Not just any privileged class Here is where the Boomer defensiveness becomes harder to dismiss—and, strangely, easier to understand. Every dominant group in history has reached for the same psychological toolkit. Roman senators, English landowners and mid-century American corporate aristocracies — all told versions of the same story: we have what we have because we earned it. System justification is ancient. Generational condescension goes back to the Greeks. But Boomers are not simply the latest iteration of a recurring historical pattern. The specific configuration of advantages they accumulated — and the mechanisms by which they accumulated them—has no real precedent. This matters, because it means the defensiveness isn’t just psychologically understandable. It’s also, in a structural sense, more consequential than prior versions of the same reflex. Start with the scale. Boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in wealth—not merely more than prior American generations at the same life stage, but more than any cohort in recorded economic history by a vast multiple. Many of them would seemingly like to think they earned this simply by working harder than anyone who came before, but they entered the housing and equity markets just before both began 40-year appreciation cycles, and they were the largest generation in American history to do so. They didn’t just accumulate wealth—they sat on top of two of the most powerful asset-appreciation engines in modern economic history during their prime earning years. Then there’s the democratic dimension, which gets almost no attention. Previous dominant classes held power through class, race or institutional control—not raw democratic headcount. Boomers were the largest voting bloc [by eligibility or participation?] in American history for nearly four consecutive decades, from roughly 1978 until the mid-2010s. That means the policies that shaped housing markets, the tax treatment of capital gains, the defunding of public universities and the dismantling of defined-benefit pensions were debated and passed during a period when Boomers were the decisive electoral constituency. They didn’t just benefit from the system. They voted for it repeatedly at the precise moment when their demographic weight and financial self-interest were in perfect alignment. No prior privileged class had that combination of democratic legitimacy and self-interested policymaking available simultaneously at this scale. Finally, consider what the gap actually looks like on the other side. In most prior periods of wealth concentration, the non-wealthy simply had less. What’s structurally novel now is that younger generations don’t just have less wealth—they carry the majority of the debt. Federal Reserve data shows Millennial and Gen X mortgage debt is nearly double that of Boomers in absolute terms. More than a third of all student loan borrowers are Millennials, and the St. Louis Fed explicitly documents a generational “clear increase in debt holdings” for younger generations. “Specifically, both Gen Xers and millennials held more debt than Baby Boomers.” Student debt—which exploded during the very decades of Boomer political dominance—has no real historical parallel in prior generational transitions. The floor has been actively lowered, not just the ceiling raised. FortuneBoomers actually do hold most of the wealth and power. So...My inbox called Millennials whiny. The Federal Reserve, a field of social scientists and Aristotle disagree. gosh... now that sounds eeriely similar to what I was saying @DriftBusta and @Mainecat ? https://www.freedomsledder.com/index.php?/topic/82049-young-vs-old-here/page/2/#findComment-1961562
