How Boomers Rule

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Introduction

Inasmuch as it has been a while since I made everybody mad, I recently reflected that perhaps it was time for me to take steps.

As it is no longer November, I will give some cautions and qualifications right here at the front end. As is my custom, I will do it in this second paragraph, right where everybody should be able to see it. I am going to say a number of distinct and disparate things in this post, and so if you are among those many who specialize in taking things out of context . . . you will have yourself a field day. From the title “How Boomers Rule,” I know there will be those who infer that I am saying that boomers should rule, no matter what, or that in every respect that matters, they have always ruled wisely, or that I have only taken up this subject because I am brittle and defensive on the point as I do confess myself to have been born in 1953—which was almost back in the forties.

But alas . . . on all such wild surmises, I am fully prepared to disappoint.

Setting the Stage

Anyone who has ever been involved in living with and caring for the elderly knows that there are times when really difficult conversations do have to occur. There do come times when the family has to intervene, insisting on taking away grandpa’s keys, or grandma’s credit cards, or both of their phones. This is not disrespect for the elderly—done right it is a most profound form of respect (1 Tim. 5:1).

But suppose the set up is a little bit different. Say a 32-year-old grandson, with 6 DUIs to his name, wants to take away grandpa’s keys because that would enable him to drive the Mercedes more, which is currently being used to drive—and pretty slowly, we might add—to an old guys’ breakfast at Denny’s every Friday. The rest of the time that sweet car is just sitting there in the garage, for pity’s sake, just begging to be flipped over a guard rail somewhere. This situation would be a tad different from the first one. I trust we should be able to come to an agreement on this point.

Scripture addresses both situations. It addresses both the impatience of youth and the intransigence of age. Which one it might be in any given situation is a matter of context. It all depends. There are in fact times when the younger have more on the ball than do their elders, and other times it is the other way.

Now the reason the psalmist knows more than his teachers, and has more understanding than the ancients is because he keeps the testimonies and precepts of the Lord. He is not just a punk popping off at his betters . . . he is a student of the Word. The only thing that keeps anybody steady is the Word.

On the other end, we see the young buck counselors who lost most of Rehoboam’s kingdom for him (1 Kings 12:6-11). His older counselors gave him some real wisdom, but the pack of young men who grew up with him, and who were impatiently itching to be a great noise in Israel, threw his kingdom down a sinkhole.

So who should be listened to? The biblical answer, as above, is that it depends. Depends on what? It depends upon what the Word of God is requiring of us. Take a gander at both elements side by side in Psalm 78.

Fathers need to instruct their children in the ways of God, and one of the things to be taught is how not to be like their fathers.

So with that it depends fixed in our minds, let us move on to some data.

Young People Don’t Have Very Much Money

Let us begin with some data that addresses the question implied by my title. How is it that boomers rule? How did that come about? The answer is simple. They are the ones with the money.

Out of all the private wealth held in the United States, the boomers have over half of it (almost 52%). That is just the way it is. Now since we all live on this conveyor belt called Time, this is by no means a permanent state of affairs. There will come a day, 50 years from now, say, when boomers will own none of it. The Silent Generation, the one right before the boomers, currently owns just 13% of all private wealth. But as recently as 2005, they were tied with the boomers at 46% each. That is because treasures on earth are necessarily transient (Matt. 6:19; Luke 12:21). All of it is in the process of going away for somebody. But before it goes away, it has an impact on who has influence in the current moment and who does not.

Now for some, this next observation will just be salt in the wound, but facts remain facts. Gen X currently owns 26% and the Millennials own 9%. But before anybody gets really riled up about this, and starts to look at this drastic inequity in the same way Bernie Sanders would want us to, back in 1990, the boomers owned only around 20%—and as just pointed out, that is 6% less than what Gen Xers currently own.

Now in that year 1990, I had been married for 15 years, had a lovely wife, three kids, and approximately three dimes. We did own our own house, but for a family of five, 900 square feet was not all that spacious. We were really grateful for it though.

