In the fall of 1966, a thousand young men converged on New Haven, Connecticut, as members of the most revolutionary freshman class ever admitted to Yale. We were chosen to advance three goals. Modernize Yale. Democratize America. Save the world.

Impossibly grandiose? Well, duh. But these were the Sixties, this was Yale, and we were the baby boomers, so anything was possible.

This spring a couple hundred of us returned for our fifty-fifth reunion. Along with creaky knees and extra pounds, many—myself included—carried a backpack of regrets about the way the road to hell was paved with good intentions.

On our generation’s watch, America has suffered a collapse in social trust, civic faith, economic mobility, and family formation. We can’t find our can-do. We’re angry, cranky, aggrieved, tribal, stuck. Our only big national project is a multifront culture war. Beyond our shores, we’ve become a pariah.

By all means blame this hellscape on Donald Trump, the boomer-in-chief who’s back in the White House with his wrecking ball aimed at America’s values, norms, laws, alliances, and common decency. Blame it, too, on the 49.8 percent of voters who, with eyes wide open, sent him there.

But keep at least one finger pointed at my generation. We’ve been pretty much running the show in America for the past four decades. Boomer candidates have won eight of the last nine presidential elections—two Democrats (Clinton and Obama); two Republicans (Trump and Bush); all four elected twice. Boomers sit in 61 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate. Boomers have been the largest age cohort in the electorate since the early 1980s.

No other American generation has ever wielded so much political power for so long. No generation has ever arrived at the doorstep of old age so healthy and wealthy. Nor has any generation ever done so much to enrich itself at the expense of today’s working class and tomorrow’s children.

Politically, we’re a mishmash. A majority of boomers are conservative, but most boomer elites—like my Yale classmates and me—are liberal. Elites set the table for the culture, which sets the table for the politics.

Here’s where the lifetime report card for the Yale class of 1970 and its ilk gets uncomfortable. Back in the Sixties, we helped lead the fights for civil rights and personal freedoms. Thanks at least in part to our idealism and activism, today’s America is a vastly better place for women, minorities, gays, immigrants, and the disabled.

But there’s a disturbing throughline between yesterday’s social justice crusades and today’s political and civic dystopia. The anti-establishment passions that fueled us then have been turned against us now—weaponized by Trump to dismantle the policies and programs we hold most dear.

No doubt some of this backlash was inevitable. History moves in cycles; human beings don’t adapt easily to change. When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. But in 20/20 hindsight, much of today’s nightmare might have been avoided, or at least mitigated. It turns out we boomer elites made a lot of mistakes:

• We paid too little attention to the way that immigration, globalization, pluralism, and the knowledge economy did wonders for us but stunted the economic prospects and “stole the pride” (to use sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s phrase) of the working class. They resent our neglect, our lip service, our condescension. This has given Trump his superpower. He too hates elites. And he has a feral genius for grievance.
• We misjudged the importance of institutions. We saw them as instruments of oppression, as surely they were. But they are indispensable guardians of a nation’s values. After we won our victories, we should have worked to restore the public trust that we’d helped to undermine. This has come back to bite us. Back then, we thought America’s political, social, and economic institutions were all rigged against “we the people.” Now, that’s exactly how MAGA feels.
• We got lost in our own echo chamber. On our watch, elite universities like Yale became ground zero for the progressive mindset. But they’ve drifted away from the rest of America. An analysis released a month before the 2024 election found that 97 percent of the campaign contributions made by Yale employees that election cycle had gone to Democrats. Does that sound like a campus where a range of views can be debated in the best tradition of intellectual inquiry? Many other bastions of the establishment, anchors of civil society, and keepers of the culture—legacy media, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, foundations, nonprofits, the arts community, swaths of corporate America—have dug themselves into similar bunkers. It helps that we happen to be right about just about everything. But I get nervous whenever I remember a quote from John Stuart Mill that I first encountered as a Yale freshman: “He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.”
• We’ve waged an undeclared war on tomorrow’s America. This has been a bipartisan boomer travesty—and no, this isn’t a story of good intentions gone awry. Decade after decade, both the liberals and conservatives we’ve sent to Washington have knowingly enacted policies that have made boomers richer and future Americans poorer. Our grandkids will spend their lives paying off the federal debt we’ve racked up. Less than a decade from now, Social Security and Medicare will be insolvent. The public outcry over that baked-in catastrophe will make today’s rumble over Medicaid feel like a stroll in the park. The fixes will be painful—benefit cuts, tax increases, both. But by then, tens of millions of us boomers will have collected full benefits and gone on to our greater rewards, unscathed.
• We never figured out the art of bipartisan compromise. The last time America took a stab at fixing Social Security’s long-term financial problems was in 1983. Our last shot at comprehensive immigration reform came in 1986. Both of those bipartisan bills were forged by leaders from older generations. Boomers have fired blanks each time we aimed for solutions of that scope—not just for those persistent challenges, but for others like climate change and gun violence.
• We haven’t been planters. When it comes to making America great, my favorite aphorism is an ancient Greek one: “Societies become great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under.” For most of our history, we’ve been a nation of planters. Transcontinental railroad, interstate highway system, Erie Canal, Hoover Dam, land grant colleges, Tennessee Valley Authority, Marshall Plan, NASA, National Institutes of Health, and so on. What tree, pray tell, have we boomers planted?

