The Boomer Backlash, Part 2

It seems no one likes the boomers.

From Vox Day Boomercide

We know why Generation X hates the Boomers. We’ve had to listen to variations of their “70 is the new 50” narcissism all our lives and endure their babbling about how their inferior, mush-sounding, crudely recorded analog music played by inept musicians with rudimentary technique is the greatest music created in human history. (I’m not arguing for A Flock of Seagulls here, I’m merely pointing out that neither the Beatles nor Led Zeppelin have anything on Mozart and Vivaldi.)

Second, I think that the younger generations, growing up in harder times and facing a much more challenging future, are angry at the Baby Boomers for squandering what should have been their inheritance of Western civilization and white America. Even though it’s not necessarily their fault – Baby Boomers were not responsible for the Immigration Act of 1965 or the Civil Rights movement or the Great Society – the Baby Boomers supported, and in most cases, still support those terrible, dyscivilizational catastrophes. As one commenter there noted, Boomers are the r-Selected offspring of WWII rabbits, “You’ll never want for anything like I did!”

This echoes earlier posts The Millennial Backlash Against The Baby Boomers and Why NRx is Popular on Reddit:

3. Related to anti-establishmentarianism, being a reactionary in an era of political correctness is in itself anti-establishment and contrarian. In the 60′s and 70′s, boomers rebelled through drugs and other acts of mindless conformity; millennials rebel by turning to intellectualism and introspection.

This falls under ‘shared narratives’, a subset of intellectualism culture, in that both the high-IQ left and the high-IQ right have a lot of grievances with baby boomers. The shared narrative in this instance: difficult economic times, dislike of low-information discourse and reductionist narratives, importance of authenticity, and rejection of conformity, superficiality, and consensus.

From the comments:

Do we… do we have our first Butthurt Boomer spotting?

It’s like calling quail or ducks.

Boomers are trash. It would be better if they sat back while the world burned. They remind me of the political elite; only their gated communities is their own mortality. We have to live in the world they created; for decades to come.

Your generation inherited a Golden Age and then spent forty years pissing it away!

Yes I definitely understand the millennial rage.

These narratives are like a giant web that spans the far-reaches of Reddit, 4chan, and even Vox magazine. Everyone is plugged into this ‘hivemind’. We’re all becoming like Nick Land, channeling his philosophy whether we realize it or not. Before the 60’s there was a general optimism about technology and ‘progress’, and then some guys in France turned those notions upside down, and the legacy still lives on 50 years later; for example, the paranoid cyper-punk writings of authors Philip K Dick and William Gibson, both of whose popularity has surged in recent years. But then also the immense popularity and notoriety of postmodernist writers Thomas Pynchon, Chuck Palahniuk, Hunter S. Thomson, and David Foster Wallace.

In defense of boomers, at least they helped get Trump elected. And just because the boomers were blessed with decades of economic property doesn’t mean they caused the situation facing millennials now. They opportunistically took advantage of an exceptionally long period of strong economic growth, abundant jobs, and affordability, and who can blame them.

Also, I dunno if you can compare The Beatles to Mozart or Vivaldi…it’s an entirely different genre of music.

But as the millennial-led backlash against SJWs and the ‘self-esteem movement’ shows–but also the rise of NRx and the alt-right–there is hope for the younger generations. Many millennials reject politically correct discourse and wish to explore potentially ‘taboo’ subjects such as HBD and anti-democracy.

From In Defense of Millennials, Part 2

If you’re on the ‘right’, it’s temping to bash millennials, but it’s worth noting that alt-right millennials, thanks to postings on 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter, swayed voters and the ‘national dialogue’ and helped put Trump in office. Although millennials supported Hillary by a much larger margin than Trump (55% vs. 38%), Trump’s millennial base was far more persuasive despite their smaller numbers. All generations have losers and idiots (for boomers, it’s aged hippies; for millennials, it’s SJWs). But dismissing all millennials as ‘brainwashed liberal idiots’ is falling into the tempting trap of reductionism and overlooks the many millennials who aren’t.

The breadth of knowledge for many millennials on Reddit and 4chan is extensive, covering subjects as diverse as physics, math, statistics, history, economics, psychology, etc. This probably explains why the alt-right was and is so successful, by leveraging the ingenuity and enthusiasm of all these smart young people, whereas boomer-led far-right paleocon movements (Pat Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, etc.) failed to sway the ‘zighiesit’ as effectively as alt-right did.