White Leftwing Boomers

Photo by Barbara Burgess on Unsplash

Many people have observed that a lot of those at the No Kings protests are white, left-wing Boomers. I don’t have demographic data to back this up, but based on my observations of Boomers in my friends and family circle, it does seem that this group is clinging the hardest and loudest to Wokeism and general left-wing derangement. I do have some Millennial friends who are still drunk on the Kool-Aid, but those who are tend to identify as some flavor of LGBT+ even though they are straight. They also tend to be rather mentally ill and comfortable sharing their struggles with mental illness, or their sheer inability to “adult”, on social media. By identifying into the LGBT+ community, they gained a lot of corrosive power that they are now grappling with losing. On the surface, this looks very different from the left-wing Boomers who are retired after having some career success, are generally well-educated, consider themselves allies of the LGBT+ community while not identifying as part of it, and who don’t air their dirty laundry on Facebook.

Given that my dad is in this demographic of Boomers, this is the primary source of my frustration. Below are just my general observations of this group as I try to figure out their motivations for going down with a ship that to everyone else is obviously sinking. (Obviously, Boomers are a large demographic population, and this certainly does not apply to every or even most Boomers.)

Protesting No Longer Works

First, I share their concerns about Trump sending the National Guard unasked into liberal cities, and I don’t trust Trump. But I’m under no delusions that taking to the streets accomplishes anything productive other than making the people who participate feel good about their own sense of righteousness. Our society is so polarized that protesting is no longer a viable means of effecting change. By and large, it’s become a way to signal your politics.

I think the people marching would be more effective if they sat down and listened with the intention to understand those of us who are disaffected by the left wing and to understand why they are hemorrhaging support. Rather than brandishing their righteousness they need to focus more on the hard work of looking inward and course-correcting.

I also think that people on both the right and the left would do well to understand radicalization and how right-wing radicalism fuels left-wing radicalism, which in turn fuels right-wing radicalism, creating the nasty spiral we’re in. We need to learn how algorithms distort our perception of the world and how to be more savvy about our social media use and news consumption, etc. But hey, it’s easier and more fulfilling to march. There’s no heady sense of righteousness from realizing you were wrong about some things or under the sway of powerful algorithms.

The Desire to be Relevant

My parents were never introspective people. I don’t think that’s a Boomer trait, I think it spans generations. But I do see that with Boomers there seems to be a desperation to be seen as relevant and attuned to the up-and-coming generation in a way their parents weren’t. My grandparents held onto antiquated, racist ideas and were never comfortable with the gay rights movement. To be clear, my grandparents weren’t cruel people who used slurs, and they welcomed my husband, who is brown and the child of immigrants, into the family. They didn’t believe in segregation. But they would make remarks about white people being “normal,” as though other races weren’t, or they would downplay how bad Jim Crow was. Like many people my age, we loved them because they were our grandparents, even if we rolled our eyes at their perceptions of race issues. They were products of their time and couldn’t help it.

It feels as though left-wing Boomers my parents’ age want to avoid being out of touch with the younger generation by following that generation uncritically. They saw their parents as out of touch on racial issues and wanted to prove they are different. Yet they ignored the work they did raising us Millennials to be a colorblind society which, in my mind, did far more to get our society to a good point than Wokeism ever has. I went to school where white Boomer teachers told us about Martin Luther King Jr. Growing up, I volunteered in the children’s department of the local library, and the Boomer children’s librarian, who was white, would talk about wanting to ensure there was a diversity of library materials. There were READ posters with various celebrities, and when I made a face at Oprah because my family disdained talk shows, the librarian said she understood and didn’t like talk shows either but decided to hang the poster up because Oprah is an example of a wildly successful Black woman. Boomer teachers taught us how people who were enslaved would sing songs about the North Star to find freedom, read us books about Harriet Tubman, and encouraged white children to play with and befriend Black children. And no, I did not grow up in a blue area, I grew up in a conservative red state.

Sadly, I don’t think Boomers saw or took credit for their work toward achieving MLK’s dream of a society where people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. To be fair, from my observation in my family, it was Millennials who embraced and ran with Wokeism (in my case, it was my sister who infected my family with it). But rather than claiming any sort of ground and saying, “Hey, the world is a lot better now on racial issues than it was in the 1960s, and here’s all the work we did to get here,” Boomers like my parents really seemed to follow the lead of Millennials and Gen Z uncritically in their desperate desire to be relevant.

The Desire to Transcend

I have a lot more I could write here, but the essence of it is that people my parents’ age, who were kids during the Civil Rights movement and too young to participate, seem to feel as though they missed their chance to be on the “right side of history.” More than that, there seems to be a general discontent with successfully living an ordinary life. Their parents fought in WWII and survived the Great Depression. They never faced starvation or deprivation the way that my grandparents had. They never fought for a just war the way my grandparents had. My grandparents seemed content with the careers they built and the families they established after WWII. Those things weren’t enough for my parents.

