Baby Boomers Better Beware

Folks in the post-war generation born between 1946 and 1964 are now sixty or older. Scanning social media, it’s hard to miss the anger building against Baby Boomers. Those born after them are increasingly placing the blame for their woes on the unrelenting greed of the Baby Boomer generation. They believe that the Boomers had the sheer luck to be born when America was in its ascendency, and so they accumulated all the wealth, and now they are determined to take it all with them to the grave, not sharing a penny with the generations which came after.

[DISCLAIMER: This post about growing PERCEPTIONS of Boomers. It’s not about how I feel, it’s about the growing anger toward older Americans, deserved or not.]

The picture of an older man giving two middle fingers to the camera unleashed a torrent of generational rage.

And it’s not just a few random posts I’ve cherry picked from social media. It’s everywhere. Any search will bring up results like these below:

So add anger toward the Baby Boomer generation to the anger of Blacks against Whites, the poor against the rich, socialists against capitalists, Democrats against Trump Republicans, and a witch’s brew of social anger is being stirred with more and more fire building under the bubbling pot.

Our social contract is so frayed that when riots begin the withheld anger boils over.

White Baby Boomers living in single-family homes in affluent suburbs will be at the greatest risk of any demographic. The anger toward them will be come from several social vectors at the same time. People displaced from urban cores by rampant criminality will have no compunction at all against invading the homes of empty-nest Baby Boomers. Their lives will be taken in the first minutes if they are fortunate. If not, their prolonged abuse and torture will serve to amuse the new tenants. Read up on what happens to farmers in South Africa when their homes are attacked if you think I’m being hyperbolic. This is one screen capture, I could post pages and pages.

Do you think that the people who live in nice suburbs like the one shown below are ready for the hellscape and sh**storm that will ensue if and when America suffers a social breakdown, one that can result from any of the maladies now simmering in that witch’s cauldron? We could experience a financial collapse of our own creation, or a cyber attack by our enemies, or a direct kinetic attack against our exposed and undefended power grid.

Will the folks living on these leafy suburban streets be ready for armed, organized and mobile bands of desperate urban poor who are looking to relocate and upgrade their crib at the same time? In third-world countries, these homes would at least have walls around them. In our current “high trust” society, these homes can be approached from all directions, without as much as a security guard in sight. And you can take it at as given fact that there will be no official police making house calls, and your desperate calls to 911 will only get a busy signal, or a taped “please hold” message. If even that.......SNIP

After reading this piece, I started an AI conversation with Perplexity Pro AI to explore the concept further. After many back and forth Q&A that explored multiple dimensions of this conflict, I arrived at a body of work that I asked Perplexity to rewrite into a narrative essay form suitable for publication.

Below is that essay.

Generations in Conflict: A Pattern as Old as America Itself
The Current Battle
In November 2025, as Baby Boomers approach their final years of institutional dominance, they find themselves under siege. Millennials and Generation Z have coalesced around a singular narrative: the Boomers ruined everything.
The indictment is comprehensive. Boomers hold $85 trillion in assets while only 22% plan to leave inheritances. They bought homes for a fraction of today's prices, locked in 3% mortgages, and now refuse to sell while blocking new construction through NIMBY activism. They occupy senior positions with elevated salaries while younger workers languish in entry-level roles with stagnant wages. They drain Social Security, which will be insolvent by 2032, forcing younger generations to pay maximum taxes for reduced benefits they'll never fully receive. They sold younger generations on expensive college credentials through guaranteed student loans, creating a debt crisis that has delayed homeownership, family formation, and wealth accumulation for an entire generation.
"OK, Boomer" became the dismissive encapsulation of this resentment—a verbal eye-roll directed at a generation perceived as uniquely selfish, uniquely destructive, and uniquely oblivious to the wreckage they're leaving behind.
