Demography is destiny.
Seven decades of Communist Party policies have left China with a soon-to-crash tsunami of the aged and male. The Middle East and Africa’s impoverished fecundity is flooding the West with single young men on the take.
In the West, the children of the Baby Boom generation are cannibalising their parents’ revolution.
The Millennials are, literally and metaphorically, the children of the Baby Boomers. Of course, not every parent of a Millennial is a Boomer and not every Boomer has Millennial children, but most of them do. Perhaps more importantly, most of the teachers of Millennials were Boomers, both because of their relative ages and because the Boomers themselves formed a very large generation of teachers. And when Millennials started attending universities at the turn of the millennium, the senior professors, heads of department, and administrators were overwhelmingly Baby Boomers.
I’ve written several times that the tide of Marxist violence associated with BLM/Antifa is really just the continuation of the Boomers’ collective temper-tantrum at Nixon from 1968 through the 70s.
When you see American cities in flames, widespread condemnation of “the patriarchy”, the decolonisation of the curriculum, calls for the end of capitalism, the police (any police) labelled as fascist, conservative speakers kicked off campus, the rise of environmental catastrophism, racialisation masquerading as racial justice, and direct action masquerading as democracy, does that ring a bell?
Revolutions, it is said, devour their children (literally, in the Stalin and Mao eras). But what is happening now is that the parents are being eaten by their children.
When Harvard’s sixty-five-year-old celebrity psychologist Steven Pinker was targeted by the cancel culture, the 629 signatories to the indictment were mostly graduate students and junior academics, exactly the sorts of people he educated in the first place.
Still, Pinker and his fellow Boomer greybeards couldn’t quite bring themselves to admit what a monster they’d birthed. The collective “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” kinda-sorta condemned cancel culture – but only where it hurt them. The real problem, they insisted, was the “radical right”.
OK, Boomer.
The problem for the Harper’s 153 is that there is very little of the radical Right left to “resist”. The Left like to identify every Right with Fascism, but it’s hard to be an effective Antifa when there are so few “Fas” around to oppose[…]
Fascism is a necessary bugbear for leftist intellectuals, because the original “Right” of the French Revolution has just about disappeared. These days even David Flint doesn’t espouse the divine right of kings. (For the divine rights of queens, there’s always the ABC.) But the original “Left” is still with us, or wants to be[…]self-identification as being “of the Left” remains intellectually fashionable even today.
As if that’s going to save them when the tumbrils come rolling out. As formerly right-on progressives from Germaine Greer to J K Rowling (born on the cusp of GenX but a thoroughgoing Boomer) have learned, you can never be woke enough for the cancel culture inquisitors.
Baby Boomer leftists might be dismayed, but they shouldn’t be surprised. They were warned: by Lenin, by Marx, even by the reactionary du Pan. Writing at the outset of the Terror in 1793, du Pan said of the Jacobins that “whosoever quitted the Club, for the purpose of disputing its authority … ended by returning within its orbit, or being crushed by it”. Members of the Harper’s 153, take note. The Millennial Jacobins smell blood in the water, and it might just be yours.
OK Boomer, you made these little monsters. Instead of bleating, “Why would they do this?” and continuing to flail at your “far-right” tar-baby, you might all be better to confess, “My god, what have we done?”
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.
