economic growth. and a little bit of stability after the 70s maybe things got a little too out of hand.

i've had people ask me whether or not this book was inspired by christopher caldwell's book last year. the answer is no, i thought his book age and entitlement was great prey the best book i read last year. in fact when i opened it up and read it i started to feel like i was on the right track but the bulk of this was written before i read coldwell's book. but he makes an argument and his book about the 60s in america which is about the baby boomers there's not really a lot of essential difference between the liberals of the 1960s and the conservatives of the 1980s. they're both about liberating the individual in one sense culturally in one sense economically. they were both about tearing down things that stood in the way of these individuals. so there is something boomer rush, backlash against the boomers but boomer -ish about

reagan and the way he governed. and i don't talk much about that in my book, but if you pick up caldwell's book you got a full chapter audit. >> even if you just look at it in 1970s a boomer candidate was torpedoed by amnesty and abortion. ronald reagan was who had liberalized abortion in california. and then past amnesty in his presidency without the promised enforcement. so you've got in a sense the kind of boomer -ish parental style even know he was a figure of an older generation as a kind of paternal figure as president, you got the permissiveness of amnesty. and you never got the promised structure that would come later. sort of like here's ice cream kids, eat it up. but next week are going to

finish her homework every night before we have ice cream again. and it was not to be. listen, i think we are beginning to wrap up. but i just wanted, go to overtime helen and say is there anything of the host i've missed eight figure? we did not cover everyone in your book, maybe a little thing about sonja, which i think is what he more fun chapters of the book. and i didn't really get into her. but kinda for what is a boomer -ish about sonja? >> that was the chapter that i was most apprehensive about undertaking. because i am painfully aware that law is a profession. there is a reason why they make you go to school for three years before you can practice it. in some ways it's a specialized field and is

venturing into dangerous territory trying to talk about it as a layman. the truth is you can't talk about the boomer legacy without looking at the war in court and what is done to constitutional law. the more i got into more than that what constitutional law has looked like in the last year, the more i came to realize that in some ways a layman is best positioned to talk about in particular talk about the most important thing about it which is the argument of that chapter. they broke constitutional law. not everybody has to be an originalist or textual list. but you can't just make it constitutional law and that's with the warren court did. the problem is that it is very hard to stand up and say constitutional laws lost all

i think justice scalia's dissent is a good example of that where he said i thought we lived in a democratic republic but today's ruling makes clear we do not live but live in an oligarchy ruled by nine ivy league graduates. i think even justice alito has said in opinions of his that constitutional law has suffered deep and i think the word is

irremediable damage at the hands of the warren court and its successors. my position allows me to foreground this really important fact that profession that we can only mention under special circumstances periodically and that is that commonwealth has gone nuts. justice sotomayor is a great example of that because she is in the successor generation, the pioneers of the warren court revolution constitutional law had been educated under the old regime and still had a limited sense of how much they could treat the constitution as their personal plaything. someone of sotomayor's generation does not have that. they have no sense of, no limits on her sense of what she can get away with as an interpreter supposedly of the constitution.

that chapter is about sotomayor as a product of the revolution, rather than an architect of one but in some ways being a product of a revolution is more revealing. >> one thing it revealed -- i think it could be summed up and foreshadows the fate that has befallen millennial's themselves is that the portrait of sotomayor reveals someone who, when she comes up upon challenges in her life or i will say, gaps in her knowledge, failures of her educators really that her insecurity suddenly flashes out and then along with that security comes bullying self assertion where there isn't knowledge and at least you can

fall back on personal offense and indignation. maybe that explains a little bit about what we seen in our politics in 2020 and so far in 2021 and going ahead into the future. listen, i think -- are we coming up on the final time here? and waiting to hear from the bosses over at aei but -- >> i'm happy to take one more question if you've got one. >> i don't have one here for me so let's wrap it up here and thank you so much for this book. this is a book i wish i had written or capable of writing and you have done your service to the ages with this book and the thing that is great about it

too is it is not just full of all these great anecdotes and these great portraits but also just a lot of fun and we haven't had a fun conservative book, i think, in a long time so thank you for that especially. to everyone that joined us thank you for taking the time out of your day, stuck in your personal covid era prison cell. we wish you well and hope to see you on the other side i rl. take care. goodbye. >> thank you, michael. >> you are watching book tv on c-span2. every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2 created by america's cable television comedy and today we are brought to you by these television companies who provide book tv to viewers as a public service.