I see posts from folks in younger generations lamenting the shortcomings of the older generation, that is to say, the Boomers—of which, for the sake of full disclosure, I am one. From what I can gather, much of the lamentation is more than warranted. The cost of living makes it almost impossible for kids newly become adults to get ahead in this country. The political divisions that pit us vs. them are so deep that many of us, and not just the younger folks, despair of moving beyond them and into a more perfect union. The state of the school systems in all the states is so abysmal that I, for one, despair of ever having a well-educated citizenry. The price of even the most routine medical procedure beggars us all—or if not the procedure itself, then hedging against illness with unaffordable insurance.
And then I think back to when I was a youngster encountering the myriad problems of the last century. Many of those memories are vivid. The unfettered expression of American apartheid in the water-fountain signs that specified this one for whites only, that one for Negroes; the tar-paper shotgun shacks along the highway with hopeless, despairing families barefoot on the front steps; the burning cities and the National Guard everywhere; the debacle of Chicago ‘68, when the whole world was watching a police riot against demonstrators exercising their constitutional right to assemble and petition; the thousands and thousands of kids drafted into and killed in an armed force battling in a senseless neo-colonial war; the corrupt and corrupting politics of Tricky Dicky and his minions in the White House and, finally, in the Department of Justice.
It’s true that the economic realities back then were very different from what they are now. Still, although I cannot speak for anyone else, from my own experience the differences are not as large as it appears. I recognize that I’m not the best avatar of my generation’s coming into the working world. I was in school until I was thirty years old, and so I expected to struggle and be financially marginal. Still, even when I finally became a worker, I never ever lived in a house anywhere near the median price nationwide. Indeed, when my wife and I finally bought a house, it was a row house in a poor city, the cost of which was at best a quarter of the median price of housing in America. Even now, after so many years of working and fully retired, we live in a house that’s about one half the median price of housing, which we can afford because we still reside in that same poor city. The one thing that seems to me very unfair in current social reality is the cost of college. The increase in those costs is absurd and obscene.
At any rate, the crisis in early twenty-first century America does not seem to me unique or unusual. Here’s the second verse from Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” which reflects the realities of 1969:
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Would a young person in 2026, when I’m writing this, recognize the sentiment? I think so. What underlies those lines is an experience of social reality very much parallel to current events, from racism to economic inequality and from exorbitant military budgets to the destruction of the planet by pollution, heat, plastics.
As is common in the language of our 21st century contemporaries, the Airplane focused on generational differences. Back then I did as well. I remember the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra, for instance. The people who got us deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War morass were all of them part of that generation that got old. The most recalcitrant of the recalcitrant racists were all of them part of that generation that got old. The despicable leaders who brought the National Guard to foreclose on all legitimate protest against authoritarianism were all of them part of that generation that got old.
And then a little bit of reflection. When the Little Rock Nine came to their Central High School classes, it was not that older generation that stood in their way. Their coevals did. When the National Guard soldiers shot and killed students in Jackson State and in Kent State, they were not members of that older generation. They were the students’ coevals. When the Chicago police beat the hell out of demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, they were, for the most part, not part of that older generation. They were the demonstrators’ coevals.
The same is true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The people who bore those tiki-torches in Charlottesville were not Boomers. Only about 40% of people who support our current authoritarian president are Boomers. Most of the tech bros who govern our economic, political, social realities are not Boomers. Zuckerberg isn’t. Musk isn’t. Page and Brin aren’t. Bezos is, but just barely.
My point? Blaming a generation for the problems we face, whether we do that in 1969 or in 2026, is just wrong. I’ll acknowledge that the older one gets the less flexible one’s attitudes become. But the “young whippersnappers are fucking up the world” point of view is as common as the “damned Boomers have screwed us over” point of view, I think. As far as I can see, though, it’s not generational differences that create the messes we experience, in 2026 or in 1969. On the contrary, the culprits are the people who hold power, regardless of their generational affiliation. I’ll concede a very important point. Given that older people have had more time to accrue the resources that produce that kind of controlling power, there’s no doubt that older generations have an undue influence on the way the society is organized. Still, I maintain that it’s not the fact that they’re old that makes the difference, but rather the fact that they have power, derived from wealth or social status or whatever resource empowers them.
If I’m right about this, that it’s not generational differences per se but rather the accumulation of power among a set of people that produces the circumstances that agitated 1969 as much as 2026, then it follows that the key question to ask is whether it’s possible to forestall such accumulation. As I’ve suggested, in the way that societies are currently organized, older generations do elaborate power for themselves simply because longevity allows for the accumulation of the resources that produce power. But, again, it’s not simply longevity and old age that are at issue. Is such accumulation inevitable? Is it preventable?