I see this discontent when my dad does not honor his military service because he served during peacetime. I see it in the wallpaper my mom used to have about wanting to hear stories of people who became wildly successful in their golden years. Having enough career success to be comfortable, but not enough to be famous, and raising a good family did not seem to be enough for them. They grew up with parents who were tested during the Great Depression, WWII, and the Civil Rights era, and they didn’t get their turn to show their mettle. Now they are replaying this current cultural moment as though it is the 1960s, when it is very different.

BLM comes on the scene. Finally, they have their chance to march, something they didn’t have when they were kids. Yes, I went to a few BLM protests and Women’s Marches during the first Trump administration. But when I realized it wasn’t making a difference and that Wokeism was hurting more than helping, I stopped. Boomers attracted to this can’t seem to let go of the illusion that this is the second Civil Rights Movement. Either that, or their desperate desire not to be out of touch the way their parents were is leading them to be out of touch in a completely different way.

This strikes me as an example of what Megan McArdle might call The Oedipus Trap. My parents waited most of their lives for their own time to be tested fully expecting that they would not make the mistakes their parents did, only to make a completely different one. In other words, I’m not sure if left-wing Boomers will ever see the light here. They would much rather die feeling as though they passed the moral test than admit that they made a grievous mistake.

Trust in Legacy Media

Another factor is their trust in legacy media. I know a lot of people accuse this group of trusting what they watch on cable news. Yet in my own experience with this group, they don’t watch cable news. They read it. NYT, NPR, Washington Post. And then there are bloggers they whose word they take as gospel, like Heather Cox Richardson. I could be wrong but comedians like John Stewart and John Oliver tend to appeal more to the Millennial crowd.

Whatever it is that they watch and read, though, they have not woken up to the brutal truth that media no longer exists to present the news but to affirm people’s biases, and they are unwilling to change how they consume the media.

In some ways, this is starting to change. When The New York Times runs a trans story they don’t like, or when they hear that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was left-wing, they’ll say, “You can’t trust the FBI.” But unfortunately, they are out of touch with finding better ways to discern truth, and unwilling to listen to those who say that you have to put in the time to research and find multiple perspectives rather than relying on a so-called trustworthy source. They are still very much in the grip of a belief that you can learn enough about any subject to have an informed opinion simply by going to trusted sources. The idea that they have to approach knowledge with humility and change their methods is terrifying to them. When I bring this up to my dad the sheer look of panic on his face is concerning.

They Aren’t Seeing the Consequences

Finally, they are not raising children in this strange new world and are not seeing the impact social media is having on children. They are retired and sheltered from how authoritarian DEI has become and how trans ideology is harming people in the real world because they seldom engage with it in the real world. They are disdainful at the thought that algorithms could influence how they see the world and that social media is a dangerous powerhouse that we don’t yet fully understand. And in some ways, I get it. They grew up hearing that TV would rot your brain, and then that video games would cause school shooting, and it all seemed like hysteria. Yet social media is a different beast, especially for young, vulnerable minds.

Granted, even adults weren’t ready for the power of social media. I feel that all the ingredients that caused my family of origin to implode were present before social media, but social media poured gasoline on everything and lit the match. And I don’t think Boomers like my dad can face it. Part of it is arrogance. They don’t want to believe that they could be susceptible and easily swayed. Part of it is a naïve belief that technology can only improve our lives. And part of it is that very human fear of changing how you approach the world, a fear that I think gets worse with age.

Boomers grew up trusting legacy media. The fact that they can’t anymore is too terrifying for them to contemplate, because it means they will have to change how they approach figuring out the truth of the world. And I don’t think they want that burden.

So they gaslight Millennials who talk about the challenges of raising the next generation in this new world and dismiss our valid concerns. They continue their social media engagements, refusing to see the detrimental impact it has had on their families. They grew up hearing about the dangers of alcohol and drugs, but not social media. How could a Facebook post be a bad thing?

Are They Capable of De-radicalizing?

There used to be a Facebook meme of how we could save the world by blocking Fox News from the tvs of our aging parents. Now that I have the equivalent of a leftwing parent uncritically drinking the Kool-aide, I sure wish it was as simple as blocking one media channel.

Overall though, what is the point? My children are the future and are much more receptive to my warnings about social media and extremism. And much as I wish my dad would wake up to how social media has devastated my family of origin and work to make some changes, he won’t. He worked a supervisory job that was respectable, paid the bills and completely unsuited to his talents and with no prestige whatsoever. He’s under the grip of an Extreme Overvalued Belief that his Facebook activity will stop the Trumpian Authoritarian Regime and he seems to get his purpose in life from that rather than being a present parent and grandparent to my kids.

And tragically rather than being the grandparent who is savvy to the way the culture is changing that he thought he would be, he fell into a trap he never saw coming. The type my kids love because he is their grandparent but who roll their eyes at how out of touch he is.