Boomers Gonna Boom
Or How Hippies Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
“And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.” — Stephen King, “IT”
Horror writer Stephen King and political commentator Dan Bongino have gotten into a bit of a Twitter tiff. Bongino bashed Biden; King bashed Bongino. In a vacuum, this is no big deal. Just another minor, puerile political skirmish amid the larger war being waged on the ideological battlefield of social media.
However, my recent, smash-hit article introducing The Harvey Dent Awards has caused me to think a lot about how people, like Stephen King, go from railing against authoritarians to rabidly defending them, and I think I have dredged up another nugget from the Thought Mines that you may find interesting. Allow me to elaborate.
Stephen King is a great writer. It is sad to see him continue to degrade and embarrass himself like this, lashing out in snarling defense of our oppressive ruling class like some rabid St. Bernard. I contend one reason why he, and many of his once-inspirational, freedom-fighting generation like Neil Diamond, have become the enforcers of authoritarianism is because they were too thoroughly traumatized and molded by the events and narratives of their youth: the horrors of the Vietnam War, the Hippie milieu that celebrated Left-Wing liberation; Kennedy, Democrat, the beautiful, slain King of Camelot; Nixon, Republican, the sweaty crook and tyrant; to name a few. Flipping through King’s Hearts in Atlantis or listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio will bring all of this to the fore.
Many liberal Boomers ossified their beliefs and identity around the self-righteous socio-political Manicheism of their era. Now, they seem either unwilling or unable to extricate themselves from that ideological framework and recognize the shifting sands swirling beneath them, dragging their beloved, virtuous Democrats into the pit of warmongering, bigotry, and tyranny, while the same sands also reveal some modern Republicans to be rising to resist censorship, oppression, and the military-industrial complex.
The situation is complicated, fluid, and nuanced, all in ways that require some Boomers to reexamine and recalibrate their perspectives. Given the natural tendency of people to grow more set in their ways over time, and the fact that the legacy media they still disproportionately consume reinforces their priors, they've degenerated into parodies of their former selves, senselessly serving the very principalities they once righteously wrestled with. It is tragic. It is also not unique to the Hippie Generation (Gen X, I’m looking at you!), but that’s an article for a different day.
Perhaps it's true: you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. I suspect Mr. King may be nominated for a Harvey Dent Award in the not-so-distant future….
I think the idea that there was ever a hippie generation is and has always been a bit of a myth. Certainly there were flower children and what have you roaming around in the 60's and 70's, and if you asked them they were probably on the left of the political aisle, but they weren't necessarily the same people as those in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, or the labor movement. It was a lot of hedonism and teenage rebellion perpetuated by goofballs whose actions didn't always live up to their values, which is why there's often the pithy observation made about the hippies growing up to become Reaganites. I don't mean to malign every hippie here or say none of them were really part of anything good, mind you, but it's not exactly a 1:1 correlation is all.
Ironically, I think Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were probably the worst things to happen to the American left. They both have that super-charisma that helped them make Reagan's neoliberalization of the economy and GW Bush's War on Terror palatable to liberals, which I think accounts for what you're talking about here. I'm certainly not letting conservatives off the hook here, mind you, as they were full-throatedly in favor of all that until it started coming from Democrats. I think it's true those things are no longer their major priorities, having shifted mostly toward culture war bugaboos and an increasingly Wahhabist level of social control over states where they have supermajorities, but I don't think they'd end the War on Terror in any meaningful way and they would certainly not reduce the influence corporations have on government (unless they perceive them as "woke").
Boomers have, collectively mind you, been slow to grasp the vast changes that have occurred in the last twenty years or so, as many of them have been inured from those changes by already owning homes and having secure jobs for long periods. Even those who have suffered as a result have often seen those failings as personal rather than societal. As such, new political realities, which are Byzantine in the best of cases, are often lost on them.
Yep, too right! I made a similar observation some time ago...
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnbotica/p/human-rights-activists-and-anti-war?utm_source=direct&r=tz7cx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web