Ep. 88 Transcript: Helen Andrews, How Boomers Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster
We brought Helen Andrews on to discuss her new book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
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Note: This is a rough transcript, lightly edited for clarity.
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Marshall Kosloff: Helen Andrews, welcome to The Realignment.
Helen Andrews: Thank you so much for having me
Saagar Enjeti: Good to see Helen.
Marshall Kosloff: So Helen you host a podcast so you know that booking and scheduling is a weird mix of art and science. Obviously we should have had this come out on the day of the book release, which for listeners is January 12th.
If I'm correct, however, the universe has intervened and as we speak, a cadre of boomers are storming the U.S. Capitol. So we could not have taped this at a better time. So the first question, is the storming of the capital, the culmination of boomer ism.
Helen Andrews: Yes. Yes, and that holds true whether or not the people actually storming the capital are all themselves boomers.
Because some of the people that I've seen in the footage look a little bit young, but this is the problem with millennials. We are all still stuck reliving and replaying the same boomer film reel. We think that the height of politics was attained in 1968. And we, when we were in college, we felt cheated if we didn't have something to protest.
So we came up with random issues if we didn't have one, cause you really haven't even gone to university if you haven't chalked something offensive on the quad and in the same way, are you really even a citizen of the U.S. If you haven't rioted at one point or another. So yeah. We're stuck in the sixties and it's the boomers fault.
Saagar Enjeti: I love that we're talking to you on this date, Helen, and that this is the heuristic that we can bring to it. And on a broader level, is this why you wrote the book? Because you can see just how us our society, our politics, everything is ruled by a mindset and by an experience of a people who just seem to have such a monolith control over how we view the world over how everything operates.
Just talk to us about why you decided to write this in the first place.
Helen Andrews: Yeah, I have to say that the resentment that was the germ of this book was almost even more prosaic than what you described. It's that I was angry that my parents' generation had it so much easier. I thought to myself, gosh, it would have been great to live at a time when you could graduate from college without a mountain of student debt, because you could pay off a semester, a couple afternoons a week sweeping floors at the chemistry lab, or when you could attain a middle-class standard of living in a one earner household.
I saw other people around me who were having a really hard time just getting married, coupling off just wasn't coming together for them. And I remember thinking, gosh, that also seemed to be a whole lot easier back in the day. But I didn't want to write a book just out of resentment.
So the mission that I set myself as I started writing it was to sort out what problems were the boomers fault versus what we're just perks where they happen to be alive at the right time. The economy was really booming after World War II and that's not anybody's fault or anybody's credit.
That's just the way the sine curve goes. So if they benefited from a really raring economy and we didn't, can I really hold that against them? So I wanted to sort out which things I could blame them for and which ones they were innocent of.
Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. One of my favorite lines because it provides the framework for the book is this idea that few generations, if any other generations have been gifted, such a great hand and then taken such a hand and screwed it up.
So let's engage with the framework. You hit on this a bit when you talk about the economy, what specifically was the hand that boomers were set? And I'll also add to this question. Not to get too woke here, but when we talk about boomers, like who are they? Because obviously if you were a black dude in the South in 1945, you obviously weren't dealt a great hand.
So how do we rank and order the boomers when it comes to the Olympics of the framework we're doing here?
Helen Andrews: Answer the last part first, because that's the critique of the book that I get most frequently, which is, sure it was great to be alive in 1950, if you were a straight white male.
And I reject that mainly for two reasons. The first is that I just don't buy into the identity politics framework that says that somebody's most marginal characteristic is the most important thing about them. You might have been a gay man in a Midwestern city in 1950 and you'd be frustrated that you couldn't really come out to anybody except your family and your close friends and your partner.
But on the other hand, maybe that same person was also a member of the Episcopal church and he enjoyed being a member of a church that had a future, which the Episcopal church today really does not. And that's thanks to the boomers. Each individual is complex and has different priorities and it's not always simple in an identity politics way.
And the second reason is that even the issues themselves are never that simple, and I think about this question mainly in terms of feminism and women, because that's the one that I know firsthand, women were a lot less liberated in many ways, in the period that I'm painting as a golden age.
So I've had to personally reckon with that. It's an interesting anthropological fact that looking at different civilizations throughout history, there have been others that liberated women just as much as we do today, where women were held in the same esteem as men in public affairs, they were allowed to hold jobs.
They were very equal in the senses that we think of as important today. But it's the anthropological fact is that societies that make women equal in that way tend to also at the same time, de-value the family. In other words, the more equal women are in terms of competing with men, the less your society cares about motherhood and children, belonging to their parents, they just denigrate the family.