Meanwhile, a youth movement emphasizing faith, family, and personal responsibility has emerged in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Turning Point USA received 130,000 chapter inquiries within weeks of his death. Young people describe finding meaning, community, and purpose in a movement that older institutional leaders—many of them Boomers or late Gen X—immediately condemned as white supremacy and fascism disguised as patriotism.
The battle lines appear clear: selfish Boomers who benefited from systems they then dismantled versus virtuous younger generations demanding the opportunities their parents squandered. One generation hoards; another suffers. One generation occupied power too long; another waits impatiently for their turn.
But this story—compelling, emotionally satisfying, and politically mobilizing as it is—is not new. It is not unique. And understanding why requires stepping back from the immediate conflict to recognize that American history has been shaped by recurring cycles of generational conflict following remarkably consistent patterns.
The current battle between Boomers and their successors is not an aberration. It is the latest iteration of a cycle that has repeated itself at least three times in the past century, each time with different players speaking nearly identical lines. And recognizing the pattern reveals something uncomfortable: the generation being blamed is rarely the generation that created the problems, and the institutions directing that blame are always more culpable than they admit.
The Missionary Generation and the Seeds of Prohibition (1860-1882)
To understand the cycle, we must begin before the patterns became fully visible—with the generation that set the template for institutional overreach and moral crusading that would define American generational conflict for the next century.
The Missionary Generation was born during the Civil War and Reconstruction, came of age during the Gilded Age, and reached institutional power during the Progressive Era. They witnessed the transformation of America from an agricultural republic into an industrial power, and they were horrified by what they saw: urban squalor, industrial exploitation, waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who seemed to threaten Anglo-Saxon culture, and most disturbingly, the social disorder that accompanied rapid urbanization.
Their response was to impose moral order through institutional power. The temperance movement, led by organizations like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, characterized alcohol as the root of poverty, domestic violence, and moral degeneracy. If alcohol could be eliminated, they believed, social order would be restored.
They succeeded. On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment took effect, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages throughout the United States. It was a landmark achievement of moral legislation—the imposition of one generation's values onto American society through constitutional amendment.
But the generation that would live under Prohibition was not the generation that demanded it. And that generational mismatch would produce the first clear iteration of the cycle that continues today.
The Lost Generation: Anarchists and Jazz Age Excess (1883-1900)
The Lost Generation was born during the final decades of the 19th century and came of age during World War I. They experienced the industrial slaughter of modern warfare—poison gas, machine guns, trench warfare that killed millions for negligible territorial gains. They returned home disillusioned, having watched Victorian ideals of patriotism, duty, and moral progress dissolve in the mud of France.
Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation," capturing the sense of aimlessness and moral drift that characterized these young people. With traditional values shattered, many turned to hedonism, materialism, and the rejection of authority.
But alongside this cultural transformation came something more dangerous: radical political violence. Young anarchists—often recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, with no visible means of support yet able to coordinate sophisticated operations—launched bombing campaigns against American political and business leaders.
In 1919, anarchists mailed bombs to 36 prominent Americans including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and J.P. Morgan. In June 1919, simultaneous bombings struck eight cities. The 1920 Wall Street bombing killed 38 people and injured hundreds. Flyers left at bombing sites bore titles like "Plain Words," accusing victims of waging class war and promising to "destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions."
The institutional response followed a revealing pattern. The Palmer Raids arrested over 4,000 suspected radicals in a single night (January 2, 1920), with thousands deported. Thirty-two states banned displaying the red flag. The government responded to violence with force—but the cultural response was more ambiguous.
The Lost Generation broadly rejected the Missionary Generation's moral framework. Prohibition, which the older generation had imposed to restore social order, became the target of widespread flouting. Speakeasies proliferated. Bootlegging enriched organized crime. The Jazz Age—with its flappers, sexual liberation, and cultural rebellion—represented systematic rejection of the values Prohibition was meant to enforce.
The Missionary Generation watched in horror as their moral legislation produced the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than eliminating social disorder, Prohibition created an entire criminal infrastructure. Rather than restoring traditional values, it accelerated cultural breakdown.
