Generational Apocalypse

Does this constellation signal the End Times?

I posted some time back about how we live in such a cruel age, and suggested that it was in part because of the character of the generations currently in leadership positions.

This Cruel Age

Our institutions, such as they are, are now dominated by Boomers - notoriously willful and self-centered. My way or the highway. Trump, vain and narcisstic, epitomizes the worst of his generation. Under them is my generation, Generation X, who are the most Trump-leaning of the current generations. We value results, the bottom-line - not following the rules.

Thinking of generations as having an archetypal character comes from the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe¹. I do think the idea goes a long way to explaining our current state of affairs.

Baby Boomers were raised indulgently in a time of relative prosperity, the Golden Age of the 1950s and Camelot. They developed an egocentric mentality and a principled sense of moral purpose. A generation down the road, Generation X (which includes me) was raised negligently in a time of cultural upheaval, during the riots of the 1960s and the malaise of the 1970s. We developed an opportunistic mentality and a fearful sense of self-preservation.

People from these two generations now make up everyone aged from their mid-40s on up. That is, the ones in charge.

There are some folks in leadership positions who are older than Boomers, granted, since more people are living and staying active for longer these days. These older folks would be members of the Silent Generation, and they still hold power in Congress (for example, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi) and in the world of business (for example, Warren Buffett). But this generation’s influence will only continue to wane as its members retire and pass away.

Note that Boomers are the oldest of the “postwar” generations - that is, the ones with no memory of World War II and its immediate aftermath. The United States of America is now led by people who have no investment in maintaining the postwar order that was established by the “war” generations to prevent the world from descending into the chaos that they had to live through.

See what I’m getting at?

That’s why the chaos of war has returned. Statements about the end of the international rules-based order or an emerging new multipolarity where Great Powers fend for themselves recognize that the postwar order is over. For a new order to emerge, first we must get through the chaos, with all of its conflict and destruction.

According to the Strauss-Howe generational model, the Boomer generation leaders should be providing the moral vision that guides the formation of the new order, while the Gen X leaders do the practical management work of making it so. This would be from the U.S. perspective - other nations have their own generations, though we do tend to conflate them using the names of the American generations.

Look, I don’t like what Trump is doing at all, but his revolutionary regime does fit that bill. He has assumed the mantle of supreme moral arbiter, and his loyal lieutenants, incompetent sycophants though they are, are doing his bidding.

The Trumpian MAGA vision, as far as I can tell, is to restore a legendary American greatness by turning back the clock 50 or 100 years, while elevating whiteness and Christianity to their rightful place as marks of privilege. It’s hard to tell exactly how implementing this is going to work, what with the administration being so unpredictable.

The Gonzo Administration

But that’s beside the point, since a substantial portion of voters have bought into it. Certain directives, particularly the crackdown on migrants that is enabled by the Supreme Court’s decison permitting so-called “Kavanaugh stops,” are clearly in line with this vision.

Any real opposition to this regime must have its own competing vision. The Democratic party has an alternate future narrative, but it comes from an economic populist wing on the left, not its mainstream leadership. Hence their reduction to minority status.

As mentioned in the previous post on our cruel age, Boomers and Gen Xers in leadership form a generational constellation.

Strauss and Howe called the arrangement of living generations that define a social era the “generational constellation.” This era’s constellation has Boomers and Gen Xers in the oldest age brackets, in charge of institutions they are radically and recklessly transforming.

With the current faction in charge, we have a particularly cruel constellation. It’s top leader is a domineering sociopath who thinks he can do no wrong, and it’s followers are callous and impervious to humanitarian appeals. Just check your social media feeds if you doubt me.

Even more disturbing is the evidence that the moral vision driving this administration’s actions has an apocalyptic bent. Military commanders have framed the war with Iran in Millenarian terms, as if they are ushering in the End Times. Presumably this is seen in relation to our alliance with Israel.

In fact, the U.S. ambassador to Israel is an evangelical Christian who believes in the Zionist tenet that Israel must take over Palestine to bring on Christ’s second coming. And the Secretary of Defense War certainly seems to be aligned with these beliefs.

As journalist Sarah Kendzior puts it, they are not building The New World Order, but rather The No World Order. She writes:

The Iran War is being fought for Greater Israel — and for annihilation. The doctrine of annihilation is not unitary. Christian fanatics, Jewish fanatics, secular accelerationalists, and technofascists seeking depopulation all have their own agendas.

Yes, even the broligarchs are down with it. With all their billions of dollars, the wealthy eilites can build themselves luxury survival bunkers to hide away in while the world burns around them. Since the broligarchy, at least at the very top, is primarily Gen X², this is in keeping with our generation’s survival instinct and “every man for himself” ethos.

Even more perverse than simply retreating from the Apocalypse (instead of trying to prevent it) is the trend of using online betting sites to make money off of the end of the world. Conceivably, some of the people making these bets are the same ones making decisions about military operations - the ultimate in barbaric cynicism. It’s not hard to believe this could happen, given how morally corrosive rule by Trump is.

There was even, briefly, the ability to bet on nuclear war on the gambling site Polymarket. Kicked off, presumably, by the Israel-U.S. attack on Iran. That particular bet has been taken down, but Dave Sirota here on Substack did grab a screenshot first:

(source)

This marriage of a Boomer Millenarian vision of the Second Coming with Gen X gamesmanship of the end of the world is apparently the best we could get now that we have established a Red State dictatorship. It’s a regime that has thrown its hands up and given up on civilization.

In an article last year, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor called this “end times fascism.”

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

What they write matches much of what I’ve written here about our new dystopia, which demands that we accept a dangerous world as the new normal, and offers us no way forward except a return to the past.

Apparently we won’t even get that, with the fate of civilization now in the hands of our deranged Mad King, who you know is just dying to use nuclear weapons. As stated in The Fourth Turning:

It’s a profoundly depressing thought, but unfortunately it fits the zeitgeist, as those Polymarket betters might have intuited.

As for how bringing on the End Times could possibly make America great again?

C’mon, we all knew MAGA was always a scam.

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1. See: Strauss, William., Howe, Neil. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 1991 (ISBN 9780688119126) and Strauss, William and Howe, Neil. The Fourth Turning. New York: Broadway Books, 1997 (ISBN 9780767900461).

2. I’m planning a future post on the topic of the tech oligarchy as a Gen X phenomenon.