Now of course, this observation can be immediately filed as just one more irritating and tone deaf boomer comment—as the backhanding move of “just pay your dues, man, and quit whining.” This retort is based on the assumption that a lot of Gen X and Millennials are simply tweaked at being shut out of the American Dream. Now I granted above that the boomers did do a lot of destructive things, but this is really not one of them.

A lot of this wealth business seems to me to be just the ordinary way the world works. Older people always have more money. And when the boomers finally make their exit, there is going to be massive wealth transfer, which is likely to land on the Millennials. And if everybody is still thinking like Bernie, this means that this will be taken as a grievous offense against both X and Z. So there is something missing when it comes to this whole question of wealth distribution, but I think the thing that is missing is gratitude.

Murderous Generation

But this is not offered as some sort of blanket pardon for the boomers. The great evil of the boomer generation was the sexual revolution, and the devastating impact that this had on family formation, on marriage and divorce, and with the bloody aftermath of it all in abortion.

The body count from the slaughterhouse of American abortion guilt runs in the millions. Roe was decided in 1973, about halfway through the period when Gen X was being born. The greatest offense committed by the boomers against the Gen Xers was the great evil of murdering so many of them. Obviously that was no bagatelle, no trifle. The boomers inaugurated the war between generations. The boomers started it, and did so with massive amounts of bloodshed. It really was grotesque.

Looking at an actual monstrosity like this has the advantage of focusing on a wickedness that the Scriptures would name as such, and not on something that Scripture doesn’t even talk about at all. Where in Scripture does it say that it is a sin to have more money than someone else? Or for one generation to be more comfortable than another one? That is a sin all right, but only in the Commie Bible.

But the great evil that boomers really did commit against the Gen Xers was an evil that the Xers in turn picked up and committed against the Millennials. Subsequent generations all walked in the ways of this bloody apostasy that began in earnest with my generation. In this respect, each generation has simply perpetuated this great generational crime, and so in the light of it no generation has any business getting on a high horse about anything.

Now if some Christian Gen Xers or Millennials protest against such a sweeping judgment, and say that they at any rate have always been stridently pro-life, and have stood opposed to this kind of evil all along, I grant the point, but would then say that the same thing would also be true of the boomers. Some of us have been in this fight for a long, long time. If you speak generally of one generation, then speak generally of them all. If you distinguish between good and evil within each generation, then do the same thing with all of them. Equal weights and measures.

But with all of this said, there is no denying the fact that it was during the ascendancy of the boomers that much of our cultural rot became pronounced.

And while murder is murder, and to be condemned regardless, it is worth pointing out that mass murder necessarily has economic consequences. One of the reasons why the boomer generation prospered materially was that there were so many of us. The name boomer reflects this—we are named after the post-war baby boom. So during the Roe years, we didn’t just kill precious children, made in the image of God. We also killed future inventors, painters, musicians, engineers, and preachers.

One of the central reasons for the bad blood . . . has been the blood.

Our Politics Currently

Now despite the radical and destructive nature of the boomer cultural moment, that radicalism has nevertheless grown significantly more conservative over the years.

What sort of political influence do the various generations have? I am referring to the political impact of their resources, whatever they currently are—and the resources I have in mind would be their numbers, their capital, their vocations, their networks, and so on.

Those who are 65 and older are 39% Republican, six points ahead of the Democrats. The next cohort (50-64) contains some boomers also, and they are 37% Republican, five points ahead of the Democrats. If you are a young and somewhat angsty hard right guy, but generally happy about the outcome of the last election, you should be willing to acknowledge that it was not your generation that gave this result to you, but rather the generation that is so easy for you to mock for being so “out of touch.” In short, the reason the commies didn’t win in 2024 was in large measure because of the current state of boomerbrain.

But let us adjust the question slightly, playing with the numbers. If women over 65 were the only ones that voted, Harris would have beaten Trump by almost ten points. If men over 65 were the only ones voting, Trump would have beaten Harris by 13 points. This is the kind of thing is frequently pointed to by some on the young-buck right as an argument against the 19th Amendment—and which I am actually happy to grant for the sake of argument, as far as that goes. “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them” (Is. 3:12). Okay. But the problem with the argument, at least for the Rehoboam-right, is that if they were the only ones voting (18-44), they would have given us Harris also. It would have been closer, but that’s what they would have done to us all.

