The Social World

Author: Christopher Caldwell

  • Eclipse of the boomers

    Eclipse of the boomers

    Shortly after Christmas, the oldest baby boomer will turn 80. The 75 million people born between 1946 and 1964 who have dominated the American political imagination since the Eisenhower administration are starting to fade from the scene.

    Anyone who has felt oppressed by the baby boom – and this includes virtually every non-senior citizen in the country – will complain that it’s about frickin’ time. If the boomers are only now losing their influence, they long ago lost their marbles. What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But maybe it was the indignant boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell over the Covid “misinformation” to which Joe Rogan allegedly gave vent in 2022. Although this pair of Woodstock-era Canadian singer-songwriters are slightly too old to belong to the baby boom proper, the crusade to which they were summoning their fans was a perfect example of the boomer style, with its sanctimony, its performative dudgeon, its imputation of ignorance and immorality to anyone who disagrees – all in the service of a questionable proposition.

    Spotify executives must have agonized for nanoseconds over how to respond to this “either-he-goes-or-we-go” ultimatum. Should they cut loose Rogan, the most listened-to talker in the fastest-growing audio-streaming genre, with a political influence to match? Or should they part with two folk singers whose Spotify fanbase (however numerous their listeners elsewhere) probably consists of 11 septuagenarians sniffling in front of their toasters in retirement communities across Arizona? Hmm. The Spotify execs didn’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows.

    Looking at the boomers these days, it is natural to ask how anybody could ever have been pushed around by such a feckless and unconvincing bunch. The answer is an actuarial one. It wasn’t the boomers’ powers of persuasion that enabled them to rally the country behind a succession of dim ideas, from complex derivatives to the Iraq war. It’s just that they were numerous enough to be demographically invincible. If the boomers wanted something, they got it, by force of numbers, and this was as true when they were six as it was when they were 60.

    Before they could even talk, society was being reconfigured around them, for better and for worse. By 1964, all 75 million boomers had been born – and the United States had only 191 million people in it. Boomers made up about 40 percent of the country. What sort of parents wouldn’t have voted for a vast expansion of secondary and university education to speed their kids’ way into the upper-middle class? On the other hand, a bumper crop of 18-year-olds stretching as far as the eye can see did nothing to reduce Lyndon Johnson’s crazy ambition to fight a war in Vietnam, where tens of thousands of boomers would die.

    Although no one ever sat down and calculated it, this critical number – 40 percent – would give a rough idea of baby-boom power as the generation passed through the various stages of life. Boomers started voting in the 1966 elections, and by the time Ronald Reagan chased Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, they were casting 40 percent of the votes. Two years later they were at 43 percent.

    The boomers were sometimes polarized on major issues, it is true. But on any matter that united them, it required a near-unanimous resistance movement to stop them. That is why politicians made the country liberal on sex in the 1970s, when the boomers were mostly in their twenties; business-friendly in the 1980s, when the boomers were mostly in their thirties; and investment-friendly – starting with Bill Clinton’s second term – in the 1990s, when the oldest boomers were entering their fifties.

    This was important, because the boomers’ command over the economy would wind up more impressive than their command over the political system. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the boomers were between 25 and 43, entering their most energetic adult years just as America was being called on to write the rules for the global economy. When they were in their prime, in the prosperous 1990s, they made up well over half the workforce.

    But now the boomers, submerged beneath immigration and colliding with mortality, make up only about 20 percent of the population. Each year, 1.8 million of them die, and that number is set to rise steeply.

    This is going to have a startling consequence. The baby-boom vision of what American society is about has been embraced almost unanimously by all society’s institutions since about 1968, when the oldest boomers were graduating from college. Boomers quarrel over the details of this vision, but not over its basic tenets, which seem to be: 1) The main thing that happened in American history is slavery; 2) There is not much difference between men and women; 3) Youth is the best part of life.

    Through their preponderance in the marketplace and the voting booth, boomers have been able to sell these propositions to the American public as the merest common sense. But they are no such thing. For most of American history they were considered outright untruths, and most non-boomers probably think of them as such today.

    There is going to come a moment when the boomers’ political power falls below the threshold necessary to prop up this vision of things. It could happen before the next election. And then something is going to happen that no one has given much thought to: control over our politics and our culture is going to pass to a non-baby boom generation – perhaps a much younger one – that looks at the world in its own, totally different way.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Is Donald Trump a game theorist?