In preparation for our fifty-fifth reunion, my classmate Jim Conroy and I took a survey of our class. The results were striking. By our own reckoning, our lives have turned out great. We’re happy with our families, proud of our careers, secure in our finances (our median net wealth is roughly $3 million), and optimistic about our remaining years.

But we’re in a deep funk about our country. Asked if the United States will still be a constitutional democracy a decade from now, 43 percent of respondents said they’re pessimistic, and just 24 percent said they’re optimistic; the remaining third are in between. Asked if political turbulence today is more worrisome than it was during our college years—with that era’s deadly urban riots, political assassinations, and anti-war protests—77 percent said things are worse now. Just 3 percent said things were worse then.

Among their comments:

• “Then the disruption was coming from us. Now it’s coming from a malign collection of wannabe authoritarians.”
• “Difference between then and now is, of course, that no matter how demented politicians were in the 1960s, 1970s, etc., none of them were rampaging all-out to end democracy.”
• “Why is everything so cruel?”
• “Off the charts in this moment. F’ing ridiculous.”

About 10 percent of our respondents identified as conservative. Here’s what one had to say:

• “Lefties, you need to dial it back. You keep taking laudable, commendable principles and diving way off the deep end with them, alienating some centrist voters like me [and] gift-wrapping the White House back to that Satan traitor for a second term.”

The Yale class of 1970 did not come to these worldviews by accident. We were an experiment in social and academic engineering directed by a blue-blood Republican whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.

When Kingman Brewster Jr. became its president in 1963, Yale was still admitting most of its students from exclusive prep schools, with a special fondness for the sons of wealthy Yale alumni. Brewster himself came from old money and had attended a prep school. But he could see that the world was changing and the marketplace of knowledge was exploding. “I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on the Long Island Sound,” he told a colleague. He wanted to educate a new generation of Yale men who would “break new ground or at least adapt to it”—men who could solidify America’s place as the leader of the free world. He said he hoped the next generation’s Martin Luther King would be a Yale graduate.

The class of 1970 was the first recruited by Brewster’s handpicked director of admissions, R. Inslee “Inky” Clark Jr.—he too a prep school product. Clark sent his staff around the country to public schools that had never before seen a Yale recruiter. A record 58 percent of my freshman class were public high school graduates. The share of Jews, no longer suppressed by Yale’s unofficial quota, shot up to a record 30 percent. The share of racial minorities was still in single digits but no longer miniscule. Our median verbal SAT score was 697, the best in Yale’s history (and better than Harvard’s!). We were dubbed “Inky’s babies.”