So if I were feeling impish, which I am not quite, I might even say that young conservatives should stop referring to older conservatives as boomercons, and start describing us as the lone bulwark.

But enough of that. Let us look a bit closer at Isaiah 3.

Isaiah 3

The third chapter of Isaiah is often appealed to by those who think it is a shame for women to rule over men (which it is), but those citing the chapter have zoomed in too closely. They have identified the plague as being one of feminism, when the actual problem is a broader egalitarianism that revolts against all ordered hierarchy—an egalitarianism that has infected them right along with the feminists.

The nature of this kind of rot is described well by Shakespeare.

Isaiah begins by giving us a list of venerable Israelites . . .

These are all experienced men, and ancients are among them. And so then what disaster befalls the nation?

Age and experience are despised here, and the impudence of youth vaunts itself over “the ancient.” Ignorance is preferred over wisdom. Inexperience is preferred over experience. The callow is preferred over the weathered. Crudity is preferred over the honorable. Meme-making is preferred over the writing of long form arguments.

Women are not included until later on in Isaiah’s diatribe, and almost as an afterthought. The central problem is a disregard of God’s established order for all of us, and the women hectoring Hegseth at his confirmation hearing are certainly a part of that. But it is just a part of a much broader problem.

Giving women the vote in 1920 and giving 18-year-olds the right to vote in 1970 were events separated by 50 years, but by little else. They both were proceeding from the same impetus, which is the egalitarian spirit of our age.

Incidentally, one of the complaints made about some of the things I write—like this post—is that I don’t name whoever it is I have in mind. But when I debate with someone, I actually debate with them out in the open. I don’t have any objection to doing that at all, and have done it many times. I have had many named adversaries. But when I am highlighting a general problem, or a tendency, or a vibe, I don’t need to name names. All I have to do is post the article to X, and watch a bunch of the comments make the point for me. Who am I talking about? Well, I would point to the comment thread shortly to arrive. One, two, three . . . I think we should forgive someone who speculated that I was paying these people to do that because that would be is a mistake with a semblance of plausibility. “These people must be Wilson’s anons. They are doing everything he says.” Some of the comments that will appear in response to this article will look like they were assembled by ADHD three-year-olds. “Neener, neener, you boomer Jew.”

The Authority Ladder

One of the things I have taught young women for decades is this. Suppose a young lady meets a young man who is very brash and confident about how authority will work in his home after he gets married, and he jabs at the “woman, submit” passages with a dogmatic finger. But suppose also that he then goes strangely silent on all the passages that would require him to be submissive to anyone—parents (Ex. 20:12; Prov. 13:1), pastors (Heb. 13:7, 17), civic rulers (Rom. 13:1-7), or one’s elders (1 Pet. 5:5). If a young man has decided and bellicose views about those who need to be submissive to him, but very broad and loose views about any submission that he is supposed to render to others, my advice to young ladies has always been to run.

Those who are younger need to submit to their elders. The verb here for submit is hupotasso, the very same demeanor that is required of wives in Scripture toward husbands. And one of the things I have seen play out over the last several years, in outrageous ways, is the most insolent treatment of older teachers in the body of Christ. This comes from younger men, attacking men who have proven faithful over the course of decades. And they attack them in the same way feminists want to smash the patriarchy, and they attack in the same way because it is the same egalitarian spirit.

I know, I know, I know. I wrote that previous paragraph as a set up, as a trap. And I am afraid that some of you fell into it.

Whenever a spirit of rebellion takes root in any class of people that has a duty of deference and submission to another class, the easiest thing in the world to do is to mock anyone in the disrespected class who tries to stay faithful to the position that God has assigned to them. Learning how to mock is like thorns under a pot having to learn how to crackle. It is the work of minutes to figure out how the person must be protesting the disrespect shown them simply because they are “threatened,” or “power tripping,” or “defensive,” or “stuck in the post-war consensus.” You don’t have to respond to the Scriptures, or answer any of their arguments. All that is necessary is to roll out a savvy gif that shows how far above simple obedience you are.