    Is Donald Trump a game theorist?

    Is Donald Trump a more sophisticated mathematical thinker than we give him credit for?

    The other day, on one of the Sunday talk shows, a lawyer named Sarah Isgur explained the logic Trump was following in throwing the book at those who had once done the same to him. Isgur, who served in the first Trump administration, sees in the President’s actions something more sophisticated than mere revenge: “What you will hear from those people in the Department of Justice is: this is what deterrence theory is about. When you’re playing a cooperative game and the other side defects,” Isgur said, “then you hit them back disproportionately to create that deterrence.”

    “Cooperative game,” “defect,” “deterrence” – this is the vocabulary of game theory, the recondite discipline developed by John von Neumann and other 20th-century European scientists to describe how certain structured encounters such as negotiations will play out, and how one can win at them. Back in the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union were negotiating over how to avoid a nuclear confrontation, game theory was something that could come up on the television news any evening.

    But only geezers remembered that, at least until last April, when the US and China were at loggerheads over trade, the dollar was tumbling, interest rates were rising and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was pressed to explain why Trump had threatened to raise duties on Chinese goods to eleventy-zillion percent. “In game theory,” Bessent replied, “this is called strategic uncertainty.”

    Could Trump have acted in such a premeditated way? There is little evidence for it in The Art of the Deal. And yet the President emerged from a decades-long business career during which he built nothing of enduring value yet somehow earned billions – he must have had some system for coming out on top during negotiations.

    Those who believe he has mastered game theory point to his bargaining on tariffs. They argue that his strategy revealed an intuitive understanding of the prisoner’s dilemma, the classic game-theory problem. Say you and a friend rob a house and get caught. The police don’t have enough evidence to convict you – unless one of you snitches on the other. So they give you incentives. If you betray your friend, he’ll go to prison for four years and you’ll go free immediately. If you both betray each other, you’ll each get two years. If you both remain silent, you’ll both be held in custody for about a year. The upshot is this: it’s always in the collective interest of you and your partner to stay quiet, but it’s in your individual interest to betray each other. When he tariffed nearly every country in the world, Trump separated trading partners who might otherwise have been able to form a common front against the US. Every nation became incentivized to fight for itself.

    Throughout his trade negotiations, Trump has also showed a keen awareness of a trade-relations paradox: in many cases, the worse your position is in a trading relationship, the better it is at the negotiating table. If you believe, as Trump does, that a trade deficit is a catastrophe, then a country that runs big trade deficits, such as the US, has less to lose in walking away from the negotiating table. China, in the Trumpian view, will suffer more than America, should trade relations break down.

    For game theorists, the heart of negotiating strategy is the ability to make credible threats and promises. In the closing stages of the Vietnam War, when the war’s unpopularity in the US gave the North Vietnamese every incentive to continue fighting all the way to victory, Richard Nixon was desperate to negotiate a settlement. American diplomats therefore put the word out that Nixon was not right in his head and might resort to an insane escalation. The hope was that this would convince the North Vietnamese to come to the negotiating table.

    Trump doesn’t require any of those Nixonian theatrics to convince his partners that he is willing to inflict damage at the drop of a hat. In late October he threatened Canada with fresh tariffs over a television advertisement that rubbed him the wrong way. The problem with this sort of melodrama is that it is self-undermining: the more credible it makes your threats, the less credible it makes your promises.

    A foreign trading partner could be forgiven for asking what good can come of making any concession to the United States at this point. Trump has decided to use the American role as the West’s defender to engage in hegemonic rent extraction, as game theorists put it. Or, as historians put it, to exact tribute. We now monetize everything, including solidarity. Humiliations result for our friends in Europe as well as for our rivals in Russia and China. This may well be a clever move in a dollars-and-cents way. It could revive American industry. It could even help balance the budget. But the problem for Americans is that humiliations and broken relationships have a cost, and it is one that is hard to calculate until it is too late. You don’t need to be a game theorist to know that.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • The bully doctrine

    The bully doctrine

    When the suspended late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel got his show back in late September, he did not apologize for the callous remark that briefly drove him off the air. Kimmel had accused Donald Trump and his followers of harboring and inciting the man who assassinated the activist Charlie Kirk, a beloved friend to many in Trump’s circle. This brought threats from one of Trump’s communications officials, then boycotts by two major station operators and finally Disney’s suspension of Kimmel. On his return, the comedian cracked a joke about Trump: “I don’t like bullies,” he said. “I played the clarinet in high school.”