Sparta is the classic example. They had women warriors in Sparta, and nobody gave a damn about whose kid anybody was because they didn't care about the family. And of course the obvious complication is that every woman or most women are also members of families. So an individual woman might say, well, I'd be willing to sacrifice a little bit of the equality on this scale if I lived in a society that cared more about me as a mother or as a daughter. So it's, there are some people who think no woman can possibly have been truly happy before suffrage. But I just don't think that simplistic way is a good way to think about it. It's always more complicated. That was a really long answer.
Marshall Kosloff: No it's but it's good.
Saagar Enjeti: No, it's good. That's what we're here for. So
Helen Andrews: I forgot to answer your question of who are the boomers, which is people born between 1945 and 1964.
Marshall Kosloff: So thanks for actually, you ordered it the exact way that I wanted you to have ordered it. So thank you. But before we get into the specifics moving forward with the boomers, can we just give a good portrait of the generations coming before, especially within the framework of the book that this is based on eminent Victorians, which was the same profile style, but focused on the Victorian era British folks. So could you, firstly explain eminent Victorians and then contextualize the silent generation, the generation before the boomers and then we'll be taken to the present day at that point.
Helen Andrews: Sure. My book is modeled on, as you say, eminent Victorians, which was written by a guy named Lytton Strachey, and he was a bit of a Bohemian.
He was English and he was a member of the Bloomsbury group. So he hung out with Virginia Woolf and all of those folks. And so naturally, because he was so Bohemian he hated stuffy Victorian values. His father had been very conservative and he was very much rebelling against his own upbringing.
And this had been always a minority view. Everybody in England liked the Victorians and thought, they're the people who made our country great and built the greatest empire the world has ever seen. So, no, we're pro Victorian here in England and then came World War I, and suddenly everybody said that is just the worst trauma our country has ever endured. What went wrong and Lytton Strachey to you was right there with his book saying it was the Victorian generation and all of their Victorian values that brought us to this crisis of World War I. And it became a publishing sensation.
It really one of the first best sellers, because that was a message. Everybody had an appetite to hear that the Victorians had screwed up, and fingers crossed that people feel that way about the boomers today.
Saagar Enjeti: I guarantee you, everybody feels that way, Helen. I'm a lover of history.
And what you're pointing to, it's funny. I was joking with Marshall when we were talking about this, I was like, yeah. He was like, look, the Victorians were terrible. They had World War I and then the break up. And then they led to World War II, literally some of the most tumultuous, most deaths.
And I'm like, but I look at the boomers today and it's, and I hate to say it, but I'm like, it's so terrible. Why are the boomers just as terrible as the Victorians, even though look, we live in tumultuous times. Yes. But it's not world war one level death. We live in a pretty lethargic and pretty wealthy society. All things considered. Yes. There are many structural inequities and all that. Why are they comparable to the Victorians and what they have wrought upon us?
Helen Andrews: Here, the answer is one of those things that's so obvious it's staring at you in the face. It's almost hard to see. And it is because there are just so many of them.
From the moment the boomers came of age, they were the biggest demographic, which meant that advertisers were chasing their dollars. If you were trying to sell a product, you have always directed your sales pitch to the boomers because that's where the money was. Politicians have courted them since they were young because they were the biggest voting bloc.
If you're an artist, if you're trying to appeal to the public in any way, you have wanted to direct your efforts to the boomers. So they grew up with an only child syndrome where they were the Prince of the house and everybody pampered them and spoiled them. And the result was an understandable streak of narcissism.
So if you wanted to boil down, what's terrible about the boomers. It is that they're narcissists, and they're almost to a salon cystic extent, but you almost can't blame them because it's strictly a function of their numbers. Everybody's treated them like the King of the heap since they were born and that's why.
Marshall Kosloff: When your biggest everything fundamentally is about you is the point I'm taking from that. So earlier in the conversation you were talking about the 1960s. A part that was funny during the book, because this is also in the category of, we don't always think about it this way, but you talk about the boomers take credit for civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, all these dynamics, but actually, if you actually think about it, it was probably, it was silent generation types. The greatest World War II generation Tom Brokaw's types who actually probably did those things.
So what is going on in that narrative that the boomers are telling themselves? Is that just a result of the narcissism or within that framework you yourself are at the center of that story.
Helen Andrews: Yeah, the boomers have really adopted everything that was good about every proceeding generation. They have this idea that Martin Luther King Jr was a boomer, which he absolutely was not. And on the other hand, really painting the past as darker than it was. So the boomers have this idea that they invented sex, right? Nobody ever had sex before the baby boomers came along. And they were really the most innovative, progressive generation in history.