The faculty was thrilled, but Brewster took flak from alumni, who saw him as a traitor to his class. “You will laugh,” an exasperated William F. Buckley Jr., Yale’s most famous alumnus of that era, wrote in 1968, “but it is true that a Mexican-American from El Paso High with identical scores on the achievement test, and identically ardent recommendations from the headmaster, has a better chance of being admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.”

Brewster was undeterred. In quick succession, Yale adopted a need-blind admissions policy and did away with its coat-and-tie rule, its numerical grading system, and its prohibition on women visiting men in their dorm rooms at night. The biggest and best break from tradition came in 1969, when, for the first time in its 268-year history, Yale opened its Ivy gates to female undergraduates.

All the while, Inky’s babies did our thing. Civil rights demonstrations. Anti-war protests. Draft-dodging schemes. The Summer of Love. Woodstock. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. When our campus activism threatened to turn violent in the spring of 1970, Brewster kept the peace by suspending “normal academic expectations” for the remainder of the term. I graduated a few weeks later without writing my last papers or taking my final exams. And, by grace of lottery number 317, I never faced that draft.

Much of America no doubt saw us as a bunch of pampered flower children, but they knew we were a force to be reckoned with. Time magazine named our generation its person of the year for 1966, a journalistic bauble typically bestowed on presidents, popes, moguls, or generals. Seemed right to us. We were going to save the world.

In truth, most boomers weren’t hippies. Most weren’t even liberals. For every long-haired college kid staging a sit-in on campus, there was a buzz-cut high school grad slogging through the rice paddies of Vietnam. Those social class divisions are still a big part of the boomer story.

Pop quiz: In the 14 presidential elections of the boomer era, from Nixon’s victory in 1972 to Trump’s last year, how many times did a majority of my generation vote for the Democrat? Surprise answer: Just once! (Carter in 1976.) Yes, boomers have grown more conservative as we’ve aged; no, we were never as lefty as those old press clippings had pegged us.

But some generational traits have stuck with us all the way through, and they span our ideological divides. Boomers have always had a thirst for cultural combat, fueled by elevated levels of self-regard, self-interest, and self-righteousness. Whatever our political or ideological leanings, we’ve been sure of one thing above all: We know best.

That self-assurance is a product of our upbringing. We were raised by parents who celebrated the end of World War II by having lots of babies and treating us like princes and princesses. “Nothing was too good for a generation lucky enough to be spared the scars of the Depression and the war,” People magazine editor Lanny Jones wrote in the 1980 book (Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation) that gave us our name. “[Postwar] affluence would now bring their children the best of everything. They would have more toys, more money, and more attention. They would have better schools and better books and better teachers.”

This has worked out quite well—for us. Eighty percent of boomers enjoy a higher standard of living than their parents had at the same stage of the lifecycle. For younger generations, that share has fallen to 50 percent. We were handed the American Dream on a platter. We are passing it along in table scraps.

Boomers have a Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship with future generations. As parents and grandparents, we’re enormously generous. (With a record share of America’s household wealth parked in our bank accounts and retirement funds, we can afford our munificence—and our kids need our money.) But as citizens and taxpayers, we’ve hung the young out to dry. Along with burying them in debt, we’ve scaled back on public investments in schools, research, infrastructure, and a wide range of family-friendly policies.

The explanation is hiding in plain sight. Put simply, we’ve closed our wallets because more than half of today’s kids are nonwhite. Many are the offspring of the giant post-1965 wave of immigrants that has turned the American tapestry into a coat of many colors. When boomers drive by schoolyards and playgrounds, they don’t see a future that looks like them.

The story boomers love telling about America is that here, you can start at the bottom and rise as high as your smarts, talents, and drive will take you. The story that young Americans need to tell themselves is to choose your parents wisely. The better off they are, the better off you’re going to be. Not a happy story, but a more accurate one. The top 10 percent of families now own 67 percent of the nation’s household wealth; the bottom half own just 2.5 percent. Our rates of mobility have fallen behind those in other wealthy countries. Economically, America is more unequal than ever, and we’re thrusting that inequality forward onto future generations.