By the late 1920s, the Lost Generation dominated economic and cultural life. They had rejected their parents' moral framework, embraced materialism and speculation, and created the economic conditions that would produce the Great Depression. When the economy collapsed in 1929, who bore the blame? The Lost Generation was characterized as morally bankrupt, economically reckless, and culturally degenerate—a generation that had wasted the peace their predecessors had won.
The Greatest Generation: Repeal and Reconstruction (1901-1927)
The Greatest Generation was born during the early 20th century and came of age during the Great Depression. They inherited economic collapse, a discredited social order, and a failed experiment in moral legislation.
Their response demonstrated the first clear example of a corrective generation following the pattern we would see repeated: they didn't argue with their predecessors' values—they simply built a world where those values no longer applied.
On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. The message was clear: the Missionary Generation's attempt to impose moral order through constitutional amendment had failed catastrophically. Personal responsibility and state-level control would replace federal moral legislation.
The Greatest Generation then mobilized for World War II, demonstrating collective purpose and sacrifice that redeemed the national narrative. They built New Deal institutions, expanded into suburbs enabled by the Interstate Highway System, and created the post-war economic boom. Their identity was constructed partly in opposition to their predecessors' failures: they were the generation that cleaned up the mess the Lost Generation left behind.
The Lost Generation's actual culpability was limited. They didn't create Prohibition—the Missionary Generation imposed it. They didn't design the financial system that enabled the 1929 crash—that was inherited structure. They responded to the world they found with the tools available. When those responses failed, they bore the blame while their successors built new systems.
This established the template: radical destabilization by young elements within one generation, institutional overreach in response, rejection of that overreach by the next cohort, followed by a corrective movement that builds alternatives while the previous generation bears comprehensive blame for problems it did not entirely create.
The Silent Generation: The Administrators (1928-1945)
The Silent Generation represents an anomaly—a generation that largely escaped the cycle of blame. Born during the Depression and World War II, they came of age during post-war prosperity and built careers during America's economic peak.
They were the organization men, the corporate managers, the government administrators who staffed the institutions the Greatest Generation built. They created much of the infrastructure that governs contemporary life but contributed relatively little to radical transformation in either direction. They were conformists who traded individual expression for economic security.
They benefited enormously from New Deal programs, the GI Bill, and post-war expansion. They bought homes for modest prices, raised families on single incomes, and built pensions through lifetime employment. But they weren't the architects of this system—they were its administrators during peak performance.
When Baby Boomers later rebelled against conformity and institutional authority, the Silent Generation wasn't their primary target. The rebellion was more abstract—against "the system," "the establishment," "the military-industrial complex." The Silent Generation occupied those systems but hadn't built them.
This escape from blame was partly demographic. The Silent Generation was small—birth rates declined during Depression and war. They lacked the numerical weight to dominate institutions as their predecessors and successors would. They were transitional figures, and their transitional status largely insulated them from becoming the target of comprehensive generational blame.
The Baby Boomers: Counterculture and Correction (1946-1964)
Baby Boomers were born during the post-war surge in births that gave them their name. They entered a world built by others: the post-war economic boom, suburban expansion, interstate highways, Cold War military infrastructure, expanding welfare state. They didn't design Social Security (created 1935), Medicare (1965), or the basic architecture of American institutions. They inherited them.
What Boomers did transform was culture. The civil rights movement, antiwar protests, counterculture, sexual revolution, and feminist movement represented fundamental challenges to previous values. Boomers rejected conformity, traditional authority, and delayed gratification. They demanded immediate transformation of institutions they saw as corrupt, racist, and oppressive.
But alongside cultural transformation came radical violence that followed the established pattern. By 1969, the radical edge crystallized into organizations like the Weather Underground. These weren't working-class immigrants—they were middle-class college students who bombed the Capitol, Pentagon, and police stations. Over 25 bombings occurred between 1970 and 1976.
The institutional response again followed the pattern. Many establishment liberals condemned violence but sympathized with "root causes"—systemic racism, imperialism, inequality. Universities tolerated radical organizing. Media coverage often portrayed bombers as idealistic if misguided.
Then came the corrective. The Reagan Revolution beginning in 1980 represented younger voters and disaffected Democrats who rejected both the violence and institutional apologetics. They didn't defeat the New Left through argument—they built a coalition around values the New Left had abandoned: patriotism, family, religious faith, and personal responsibility.
But this correction was partial and contested. The cultural battles of the 1960s never fully resolved. And critically, many former radicals didn't face consequences—they became professors, foundation executives, and Democratic activists. Bill Ayers, who participated in Weather Underground bombings, later hosted Barack Obama's first political fundraiser.
Boomers reached peak institutional power in the 1990s-2000s, occupying the presidency continuously from 1992 to 2024. And during this period of dominance, structural problems metastasized that would define the next generation's grievances.
Generation X: The Forgotten Middle (1965-1980)
Generation X was born during declining birth rates following the Boomer surge. They came of age during the Reagan era, watched the Cold War end, and entered the workforce during the dot-com boom and bust.
They were shaped by divorce rates that peaked during their childhood, latchkey kid experiences, and institutional skepticism learned from watching both the idealism and hypocrisy of their Boomer predecessors. They rejected Boomer earnestness in favor of ironic detachment. They entered a labor market already shaped by early computer technology but still structured around traditional career paths.
Gen X has been largely forgotten in current generational warfare—squeezed between Boomer dominance and Millennial/Gen Z grievance. They're too small numerically to dominate institutions and too cynical to expect institutional solutions. Many became the entrepreneurs, technologists, and independent contractors who built the digital economy outside traditional structures.
Their formative technological experience—personal computers and early internet—came during early career years, making them adapters rather than digital natives. This positioned them as translators between pre-digital Boomer management and digitally-native younger workers, but it also meant they never fully controlled either paradigm.
Millennials: Debt and Disappointment (1981-1996)
Millennials were the first generation to come of age in the 21st century. They experienced 9/11 during their formative years, entered the workforce during or after the 2008 Great Recession, and became the first generation expected to be less prosperous than their parents.
Their defining economic experience was the collision between the promises they were sold and the reality they encountered. They were told that college was essential for success. They borrowed accordingly—student loan debt increased from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.6 trillion by 2020. The 2010 nationalization of student lending removed underwriting standards that previously ensured loans matched career prospects, enabling unlimited borrowing for degrees with no labor market value.
They graduated into the worst labor market since the Depression. Entry-level positions required years of experience. Unpaid internships became common. The credential inflation their elders encouraged meant bachelor's degrees became necessary for jobs that previously required only high school diplomas, while actual career advancement required ever-more-expensive graduate degrees.
Housing became unattainable. When their parents were their age, median home prices were 3-4 times median household income. By the time Millennials reached prime home-buying years, that ratio had doubled. Meanwhile, existing homeowners—increasingly Boomers—adopted NIMBY policies blocking new construction that would increase supply and reduce prices.
The technological dimension compounded these challenges. Millennials were digital natives, forming their identities through social media and internet connectivity. But this meant they competed in a global labor market where tasks could be outsourced, automated, or eliminated. The same technology that connected them made them vulnerable to disruption in ways previous generations hadn't experienced.
By their 30s, many Millennials had delayed or abandoned traditional markers of adulthood: homeownership, marriage, children. These weren't choices—they were necessity imposed by economic conditions. And they were told, repeatedly, that these conditions resulted from Boomer selfishness: refusing to retire, opposing housing construction, bankrupting Social Security, and voting for politicians who protected their interests at younger generations' expense.
Generation Z: Digital Natives in Crisis (1997-2012)
Generation Z came of age during the 2010s-2020s, experiencing unprecedented technological connectivity alongside increasing isolation, anxiety, and political polarization. They are the first generation with no memory of pre-smartphone existence, the first to experience social media throughout their formative years, and the first to face the collision of digital-native identity with institutions built for analog existence.
Their formative sociopolitical experience included the 2020 pandemic, which interrupted normal adolescent socialization during critical years. They watched cities burn during George Floyd protests while institutions characterized the violence as "mostly peaceful" and justified by systemic injustice. They experienced "cancel culture" and social media mob justice as normal features of discourse. They watched political polarization intensify to levels not seen since the Civil War era.
Their economic prospects appear even dimmer than Millennials faced. They inherit all the problems Millennials confronted—student debt, housing unaffordability, climate anxiety—while adding new challenges: AI displacement narratives suggesting even credentialed knowledge work will be automated, gig economy precarity, and the collapse of career paths their parents understood.
But critically, Gen Z is experiencing something Millennials largely didn't: a spiritual vacuum. Religious participation declined throughout their childhood. Traditional community institutions weakened. Social connection became mediated through screens rather than physical presence. Rates of anxiety, depression, and social isolation reached crisis levels.
Less than half of young Americans report feeling connected to any community. Young men especially express profound lack of belonging. Yet paradoxically, among those who do attend religious services, Gen Z churchgoers attend more frequently than Millennials or Gen X. Bible sales are rising. There's hunger for meaning and transcendence that secular institutions have failed to provide.
The Current Cycle: Antifa and TPUSA (2010s-2020s)
Against this backdrop, the familiar pattern emerged with remarkable fidelity to historical precedent.
The Radical Destabilization: The modern Antifa phenomenon coalesced around 2016-2017, gaining visibility through confrontations at Trump rallies and Berkeley riots. By 2020, Antifa-associated violence during George Floyd protests brought the movement to peak prominence. Like their anarchist and Weather Underground predecessors, they present as decentralized ideology rather than organization, yet consistently mobilize bodies to specific locations on short notice.
Trump administration investigations documented what they termed "Riot Inc."—coordination across cities with people "paid and transported to participate in unrest." The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund openly acknowledges funding 800+ activists across 26 countries since 2015. Organizations like By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) provide structure while maintaining plausible deniability.
The November 2025 UC Berkeley TPUSA event illustrated operational capacity: protesters gathered hours beforehand, chanted "anytime, any place, punch a racist in the face," threw smoke bombs, and hospitalized attendees. Universities identified "outside agitators," and federal investigators examined whether this constituted organized conspiracy to deny free speech rights.
The Institutional Response: Rather than condemning violence, major organizations minimized it or justified it by framing targets as existential threats. The Congressional Black Caucus called Charlie Kirk a purveyor of "racist, harmful, and fundamentally un-American ideas." Teachers' unions filed objections to block TPUSA chapters. The NAACP and ACLU treated the movement as a threat.
These organizations—forged in genuine oppression, achieving transformational victories—now face an existential paradox. Success undermines purpose. An organization built to fight Jim Crow doesn't dissolve when Jim Crow ends; it finds new Jim Crows. The formational experiences of leadership—fire hoses, police dogs, assassinations—became the permanent interpretive lens. Every challenge becomes 1963 Birmingham. Every opponent becomes Bull Connor.
The Corrective Emergence: When Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, the response followed the pattern of every previous corrective generation. Within weeks, 130,000 young people requested information about starting TPUSA chapters. Texas high school chapters doubled; some regions tripled. Students who might have remained politically disengaged mobilized around "honoring Charlie's legacy" and "carrying the torch."
For participants, the appeal is spiritual and communal, not primarily political. They describe finding meaning, purpose, belonging, and validation in a movement emphasizing faith, family, personal responsibility, and constitutional literacy—precisely the values that civil rights movement's religious founders originally preached.
The movement offers something the radicals destroyed and institutions failed to provide: community independent of credentials, meaning independent of institutional validation, economic resilience through family rather than government programs, agency through personal responsibility rather than victimhood narratives.
And predictably, institutional leaders condemned it using the familiar template: racism, extremism, threatening democracy. They cannot acknowledge the movement's legitimacy without admitting their own failures.
The Technology Dimension
But this cycle differs from predecessors in a crucial way: technology is constitutive of both radical and corrective movements, not merely instrumental.
Previous generations experienced technology as additive. The Lost Generation used automobiles and phonographs to enable Jazz Age mobility and culture, but those technologies didn't define their identity. The Greatest Generation harnessed mass production for war and prosperity, but they weren't defined by assembly lines. Boomers used television to spread counterculture, but TV was a tool, not an identity.
Gen X and Millennials were the first to form identities through technology—the internet shaped how they understood politics, relationships, community itself. Technology wasn't added to their worldview; it was their worldview's medium. Gen Z is even more thoroughly digital-native, with no memory of pre-smartphone existence.
This creates a technological misalignment compounding sociopolitical conflict. Boomers see technology as instrumental tools layered onto existing values. Younger generations see technology as constitutive of values themselves. When Boomers offer advice based on pre-digital paradigms—stay loyal to employers, build institutional careers, network in person—younger generations hear instructions for a world that no longer exists.
The AI inflection amplifies this. Every previous technological transition changed how work was done without fundamentally challenging what humans uniquely contribute. AI narratives (whether accurate or not) suggest replacement of cognitive work itself—the domain credentialed workers believed was protected.
The "scare journalism" around AI creates artificial intergenerational conflict. Young workers are told to fear both Boomers blocking jobs and AI eliminating those jobs. Older workers are told their skills are obsolete. Both are discouraged from seeing shared interest in successful adaptation.
But history suggests AI will follow the pattern of previous transitions: replacing tasks, not workers. Workers who learn to leverage AI will become more productive. Workers who compete with AI will lose. The spreadsheet didn't eliminate financial analysts—analysts who mastered spreadsheets became more valuable while manual calculation disappeared.
The TPUSA generation may be recognizing this: refusing to let technology or technological narratives define their possibilities, using digital tools pragmatically while grounding identity in values that transcend technological substrate—faith, family, community, responsibility.
The Attribution Error
Understanding the full cycle reveals why the Boomer blame narrative, though emotionally satisfying and politically mobilizing, is fundamentally misdirected.
The housing crisis began in the 1970s when construction starts declined from 8.8 units per 1,000 people to approximately 4 units per 1,000 people during subsequent decades. Cities enacted zoning regulations—minimum lot sizes, density limits, parking requirements—creating supply constraints. These policies were enacted by local governments responding to existing homeowners across multiple generations. The real problem is structural incentive for any homeowner, regardless of generation, to oppose supply increases that might reduce property values.
Student debt resulted from policy decisions to expand college access through guaranteed federal lending, removing underwriting standards while universities responded by raising tuition to capture available funds. These were political choices by leaders across generations seeking votes through promises of universal college access, not Boomer conspiracy to saddle Millennials with debt.
Social Security insolvency results from demographic math—declining fertility, increasing longevity, fewer workers per beneficiary. Politicians across multiple generations chose not to fix this because reform was politically costly. Boomers expecting full benefits aren't stealing from the young—they're expecting fulfillment of a contract they paid into for 40+ years.
Job market structure reflects organizational hierarchy that existed before Boomers and will exist after. Every generation starts at entry positions with lower compensation. The wage gap between senior and junior workers is partly the gap between experience levels, not generational theft.
Many policies creating current problems were explicitly designed to help younger generations. Student loan expansion aimed to increase access. Zoning regulations aimed to preserve neighborhood character. Social Security maintained benefit levels to protect vulnerable seniors. The system produced dysfunction not through generational malice but through poorly designed incentives.
The Pattern Recognition
Every accusation leveled against Baby Boomers was previously leveled against their predecessors:
The Lost Generation was accused of moral degeneracy, economic recklessness, abandoning traditional values. The Greatest Generation characterized them as "lost" and built identity around cleaning up their mess.
The Greatest Generation was accused by younger Boomers of rigid conformity, racism, warmongering, environmental destruction. The counterculture rejected their values wholesale.