Now if you know anything about the roaring twenties, that's not the case. But it's an inability to give previous generations any credit for anything because on the one hand you don't believe anything good about them. And on the other hand, anything that is good about them, you take credit for.
Marshall Kosloff: A quick thing on that then in fairness to boomers, because we are definitely insulting a small, but no doubt loud percentage of the audience here, what would she,
Saagar Enjeti: We're going to get a lot of emails about this one.
Marshall Kosloff: You gave the critique of the victorian era, but in the U.S. specifically, what were legitimate gripes that, that baby boomer post 1945 generation had with their parents and their elders?
Helen Andrews: The number one was the war. The antiwar movement had its problems and I don't like Bill Ayers and Bernie Dorn any more than any other conservative does. But it's true, that if you were in your twenties at the end of the sixties, a lot of your friends were getting sent off to die for a war that did not make any sense at all.
Now, if you look at the actual antiwar movement, Brian Burroughs, his book days of rage is really, really good on this. He makes the point that the people who were the leaders of the anti-war movement were all radicals before the war escalated. The war was not their issue. They were into black power, they really believe in black Panther type issues or they were communists and they wanted a genuine revolution.
And they used the war as a way of roping naive middle-class kids into their rebel movement that they genuinely thought was going to stage a revolution in the United States. So they manipulated the issue of the war in a way that wasn't particularly honorable. The Chicago seven are a good example of this, but at the end of the day, I cannot defend the Vietnam war and the anti war movement was correct on the merit.
Marshall Kosloff: You'll defend everything else, just not the Vietnam war.
Saagar Enjeti: I think the real thing that I want to make sure that we put forward is a framework. And this is actually another thing I really appreciated about the book is you selected a few different characters. Tell us who those characters were, why you selected them. Steve jobs, right? One of the people that you point to is Steve Jobs and I'm like Steve Jobs this guy's one of the richest people in the world and hey, he created the iPhone, he was an icon.
What is it about him that exemplifies the problem with the boomers?
Helen Andrews: The first thing to say upfront is that while this is an anti boomer book, that does not mean that I hate the people I profile. In fact, I didn't want to profile anybody that I felt contempt for or who I thought was strictly a villain.
They are all people who have elements of greatness, but who ended up having sometimes an ironically negative or tragic effect on the world. And Steve Jobs is a great example of that. I actually came into that chapter wanting to defend him against something that people always say about Steve Jobs that I thought was unfair and wrong.
People always say that Steve Jobs, his hippie persona was just an act. They say he was only pretending to be a groovy hippie who went on a pilgrimage to India and studied design at Reed. And whose idol was Bob Dylan. At the end of the day, he was just a corporate shark and nothing more. I reject that.
I think that the sixties and boomer values truly shaped how Steve Jobs ran his business. The simple way to put that is that before Steve Jobs, IBM was the definitive computer company, and the way IBM computers worked is that there would be one computer in your office and it would be supervised by specialized technicians and you would go in and you would ask them for permission to have time on the computer or for them to do a certain task for you.
And they would consider your request. And then, maybe fulfill it in a week and a half. Steve Jobs said, I reject that. One person, one computer, that's my mantra. I want it to be in everybody's lap. And I want it to be simple enough to use. That unlike an IBM computer, you don't need two weeks worth of training to figure it out.
I want it to be a bicycle for the mind, a tool of liberation and you know what, he succeeded. Technology looks the way it does today, it's individualized because Steve Jobs, his vision for technology prevailed. Now there have been some negative effects and some downsides, and I think in many ways, people are less free today.
Because he prevailed on individualized computers, putting a computer in everybody's pocket, but you have to give him credit one for having an idealistic vision and two for following through on it, because he absolutely did.
Marshall Kosloff: I want to move forward, but I have to ask a follow-up to something you said, who are the boomer villains?
You said there were villains that you had to ignore. Who were the villains?
Helen Andrews: Gosh, he's somebody who also has elements of greatness, but somebody who I did not want to write about was Bill Clinton. First of all, cause I don't think there's a lot more to say about Bill Clinton that has not already been said.
But also just because I don't feel the magnetism that he is said to possess. I just, I don't like him. I don't have that feeling that I have about Steve jobs that you had greatness, but it was ended. It ended in tragedy. I don't see the irony. I just find him repulsive.
Marshall Kosloff: Here's, what's interesting.
