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I was in high school when I came across a copy of ‘13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail’ in the principal’s office. The book with its shortened ‘generation’ title, computer reference, mixture of cartoons and factoids had been intended for teenagers, but was mostly read by the baby boomers trying to understand them. And ‘13th Gen’s message was to blame the Boomers.
‘13th Gen’ was the work of two D.C. consultants and staffers William Strauss and Neil Howe trying to popularize their, unfortunately all too popular, ‘generational theory’ to a younger generation that they presumed was stupid, shallow and incapable of grasping anything that wasn’t an MTV music video. And they did it by trying to convince Gen X they were victims.
The popular stereotype of the newest generation as lazy idiots wasn’t a new one.
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders. They disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Plato wondered.
The Greatest Generation had been held in contempt by its elders who had fought in the trenches amid poisoned gas, and the veterans of Normandy then scorned the Boomers, but Gen X was the first generation to be both held in contempt and to be told it wasn’t their fault.
When I skimmed through 13th Gen, the takeaway was that my generation was doomed, the Boomers had taken all the good things in life and left nothing but crumbs and a poisoned chalice. We would inherit a bad economy and a wrecked environment and the Boomers who selfishly did this would unfairly blame us for being slackers even though we never had a chance.
13th Gen is long forgotten because Strauss and Howe made a bad bet on the branding, trying to brand my generation as the 13th after America’s Founding. A bad novel written by an author influenced by the ‘Strauss-Howe Generational Theory’ borrowed the old Generation X name that had been in use for every generation beginning with the Baby Boomers. And it stuck.
By the time I was skimming through 13th Gen, I was confused by the title because we had long since been known as Generation X and I wasn’t impressed by its premise that I was one of the downtrodden, a member of a ‘generation’ rather than myself. I had not yet learned to apply the concept of ‘Marxism’ to pop culture messages but victimhood had never appealed to me.
Strauss and Howe did better when they named Millennials who proved less resistant to generational victimhood than Generation X had and then the awkwardly named Gen Z had come of age in a culture where victimhood had become the default setting for daily life.
Generational victimhood turned generations, beginning with mine, into minority groups, simultaneously treated as inferior and as victims, who needed to be condescended to and life had to be made easy for, because we weren’t good enough and it wasn’t our fault.
Gen X and then every generation after us were the new ‘blacks’, told that there was no use in trying because the game had been rigged against us, that we should stop working hard and start radicalizing against our generational oppressors. And much as black people were condescended to and organized in this fashion by white liberals, Baby Boomers like Strauss and Howe were the ones telling newer generations beginning with mine to blame their generation.
This behavior might seem paradoxical to anyone who took the Strauss-Howe generation paradigm seriously, but it’s how Marxism works as revolutionary thought-leaders seek to define an underclass of ‘others’ to organize against their peers, the poor against the rich, minorities against whites, women against men, and the young against the old, to overthrow the system.
Academics trying to dismantle the system claimed that Gen X had to be talked down to and so replaced English Literature with the lyrics of Kurt Cobain, then Buffy episodes for Millennials and SpongeBob for Gen Z. (The cartoon character shows up alongside Karl Marx and Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a comparative literature class at Emory University about the evils of work.)
Radicalizing Gen Z paid dividends with the WTO riots in Seattle that foreshadowed Occupy Wall Street and introduced Antifa violence in major cities. Organizers billed it as the voice of a disaffected generation. Their ‘disaffection’ coincidentally sounded like Marxist talking points. The violence marked the official passing of the radical torch across generations. “WTO Protest: The apathy generation finally has a reason to be angry,” a relieved Independent article proclaimed.
Every new generation was inducted into the culture of anger and taught that all their problems were the fault of the Boomers and the generations that had come before them. The same core message of 13th Gen was distilled to each generation. Every generation was different, more disaffected, more lacking and more in need of being condescended to. Older generations had to learn how to talk to and make allowances for Gen X, then Millennials and then Gen Z. Worse work habits and ethics weren’t immaturity due to low expectations, but signs of ‘authenticity’.
The new generations were the new ‘noble savages’, true to themselves and therefore less prone to adapting to capitalism and polite society. Their truths would help redefine us.
A decade after the Strauss-Howe worldview was popularized, everyone took it for granted that we were defined by generations, not by our individual selves. This brand of socio-political astrology convinced hundreds of millions of people to measure themselves and others by the generational equivalent of Scorpio and Libra that were just as real and just as valid.
Identity politics works because people love to group themselves into artificial categories, granfalloons, that appear to explain their identity in relation to a large whole. Generational identity, like the rest of Marxism, is a false construct based on dubious theories about society. Even though people assert that they’re one generation or another, no one even agrees what years serve as the boundaries for the artificial generations beginning with Generation X.
And the real purpose of the generational divides isn’t a meaningful identity, but radicalism.
Fast forward to the present and generational victimhood, contempt for previous generations and calls to “listen to the youth” aren’t just a staple of leftist politics, but of the woke right. The litany of complaints sound familiar. The newest generation is oppressed. They can’t get jobs or get married because the system has been rigged against them. All they can do is attack the system.
What used to be slacker Marxism has been adopted by apologists for groypers and other woke right movements who claim that the likes of Fuentes are victims of the Boomers. The old paleocon criticism of conservatives was that they’re a generation away from adopting liberal positions but the woke right proves that it’s a generation away from adopting Marxist ones.
Generational identity politics is the Marxism of losers. And that loser credo is what the “OK Boomer” taunt really comes down to. The only things sadder than the woke right whiners are the adult apologists pretending to take their whining seriously as the future of the movement.
“Listen to the youth” is as dumb coming out of the mouths of the woke right as it did coming from the far left and generational identity politics is as fake as any other kind. The Groypers, like their DSA counterparts, are rich kids, not the sons of the struggling working class who fill out the ranks of the military and do all the dirty jobs, with the leisure time to get into political trolling.
Generational identity politics follows the usual identity politics pattern of manufacturing an oppressor/oppressed paradigm and then painting their targets as the oppressors. The targets are not the ‘other side’, certainly not the Left, but the system they want to break and take over.
That’s why the woke right and its defenders don’t fight the Left, they fight conservatives.
The woke right’s professional generational victimhood is a farce in which rich kids claim that they’re locked out of the economy and obviously gay men complain that women are ‘undateable.’ Their complaints are just as sincere as their leftist counterparts who claimed that they wouldn’t get married until gay marriage was legal and that they won’t have children because of global warming. They invent a world in which every generation before them, especially the Boomers, had it easy while all they can do is start podcasts with $5,000 worth of studio equipment to complain about how everything and everyone is keeping them down.
Life in America has been going downhill, not because of just one single generation, but every generation which made the new low into the new normal, and yet it’s also to the credit of every generation that it kept the country going throughout all the cultural and economic decay.
If the majority of the population of any period really were more bad than good, the United States of America would look like Haiti. No generation has a monopoly on sins or virtues. Behind the stereotypes of each generation and its worst representatives is the concrete reality that when its time came, each generation provided the heroes and the everyday people who make life possible. As Americans, what we truly have in common, beyond the surface detritus of pop culture, fashion and memories of world events, are the values that extend across time.
Those who try to tell you otherwise, whether they claim to be on the left or the right, are the envious and the ungrateful, the corrupt and the false, who want to tear America down. They’re not the victims of anyone except their own sins and refusal to reckon with their natures. We should feel sorry for them, not because they’re oppressed, but because they’re losers.
And losers will always cluster into a group, blame someone else and demand to be in charge.
