Tailspin. A different look at the Boomers

I don't know if this link to Meet the Press will post or not.  I find these links problematic. 



At any rate, this is one of two recent books out there that touches on the concept of cultures in termoil and destruction, and which given their contents and at least in one case (which I'll get to in a moment) their authors, should be listened to.

The first book is one called "Tailspin" by Stephen Brill.   I haven't read it, but I saw that it made the cover with the provocative title about "how my generation broke America".  With that cover, I figured it was going to be yet another blame it on the millennials screed, but in fact it's Brill's thesis that the Baby Boomer generation in fact "broke America".

If you listen to this interview from  Meet The Press, it's even more disturbing than that.  Brill, who is a lawyer, argued that the opening up of colleges and universities based on merit rather than (not clearly spoken) economic class, produced the "knowledge economy".  That, and he notes it, sounds good, but in reality what it did is open up liberal law schools in that fashion which produced tons of smart activist lawyers who have no restraint whatsoever, and have used their knowledge to destroy social controls on the right and the left.

There's a lot to that, and again only implying it, he's also indicating that the entire American social structure is now controlled by a hyperactive thesis that everyone and everything needs to be a super active over achiever.  This isn't what most people really desire, but with everything basically ruined and the social controls that kept that from being  necessity removed, that's what we are in. And that, he maintains, is what broke the country.  Part of the interview, for example, is as follows:

STEVEN BRILL:
Or, you know, a consumer rights claim. So, the knowledge economy typically ended up with liberal lawyers who were coming out of, you know, liberal law schools, going to liberal law firms and doing the legal engineering that caused all the discontent that we have in, you know, the middle class today. The Paul Weiss law firm, for example, in New York.
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
STEVEN BRILL:
A notable bastion of, you know, Democrats. They did the legal engineering for the J.P. Stevens company when they figured out how to fight unions.
CHUCK TODD:
Is this sort of the harshness of Darwinism, is what you're saying? It's like, "Okay, it became survival of the smartest. And survival of the hardest working. And we--"
(OVERTALK)
CHUCK TODD:
--"got this new elite." Right. And so, the door was open for many people.
STEVEN BRILL:
You've got it exactly right.
CHUCK TODD:
And then, what happened? What about these people that were left behind? Are they not capable of doing it?
STEVEN BRILL:
Well, what we usually have had in this country, and what any country needs in order to be balanced and to survive, is a balance where there are guard rails that are put on all of the overachievers. So that they can't do too much in terms of the legal rights they assert, the financial rights they assert. And that got lost in this country because these people were so smart that they ran all over that stuff.

I suspect that there's a lot of truth in that disturbing message.

Indeed, I've posted similar theories of my own along those lines here before, although not quite in the same fashion.

I've struggled to fully define what occurred, but it is clear to me that something has really changed in American society since World War Two.  We've had a consumer economy since the early 20th Century, or maybe the late 19th, but it's been nothing like what we currently have.  Even through the Great Depression and the recovery from it, and World War Two, people's focus was much less on making it big as having a decent life, which tended to be focused on family life. And that focus was much, much different than today.  Starting in the 1970s, as the Boomers came into the mainstream, that really changed and it hasn't quite changing.

It isn't the only thing that's changed, particularly recently, and tying them all together is something that people have grasped for but not really been able to define.  Brill may have hit on the thesis.  The hyper over achievers in society have broken down all the barriers of any kind and have defined absolutely everything as a self centered competitive endeavor.  And its been massively destructive and, moreover, massively misdirected.  That will be really hard to fix, although Brill is optimistic that it can be and in fact will be.

I hope he's correct.

The other book that I've been pondering along these lines, which I also haven't read but which I might order, is Weigel's "The Fragility of Order".  I mentioned that here the other day.