Here's what interesting about Bill Clinton and Saagar, you know Clinton not personally. Audience listeners, we're okay here, but on the level of Bill Clinton, What's interesting about his story is, the David Maraniss book, first in his class, the best, the brightest, the smartest, then he's just a total letdown.
He's the charismatic speaker who never gave a good speech. That doesn't interest you?
Helen Andrews: You know what? I actually did get a chance to say what I wanted to say about the interesting qualities of the Clinton white house in the chapter on Aaron Sorkin because that was,
Saagar Enjeti: I was just about to go there.
Helen Andrews: Oh yeah. Because I don't know if people know this, but it's obvious if you know anything about the nineties or about the West wing that a lot of West wing plot lines were ripped from the headlines. There were Clinton, white house, alumni consulting on the show and they basically just fed Aaron Sorkin all of their best anecdotes.
So literally at least half of the plot lines in West wing are straight Clinton things that actually happened. And obviously that's a case where Aaron Sorkin made a more idealized vision of the Clinton white house, then the one that actually existed. So yeah I can see that there, there was some nobility there.
But all of that nobility was extracted and purified by Aaron Sorkin and the West wing. And that's what I preferred to talk about.
Marshall Kosloff: So when we're thinking about Aaron Sorkin, let's just make this as millennial conversation as possible. And what do you think of the West wing as a show, especially the first three seasons for Aaron Sorkin seasons.
We're not going to speak of the four or five, six, seven.
Helen Andrews: Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I, secret confession. I love Aaron Sorkin. I have seen everything he's ever written and I love all of it.
Marshall Kosloff: Could I just stop you real quick? Helen I want to actually offer you a quick compliment on this. Speaking of that, because when you're reading the book, there's the version of this book that you could have written in terms of the predictable conservative take.
So the predictable conservative take would have been West wing is terrible and libs are libs, and it's really bad. I also, we'll talk about it, but you're Al Sharpton chapter was incredibly charitable in a very fair way. It's not really focused on the very obvious, like AKA he engaged in antisemitism.
That's true. We all know that we've all read our NR copies from 2008. So that's not much of a thing for debate. So I just want to, if you're, when you're listening to this, just really consider this as it's fair and that's what makes it really meaningful on my part.
Helen Andrews: That means a lot to me. And actually when I was first writing the manuscript that's feedback that I got from early readers, and it was the, it's the response that means the most to me, because it was important to me to be scrupulously fair.
Especially to Aaron Sorkin who I want to reiterate, I love, yeah, the Aaron Sorkin chapter is actually not so much a defense of the West wing it's more a defense of the rest of the Aaron Sorkin canon. Because I lived through that and I remember people saying that studio 60 was a terrible TV show.
Marshall Kosloff: Can you tell people about what that was? People don't know, studio 60. One season
Helen Andrews: It has been suppressed.
Marshall Kosloff: You made that sound like a conspiracy.
Helen Andrews: Aaron Sorkin definitely doesn't want to talk about it because it was a huge flop and Aaron Sorkin was the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. He had, they wrote him a blank check to do whatever show he wanted.
He had total control and he decided he wanted to do a behind the scenes comedy drama about a show like Saturday Night Live, weekend sketch comedy. And it would be all about the actors and the lead writer and the producer, a behind the scenes comedy about SNL. And the critique that he always got that annoyed the heck out of me, most people saying he's writing West wing monologues for people who work at SNL. Late night comedy just isn't that important, man.
You're sounding so pompous. And the tragedy there is that Aaron Sorkin genuinely believes that the decisions made by Hollywood executives mean more to more people than the decisions made by the people who work at the white house. And you know what I think that's absolutely true, right? Like entertainment just looms a lot larger.
In the mental headspace of your average American, than whatever news stories coming up on CNN, they just know more about it. It's more important to them. And it's extra ironic in a final sense because Aaron Sorkin himself does not care that much about politics. And that always annoyed him when the West wing became this liberal cause celeb and everybody was saying that he was some political guru.
He's like, I just write nice dialogue. I'm not an idealogue, I don't know that much about politics or care that much about politics. I just liked the sound of smart people talking to each other. So don't make me some political guru. I don't know. So yeah, he finally got to make a show about something he's truly passionate about, which is television.
And everybody told him to shut up because he was sounding pompous. That's the tragedy that most attracted me to the Aaron Sorkin story.
Marshall Kosloff: Do you have a defense of the newsroom? That is the, that is, you do. Okay. That's what we're all waiting for.
Saagar Enjeti: I actually love the newsroom by the way. Yeah,
Helen Andrews: See,no, it's a guilty pleasure.
