[Spooky23]

That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

[bumby]

Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.

[bitwize]

That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.

[jcranmer]

> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.

[gedy]

I think if you look at how most people lived, worked, travelled, communicated, educated, etc before WW2 - there was a huge improvement after the war that resulted in lots of development and economic opportunities for the average person.

[Clubber]

Sure, but that doesn't make the original statement correct.

>WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower.

[majormajor]

Labor also has more power when a ton of young newcomers to the working force were just killed before they could ever make it there.

[southernplaces7]

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.

[djmips]

Boomers is anyone 60 or older right now - not just 70+

That being said, Boomer has evolved to mean anyone older, established and conservative.

Like the counterculture saying from the past, don't trust anyone over 30.

[TheOtherHobbes]

One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.

The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.

Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.

Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.

It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.

[rightbyte]

"Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible."

I think I need to print that out and put on the wall. However, did you live through it youself? I think it it hard to evaluate stuff like this with 2nd hand experience only.