The current crop of tech bros is informative. Up until some discrete point in their lives, those bros were generally speaking on the progressive side of things. My sense is that the switch to a right-wing political stance came as the Biden presidency and democratic congressional folks exerted pressure to regulate the expansion of the bros’ enterprises. It was then, in 2022 and 2023, that the bros experienced efforts to rein in the increasingly monopolistic practices of corporations like Meta and Google while at the same time the government tried to exercise its trust-busting authority. Those government initiatives coincided with the 2024 election, so that the hitherto Democrat-leaning bros became part of the Trump campaign. The most notorious case of support for Trump is Elon Musk, of course, who having voted for Obama and Hilary Clinton and then for Biden in 2020, now contributed near three hundred million dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The switch is not relevant to the primary question I asked, however. Sure there’s no doubt that plutocrats who want to generate even more wealth would not support politicians who seek to constrain their businesses by pursuing antitrust and anti-monopolistic actions against those businesses. But the power was there before the switch took place. The issue I’m trying to figure out is whether it’s inevitable for any society, under any political or economic arrangement, to produce differences in wealth and status that lead to the kinds of social and economic disparities that agitated 1969 and continue to agitate 2026.
Is it possible to have an entirely egalitarian society, in other words?
As I see it, history suggests that such egalitarianism is not possible. Whether it’s aristocrats in a latifundist system or monarchs in a feudal system or nation states in a mercantilist system or straightforwardly capitalist enterprises, every society on the planet has produced the kind of disparity in wealth and status that engenders an accumulation of power in the hands of the very few at the expense of deep inequalities and inequities.
Revolution seems to do no good. The American Revolution is said to be the exception, but Washington Irving saw the fallacy of that assertion when he made Rip Van Winkle wake up to a newly created United States where the only notable difference was that the George III Inn had become the George Washington Inn. The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? All of them reproduce the same disparities, and therefore the same inequities, as existed before the revolutionary “transformation.” Before and after, it turns out, are the same.
Marx dreamt of an utterly egalitarian society. But in practice the societies ostensibly predicated on Marxist principles produce even more disparity in power than any other system, with the exception, perhaps, of absolute monarchy. The ruling cadres in Cuba does not suffer the same painful daily existence that the ordinary Cuban does. The same goes for any other country that has laid claim to being “communist.” The argument goes that all such countries are not really communist but rather were working towards communism via the state capitalism that they actually practiced. OK. Marx’s dream remains a dream, and one regular feature of dreams is that they are not reality.
Is it the case, then, that a truly egalitarian society is impossible? Hobbes’s vision of the world before and after the creation of a social contract certainly suggests that such a society is absolutely not possible. Before the institution of the great Leviathan, local centers of power come into being in the “state of nature,” where every individual is in battle against every other individual. Might makes right, as they say, and the more might one person has, the more inequities there are. After the institution of the great Leviathan, that imagined creature becomes the “mortal God,” wielding unchecked authority and power as he wills. Society gains a surcease of the eternal war of each against all, but at the cost of even a hint of equity or egalitarianism.
At this point I’m reminded of two passages from the works of very different playwrights. In Julius Cæsar Shakespeare has Cassius say that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” I’d substitute “humans” for “underlings” because, it seems to me, the condition that leads to the disparities of 1969 and 2026 are simply a consequence of our humanity. The second passage comes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Didi comments, “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” It’s the generational difference, we say. Or it’s the economic system, we say. Or it’s the political arrangements of this or that particular society, we say. But Didi knows that it’s our very own feet, our very own selves, the fact that we’re human, that’s the problem.
Is there then no solution? I think not. A fantasy might suggest that the solution could come from being governed by an artificial intelligence programmed to ensure that no one group elaborates power for itself. I find that fantasy even more dismaying than Hobbes’s Leviathan. Ultimately, I’m afraid, there is no balm in Gilead. We can fret our hour on the stage of life, conspire to overthrow the oppressive system, battle against the forces that keep us down and out. And then we come back to where we started.
There’s “progress” of sorts, to be sure. I would not want to be a peasant in 13th Century China or Germany or Ghana or Cusco. I acknowledge fully that the average worker in the 21st century works longer and possibly harder than the average worker in the 13th century. But the conditions of life in the 13th century are spine-chilling for someone raised in the 20th and now living in the 21st century. The progress does not come in the reduction of the differences in power that produce our discontent, but rather in the padding that makes the discontent less noticeable. And here again I acknowledge fully that when the padding fails to disguise the discontent, the result is France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959 or. . . . I’m afraid that the United States is now at a point where the padding is getting mighty thin.
Again, there is no balm in Gilead.