And it's again, Aaron Sorkin wanted to make a show about TV, but I guess some executives told him he had to throw some politics in there and he agreed and said, okay, fine. I will. When even today politics is not what gets Sorkin's blood moving. So yeah, the newsroom was a show with a lot of really sparkling dialogue, a lot of really good cast.
Alison Pill was just a knockout in that show. She was really good. In kind of an old timey screwball comedy sense, but the presence of politics just ended up grating. And the reason is that's not what Sorkin cares most deeply about.
Saagar Enjeti: Helen. I guess this is one thing I was occurring to me as you were talking, which is that the power of Sorkin's dialogue and really just what he was so good at.
And this again, goes again to that heuristic that he and boomers rule both really all of us is that as a child growing up, watching the West wing and then now working in DC, I'm sure we all have the same phenomenon is that people. It, infected the way that we all think about lofty rhetoric, about what rhetoric is, about how politics should work.
And even today, as much as I make fun and I dunk on these people, I can't help, but still operate within that framework. Talk to us about how that victory has had an impact on our politics right now.
Helen Andrews: Oh, man, you don't even know that half of it. I am exactly the right age to have come up with the generation of people who went into politics because they watched the West wing, gosh, being in the Yale political union, it was just omnipresent.
Everything was West wing references wall to wall. And it still is today. You're absolutely right. Uh, Armando Iannucci has a funny anecdote when he was doing research for the show Veep. He was shown around the white house and the people who were showing him around were saying, Oh, that's the desk where Donna would sit.
And that's where Josh would be. And he kinda wanted to say, timeout, those are fake people. You are real who have those actual jobs, would it not be more accurate to say that is where you sit? But no, it's really how they think about their jobs. And the downside of that is one that it breeds a certain arrogance, right?
Because the Sorkin characters are glamorous and omnicompetent, and I'm not sure I want my white house staffers and politicians to be thinking of themselves as glamorous and omnicompetent. I think that leads them down a bad road. But also I mentioned earlier that a lot of West wing storylines were ripped from the headlines.
The difference is that Sorkin always gives his storylines a happy ending. There was a contested election in Haiti, and they tried to unseat the democratic winner, but we went in and reinstated him and then everything was happy ever after, when the election of Aristide, it was very much not that way.
Or, intervention in a Rwanda like country, all of these storylines that made their way to the West wing ended up with happy endings and there were no complications and no more amiguities. And I also don't want the people in the white house thinking that way either. I think if you think of your job in terms of the West wing, even apart from the lameness of being one of the most powerful people in the world and thinking of your life in terms of a TV show, this particular TV show leads to some very bad habits of thought for powerful people.
Marshall Kosloff: Could you talk about the left-right split there? So we all have an image of Obama era and now at pod save America type people in 2013 as we're discussing this. But when you encounter the conservatives at the Yale political union or conservatives in DC, New York, whatever, is there a cultural product that's influencing the way that they LARP or engage with the world to the same degree?
Helen Andrews: No, it's still the West wing it's, they're all Ainslie Hayes is what they say. Every female Republican in DC has had people say, have you, do you know, Ainslie Hayes? And actually that's, while I'm making a defensive Aaron Sorkin, one of the other things that I'd like to defend him on is being fair to conservatives.
I think that all of his conservative characters are ultimately failures. He does not do it well, but he is trying to do conservatives fairly. And to understand that you have to know how Aaron Sorkin first became famous. He broke out as a young playwright with a few good men, Jack Nicholson on the stand.
You can't handle the truth, a few good men.
Marshall Kosloff: Don't erase Tom Cruise. He's very important here too.
Helen Andrews: I don't know. Was he, even in that movie, I was supposed to say on Nicholson and Demi Moore, Pollock was great. Kevin Pollock. That's a really good cast in that movie. But when he wrote that he had a lot of people coming up to him saying, Oh man, so where did you serve?
What's your military experience? And of course, Aaron Sorkin, he himself never served a day in uniform. He has no military experience. But he really captured something about the conservative ethos of fealty to the Marine Corps and patriotism. That just, it rang true to a lot of people. And so that was beautiful and a Testament to his talent, but it also gave Aaron Sorkin the idea that he was going to be like the red state whisperer.
Who could understand conservatives and capture their voices and explain them to the left. And that's why he keeps trying to write conservative characters and it just never quite comes off. It's very frustrating. But I, gosh, give him credit for trying, not everybody in Hollywood would.
Saagar Enjeti: I actually thought that was one of the most charitable sections.
