On Friday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the bad things that happen when a generation lacks a vision for the country. Video and partial transcript below:
We had this discussion backstage [on Wednesday], we were talking about all the candidates, we were just discussing the election. It was me and mostly Jeremy [Boreing] — Ben [Shapiro] was in it to a little bit — but we were discussing why we have all these old people as presidential candidates. Now, as an official old person myself, I will say that old people are not as old as they used to be. We exercise, take care of ourselves — our brains stay sharp, it’s great. You know, I believe that you know 70 is the new 30. Basically, I plan to be around for another 150 years.
But you know at some point, you do want the younger generation to take over — even old people want the younger generation to take over, especially [people] from my generation. My generation sucked. The Baby Boomer generation was a terrible generation. I always say, I wish my generation could die off without taking me with it because I think we were awful. We were awful. Not only did we destroy the culture, but we maintained what we got out of our parents’ culture. Our parents fought the war, they fought the Depression, they got through all that, and they handed us this wealthy rich country on top of the world — the most powerful country on earth. And what did we do? We were like, We don’t want it! We want to complain. We don’t want to go to Vietnam! They’re shooting at people! It’s terrible, you can get hurt. I mean it was awful, it was an awful generation.
And, we sold you this stuff. Drugs, dropping out, getting rid of Western civilization in colleges — we sold you the stuff that was crap and we didn’t have it ourselves. We understood to give up drugs. If you look at the older people, the people who were rich, they get married. They don’t take drugs. They have kids in wedlock. They don’t have kids out of wedlock. But we told you, we told — the younger people — all, you know, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” That was a baby boomer idea. That’s brilliant, that was a really brilliant idea.
I mean it was just, oh and drugs! Drugs are great, they expand your mind! Terrific! You know who got nailed by all those policies? It was the poor. Of course it was … and a lot of the poor were black. And so then you have people saying, Oh this is a bigoted country, when it’s really the least bigoted country on earth, it was just bad ideas, and a lot of those bad ideas came from my generation. And I’d be happy to see my generation hand over the reins of power to the next generation. The problem is this new generation has no vision. They don’t have an American vision. And we did have an American vision, it just happened to suck. You know, I mean that’s the thing…
I mean even [Ronald] Reagan wasn’t a Baby Boomer. [He’s] actually older, he was the last generation and actually governed like it was the last generation. And our vision was defined a lot by the Cold War, was defined by the Russians. We thought the Cold War was going to go on forever. We had no idea that Reagan was actually going to end the Cold War like he said he was. And when you define things in opposition, when you define your ideas — your vision — in opposition, that’s a very human tendency, a very human trait. But it really does produce problems because it means you don’t have to exactly know who you are. I think conservatives do this with Lefties. We look at Lefties and they’re so crazy, they’re so stupid — their ideas are so bad that we can just make fun of them, but we don’t really have to define what it is we believe in except in the vaguest terms. We don’t have to define our vision of the future. It becomes a negative vision. And I think that’s what happened with the Soviet Union.
And you know, when that happens, and when you beat the Soviet Union, when you beat the Nazis — a lot of time their policies become your policies. I mean, America beat the Nazis and now we’re aborting people just like the Nazis did. “Is this kid sick? Is he not going to be perfect? Let’s kill him.” You know, that’s a real good Nazi policy. We have anti-Semitism on the rise again, we beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War and now we’re talking about being socialist. We’re talking about adopting the policies that we’re fighting so hard, when you could see them right in front of you, when you could see the Soviet Union was a bad place — it was easy to oppose them. So we had a vision but it was in fact the negative vision, and that’s why when we turned our attention to our own country and started to say you know take drugs, you know, burn the flag — all the stuff that we said during the ’60s — we were idiots. You know, it was really, it was really bad stuff. You have to have a positive vision. And that’s why when I look at some of these candidates — I look at some of the old candidates on the Left and when I look at Trump, too — I mean, I think Trump’s vision is a stopgap vision. You know, a nationalist vision is a stopgap. The vision we’re going into a global world. What is it we need in that global world that you can’t stop that from happening— and it’s going to be a global world, it’s going to be a global economy. But he was right, there were a lot of problems with that global economy that hadn’t been thought out yet.
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