The story of America over the last half-century is the story of the baby boomers. Born between 1946 and 1964, the boomers were, for more than 50 years, the country’s largest generational cohort, and though millennials, born 1981-1996, finally overtook them last year, the boomers remain in many ways the most important. Their money still drives our economy, their concerns still dominate our politics, and the stories they tell themselves about our country and its history are still, by and large, the stories that children are taught in schools today. When Joe Biden is sworn into office on Wednesday, he will be our first nonboomer president since George H.W. Bush, only because Biden, born in 1942, is technically a member of the preboomer silent generation. His four predecessors, whatever the differences among them, were and are boomers to their core.
But what is the essence of their boomerism? And why, as the boomers age into retirement, are their children and grandchildren turning against them? The essayist, former Washington Examiner magazine editor, and millennial Helen Andrews attempts to answer this question in Boomers, a scathing and witty new broadside against America’s most mythologized and self-mythologizing generation.
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