    Weird thing to say. With tempers running so high, why would an impenitent enemy settle for calling Trump a “bully?” Why not call him a censor? A dictator? A traitor?

    Because today, “bully” has somehow become a worse insult than any of these things. The reason has nothing to do with reality. In real life, bullies are like Moe, the lumbering, mop-headed mauler in Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is small and Moe covets his school lunch. He makes credible threats of violence, conveyed by a clenched fist or a muttered insult, to get it. Whether or not you think Trump is a bully, both he and Moe must be reckoned with. Bullies can be dangerous and effective.

    Not so the “bully” of today’s political cliché. On the one hand, he’s utterly evil – intimidating others for no reason at all. His goals don’t even rise to the level of Moe and his school lunch – they’re mere pretexts. Trump doesn’t want to secure the Mexican border against immigration. He wants to put children in cages.

    On the other hand, he’s a pathetico. The key trait of today’s imaginary “bully” is this: he’s a coward. He’s like a macho man in an Italian comedy. All his roaring toxic masculinity is a front. Eventually he will run squealing away, like the pusillanimous little sissy he is at heart. Democrats cling to the fantasy that anyone they label a “bully” will wimp out. Last election season, California Governor Gavin Newsom called on fellow Democrats to “punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.” Has that worked out? When Trump advanced his tariff plans in March, a Miami Herald correspondent urged massive resistance: “The only way to fight bullies,” he wrote, “is to stand up and watch them cower.” We’re waiting. The “bully” story is the familiar parable of Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938, retold for people who know more about pop psychology than history.

    We have convinced ourselves that Putin will back down if only we provoke and insult him enough

    If the world really functioned this way, it would be a convenient thing for politicians. The essence of politics, after all, is enlisting supporters in battles of various kinds. It’s easier to do that if you can pretend that high-stakes conflicts are actually low-risk. All you have to do is “stand up” to the bully. For 20 years, we have convinced ourselves that Vladimir Putin, possessor of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, will “back down” if only we provoke and insult him enough. How do we know this? Because he is a “bully” – in fact, a “schoolyard bully,” which conveys that opposing him will be no more difficult that opposing a child. Again, we’re still waiting.

    Like a lot of what professes to be age-old wisdom, our picture of the bully is actually a recent ideological invention. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the graph showing the use of the word “bully” over the past two centuries is shaped like a hockey stick. Never a particularly common word, it makes an almost vertical leap sometime in the 1980s, to the point where it is today used about ten times more frequently than it was back then. Similarly, expressions involving the things you do to bullies – whether “standing up to” or “calling out” – have also roughly doubled since Ronald Reagan’s day.

    That is no coincidence. Sometime around the end of the Cold War, Washington began to need this redefinition of “bully” – mostly because it was intent on using the so-called “unipolar moment” to push others around. In 1999, the United States launched the first interstate war in Europe since World War Two in order to discipline Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević for his anti-terrorist actions in the province of Kosovo. As one foreign policy expert put it, Milošević was “a playground bully who would fight, but back off after a punch in the nose.”

    Then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s advisors took to calling Milošević the Bully of Belgrade, just as defense experts in the two George Bush presidencies referred to Saddam Hussein as the Bully of Baghdad. The Iraq War that the younger Bush launched in 2003 has indeed gone down as a landmark in the history of bullying, though not for anything Saddam did.

    American policymakers persist in making bullying our model. “Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies,” said Obama advisor Susan Rice on a recent podcast. “And they back down when people stand up to them.”

    The Bully Doctrine boils down to this: the more threatening a person is, the less threatening he is. Where does this bizarre idea come from? Perhaps it is a holdover from an age of gentlemanly manners when, for instance, bragging about money was a sign you didn’t have any. Perhaps it comes from the age of Freud, when people understood human personality traits as compensations for deeply felt, hidden inadequacies. But it seems more likely that our ideas of bullying arise from stupid after-school specials and Disney films – and that we believe them out of wishful thinking. It’s a poor compass for navigating a dangerous time.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Liberalism is a lost cause

    Liberalism is a lost cause

    The worst book title of the modern age actually belongs to a superb work: The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, which the English sociologist Colin Crouch wrote in 2011. The title was meant to play off the historian George Dangerfield’s 1935 book about the politics of the United Kingdom before World War One, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Alas, after almost a century, not many people remember Dangerfield. A larger problem is that it is hard to say what liberalism is, neo- or paleo-, dead or alive. In Europe, it mostly means the free market. In the United States, it mostly means various movements for social betterment pushed by those skeptical of the free market. Liberalism thus comes to mean every political tendency and its opposite.