You're like, look at least the characters he writes are honorable and they were like, they, he tries to project something and look, I could talk West wing, Aaron Sorkin and all that all day. I also can confess, I was one of those people when I first got to go to the press secretary's office, I was like, this is CJ's office.
And with the turkeys and all that. I know it's cringe and it's embarrassing, but that's how it is. And I gotta admit it. Let's also talk about Al Sharpton because I thought this was a really interesting section of the book, and I want you to just lay out, what it is about Sharpton and his career and, experiences through our age to tell us the story of the boomers today.
Helen Andrews: Gosh, just start off with something good about Al Sharpton because, as you said, Marshall, hopefully we all know the bad things about him and the dabbling in antisemitism and getting murderers off. Yeah, all of that is true. But something good you can say about him is that he has a genuine democratic following, right?
When he talks people, listen, when he needs people to come out to his rally, people will show up, which is not true of a lot of black lives matter type activists today, the glaring two data points. All you have to look at.
Marshall Kosloff: I know where you're going. I'm smiling. I love this example. It's amazing. Yeah,
Helen Andrews: No. When Al Sharpton ran for mayor of New York City, he came in second for the Democratic nomination, to run against Rudy Giuliani. He almost made it. And his percentage of the vote was higher than the black population of New York at the time.
So it was not just black people voting for Al Sharpton. He had a following, he got people to vote for him. Compare that to good old DeRay McKesson. The guy with the blue puffy vest, who came out of the Ferguson protest in black lives matter. He made a try running for mayor of Baltimore because why not?
And ended up getting 3% of the vote. Something like 3000 people voted for him, maybe not even. Whatever you want to say about Al Sharpton, he has a genuine democratic following. But I, he has not always used that way.
Marshall Kosloff: In the best sense
Helen Andrews: Yeah. That's definitely true.
Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. The question that comes to mind, especially given the dichotomy you set up is what differentiates a black leader like Al Sharpton.
Boomer from the alpha millennial black activist type, like DeRay McKesson, right? There are many like we, when I was on firing line, he came on the set and he wore the jacket and the way that, and to be entirely honest, the way that white upper-middle-class liberals respond to it, the jacket is just the most.
They're like, it's so edgy, but it's safe. Whoa. And then we were doing research for the show and he went to a vanity fair party and he was still wearing the jacket over his tuxedo. They're like, Oh my gosh, he still did it. It's remarkable. It's brilliant. That's the point of it.
Helen Andrews: So how many of those vests does he have?
Does he just have them?
Marshall Kosloff: It's, the vest is beat down, which adds to the effect. It's brilliant. It's not new. It's worn down. I break it. I don't know. I'm not going to comment. Maybe it doesn't smell the way it does, but it looks like it's beat down. It's remarkable. But, can you talk about the two generations and what drove that process?
What I would just say is my thesis. This isn't mine. It's a friend of ours who you definitely know is it's all college campuses, especially the type of black leader who does very well in the let's just say. Actually, I'll just say the example I gave this person went to a Northeastern liberal arts college, very small, very elite, very white.
And he was like, I'm, when I saw DeRay for the first time, I was like, this is the type of person who gets selected to be the tour guide at this school because the families come in and they're like, this doesn't seem diverse. But then there was this nice smiling person who does come from a humble background, but once again, he's safe.
So anecdotes aside.
Helen Andrews: I don't know if you guys saw the recent list of demands at Dalton, the very elite private school in New York City.
Saagar Enjeti: Oh yes.
Helen Andrews: But the one on that list, which was completely crackpot, but the one I liked was that all, multicultural kids, any black kids who make it into the promotional material.
You need to pay them extra. You need to refund their tuition by a few thousand dollars because you're clearly taking advantage of them by putting them on the front of the brochure. Hey, look at this guy. So yeah, no making him the tour guide on campus. I knew exactly what you mean by that. The framing that I use in the chapter is one that Sharpton uses himself, which is that there are transformational leaders and transactional leaders.
Transformational leaders, somebody like Dr. King changes the way people think. A transactional leader is somebody who is a compromiser. He brokers deals, he gets, he maybe sacrifices some of his principles, but he gets things done. The boomers truly believe that transformational leadership is the only worthwhile kind.
That, you never want to compromise on any of your principles. You always want to have this high flown, idealistic stand and never give an inch from that. But the problem with that is that transactional leaders are actually really important. There are people who have disagreements and we need to learn to live with each other without, conclusively, vanquishing our foe every single time. We need to have compromises and I think that Al Sharpton still styles himself, a transformational type. But he knows transactional leadership a little bit. He knows how to make deals.
