Now available is my discussion, in essence an interview of me, on Third Way Radio, a presentation of New Frontier! This features Haywood in high gear and taking no prisoners, castigating the Baby Boomers, elucidating Foundationalism, and generally pushing wholesale change. We discuss the role of government in societal virtue, and the rejection of what today’s Left and Right (or at least today’s Republican Party as representative of the latter) have to offer.
You can find the episode here in video on Odysee, or embedded below. You can follow New Frontier, whose political program has many overlaps with Foundationalism and can be found here, on YouTube and on Telegram, as well as directly on their site.
Charles, the pandering you were doing to the young interviewers regarding how awful old people and Boomers are was beneath you, I think. When they were saying that old people are going to die off in a few years anyway and don’t really do anything except take all the good jobs because they have more experience, you should have called them on that.
Young people don’t have experience in life and thus are often the ones who enthusiastically ignorantly and naively advocate solutions like communism and all the other “Cultural Revolution”-type stupid policies that people with more experience and learning know are proven disasters. That’s why you need people with experience leading the country. The more experience the better. You have to be pretty inexperienced in life to think that not having experience is better than having experience.
Yes, young people are passionate and dynamic and open to new ideas, and that’s fine, but genuinely “new” ideas are very few and far between. What we need are very well educated (in history, etc, not wokeness) young people working with leaders and mentors who have experience.
I must have done a bad job if that appeared as pandering. Old people in their present, modern incarnation are by far the biggest driver of problems in America; all the nasty people who were young in the 1960s now constitute the backbone of the regime. And totally aside from politics, as I said, old people today are huge on getting and not interested at all in responsibility or leaving some crumbs for the young. (That there are exceptions is utterly irrelevant to the point.)
Young people may advocate, that is, some may advocate, Left nostrums. They do so because the Baby Boomers taught them to do so, and nobody has ever called them out on it. The “people with experience” who should be running the country are forty- and fifty-year olds, Generation X. Everyone above seventy should not be allowed in electoral politics; that was a good idea. As I said, as advisors, perhaps. But old people need to make way for the young; the system we used to have has been inverted.
A non-political example is discounts for old people. In America, people 65 and over have the lowest poverty rate of any group, and the second-highest per capita income. And that doesn’t even take into account they mostly have debt-free assets. Discounts should go to the young, particularly those with families. And all government payments for the old should be aggressively means-tested. If I remember right, more than half the entire federal budget is direct transfer payments to old people. That’s insane.
And yes, young people are dynamic, and old people are not. That is why 99%+ of notable world accomplishment has been done by young (men) under forty. Old people are not dynamic, for good reason–they want to protect what they have. No doubt there is a role for experience–to educate and advise the doers, who are young. Old people should not be shuffled off. But neither should they demand all of society be organized around them, which is what we have now. If a choice has to be made, it should be for the young. The Wuhan Plague is a good example of this. The cost of destroying young people’s lives and children’s pysches isn’t worth keeping a few more years of life on a million or two million older people. That’s just the truth. Yet that’s what the old people have demanded and gotten (though without even getting much of the benefit they demanded, because their course of action turned out inadequate, because nobody can control a respiratory virus–yet they have not apologized for the wave of destruction). To take a small example–we need a counselor/therapist for one of our daughters, who is showing signs of OCD. Nobody will even call us back, because millions of young people are suffering extreme psychic problems, about which we are not allowed to speak. This is the fault of the old (and their political enablers, and younger women and feminized men).
Its somewhat tangential, but your post on the relationship between young and old, and your aside about the boomers as the grown up 60s generation, made me think of this recent essay by Freddie: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/gen-x-was-the-political-generation Its worth a read.
Also, I think the millions of young people suffering extreme psychic problems is a product of longer term trends that covid exacerbated. The youth suicide rate, as a particularly objective measure, has been increasing for years. Young men (who are much more likely to successful kill themselves than young women) are still well below all time high rates of suicide, but young women appear to have the highest rate on record. in 2020 both groups saw a very small increase in their rate, below trend. I think the super-saturated social realm online is uniquely bad for young women’s psyches, and that the primary way that covid restrictions harmed these people was to push even more of their lives into that realm.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/
An interesting piece; gave me some thoughts for a piece I’m writing now. Yes, the Plague certainly didn’t create these problems from scratch. But the reaction to it definitely exacerbated it.
It’s ironic, the Boomers are certainly responsible for many of the problems affecting the West today (although the role played by the “Greatest” and “Silent” generations shouldn’t be downplayed – it wasn’t the Boomers who passed Hart-Cellar, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964), but at the same time, they may be all that’s holding back the deluge. There’s reason to think that, if 40/50 somethings were running the country right now, things might be even worse; as Wm Briggs puts it “Many complaints about Boomers are heard, but their aging grip on power is what is staving off the spiral into the hell of Full Wokeness”. Don’t wish the Boomers into the grave too soon…
https://wmbriggs.com/post/38857/
I see the reasoning, but I doubt it. As it happens, this very moment I am writing a long piece on the future that mentions not only Briggs, but the widely-disseminated recent N.S. Lyons piece. In short, I agree with the facts, and reject the conclusions as both unsupported and illogical. The future is not going to be woke, whatever the young say they are now.
I hate to say it, but I couldn’t get past the introductions because the audio was so bad.
Ah, they fixed it within a minute.
I like how you didn’t directly confront Enver’s contention that it’s desirable and possible to have a religiously neutral state apparatus. Instead you pivot to making the point that young people can be made to believe anything that shows power and promise. Well done sir!
You’re probably giving me too much credit, but thank you!