"As leaders, boomers are a bust" (Dana Milbank) -- or, what the world needs now is more Howard Bakers

Is the root of all our political problems that we don't have any modern-day "great compromisers"? You know like that master political fixer the late Howard Baker? (If you're dying to see the master fixer "rendered" in a video minute, you'll find the clip here.)

by Ken

I think this is wrong, or mostly wrong -- the case that Dana Milbank makes in a Washington Post column, "As leaders, boomers are a bust," arguing the all-surpassing virtue of compromise, and arguing that the failure of baby boomers to rightfully esteem compromises explains why boomers have produced such execrable leaders.

As I say, I'm inherently suspicious, first off when it's led into as a tribute to that great American Howard Baker, who died Wednesday at 88. I mean, Howard Baker? Is there much chance I can be persuaded by an argument that says what America needs is more Howard Bakers? Also, I'm not encouraged when we get to the historical analogies and the Civil War turns out to have been caused by a generation that, like the boomers', refused-to-compromise us into cataclysm.

But here's the thing. Dana has built up enough cred in my cred-account book through his diligent reporting on the workings of our gummint, that I'm willing to give him a hearing. And when he talks about boomers producing crappy leaders, and about the paralysis produced by sides uniformly committed to "hell no, we won't compromise" beliefs, then he has given me some stuff to think about.

I don't want to dwell on Howard Baker, because I'm not going to ask anyone to take seriously that what we need is more Howard Bakers -- corrupt stooges eternally prepared to serve the interests of the powers that be, for their usual percentage of the action.

But we can at least enjoy a cheap chuckle when Dana notes the irony of Sen. "Miss Mitch" McConnell shedding crocodile tears for St. Howard.

[E]ulogizing Baker as the Great Conciliator — an echo of Henry Clay’s sobriquet, the Great Compromiser — was a curious choice by McConnell, whose recent actions have given no indication that he views conciliation as a virtue. McConnell’s partisan screeds delivered on the Senate floor and his reluctance to negotiate — traits mirrored by his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid — and his record quantity of filibusters have set the tone for the current era of dysfunction in U.S. politics.

I'll leave you to check out for yourself Dana's counting and sorting of the various villains in his presentation on his way to his real subject: "the baby boom generation that wrecked our politics over the past 20 years."

Boomers inherited a system based on compromise and sacrifice — and they gave us the current standoff. They received a United States victorious in the Cold War and atop the world economy — and they gave us the Iraq war and the Great Recession. They are the parents of the first generation in U.S. history — the millennials — to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. And, in retirement, they will probably break Social Security and Medicare.

“Boomers are the scorched-earth, values-driven generation,” said Neil Howe, who with William Strauss chronicled the recurring patterns of generations in the United States. “They invented the culture wars and they’re taking it with them as they grow older, which is this complete polarization and gridlock. It’s very hard to compromise over values.” That’s not to malign this entire generation of Americans, which has dominated the culture for decades and expanded the frontiers of civil rights. But “in terms of politics, actually building things, boomers are clueless,” Howe told me.

"Contrast that with Baker’s generation," says Dana, "shaped by suffering and war."

“The politics of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was informed by ‘we are all in this together’ and . . . at the end of the day we shake hands and find a pragmatic solution,” said the Pew Research Center’s Paul Taylor, author of a new generational study, “The Next America.”

Okay, this isn't the way I remember the '60s, '70s, or '80s, but clearly something has changed. Maybe there is something to these large generational sweep-of-history ideas. Maybe being "values-driven" really is a bad thing. Let's let Dana finish up.

Gen X — my generation — is ill-equipped to fix the boomers’ mess. Alienated and individualistic, we don’t have faith in institutions or in our ability to change them; like Obama, we react to events. Happily, the millennials may have a better shot at fixing things when they get older. Unhappily, history suggests it will require a crisis. It was, Howe notes, “a generation like this (the boomers) that took us into the Civil War, and it was a generation like this that took us into the Great Depression.”

War soon followed the 1852 death of Clay, the Great Compromiser. Let’s pray that the passing of the Great Conciliator’s generation, and the disastrous reign of the boomers, doesn’t end in such misery.

Okay, so one thing we know is that Dana's ideas about the '60s, '70s, and '80s -- and the great career of Howard Baker -- are acquired knowledge, not the sort of thing he gleens as a columnist-reporter by getting out there and observing firsthand.

True, much of our knowledge, and obviously all of our knowledge of history, is "acquired." But when we get back to the Civil War, while yes, it's true that the decades that preceded it were marked by a lot of compromise, was all -- or indeed any -- of that compromise a good thing? Wasn't it all that compromising, all that papering over of fundamental differences of "values," what made the Civil War inevitable?

My gut reaction, as I say, is to suspect that some wildly romantic armchair theorizing about Great Matters has produced some screwy history. (And maybe the Grand Historical-Generational Panorama is just fancy trimmings designed to impress us with the illusion of historical significance in the absence of actual historical substance?)

Still, I do think there are some things here that deserve to be thought about. The ability to compromise is important. And maybe its importance is easier to appreciate for those Greatest Generation types, of which I'm not one. And who knows? We might even come up with some interesting answers or theories. I'd be surprised if they led us to the conclusion that more Howard Bakers is the answer to any of our problems, but then, I'm often surprised.

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