A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Pity the Babes in the Woods

What an odd and labour-intensive way of getting even with your parents - write a book, not about them, but their entire generation. Now here is an author with issues.

Here’s the bare logic of this book: In American democracy The People are sovereign and The People in recent years have exercised that sovereignty abominably, so much so that the wisdom of the Sovereignty of The People is becoming highly questionable. The author seems quite aware that he couldn’t profitably write a book about the failure of American democracy so he wrote one about the failure of a generation of The People - the so-called Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 - during whose purported sovereignty the wheels came off of the American democratic experiment. Gibney’s attack on Boomers rather than democracy allows the author to sell books to steadfastly patriotic younger Americans while condemning everything they hold dear. He can also maintain his own hope in the future of America - as the Boomers die out, he is confident of a new Golden Age of prosperity and social justice, surely with himself in high political office..

Gibney is right to cite the Boomer generation for their frequent blind ignorance and malicious stupidity. It was Boomers who have been in charge since the 1980’s, and the Boomers in charge were put in charge by other Boomers. So by definition Boomers must carry the can. The evidence of Boomer malfeasance in the office of both politician and private citizen is overwhelming according to Gibney: The unmaking of the fabric of traditions of civil courtesy and middle-class toleration; the creation of a culture of self-serving individualistic idealism; the establishment of greed as a prevailing virtue; the compromise of their progeny’s future through the accumulation of massive national debt; decaying infrastructure; almost continuous war-mongering, a range of government policies that made the poor poorer, the rich richer, and kept the middle class in a fearful limbo; the plundering of state benefits throughout their lives. Yes, these things certainly happened on the Boomer watch.

So who could argue with Gibney’s list, which is apparently compelling, not least in its incompleteness. And who could argue with Gibney’s accusation of the lack of conscience or remorse about these events as the true sign of sociopathy. There is certainly no monument which expresses atonement. But where could one go to register an apology? I take him to mean that there seems to be no one in a leadership position who is willing to take responsibility in a biography or memoir. I don’t know of any either. But offhand I can’t think of leaders from any previous generations stepping up to the plate either. A nonsensical argument really. But just to calm Gibney slightly, therefore, let me be the first to declare mea culpa on behalf of the entire generation (actually I already did at length: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

In any case, the book is wrong to blame this Boomer generation, sociopathic or not, for the state in which the country finds itself. Gibney doesn’t appreciate the traditions of the American Way which is what he’s really writing about. The condition of persistent incompetence - political, financial ,social, legal, environmental, and aesthetic - is an inevitable consequence of the logic of the American system of government and its associated culture, of which Gibney himself is very much a product. That system and its culture shaped the Boomers and encouraged them to make their mess. Boomers were the next in line, as it were, of previous generations who praised American democracy while exploiting every crack in its very porous façade. Boomers built on the shoulders of the giants before them. Gibney might well look at the foundations rather than the floor just below his.

Consider the main political and cultural facts. From its inception the electoral system in the United States - the way candidates are chosen, elections financed, voter eligibility defined, constituency boundaries established, and votes counted - meant that the the concept of The People is highly variable. The country has never been sure what this concept meant. Disenfranchisement - both legally and as a matter of practical routine - of people of colour is a long-standing tradition that needs no commentary other than that it is still going strong. There is a straight line from slavery and black voter suppression, even in pre-Civil War Northern states, to Democratic Jim Crow, to Republican gerrymandering and voter disqualification. Keeping The People an uncertain idea is in the blood of America as its primary corruption, its Original Sin.

But this conceptual ambiguity about The People is made largely moot by another aspect of the American system. Its tri-partite structure was meant to mitigate the possibility of the emergence of a sovereign, that is an individual with the power to declare exceptions to any established law. America prides itself that no one is above the law. This is entirely accurate. The law is indeed sovereign. By design there is no sovereign power to usurp it that is held either by The People (however that is defined) or any other wannabe monarch or dictator. Power is so distributed that its locus can’t be found, something Trump learned to his frustration in 2021. The design of hidden sovereignty appears to work. But at a price.