Small wonder that 60 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 tell pollsters they’re not proud to be American. Three in ten say they’re embarrassed. Just a fifth say they trust government; fewer than a quarter say they trust human beings. These numbers have been steady for a decade or more—no matter who’s in the White House.

This is the most damning indictment of the boomer era: Our kids and grandkids are not doing well. In 2024, Americans ages 18 to 30 ranked sixty-second in the world in self-reported life satisfaction, behind their same-aged counterparts in countries like Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, according to Gallup’s annual World Happiness Report. Their malaise goes way beyond politics. They are wary about making friends, finding romance, getting married, having kids. Back when the boomer generation was conceived (1946-64), America’s total fertility rate was 3.0 children per woman. Now it’s 1.6 and dropping. Marriage rates have fallen by a similar order of magnitude.

Is this all the boomers’ fault? Of course not. The rise of social media—largely a post-boomer phenomenon—has played a big role in the global rise of youth angst. But here in America, my generation created an economy that has left most young people feeling like they can’t get ahead in life. That cannot be good for their sense of well-being, much less their dreams of marriage or parenthood.

One of the best parts of a Yale reunion is the chance to sit in on lectures by faculty superstars and find out how they’re grooming the next generation of America’s elites. I attended three, each of them fascinating.

Laurie Santos gave us a souped-up version of “The Science of Happiness,” which has been the most popular course at Yale for the past decade. She opened with grim statistics about the mental health of today’s college-aged youth: Forty percent say there are days when they’re too depressed to function; 10 percent say they have seriously considered suicide. These trends have been building for many years. Santos cited a familiar litany of causes: the ill effects of social media and the pandemic, the rise of income inequality, the “dumpster fire” of our civic and political culture, and anxiety about climate change and school shootings.

Her remedies were pretty familiar too: Seek out more human connections; say nice things to other people; make time for gratitude; savor the good things; focus on your strengths; get more sleep; give yourself the gift of self-compassion. Not exactly rocket science, but revelatory. Apparently, this is what tomorrow’s leaders need to hear.

Amy Chua is known both as the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and as a mentor to one of her Yale Law students, JD Vance. She’s also written a book about tribalism, a condition she described to us as hardwired in human biology: “Studies show that our brains light up when we stick it to the other side.”

But as Chua tells it, there’s very little of that happening in classrooms, where students hold their tongues out of fear of cancel culture. “Sometimes they will email me their honest views privately,” she added. Outside the classroom, Chua said, students self-segregate by race and ethnicity and don’t dare strike up friendships or romances across political boundaries.

I’m guessing other Yale faculty might take issue with the starkness of her portrait, but I doubt many would disagree with her remedies. Chua wants America to create a national service program where young adults from all walks of life would have to interact with one another. She also called for a new national commitment to a civics curriculum that tells hard truths about America’s flaws “while still conveying the idea that we are a great nation.” “We’ve overcorrected,” she said. “Too many of our students think of the founding fathers as dead white male racists.”

Akhil Amar, Yale’s great constitutional scholar, made a similar argument. “America needs a new national narrative because we don’t have one,” he told a standing-room-only auditorium. He suggested we build it around the Constitution, which he extolled as “the only thing that makes us a we” while venting his outrage at the way Trump and his lawyers keep trying to torch it. “We’re living in a golden age of lying,” he said. “They just make shit up.”

Most of my Yale ’70 classmates are, like Amar, astonished and infuriated by the gusher of bullshit, chaos, and cruelty erupting each day from Trump’s White House. In our class reunion survey, more than a third said they’ve become more spiritual—partly because age has sanded off their sharp edges, partly because they need a way to cope with the hellscape. Several spoke of using daily meditation sessions to stay grounded.

