I went to a public lecture the other night (one of the best things about London is that it is saturated in high quality public commentary). The speaker made an impassioned call for new thinking from the left to solve the conundrums of Brexit. The new ideas were the same old stuff: nationalisation, protectionism, a sprinkle of community here, a dash of public spending there. The talk really crystallised something for me: the boomers are out of ideas.
The boomers are defined not by the 60s when they were growing up, but by the 80s, when they made their great contribution to the political history of the Atlantic in the structural reform years. Almost everything written and done by boomers remains to this day stuck in that great moment of ideological battle, especially in American and Britain. Structural adjustment was the triumph of neoliberalism. Keynesianism was doing more harm than good (mostly because of stagflation) and needed a corrective. Nothing too major mind you (this is always forgotten), just for markets to be left to do the things they are obviously good at, and to be more generally used in sensible ways. In Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, this was done sensibly in general, or I should say in a technocratic fashion. Markets were only implemented where they could, on logical grounds, be expected to work well. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the government was withdrawn just cos. That is to say, there was not technocratic expertise driving reform (though a lot of the reform was sensibly in the direction advocated for by the Chicago School) but ideological conviction. As a result, reform under these administrations was overwrought and overdone. The left-leaning governments that came after (Blair and Clinton) tried to reverse some of the extremes of this doctrine, but it was burned into the national psyche. The right could never be brought back to the centre, and the changes inflicted were so extreme that forever after the left who lost the 80s would be crying for a return to that era. These unreconstructed 1980s leftists are now among the loudest voices in America and England.
The key thing is that they are unreconstructed. They claimed in the 80s that neoliberalism would lead to devastation, and now that devastation has arrived, all the blame is of course to placed at the feet of neoliberalism in general, not at specific ideas therein that weren't quite right. By contrast, in countries where neoliberalism worked quite well, the discourse is much more reasonable. People don't, for example, think privatisation is bad eo ipso, they think poorly executed privatisation is bad. So for example, privatising Qantas was a great idea because there is nothing about the airline industry that suggests it wouldn't function perfectly well under market rule. Privatising railways on the other, as Thatcher did, was always going to end badly because railways are a natural monopoly. Milton Friedman could have told you that.
So what we've got is a bunch of boomers stuck in the 80s coming up with shit policy and spending 0 time speaking to younger or at least more reconstructed intellects about what could be done now, given contemporary conditions and what we have learnt in the near 3 decades since the 80s, to improve our lot.
Part of the reason for this is that the boomers won't fucking retire. They are one of the longest living generations in history, and they've stitched up all the ruling class jobs among them. Look at the people running Congress on both sides of the house. Borderline septuagenarians the lot of them! We are tremendously bogged down with greying dinosaurs in the OECD today. Fuck 'em off and let's get some fresh thinking. This is another example of how the core of liberalism - open political and economic competition underpinned by equal opportunity to participate in that competition - has fallen by the wayside.
The boomers are defined not by the 60s when they were growing up, but by the 80s, when they made their great contribution to the political history of the Atlantic in the structural reform years. Almost everything written and done by boomers remains to this day stuck in that great moment of ideological battle, especially in American and Britain. Structural adjustment was the triumph of neoliberalism. Keynesianism was doing more harm than good (mostly because of stagflation) and needed a corrective. Nothing too major mind you (this is always forgotten), just for markets to be left to do the things they are obviously good at, and to be more generally used in sensible ways. In Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, this was done sensibly in general, or I should say in a technocratic fashion. Markets were only implemented where they could, on logical grounds, be expected to work well. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the government was withdrawn just cos. That is to say, there was not technocratic expertise driving reform (though a lot of the reform was sensibly in the direction advocated for by the Chicago School) but ideological conviction. As a result, reform under these administrations was overwrought and overdone. The left-leaning governments that came after (Blair and Clinton) tried to reverse some of the extremes of this doctrine, but it was burned into the national psyche. The right could never be brought back to the centre, and the changes inflicted were so extreme that forever after the left who lost the 80s would be crying for a return to that era. These unreconstructed 1980s leftists are now among the loudest voices in America and England.
The key thing is that they are unreconstructed. They claimed in the 80s that neoliberalism would lead to devastation, and now that devastation has arrived, all the blame is of course to placed at the feet of neoliberalism in general, not at specific ideas therein that weren't quite right. By contrast, in countries where neoliberalism worked quite well, the discourse is much more reasonable. People don't, for example, think privatisation is bad eo ipso, they think poorly executed privatisation is bad. So for example, privatising Qantas was a great idea because there is nothing about the airline industry that suggests it wouldn't function perfectly well under market rule. Privatising railways on the other, as Thatcher did, was always going to end badly because railways are a natural monopoly. Milton Friedman could have told you that.
So what we've got is a bunch of boomers stuck in the 80s coming up with shit policy and spending 0 time speaking to younger or at least more reconstructed intellects about what could be done now, given contemporary conditions and what we have learnt in the near 3 decades since the 80s, to improve our lot.
Part of the reason for this is that the boomers won't fucking retire. They are one of the longest living generations in history, and they've stitched up all the ruling class jobs among them. Look at the people running Congress on both sides of the house. Borderline septuagenarians the lot of them! We are tremendously bogged down with greying dinosaurs in the OECD today. Fuck 'em off and let's get some fresh thinking. This is another example of how the core of liberalism - open political and economic competition underpinned by equal opportunity to participate in that competition - has fallen by the wayside.
Bullshit this Babyboomer retired at 56 thank you Bob Hawk, Paul Keating & later John Howard, the best spike of employment & economic prosperity 1980 to 2000 my time in the workplace & earning sunshine
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