Marshall Kosloff: That's the key thing. He actually, when you have people, when you have bodies who will show up, that's part of what you use to wield that transactional power.
Helen Andrews: Exactly. And the younger people don't. And so, because they're not tethered to reality, the way that Al Sharpton has to be because he has actual, genuine followers that he has to deal with. They are able to become more and more radical and it just spins off in an, in escalating cycle until they get more and more untethered from reality.
And you see what you see today.
Saagar Enjeti: One of the things that you just said, which I really loved was about that transformational idea. And how it is. And this is something you said at the very beginning, in terms of the stakes and how we view the revolutions and the protests and so much more. And I think actually really you have all the characters in the book.
I wish we could get to all of them, the Sotomayor section in particular, but we'll save that for another day. It's actually the millennials and the lessons that we have learned. And the heuristics, like I said, at the beginning, in the midst of. All of that what is the recipe? What is the actual way in order to change any of this Helen, given all of the structural things in our society that you lay out here, especially the power of the media and that monolithic view that we have now been imparted to all of us about revolutionary change is the only real change.
Helen Andrews: You know, it's really difficult because millennials are in a tragic situation, on the one hand, millennials know that the boomers made a lot of mistakes and we know that because we're paying for a lot of them. So we know we need to make different choices than they did. But the difficulty is that because of these structural changes, it's hard for us to make different choices than the boomers did.
We know we should, because we know it didn't work out very well for them but a lot of the institutions that were available to them, just aren't available to us. So yeah, in terms of the solution for millennials going forward, we, even if we are able to break out of the mental monopoly that the boomers have and are finally able to, stop playing John Lennon's imagine ever again, which I, I believe in free speech and the first amendment, but I would support a ban on that song. Even if we're able to liberate ourselves mentally from the boomer monopoly, the world just doesn't look the same as it did for them. And so even if we want to make better choices and belong to the institutions that they destroyed a lot of times, we're just not able to.
So I wish I had a solution for that, but I do not.
Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. So here's the real question. I'm thinking about what you just said. What is something that the millennial generation knows the boomers screwed up in? And I was drawn because I, I'm not quite sure how true that is, or maybe there's a degree of false consciousness here, but what are two or three things that you're most new Yorker reading, the daily listening tote bags galore 28 year old in New York City who has student loan debt, has a good job, but has been shut in their studio apartment. I don't know if you've seen on Twitter, the meme, the new Yorker cover of, we'll put this link in the show notes, but what does that person know because I'm just suspicious about how much is known.
Helen Andrews: Yeah. it's, some of these are things that person is going to know in the next few years as she enters middle-age, one, she's probably less likely to be married than any previous generation. So clearly something about the sexual free-for-all that the boomers inaugurated is making it really difficult for millennials to pair up.
So she's going to know that she doesn't have a partner willing to commit to her. So that's a big problem. Gosh, I love this new Yorker cover. I'm so glad you brought it up because I can just look it. I have it etched in my mind. It's just such a millennial snapshot. I hope they put it in textbooks someday.
I remember she has a bottle of antidepressants on her desk. At least I think it's antidepressants and some kind of medication. And that's another thing because the boomers I think probably came to regret their reliance on drugs. It was really the first generation to say that drugs were cool. Pot was unknown, essentially on college campuses before the sixties.
You would not smoke pot unless you were a jazz musician or something. So at once pot became ubiquitous on college campuses, then you got cocaine and then you got eventually the kind of normalization of mind-altering drugs by prescription. And I really think the millennials are moving towards a skepticism of overmedication for psychiatric disorders.
Because for millennials, that's not something that they chose for themselves. That's something that was done to them. I can't even count how many people, my age, I know who were put on antidepressants or Ritalin or Adderall when they were teenagers and have just stayed on it. A Books that I read for this book that I love is called coming of age on Zoloft.
By a millennial journalist named Catherine Sharp. And the reason I love it is because it doesn't just look at the statistics about over-diagnosis of depression and anxiety disorders. Although the numbers certainly are there. She talks about it subjectively. She describes what it was like to be 28 years old and wake up one day and think, do I really not have any firsthand experience of my own personality?
Do I not even know who I am, because I've always experienced reality since I was 15 years old mediated by this mind altering drug. So I really do think there's a backlash brewing among millennials that they know as they get older, that taking a pill for every problem is wrong and that it was wrong for their parents to do that, to them to say, oh gosh, my little eight year old doesn't have sufficient discipline.