Others are staying in the fight. Charles Thomas, 77, a retired assistant U.S. attorney, is about to start his second tour as a Peace Corps volunteer. Pending medical clearance, he’ll be heading off to Thailand in January. He did his first stint in South Korea, shortly after graduating from Yale. “As a 12-year-old, I heard John F. Kennedy give the speech where he called for the creation of the Peace Corps,” Charles told me at the reunion. “He appealed to America’s idealism. From that moment I knew I wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer.”

Lots of other members of the Yale class of 1970 have had careers animated by public-spiritedness. Some are still doing their work—in medical practices, research labs, law firms, classrooms, advocacy and civic groups, news organizations. Inky’s babies became admirable men. I think Brewster would be proud.

But our generation never did produce the next JFK or MLK. Nor did we do enough to protect the values that truly make America great. When the vital center fails to fortify itself, demagogues can rush in to fill the void. That’s a lesson we’ve learned too late.

Will there be a backlash to this backlash? I hope so. I believe so. I can’t say how or when—or after how much carnage. I can say this: It won’t be the work of the boomers. Our ledger is full, our time nearly up.

It will need to be the work of the generations that have come in our wake. They face a challenge even more daunting than ours was back in the day. Twenty-first century America must aspire to become a society the like of which the world has never known: a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in which no one group is in the majority and everyone in every group has a fair shot at the American Dream.

There is some cause for optimism. Many of today’s young are champions of diversity. For much of American history, “melting pot” was the go-to metaphor for a nation of immigrants. For their America, it’s “mosaic.” They don’t want everyone to look and act alike. They celebrate the differences. They want to protect and preserve individual agency. Good for them.

But there’s also cause for pessimism. I’m not sure how well this new generation understands that while a mosaic needs beautiful pieces, it only works if it also has glue. Our public square has become such a dark place, we have normalized so much hatred, we have abetted so much economic inequality, that it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t left some scars on tomorrow’s leaders. On college campuses and inside social media silos, they are growing up as a liberal generation with illiberal tendencies—a victim mentality, an intolerance of viewpoint diversity, a distrust of institutions, a wariness about human nature, a cynicism about the whole American experiment, and an instinct for group aggrievement at the expense of national identity.

Of all the demographic groups that migrated toward Trump in last November’s election, none swung more heavily than young men, especially young men of color. With young women outpacing them in school and running neck and neck with them in the workplace, many are struggling to find a life script. This wasn’t a dilemma for their fathers and grandfathers, who knew they’d been put on earth to be the family breadwinner. But in today’s America, either gender can be that. And there aren’t nearly as many families to feed.

“[Young men] can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future,” Hasan Piker, a leftist streamer with millions of followers, recently told The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’”

Toxic gender dynamics and plummeting birth rates have taken root in much of the wealthy world. Democrats will need to do a lot of soul-searching to solve their political problems with young men. But to those who despair that the party is doomed to a long, dry spell out of power, here are some numbers that may calm your nerves. In each of the last three presidential elections, the incumbent party has been kicked out of the White House. This hadn’t happened in 120 years. In the past two decades, the White House, the House, and the Senate have all changed hands four times. This had never happened before.

In short, twenty-first century America is a nation deeply but evenly divided. Neither party has come up with a durable cure for our pervasive discontent. There are no stable partisan majorities, as there were in the days of FDR and Ronald Reagan. With its governing margins so thin, Trump’s burn-the-house-down right-wing populism could easily choke on its own fumes.

The harder question is whether our values, norms, and reverence for the rule of law will survive the fire. Democracy is sustained by a thousand small sanities. It depends on civic habits that need to be learned, relearned, and maintained by muscle memory. “Democracy is one of the most faith-fueled human activities there is,” says citizen activist Eric Liu. “Democracy  works only when enough of us believe democracy works. It is at once a gamble and a miracle.”

We boomers launched modern America down the path to this miracle, then lost the way. Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z, the baton is yours. You’ve got every right to be despondent about the America we’ve left for you. Let our journey be your cautionary tale. You won’t get far if you spend all your time tearing down our institutions. At some point, you’ll need to build them back up.