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There
is nothing more pitiful then Boomer guilt. A paradigmatic example of Boomer
guilt is the reaction of the fourth estate (a Boomer haven if there ever
was one) to Bill Clinton’s new book. Anyone with even the most limited
exposure knows that it’s a piece of crap. Many of the reviewers have hit
on why: its relentless focus on the self provides insight only into Clinton’s
– and his generation’s – narcissism; the discussion of regeneration and
self-improvement are a sham mixture of therapy-speak, self-help mumbo-jumbo
and watered-down Emersonian clichés, the reduction of the political in
general to the personal, etc. But it’s interesting that many of Clinton’s
Boomer judges, while harshly judging him for these sins, can’t seems to
shake these categories themselves.
Take,
for example, one of the moments when Clinton plays against type and calls
attention to how an episode that was interpreted through the lens of the
personal actually was political. Clinton asserts that the impeachment
fiasco should be viewed as one episode in a series in which the Republican
Party attempted to extend its power in a fashion that falls outside the
norms of American politics. One could here site the attempted impeachment,
the election of 2000, and various successful attempts to redistrict in
the middle of redistricting terms. In response to this plausible characterization,
the Washington Post felt the need to write an outraged editorial. The
editorial, entitled “Alternative Universe,” seethes that Clinton thinks
that “his impeachment reflects nothing bad on him but is—as [Clinton]
put it recently—‘a badge of honor,’ a defense of the Constitution against
the ravages of his Republican enemies.”
The editorial, of course, thinks that the impeachment does reflect
badly on Clinton (which of course it does)
and that his transgressions should not be overlooked or written out of
history. What is the chief transgression? That he “lied under oath.” There’s
that slogan; the obsessive recitation of which might lead one to think
that it has become a ritual
by which one swears fealty to some unuttered consensus. Now this charge,
at first blush, would not seem to fall prey to Boomer logic. After
all, it is concerned with Clinton’s public conduct as an official who
must serve under the law. But this is what everyone says to cover their
ass, to make it seem as if their interest in the case is not prurient
but the stuff of great weightiness.
What one means when one says this is: he humiliated the office of
the president because he, like the Boomer he is, could not muster up the
self-restraint to stop himself. As his generation’s effort to change the
world was transformed into hedonism and self-obsession, Clinton’s utopian
energies were frittered away in licentious self-pleasuring. Because this
is the inevitable result of unleashing these energies, we should not arouse
them in the first place. (Notice how the structural homology between Clinton
and the Sixties helps the conservative cause in another way: to make this
comparison hides the vast gulf between the transformative vision of Clinton’s
centrist “neo-liberalism with a human face” and the transformative vision
of the Sixties.) Even though the editorial acknowledges—in a display of
“fairness”—that “Mr. Clinton had powerful and committed political enemies
who waged a well-financed campaign against him throughout his presidency,”
as well as “the rank partisanship that helped fuel impeachment,” it ends up justifying the impeachment as a
legitimate event in American
politics. It was legitimate because Clinton brought it on himself.
Especially
since our world became nasty and brutish, many Americans have taken to
thinking of Clinton as a bellwether of better, if gilded, times. But one
does not sense this ease with Clinton’s legacy on the part of certain
sectors of the so-called Boomer “new class” of journalists, intellectuals,
academics, etc. This goes not only for conservatives but also for many
liberals. These liberals take Clinton to represent their generation’s
sins. Many liberal Boomers have the feeling that back in the Sixties they
went a bit too far. Sometimes they even put the Idea of America into question,
asking not when America would live up to its ideals but whether America could live up to those ideals.
There
have been many moments of dissent in America (indeed that is how the nation
began), but few in which this question has been asked with any seriousness.
Dissent meant making America live up to its vision of itself, it did not
mean questioning whether America could actually do it and still be another
ordinary nation-state. The Sixties mostly did not ask this question either,
but it was posed. In posing it, one transgressed the so-called “rituals
of consensus,” as Scavan Bercovitch calls them, which tied together the
Idea or Symbol of America. Not only did Boomers transgress these rituals,
but they also transgressed them while having
a good time. Of course, there were many, many serious young men and
women who swelled the ranks of the New Left, but there were many other
young men and women who mouthed the slogans to get high, and get laid
if possible. One has the feeling that the Boomers, now looking at themselves
retrospectively, don’t think this really stood up compared with the trials
of their parents, the so-called Greatest Generation (another Boomer obsession).
Of
course one could tell the Boomers thought that the Romantic aspiration
to transform the self through various forms of experience, drugs, sex,
etc., itself had an illustrious history in America. It is my sense that
the response to Clinton, on the part of many Boomer journalists, is informed
by guilt. It is informed by the guilt that their generation broached,
however gingerly, the consensus of the Idea of American, and did so while
having fun. The whipping of Clinton’s personal failings is this generation’s
way of reenacting or taking part in the ritual of consensus.
All
this would be an amusing display of generational folly if it did not have
such serious political repercussions. One of the examples of fallout is
the conservative backlash that has dominated American politics since the
early Seventies, which plays upon this feeling of guilt. Conservatism
is confident that it embodies the Idea of America (think of Ronald Reagan
on his horse) and it is confident that Boomer liberals, deep down inside,
accept this as well. One of the appeals of Howard Dean, for all of his
faults, was that he was perhaps the first liberal politician since Bobby
Kennedy that did not tacitly accept the idea that Conservatism embodies
the Idea of America. It was his rejection of this idea even more then
his rejection of the Iraq war that distinguished Dean as an original political
phenomenon, and one hopes for some transfer of that feeling to the Kerry
campaign. In not bowing to the shibboleth of the unpatriotic liberal,
perhaps Dean signals something greater brewing in the American polity,
and the first sign of something new and exciting among Democrats since
Triangulation.
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