    Fourteen years after Crouch, in The Collapse of Global Liberalism, the Irish economist Philip Pilkington argues that liberalism is finally on its deathbed. Pilkington views liberalism as earlier generations of political philosophers did: as one long process of replacing relations based on “status” with relations based on “contract.” Since the days of John Locke, the heart of the liberal idea is that every human being is free to make his own choices: why should I have to worship in the state church if Father X is preaching next door and I wish to listen to him?

    Liberalism aims to increase happiness by smashing every rule and razing every institution that keeps individuals from contracting freely with one another. If we were all only individuals, that would be great. But we also belong to institutions that care for us and allow us to care for others – families, churches, fraternities – and liberalism has destroyed these as well. Liberalism, Pilkington argues, has a decidedly dark side and he has a theory that ties together the seemingly disparate phenomena that people hate about it, from credit default swaps to the Iraq War to Drag Queen Story Hour.

    Liberal economies, which promise prosperity, cannot produce the main thing they need to guarantee it

    There are many paradoxes about liberalism. Breaking all these traditions and keeping voluntary organizations from re-emerging requires a huge role for law and lawyers. So it never feels like we’re getting freer. A country is forbidden to subsidize industry if it wants to join the World Trade Organization or the EU or some other institution of “free” trade. A businessman is forbidden to hire his old friends according to the anti-discrimination laws that govern the “free” market. For Pilkington, liberalism is a bit like communism – a set of sweet ideals realizable only through ruthless measures.

    And like communism, it is failing. American deindustrialization started the avalanche. When American businessmen broke their contracts with their own workers to profit from cheap labor abroad, liberals were ready with excuses. The world was “embracing our liberal values.” Except it wasn’t. Deng Xiaoping’s xiaokang system of “moderate prosperity” in the 1970s, Beijing’s “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign” against pornography in the 1980s, Zhu Rongji’s fight against western speculation in the 1990s – China thinks its illiberal path was the better one. Pilkington agrees. One of his darker conclusions is that it is too late to do anything about it. China took over the synergistic culture of technological innovation the United States possessed till this century, and it would take us decades to get it back.

    For Pilkington, the Russo-Ukrainian war is a turning point. The US underestimated the industrial base that the now thoroughly deindustrialized West would require to keep Ukraine in the fight. And it overestimated its ability to bring Russia to heel through sanctions. Cutting off Russian energy to Europe undermined our allies’ economies; freezing (and considering stealing) Russia’s currency reserves undermined our own status as an honest broker in the global marketplace, and the power of the dollar along with it. “So what?” one might reply. The US has been screwing up all century long – but it doesn’t seem to stop us. The difference is that an anti-liberal alliance has formed (that of the BRICS countries) which, if not more powerful than the liberal West, is at least strong enough to circumvent American-controlled institutions and resist US intimidation.

    It all happened so quickly. “The global liberal world order should have been able to put up a better fight,” Pilkington observes. He blames “the bizarre upside-down culture and morality of late liberalism,” and he has a smart, simple theory about this, too. As Pilkington sees it, “the liberal political order flows directly from the liberal economic order.” Unfortunately, the contractual basis of liberalism cannot really be applied to sex. The problem this creates is fatal. Liberal economies, which promise prosperity, cannot produce the main thing they need to guarantee it: new generations of human beings. No longer self-sufficient in population growth, societies must trade for it. This is what we call mass migration. Where people stop having children, the young (who possess the vital energy) are pitted against the old (who possess the democratic majority), so democracy tends to lose its legitimacy. Alternative solutions to the population problem bubble up, though no one dares speak their name: Pilkington believes the current fad for euthanasia is one of these.

    Those who design liberal systems are often the last to see this decline coming. This is due to another element of liberal order: “Liberals,” Pilkington writes, “have an almost magical belief in the power of perception.” One can complain about the elites of the old days – magnates, clerics, military barons – but at least their business was reality. Today’s leaders tend to be “symbolic analysts,” to use Robert Reich’s term – or “bullshit artists,” to use the more common one. Their professional experience has convinced them that reality can be whatever you want it to be. And it can. Until suddenly it can’t. Things fall apart. The lack of a center cannot hold.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.