For a start, the phrase Sovereignty of the People is entirely vacuous and therefore so is Gibney’s thesis about Boomer responsibility as The People. And just as the locus of sovereignty cannot be determined, so the locus of responsibility and accountability is equally elusive. Consequently there is no force of blame or shame in American governmental structures. This is not a generational phenomenon at all. It is how the system works and what the culture demands. Ministers of state may resign for personal crimes but extremely rarely for professional mismanagement. Again, the psychotic Trump administration is an example. But so is that of paranoid Harry Truman, the fraudulent Warren Harding, the treasonous Richard Nixon, and the racist Woodrow Wilson to name but a few in the 20th century. The 19th was even worse.

The diffusion of power means that blame can be shared widely and thus neutralised; and that accusers have little power to force personal accountability. Thus Gibney has no choice but to throw shade to an entire generation. Easy to do, and no one’s likely to sue for defamation. He can name names like Trump and Bush and Clinton but his accusations have no force. “Who cares,” is a rather standard reaction, “We got rid of them didn’t we? The system works.” Boomers are his target simply because they’re still around, in his view, polluting the political and social waters of America, not because they are noticeably more incompetent than their predecessors.

And there’s more misdirection by Gibney. The diffusion of power in America means the country is not so much governed, as it is adjudicated. Political issues are constantly weighed, negotiated, and resolved according to the interests at hand by folk who are directly or indirectly dependent on those interests. This adjudication of interests, or values, is most often economic, sometimes religious, but never moral or altruistic; and, despite its staging for public consumption, adjudication is always concluded in private agreements reflecting the interests of the negotiators themselves - so much pork in my barrel for so much pork in yours. Boomers used this very democratic process but they didn’t invent it. Gibney does not like how things get adjudicated. Neither do I. Neither did de Tocqueville 180 years ago. La même chose. Nothing new at all to do with Boomers.

Of course politics is not independent of the culture in which it takes place. The parties in the process of adjudication - in both its legislative and judicial phases - are overwhelmingly corporate entities not individuals. America is neither a capitalist nor a socialist but a corporate nation. And it is corporations which finance elective candidates, provide research as guidance in the detailed formulation of law, lobby legislators, and subsequently litigate in court to enforce their self interested interpretation of law. They also employ the majority of the constituents of politicians. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gibney, a successful corporate leader, neglects to mention the dominance of corporate culture in America and his part in it.

The Founders knew nothing of the corporation, its potential for the concentration of wealth, or its future pervasiveness and power. Collectively they form the reservoir of non-military power in the country. If democratic politicians want a share of that power, they adjudicate appropriately. The Boomers know what the Founders couldn’t. Yes, Boomers are the corporate creeps who inherited their corporate loyalties from their Depression Era parents. And when you inherit lemons, if you’re smart you don’t make lemonade, you plant lemon orchards on a bank loan, line up second round equity investors, short lemon futures, and arrange an IPO to cash out. Oh, wait… that’s what Gibney does for a living!

So the Boomers went their parents one better and opted for corporate careers not mere corporate jobs. They moved up, largely by being skilled at the process of adjudication, which is the essence of how corporations are run. Gibney doesn’t seem to get it: the corporation is the dominant shaper of American culture. It has been so for at least a century. And barring some natural catastrophe or nuclear war, it will continue to direct the moral as well as economic energies of America. Getting ahead in corporate life is what life has meant for the Boomers. Hate the Boomers, hate the corporations that moulded them. Then what, Mr. Venture Capitalist? You’re a pretty big cog on the corporate wheel. Are you planning to retire to a Buddhist monastery?

What is misplaced in Gibney’s extended rant is not his factually justified accusation of moral bankruptcy and managerial incompetence by many Boomers. These can’t be denied and they are regrettable. The Boomers primary flaw however was that they were of their time and they did what they considered their time demanded without serious reflection. They succumbed to the temptations of democratic politics and corporate economics. Like every other generation, Boomers were babes in the woods, travelling so far into the undergrowth until they could find no other place to be. Gibney and his generation will do exactly the same in the woods planted by the Boomers. The real challenge for Gibney and his cohort is getting an understanding not of the psychoses of the Boomer generation but the psychoses of their own which will be different but probably just as devastating.

Postscript 26/10/2021: upon further consideration, I have realised the authentic genre of this book and its place in the cosmos: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews