Reflections on What I Heard About Boomers at an Academic Summit

It’s only on rare occasions that you don’t receive this letter from me, and last week was one of those rare occasions because I was immersed at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s (ISI) 2025 American Politics and Government Summit, ISI’s annual gathering of conservative scholars and faculty, in Delaware. For two days, we delved into lectures and discussions on the future of conservative ideas and governance. This year’s theme, “Statesmanship and Leadership in the Age of Mass Society.”

Among the lectures, the most talked-about, at least among the young cohorts, came on the first evening, delivered over dinner by Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute. Caldwell, a Boomer (defined as being born between 1946 and 1964), author of several books including The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, has long dissected his own generation’s enduring grip on the nation. I’d read his aforementioned book when it came out in 2020 and even heard him lecture on it at Hillsdale in Washington, DC years back.

If memory serves, he opens with a pivotal scar for the Boomers: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. That tragedy didn’t just shock the country; it ignited a moral and political revolution. From the Kennedy era’s promise of “permanent prosperity,” a philosophy that used government intervention to stimulate economic growth and avoid the boom-and-bust cycles of the past, emerged a bolder vision to remake America: civil rights, women’s liberation, sexual freedom, open immigration, and an interventionist foreign policy.

Caldwell frames this as the birth of two clashing social orders.

The first was the old constitutional order—pre-Great Society—rooted in limited government, freedom of association, and the traditional liberties that had defined the republic. The second, crystallized in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its sprawling judicial and regulatory offspring, unleashed the federal government to mandate equality and diversity—what we now shorthand as DEI—often trampling those very liberties in the process. Boomers, Caldwell contends, inherited and enforced this “second constitution,” weaving the 1960s’ moral fervor into the fabric of American life: civil rights compliance, anti-poverty initiatives, affirmative action, educational sprawl, and an ever-ballooning administrative state.

[RELATED: How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture]

But utopia has its price tag.

Enforcing these ambitions drained the nation’s resources, and as the postwar economic miracle sputtered, first in the late 1960s, then more sharply in the 1970s with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the oil crisis of 1973, and the stock crash of 1973–74, the Boomers in power turned to the one lever they could still pull: borrowing. To prop up the Great Society’s promises, they financed social programs, moral crusades, and ballooning economic and social expectations with debt. Reaganomics, in Caldwell’s telling, was the sleight of hand that made it all click for their generation—letting Boomers savor the moral highs of the new civil rights order while clinging to the freedoms of the old. The outcome? A nation split between aspiration and illusion. And now, with the bill arriving, it’s not the Boomers footing it, but their children and grandchildren.

Caldwell’s ISI lecture built on this, leaving many in the room, especially those under 46, with a stark realization: Gen X, Millennials (my cohort), Gen Z, and Gen Alpha have been handed a country in tatters. The borrowing binge to bankroll Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—not to mention all of the failed foreign interventions—was never meant for Boomer repayment. Today, as those programs wobble toward insolvency, the tab lands on us. And this imbalance has fueled a simmering generational chasm, spilling into cultural fault lines like parental estrangement.

Today, essays abound on adult children—especially Boomer offspring—going no-contact, often because their parents simply can’t bridge the gap. “Boomers can’t conceptualize” has even become a wry mantra in youth circles. Consider Cat, the 2023 TikTok phenom who juxtaposed her mother’s $36,000 entry-level bank teller salary in 1980 (about $102,200 in today’s dollars) against the 2023 average of $55,260. Her clip racked up 2.2 million views and 7,000 comments, and a chorus of young voices in the comments vented that their elders can’t grasp the grind.

Two months before his assassination, Charlie Kirk argued this same point on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, saying that Boomers struggle to recognize the hardships facing young people because, for them, the economy looks like it’s working.

Stock markets are up, home equities have soared, and personal wealth has grown. It’s a booming economy for the asset-rich. Boomers made it on $36,000 and cannot fathom why someone today cannot make it on $55,000. The reality, of course, is that young people today have significantly less purchasing power than Boomers did at the same stage of life. They face a tougher job market—partly because Boomer-led Congresses over the decades passed policies that outsourced jobs and accelerated globalization—and must enter a housing market that is now astronomically more expensive than the one Boomers enjoyed.

A brief comparison between the Boomer economic landscape and that of Millennials and Gen Z illustrates why younger generations feel so misunderstood.

The federal minimum wage, for example, has only inched over 40 years, from $3.10 in 1980 to just $7.25 by 2023, but to match 1980 purchasing power, it would have needed to reach at least $11.40. And that’s just the national standard. In some cities, like D.C., even its $15 minimum wage won’t lift you out of poverty.

Additionally, Boomers entered a far easier job market, often with union protections, training, and wages that enabled early homeownership—a foundation for raising families, something many young people today cannot afford. My grandfather, for instance, earning a modest income from a factory job, bought a house, a large house, in his early 20s, replaced his car every few years, and retired with both a pension and Social Security. His brother, my great-uncle, served twenty years in the military, then twenty at the post office, and now collects two pensions plus Social Security. These pensions and social safety nets were, of course, earned—but they were extraordinary advantages that became increasingly rare for anyone born after 1964 and are now almost entirely unavailable. The Great Recession hastened their demise. As markets collapsed in 2008, pension funds tied to both public and private employers plunged in value, even as their payout obligations remained fixed. States and cities, bound by contract to provide baseline benefits regardless of portfolio performance, found themselves facing multibillion-dollar shortfalls. Many governments responded by scrapping defined-benefit pensions altogether, replacing them with 401(k)-style plans that shift the financial risk onto employees. What had once guaranteed a stable retirement—like the one my grandfather and great-uncle enjoyed—has effectively vanished outside of a handful of unionized jobs.

And as for unemployment, it’s tough to ignore just how bad the economy is for Gen Z graduates. As of August 2025, unemployment for Americans aged sixteen to twenty-four stood at 10.5 percent. (I suspect the reality is actually worse, as these figures are often presented in a more favorable light to boost each presidential administration’s approval ratings. For example, the Biden administration got caught manipulating jobs report numbers.)

And speaking of houses, Boomers entered a housing market that, too, was far more accessible than the one facing Millennials and Gen Z.

In 1970, the median home price was about $23,000, while the median household income stood at nearly $9,000—a price-to-income ratio of just above two times annual earnings. Though Boomers lament the high interest rates of the Carter years, many could purchase a house in their early twenties, sometimes even paying cash, and build generational wealth through rising property values. And many did so without attending college.

Today, by contrast, the median existing-home sales price reached $389,400 in 2024, compared to a median household income of $83,730, pushing the ratio to nearly five times earnings. Add to this scenario the fact that many young people today have crushing student debt, which likely accounts for why home purchasing remains dominated by Boomers: 42 percent of buyers in 2025, for example, were Boomers, nearly half paying entirely in cash, while Millennials accounted for only 29 percent, many relying on family help for down payments—I am one of those people.

And as for education—after all, that is what this site is about—it is impossible to overlook how the political ideologies that emerged in the 1960s reshaped the country’s educational institutions into the divisive forces they are today. A significant cohort of Boomers, carrying grandiose ideas about civil rights and social reform—principles that over time evolved into the forms of wokeism we see today—spearheaded this transformation, driving higher education into intellectual decay. Members of this generation oversaw and sustained the rise of anti-Western sentiment in education and gradually phased Western Civilization out of college curricula, replacing it with courses that emphasized multicultural narratives.

Stanford, for example, replaced its Western Civilization requirement with “Culture, Ideas & Values” in 1987, a move soon copied by universities nationwide. (To be sure, while Boomers formed the bulk of this demographic pushing the shift, some members of the Silent Generation also played a role—historians like Peter N. Stearns, who argued against the traditional Western Civ curriculum, and activists such as Jesse Jackson, who led the Stanford revolt, were part of that older cohort.) By 2010, World Civilization had largely supplanted Western Civ. The result has been a decline in students’ basic civics and historical literacy. (Read the National Association of Scholars’s report The Lost History of Western Civilization, which traces Stanford’s 1988 revolt against Western Civ).

Stephen G. Adubato doubles down on this critique in his essay “Boomer Professors Are Not Based,” noting that many of these professors traded intellectual rigor for moral pageantry, cramming students full of culture-war messaging rather than equipping them with the basic facts to think independently. Graduates who have studied under these professors have not been trained to reason for themselves but primed to repeat the talking points of the echo chamber—what Adubato aptly calls “algorithmically generated robots.” (And, interestingly, despite not requiring a paycheck, Boomer professors and administrators are not retiring.)

[RELATED: Will Gen Z Save America?]

So, yes, resentment is boiling. But so what?

The expectation going into ISI’s 25th American Politics and Government Summit was that we would be guided toward answers. I thought we would leave with concrete ideas for addressing the structural and economic challenges that younger generations face in a nation still largely shaped by Boomer-era policies. But for all its insight, the summit, I think, largely failed to provide answers. And even when solutions were offered, the solutions were recycled talking points about ideas that we know fail.

Take, for example, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, who, during a lunch session on the first day of the conference, proposed slashing corporate taxes to enrich younger cohorts. When I asked him how this would boost my generation’s purchasing power, he defaulted to trickle-down economics, a theory that, since the 1980s, has swollen corporate profits while leaving employees poorer. It does nothing to address outsourcing, corporate collusion, monopolistic strangleholds, or the simple fact that foreign nationals are increasingly taking jobs from Americans.

But this lack of answers, though frustrating, actually invites us to forge our own inquiries: What, then, might the way forward look like?

I’ve only been mulling this for a week, so I’m hardly brimming with answers myself. But here’s what I can say: Young people crave the purchasing power our parents and grandparents once enjoyed, and—especially among right-leaning young men—we yearn to reclaim and reform the institutions that left-leaning Boomers reshaped over the past half-century.

If I had to pinpoint a starting place for solutions, it would be this: Younger generations might begin by adopting a more nuanced view of the Boomers. After all, not every voice from that era bears the weight of the excesses we’ve inherited; many among them, including the President of the National Association of Scholars, our older staff, and our older members, have been steadfast stewards of Western civilization, having spent several decades sounding the alarm and advocating for the very course corrections now so urgently needed.

By tuning in to those prescient warnings, we young conservatives could gain an invaluable footing, forging practical and principled paths to steady the nation, safeguard its core institutions, and build a prosperity that honors every generation, including the Boomers. The legacy we’ve received may test us, but with such wisdom as our guide, we can transform it, not into division, but into a shared renewal, a reform that repairs what’s been broken.

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