Baby Boomers are now accused of wealth hoarding, institutional capture, destroying prospects for younger generations. Millennials and Gen Z characterize them as selfish and build identity around rejecting Boomer values.
The pattern isn't just similarity—it's structural inevitability. Each corrective generation defines itself against its predecessor. The accusation serves psychological and political functions: providing explanation for difficulties, creating targets for policy advocacy, building generational cohesion through shared grievance.
But recognizing the pattern reveals the accusations are always misdirected. The blame falls on whichever generation happened to be in power when consequences became undeniable, not the generation that created the conditions producing those consequences.
Where We Go From Here
If this analysis is correct, several conclusions follow:
First, waiting for Boomers to die won't solve structural problems. Housing unaffordability results from zoning policies and construction constraints, not Boomer homeownership. When Millennials become homeowners, many will oppose new construction for identical reasons Boomers do. Student debt results from policy choices that can be reversed regardless of generational succession. Social Security insolvency requires demographic and fiscal reform, not generational warfare.
Second, the capacity to adapt matters more than inherited circumstances. Every generation inherits problems created by predecessors and creates new problems for successors. Boomers who purchased homes early and built careers through organizational loyalty made choices appropriate to their moment. Millennials and Gen Z facing different circumstances need different strategies—not waiting for Boomers to die, but building alternative paths that work in current conditions.
Third, institutional blame-shifting serves institutional interests, not worker interests. The organizations dominating American life—built by the Greatest Generation, matured under Boomers, now facing corrective generations—created many problems through policy advocacy and credential inflation. When they encourage generational conflict while promising institutional solutions to "Boomer problems," they deflect attention from their own culpability while maintaining relevance.
Fourth, the corrective movement represents adaptation, not regression. TPUSA's emphasis on faith, family, and personal responsibility isn't nostalgia—it's rational response to an economy where credentials no longer guarantee prosperity, institutions no longer provide security, and technology enables both connection and isolation. Building communities of mutual support, emphasizing family formation, rejecting consumer debt culture, developing skills that compound over time—these provide both spiritual grounding and economic survival strategy.
Fifth, technology requires adaptation, not fear. Every generation has faced transformative technology. Those who learned to leverage new tools thrived. Those who competed with technology or resisted it struggled. AI will likely follow this pattern—replacing tasks while creating new roles for workers who master augmentation rather than compete with automation.
Sixth, cross-generational coalition is possible but requires recognizing the pattern. Boomers can acknowledge their advice requires translation for different technological and economic substrates. Younger generations can recognize that Boomer success reflected adaptation skills that remain relevant even as specific adaptations become obsolete. Both can recognize that the capacity to adapt to change is the transferable skill, not the specific adaptations themselves.
Seventh, breaking the cycle requires institutional accountability. The organizations that created student debt through credential inflation, housing unaffordability through zoning advocacy, and Social Security crisis through political cowardice must be held accountable for policy failures rather than deflecting blame to demographics. This requires younger generations to demand structural reform rather than accepting generational warfare as explanation for their difficulties.
The Choice Ahead
The pattern suggests that intergenerational conflict will continue as long as it serves institutional purposes. Each corrective generation will define itself partly in opposition to its predecessor. Each predecessor will feel unjustly blamed for problems it didn't entirely create. And each cycle will produce radical destabilization, institutional overreach, corrective movements, and comprehensive blame directed at the generation that happened to be in power when consequences became undeniable.
But recognizing the pattern offers a choice. The emerging generation—and the movements that follow—can either repeat the cycle or break it.
Repeating means: accepting the Boomer blame narrative, waiting for generational succession to solve structural problems, depending on institutions to provide solutions, and eventually becoming the next scapegoat generation when their successors face difficulties and need someone to blame.
Breaking the cycle means: recognizing that structural problems require structural solutions regardless of generational succession, building communities and economic strategies that work in current conditions rather than conditions their parents faced, holding institutions accountable for policy failures rather than accepting demographic explanations, and refusing to define identity primarily in opposition to predecessors.