And I don't want to be the mean parent, let's stuff him with Ritalin. I think anybody who resents their parents having done that to them probably has a pretty decent point.
Marshall Kosloff: So two last questions here. And one that's coming to mind is I detected a degree of contradiction in your previous answer.
And maybe I'm just mishearing. You were talking about how something that baby boomers do with their narcissism as they act as if they are the first ones to do X, Y, or Z. However, as we're discussing the, and then you gave the example of sex, sex it's, the sixties were free, but in, the jazz age, roaring twenties, et cetera.
Why were the boomer iterations of these trends more lasting and impactful? Is that just a consequence of size and control?
Helen Andrews: No, you're absolutely right. That's a good catch because in some ways the boomers are too full of themselves, but the bottom line of this book is that the boomers really did alter the world.
Yeah, they really did change society. I think I compare them to the Protestant reformation and I stand by that. I think the boomer revolutions were on that scale and, in some ways some of those things were technological. The pill really did make a pretty big difference in making their sexual revolution last, in a way that the one of the roaring twenties did not, some of those were legal changes.
The advent of no fault divorce. But so yeah, some of it is things like that, that just happened to come along when the boomers were there. And some of them were, factors of demographic size. So yeah, you're right. It's attention in some ways the boomers need to get over themselves. But in other ways they really were pretty darn consequential.
Marshall Kosloff: And last but not least and fittingly so we need to talk about gen X. The left behind, the ignored all those things.
Helen Andrews: We don't ever, nobody needs to talk about gen X,
Marshall Kosloff: Give them, give us something. Give us something.
Helen Andrews: Gosh, my, my poor friend, Matt Hennessy, over at the wall street journal wrote an entire book about gen X and it's terrific. But I think it just did not get sufficient attention because sadly, nobody cares about gen X.
Marshall Kosloff: Quick, is he the one who says that gen X is going to save us all?
Was that his book?
Helen Andrews: That's his thesis. Yeah, they may yet. I don't know that could happen. It could happen late in the day. No, they gen X genuinely has, in some ways, just as much of a grievance against the boomers, because they're the ones who are trapped in their careers because all of the boomers just are not moving on.
There are too many of them. So the gen Xers have nowhere to advance, but I do genuinely think there is something special about having the boomers as your parents, because the boomers were fundamentally allergic to authority and you can't be a parent and not exercise authority. Being allergic to authority makes you unsuited to the very fundamental tasks of raising children.
So millennials are in a better position than anyone to diagnose what's wrong about the boomers. So poor gen X, they get sidelined again, but that's the reason why.
Marshall Kosloff: That's great. And I keep saying last question, but this actually is the real last question. Oh, sorry. Saagar. I thought you were dropping. Just ask it and then you're good.
Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, no. The very last question here, Helen, what about the zoomers? This is the real question, right? Which is, and I'm sure we have some zoomers on here. Some Tik Tok loving, what else do they do? Youtube star indulging, yeah, snap. No, no. Snapchat is awesome. Marshall, that's a millennial crap.
Minecraft playing, Mr. Beast watching. Are they the ones that are, they're, they will have, I guess gen X as parents. So is gen X going to save us all with their children?
Helen Andrews: I look forward to the anti-gen X polemic by the zoomers of the future. No, actually, as I was writing this book, I really wanted it to have something to say, not just to millennials who are angry at the boomers.
But to boomers who are bewildered by millennials, who understand why their children are so angry at them, or who supervise millennials in the workplace and don't understand why they are such crap workers. If you're a boomer out there and you don't understand why millennials are the way they are, hopefully this book will have something to say to you.
But the same way that those boomers feel about the snowflake millennials in their office, that they don't understand is how I feel about the tik toking zoomers I just don't get it.
Marshall Kosloff: I don't get this. I don't feel like the American conservative is full of tik toking zoomers in terms of its demographics, I feel like we're covered.
So Helen where can everyone find your work? Obviously, please purchase the book. We'll put a link in the show notes, go to bookshop.org to do that, but where else can everyone find you?
Helen Andrews: Yeah, the book is boomers, the men and women who promised freedom and deliver disaster, wherever fine books are sold.
My social media of choice is Twitter. That's where you can find me most often at H E R Andrews. And my day job is as a senior editor at the American conservative, which is at theamericanconservative.com.
Marshall Kosloff: Thank you Helen we really appreciate it.
Saagar Enjeti: There you go. Everybody go follow Helen by the book and all of that. Thanks.
Thanks so much.
Helen Andrews: Thanks so much for having me.
Marshall Kosloff: Yeah. Thanks Helen.