The hatred against boomers: a preview of what will happen to the woke right

"Forever young. I want to be forever young. Do you really want to live forever?" This will sound familiar to many people my age.

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Those words are part of the chorus of a beautiful song called "Forever Young" by the German pop group Alphaville. It's one of my favorite songs from that golden age of music. That song expressed the desire of many people not to grow old, to remain forever in a stage of life when maturity seems abhorrent. It's that youth that awakens nostalgia in many of us, until we start remembering more details.

What some political movements love about youth

As time goes by, you realize that being young has advantages and disadvantages, and the greatest of the latter is inexperience, that ignorance about life that exposes you to situations that will lead to harsh disappointments. This ignorance is one of the reasons why youth has been the object of worship by totalitarian movements, not only for its vitality, but also for its malleability, for how receptive it is to any nonsense, even if its terrible results have already been amply exposed.

Obviously, no generalization is fair: there are brilliant young people and mediocre old people, and vice versa. Being young or being old does not guarantee that anyone is a better person. However, some insist on turning youth into a political category and maturity into an object of contempt. It's a clumsy attitude that we already saw years ago on the far left, when they complained that in Spain people over 45 also voted, because if only people under that age voted, they would already have won. It's an example of that "woke" left that centers its discourse on identities to pit against each other: women against men, poor against rich, "racialized people" against whites, etc.

A great opportunity that risks being lost

Today it seems that this "woke" left is in decline, sunk by the weight of its irrationality, punished by the effects of the nonsense it itself formulated and which led it to scare away many of its followers. This is a great opportunity for the Western right to recover a sensible and rational discourse, centered on values, on goodness, on freedom, and on the importance of the individual, and not on the conflicting collective identities that the left claims. Unfortunately, this opportunity is in danger of being lost.

The woke right's rhetoric against boomers

This risk exists because a section of the right has decided to make the same mistakes as the woke left, adopting an identity-based discourse that mirrors the discourse championed by its rivals. One of the most painful examples of the discourse of this "woke" right is its hatred of "boombers", as people born during the "baby boom" era are commonly known, from the years after World War II to the 1960s or 1970s, depending on the country. Thus, boomers" would be people from 45 or 50 years old to 70 or 80. We're talking about billions of people around the world.

This "woke" right blames "boomers" for the current state of society and the world, as if all people of a certain age had the same way of thinking and the same responsibilities in society. Such discourse is just as ridiculous as the "woke" left's discourse demonizing men, white people, or heterosexuals, but the right-wingers who have decided to join this wave of irrationality seem not to realize that they are doing the same thing as the left, but from the other extreme.

A vicious circle that does not end well

You don't have to be a fortune teller to know what's behind such a stupid speech: it's the old tactic of blaming others for your inability to offer convincing arguments that will encourage them to support you. Those who adopt this discourse find themselves in a vicious circle: they adopt irrational theses that provoke rejection among many people and then blame others for that rejection, without having the slightest capacity for self-criticism, without stopping for a minute to think that perhaps they are wrong or, at least, have used erroneous methods to communicate their ideas.

It's not hard to guess what will happen to this "woke" right, given what happened to its leftist reflection. They will end up boring people and will lose much of the support they received before they opted for this increasingly irrational attitude. In the end, those young people whom the "woke" right claims to adore will eventually mature, and many will look back with shame on their past attitudes, especially their widespread and unfair criticism of millions of people simply for being of a certain age. By then, perhaps, the left will have managed to regain the ground it is losing now. Someday, history books should remember this moment as a clear example of what it means to shoot yourself in the foot in politics.

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Photo: Aaron Andrew Ang.