The Generational Blame Game, and Why We Must Refuse to Play It

If you asked me to pick the most tired political platitude of the last decade, I would have to respond with the trope of “Millennial murder.” In the mid-2010s, it was almost impossible to go a month without hearing a new story about how millennials were killing some industry — homeownership, diamonds, mayonnaise, you name it. The tale that millennials were responsible for the decline of a multitude of industries — all of which can be linked in some way with the image of American-brand capitalism — was easy to spin to a largely Generation X (1961-1981) and boomer (1946-1964) audience, ready to point fingers. In a way, the speed and ease with which the myth gripped the American public are indicative of a wider attitude held about generational differences. It implies the unfortunate existence of a strong propaganda machine, one that has successfully swindled many Americans into believing the issues that plague their society are the fault of their fellow citizens while distracting them from the real culprit: capitalism. 

Since1967, Time Magazine has published twenty separate magazines with covers calling out specific age groups. “The Generation That Forgot God.” “Generation Disappointment.” “Generation Jihad.” And perhaps most famously, plastered across the cover of a May 2013 edition, was “The Me, Me, Me Generation: Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” Yuck! The danger of these sorts of broad generalizations about certain generations is that even if they happened to be true — which, nine times out of ten, they aren’t — they lack any nuance, depth, or real analysis into the conditions that might lead to some of the disadvantages people of certain age demographics face and the ways they respond to them. You don’t need to be a biologist to realize that there is not some special allele that exclusively activates in people born in certain years that makes them more prone to living with their parents or not eating out every day of the week. In the case of millennials, their failure to buy houses as early as their grandparents did isn’t because they don’t want to buy houses; in fact, the 2018 Homebuyer Insights Survey by Bank of America found 72% of millennials picked “owning a home” as a top priority in life — above “traveling the world” (61%) but below “being able to retire” (80%). Yet homeownership rates are down among millennials by 8% compared to previous generations. Thanks to a combination of crushing student loan debt and their possession of a mere 3% of America’s wealth (boomers at similar ages had 21%) millennials simply can’t afford homeownership.

The fact that this easily-debunked narrative has been entrenched into our cultural understanding of our economic struggles for so many years is quite upsetting. There are so many more pressing narratives deserving to be explored. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and breathtaking socioeconomic inequality all taint the fabric of American society. Yet, in an environment where everything we consume is broken down to its most easily digested parts, commercialized, and commodified, discussing these issues simply isn’t marketable. Instead, popular magazines, like Time, choose to sacrifice integrity in favor of accessibility. This isn’t the fault of Time itself, which was owned by Meredith Corporation until it was purchased by tech billionaire Marc Benioff in 2018. Another popular publication, the Washington Post, is owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest of the rich, and perhaps the most well-known of America’s many billionaires. When corporations and billionaires fund media outlets, there will inevitably exist a tendency to produce stories that are more marketable than substantive. You can bet that someone like Bezos, whose wealth could not possibly be spent by a single person in even one thousand lifetimes, would be glad to have the public eye shift its gaze towards an arbitrary age group rather than towards the billionaires who are truly responsible for a majority of our world’s woes.

Of course, the “millennials are killing” fable has been dismantled countless times. But now that the cliché has run its course, and many are disillusioned with the narrative that it presents; it is important to go one step further and recognize the danger in blaming any particular generation for the troubles faced by today’s youth. Yes, it is easiest to blame the boomers. A 2019 census of billionaires shows that 90% are over the age of 50. Near the end of 2019, the “OK boomer” slogan took the internet by storm, becoming a ubiquitous expression of anger against not only the group one might think of as “old people,” but also the broader band of all those who hold racist, classist views, are pro-war, bigoted, voted for Trump, or generally don’t align with progressive views. However, at its core, the OK boomer was a blanket statement that, before it was co-opted out of the hands of zoomers and millennials by the very people it was meant to disarm, was a more modern version of the “millennials are killing” myth. It served as an easily digestible, accessible way to attack a generation that was (and still is) broadly perceived as responsible for many of society’s issues. But it is of the utmost importance that we abandon our rage with boomers and instead realize that the many problems we as a society face today are a result of the simple fact that capitalism is an inherently unsustainable economic system.

The impending climate crisis that threatens to displace and destroy the lives of millions within just a few decades is a major example of capitalism’s unsustainability, and that one many young folks are actively, even desperately, campaigning to fix. A mere 100 companies have been responsible for 70% of carbon dioxide emissions since 1988, according to a 2017 study by the Carbon Disclosure Project. And the bottom 50% of countries by wealth account for 14% of emissions, while the top 50% emit 86%. The United States and China alone account for 47% of global emissions to date. These statistics all point to a harrowing trend: corporations in wealthy capitalist countries do not care about the impacts their operations have on the environment. Yes, this includes China, which, although its ruling party is still the Communist Party, long ago abandoned the Marxist-Leninist path Mao laid out in the late 1940s. In fact, Beijing has the most billionaires of any city in the world. The crucial fact of the matter is that the people who run these corporations do not actively destroy our world out of spite. Instead, capitalism enables these people to make destructive decisions in the name of maximizing capital gain. Capitalism is not concerned with morality. Capitalism, a system that functions through private ownership of the means of production and eschews the legitimate pursuit of the common good, is concerned only with one simple question: “What will increase profits?”

The fossil fuel industry provides insight into many of capitalism’s flaws, but let’s broaden this examination. The industrial complex, a broad concept that can be summed up as the interplay created between corporations and our operant political system, is a frightening positive feedback loop that relies on a two-step mechanism to continue operating. First, profits grow when flimsy legislation allows billionaires to store profits off-shores in shell companies and dodge taxes. Some of the largest corporations in the world like Apple and IBM use hundreds of shell companies in countries like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes. This tax dodging costs the US approximately $111 billion every year, hindering economic growth and sapping investment in sectors like healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Second, billionaires and corporations use their vast stores of illegitimate profits to pay off legislators through lobbying and campaign gifts to promote special interests. In 2012 alone, business interests spent $2.57 billion lobbying Congress, which made up more than three-quarters of all spending by politically active organizations. These corporations use their wealth to restart the cycle, going back to step one and keeping the legislation, that allows them to garner that wealth in the first place, intact.

When spending thousands in the pursuit of legislative decisions favorable towards corporations is viable, everyday citizens who do not possess such wealth cannot be expected to take such a legislative process seriously. The average age of the members of Congress is 58.5.  Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’s supporters tend to be younger than 45. Yet capitalism, which has its roots in the mercantilism and feudal societies characteristic of medieval Europe, is centuries old. When you see a news article slamming millennials for killing an industry, you are not seeing the disease. You are witnessing a symptom. Falling prey to the idea that a single generation is at fault for the existence of a flawed system older than America itself serves only to divide the working class. The key to overcoming capitalism is first rejecting the narrative of the “generational blame game” and establishing solidarity among members of the working class. To paraphrase Che Guevara: “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, you are a comrade of mine. Including boomers.”