The Greatest Generation didn't defeat Prohibition by arguing with temperance crusaders—they built a world where that framework no longer applied. The Reagan coalition didn't defeat the New Left through debate—they built a majority around values the New Left had abandoned.
The TPUSA movement may be attempting something similar: building communities where institutional frameworks and generational grievances become irrelevant to lived experience. Not waiting for Boomers to die and institutions to reform, but creating alternatives that provide meaning, prosperity, and purpose independent of inherited structures.
In the weeks following Charlie Kirk's assassination, his widow Erika Kirk began referring to those joining the movement as "The Courageous Generation." The name is significant—not just as marketing, but as a statement of intent that distinguishes this potential generational marker from all its predecessors.
Previous generations were named for what happened to them. The Lost Generation was named for their disillusionment. The Silent Generation for their conformity. The Baby Boomers for the demographic surge that defined them. Even Generation X and Millennials were named descriptively, marking their place in sequence or their relationship to the calendar.
But "Courageous" names an aspiration, not a circumstance. It defines the generation by what they choose to be rather than what they inherited. It emphasizes agency over victimhood, moral fortitude over grievance, building over blaming.
The courage it describes is specific: not the physical courage of the Greatest Generation facing Depression and war, but the moral courage to stand for values despite institutional condemnation. The courage to embrace faith when secular institutions mock belief. The courage to build families when economic conditions discourage it. The courage to take personal responsibility when cultural narratives emphasize systemic oppression. The courage to create alternatives when established pathways have failed.
Most importantly, the courage to refuse the role of victim—to reject the narrative that they are merely casualties of Boomer selfishness requiring institutional rescue, and instead become architects of their own prosperity through community, faith, and mutual support.
If "The Courageous Generation" resonates and sticks—if it becomes how this cohort understands its historical mission—then future historians may look back on this moment not as the culmination of Boomer failures but as the beginning of something genuinely new. Not another iteration of the cycle, but its disruption.
They would recognize a generation that saw the pattern, understood how each predecessor had been blamed and each corrective movement eventually became the next target, and chose a different path. Not by defeating their predecessors but by making their predecessors' conflicts irrelevant. Not by waiting for institutions to solve structural problems but by building communities where those institutions become unnecessary.
Whether this happens depends on choices not yet made. The name is aspirational, not descriptive—a challenge, not a conclusion. Courage can be claimed in a moment of grief and solidarity, but it must be sustained through the mundane difficulties of building alternatives: forming families despite economic pressure, pursuing meaningful work despite credential expectations, maintaining faith despite cultural hostility, building community despite technological isolation.
If they sustain it—if the 130,000 chapter inquiries become 130,000 functioning communities, if the religious awakening produces stable families rather than temporary enthusiasm, if personal responsibility becomes practiced reality rather than rhetorical flourish—then "The Courageous Generation" will have earned its name.
And if they do, they will have accomplished something no American generation has achieved in over a century: breaking the cycle not by winning the generational conflict, but by transcending it entirely.
The Lost Generation blamed their predecessors and created conditions for Depression. The Greatest Generation blamed the Lost and created conformity their children rejected. The Boomers blamed the Greatest and created fragmentation their children resent. Each cycle repeats because each generation defines itself primarily in opposition to what came before.
The Courageous Generation—if that name truly describes them—would be the first to define itself by what it builds rather than what it opposes. The first to ground identity in transcendent values (faith, family, community, responsibility) rather than grievances against predecessors. The first to recognize that the institutions encouraging generational blame are more culpable than any demographic cohort.
The pattern is clear. The choice remains open. The name has been offered. And the stakes—for this generation and all that follow—could not be higher.
History will record whether they proved courageous enough to deserve the title. The answer will be written not in speeches or social media posts, but in the families they form, the communities they build, the values they transmit, and the world they create for their own children—who will, inevitably, judge them as harshly as they have judged those who came before.
The only question is whether that judgment will find them guilty of repeating the cycle, or courageous enough to have broken it.

-PJ

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