From the Playbook of the Feminists

Anyone who knows anything about the fallenness of this dirty world of ours knows that the early feminists did have genuine abuses to point at, and they took to the task with enthusiasm. Men who really had been skunks and scoundrels were made the poster children of the feminist cause. But therein was the trap. As soon as the feminist movement got to a point where they had sufficient strength, the revolutionary spirit came out and they began attacking the men who were not like that at all. The enemy was no longer the dirt bag who impregnated a girl, and then high tailed it. The enemy suddenly became the faithful husband who had married a woman and spent the rest of his life dutifully providing for her and their children. Glorified prostitution, they called it.

Men were not attacked for being sinners, but rather for just being men. And the more faithful they were in their calling as men, the more the abuses of the miscreant males were used against them. Faithful Christian husbands are not being attacked for abusing their wives, because they don’t do that. They were being attacked with the sins of other men. They were not attacked for sins, but they were certainly attacked with them. They were not attacked for abusing, but they were charged with abusing, and the fact that they were not like that at all didn’t matter in the slightest.

The same thing is happening here. Collectively the generation of boomers really did do an awful lot of cultural damage, and there is a lot of folly to point to. But enough about Neil Young. The restive right, let us call them, has now taken to attacking those boomers who never did go along with their generation’s folly at all—or who did but repented and wised up later, kind of like Wordsworth did. See the above section on how the boomers are currently the most conservative generation.

In this moment, turning our political life over to the Millennials would be kind of like turning it over to the electorate of Vermont, one of our whitest states, and fully two thirds of whom voted for communism in this last go round.

Is This Not Fair and Balanced?

So folly is folly, regardless of the age of the head in which it occurs. And wisdom is wisdom, regardless of the age of the one bringing the wisdom. I take the voice of Elihu as anticipating the greatness of God from the whirlwind, and he was the youngest of all of those there.

But none of this sets aside the structured hierarchy that God has established in the world. There are times when we must speak across the boundary lines that He has fixed, but we must always do it with deference and respect. And why?

Woke Right?

I am not among those who glibly charge anyone on the hard right with being their own version of right wing “woke.” That is too often said simply as a lame attempt at a clever come back. “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re one too!”

But this is not to say that the cultural forces that swirl around all of us all the time have left the right unaffected. It is not as though these thought forms are automatically kept out of certain circles, provided those circles use the adjective right in their name or profile. Put another way, even though the jab can be too broadly applied, and for partisan reasons, it remains a fact that there is such a thing as the woke right. It does exist.

What are four indicators that we are dealing with such a thing?

First, if I say that there is such a thing as the woke right, that the thing exists, and someone in the comments jumps to the conclusion that I am thereby accusing anyone who disagrees with me on the right of being woke right, I deny the charge with warmth. But I would also add that the person who reacts that way is a member of the woke right. It is like me saying that “some feminists are harpies,” and a woman accuses me of saying that all women are harpies. No . . . but we now know where her allegiance is.

Second, we see it when group identities are used freely as terms of praise or blame, meaning that justification and/or condemnation are applied on the basis of simple membership in that group—and when for the purposes of whatever discussion you are in, nothing else is necessary. This is the kind of thinking that should disqualify people from jury duty.

Third, we see it when any disparities to the disadvantage of the group you are in are disparities that are automatically assumed to be the result of deliberate malice or evil design. This is how envy always works. The simple disparity is the only proof of malevolence that is needed.

And last, there is a foundational faith in disruption and chaos. The revolutionary mind is a mind on fire, and it is driven by a naive faith that if the current corrupt system is simply torn down, then some new order will mysteriously arise to replace it.

In sum, hair-trigger allegiance, group think, a leveling spirit, and faith in destruction. And if you see three out of four, be sure to steer clear.