The Tea Party and the Rise of American Gerontocracy

tea party

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 16, 2010. I’m re-posting it here because it is relevant to Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and the violent opposition it has engendered from Baby Boomers. It and other articles I wrote for In Mala Fide can be found in my book Three Years of Hate.

Some time ago, I saw a picture of a sign from a Tea Party rally that read “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” It dovetails nicely into an expose Matt Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone in which he described the hoards of anti-government protesters rather uncharitably, to say the least:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending–only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending–with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about–and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

He goes on to write how Rand Paul opposes eliminating the one government program that enriches him personally:

Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine.” But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself–half of his patients are on Medicare–he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. “Physicians,” he said, “should be allowed to make a comfortable living.”

A while back, the New York Times reported on a poll of Tea Partiers that backs up Taibbi’s observations:

When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security–the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

The lesser mind will look at the above excerpts and proclaim, “Aha! The Tea Party is a bunch of hypocrites!” And yes, they may be hypocritical, but there’s a method to their madness.

Liberals like to attack the Tea Party as racist, and some on the far right embrace them as an evolving expression of “implicit whiteness” in America, but race is not what defines them. The Tea Party is fighting to transform America into a gerontocracy: a government of the old people, by the old people, and for the old people. More specifically, the old people who will be ruling are the Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic and avaricious generation in American history. The above-mentioned NYT report identifies the demographics of the Tea Party as being primarily old and white:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

The more cynical among you might argue that America is already a gerontocracy, what with the levers of power held by dried-up old prunes like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. But just like how having white men in government doesn’t mean that white or male interests are represented, Congress being an old folks’ home doesn’t mean that elderly interests are represented. When then-President Bush proposed privatizing Social Security in 2005, the old farts in this country had a collective anal prolapse.

Ever wonder why Social Security is the third rail of American politics? It’s an obvious scam that is slowly dragging down the economy, but it just happens to benefit the fastest-growing and most politically influential voter bloc in this country. Government pension programs by nature are Ponzi schemes because they require an ever-increasing number of citizens paying into the system to stay solvent. This leads into the primary reason why Social Security is in danger: the Baby Boomers didn’t have enough kids to keep the Ponzi scheme going. Unlike their frisky parents, the Boomers preferred to have smaller families of three, two, or just one kid, and in some cases none at all. No kids means no taxpayers to keep you from having to eat Alpo when you’re 75 and can’t work because of your bum hip. To make matters worse, Social Security was designed merely to keep seniors out of poverty, not to fund the big, expensive cars and trips to Bermuda that the Boomers are used to.

There are only two ways to save Social Security. The first is to drastically increase the number of workers paying into the system. The government’s preferred way of doing this is with immigration, legal and illegal. The negative effects of legal and illegal immigration have been hashed out so many times by so many different writers that I don’t need to repeat them. Suffice it to say, importing large numbers of foreigners isn’t an option, either practically or politically. This leaves our other choice: liquidate all parts of the government save for Social Security, Medicare and other programs that benefit seniors.

That is the true purpose of the Tea Party. For all of their anti-government bluster, they’re just another interest group clamoring for their slice of the entitlement pie. They are the final expression of Boomer vanity, narcissism, and greed before they skedaddle on up to that spirit in the sky. If you doubt me, find me a Tea Party politician who is even considering talking about cutting Social Security or Medicare. Sharron Angle? Rand Paul? Marco Rubio? Not a chance. They are all part and parcel of the Gray Mafia, who will appropriate all of the ducats to their vampiric constituents while denying you so much as crumbs from the table. The young must die so that the old may live.

And make no mistake, the Baby Boomers are nothing more than a generation of vampires seeking to suck the blood out of their children to prolong their own wretched lives. They’re also a vile gang of hypocrites. After they spent their youths in the sixties and seventies taking every illicit substance known to man, they got Puritan pious and instituted the War on Drugs in the eighties to ass-rape anyone else who did the same. After voting themselves massive entitlement programs in the form of the Great Society, they foisted neoliberal capitalism and “free trade” on America to denude blue-collar work and make getting into tens of thousand of dollars in debt a requirement just to enter the middle class. After dodging the draft during the Vietnam War when they were young enough to die for their country, they conjured up some “Support the Troops” bullshit as a salve to their corrupt souls and to browbeat everyone into becoming sunshine patriots. Every joy they indulged in they seek to deny to the rest of us; every ladder that they used to climb to the top they kicked away. And now that their lives are finally coming to a close and the scam they were hoping to cash in on is about to collapse, they’re scheming to hoard the government’s bullion all for themselves.

Fortunately, being the selfless Samaritan that I am, I’ve devised another, foolproof way to save Social Security from collapse. In fact, seniors can use it themselves! I call it the Elderly Cranial Evacuation Boomstick:

tea party

It’s easy to operate. Here’s how it works:

  1. Load the provided Elderly Cranial Evacuation Pellets into the Boomstick.
  2. Insert the end of the Boomstick into your mouth, aiming towards your medulla oblongata at the back of your head.
  3. Pull the trigger.

WARNING: don’t use out-of-doors, in public places, or anywhere large amounts of people will see you, because you’re gonna leave behind a real mess!

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