susan: journalist helen andrews, you have a new book, "boomers: the men and women who promised freedom and deliver disaster." in its preface, you explain how the book came to be. what is the story? helen: well, i am a millennial, and the idea for the book started when i looked around at a lot of my peers and noticed we were all feeling a little bit dispossessed. the amount of wealth we had accumulated by the age of 35 is less than generation x and about a quarter less than the boomers had at the same age. materially, we felt like we were falling behind. but also culturally and socially dispossessed. there was a sense a lot of the functioning institutions that the boomers had inherited did not get passed down to us. boomers had spent down our social capital and lived on the capital and left us with not very much. a lot of the things we were supposed to inherit, we didn't. i wanted to look back at history and find out how that happened and why. susan: it also -- the way you approach the subject has a provenance in history. a book called "eminent victorians." what was that book, and why did it inspire your approach to the topic of boomers? helen: "eminent victorians" was one of the great classic takedown books. it was written by an author who was part of the bloombsbury group, palling around with virginia woolf and her friends. like a good bohemian intellectual, he hated victorian values. he thought they were stuffy and repressive. this was for a long time a minority bohemian opinion. but he was lucky enough to publish his takedown of the victorians in 1918, right after world war i, when britain was feeling traumatized and had a deep sense in the majority of the population that something must have gone deeply wrong to have led civilization to such a bloody climax. along he comes, saying the problem is the stuffy old victorians and the stuff they believed in. the book became a bit of a phenomenon. a lot of the cynicism and frivolity you see dominating the culture of the 1920's is a hangover from those people saying all the victorians believing in stuffy old things like morals and religion, that was a mistake. we are going to move beyond that now. the thing i took as a model for me was that he did his takedown in a series of biographies. i like that because, as a reader, i tend to get very frustrated with books about generations, which is funny to say, as someone who has written one. but i find they often devolve into generalizations about generations. i wanted to ground my book in individuals. so i picked six representative baby boomers who i thought captured something about that generational experience in their life story. susan: i wanted to explore that a bit more. i had the same reactions that , that generational generalizations are just that. what are the qualities of the millennial generation and the boomer generation that transcend issues or socioeconomic issues, gender issues, and the like? helen: well, the one liner about boomers, that i did not come up with but i think is brilliant, is they are a generation that sold out but would never admit that they sold out. a combination of a great deal of idealism and a sense of themselves as morally noble, noble idealists liberating humanity, but on the other hand, a great deal of selfishness and narcissism and kind of a blindness to the ways that their liberationist agenda knocked down a lot of functioning institutions and left a lot of people worse off. because the boomers have a selfish idea that as long as they are doing better, it does not really matter about the institution. that is a toxic combination when it becomes as prevalent as it was among the boomers. this combination of idealism and selfishnessand and on the others. . and so millennials living in this world kind of denuded of the old institutions had to become very scrappy and self-reliant, and i think that is the dominant quality of millenials, as i see it. we really have to fend for ourselves, which in some ways is good and promotes self-reliance and on the other hand leaves us very untrusting and is not a good way to run a society. susan: we better defined millenials and boomers for our watchers. what are the years that each generation encompasses? helen: the boomers are technically people born between 1945 and either 1962 or 1964. some of the younger boomers do start trending into generation x. millennials, that is a bit fuzzier. rule of thumb, people born after 1980. i was born in 1986. susan: and into about 1996, so the oldest are going to be 40 this year. oldest boomers in these parameters change from site to site. i looked at pew. the oldest boomers would be turning 75 in 2021. so what was the hand that boomers were delivered that they failed to make good on? helen: well, i have mentioned institutions several times so far, and i think looking at all the various realms of society, where the boomers have done their damage, that is a running theme. they are against institutions. they see them as constraining. but one of the institutions they that they have torn down is the family. , institution of the family, the institution of the family, because they thought that was too restrictive and restraining. in the aftermath of the boomer liberation, i suppose they thought we would have some kind of liberated utopia, where we would be emotionally satisfied with family lives. but we actually see something that looks a lot more like wreckage. functioning families, functioning churches, functioning politics, political parties are just a lot different today than they were when the boomers inherited them. they are a lot more individualistic. so that is sort of the running theme. the boomers inherited functioning institutions and failed to pass them on. susan: since you dealt with individuals who are emblematic of society, who are the six you that you profiled? helen: they are, if i can get them in the correct order, steve jobs, aaron sorkin, camille paglia, jeffrey sachs, al sharpton, and sonia sotomayor. so you see, it is a pretty good spread. somebody from tech, hollywood, somebody from hollywood, somebody from academia, which is hugely important to the boomer story, and a supreme court justice. susan: it is interesting you did not choose anyone from your own field of journalism. helen: there were so many people i had to leave out. i would have loved to have had somebody from journalism or finance, which is a huge -- the rise of economics is the dominant field. so there are a lot of stories i did not get a chance to tell, but i did not want to make the book too long. susan: perhaps there is a "boomers 2" in your future. [laughs] i wanted to spend a little bit of time with a couple of these people, so viewers have an understanding of how you approached it. let's start with aaron sorkin. who is aaron sorkin? helen: aaron sorkin got his start as the young sensation who wrote "a few good men." if you can picture jack nicholson saying, "you can handle the truth," that is aaron sorkin. once he moved out west to hollywood from new york city, where he had been in theater, he started a little show called the "the west wing." that is what he is most known for. he did a few tv shows after that and is now directing features , including, funnily enough, he wrote the biopic of steve jobs. susan: we have a clip from our archives of dede myers, the clinton press secretary. she became a contributor to "the west wing." this is july 14, 2001, where she talks about the impact of the series. let's watch. [video clip] myers: it portrays people who work in politics and public service as real people, as people who get up every day and do their best to do the right thing to try to make the country a better place. yes, they stumble, they fall short. but they get up the next day, and they tried to make it right. i read this pilot and went this "this is great, but it is never going to get made." it was the height of the impeachment scandal, and i thought, "people are going to come home after seeing this all day and realize they are not going to want to watch it on television," which goes to show you why i did not choose television as my primary career, because the show did get made. [laughter] nbc bought it and the critics love it, and it has found a huge audience and an almost cult like -like following. i cannot tell you how satisfying it has been for everybody involved in the show. we believed in the show. we worked hard on the show. took the audience seriously. this is a show that deals with complex issues. it does not talk down to the audience. it does not treat them like they're stupid. it has found this wonderful loyal audience. i cannot tell you how many phone calls i have gotten from people saying here is an idea for a story. here is an issue i would love to see you get into the west wing, because it is an intelligent dialogue that is educating people, inspiring people, and changing not just the way people think about the process, but the way people think about people who are participating in the process, and that is a wonderful thing. at the end of the day, it is still a television show. but i think it is doing some good. it is not just entertaining us. it is entertaining us and inspiring us. susan: the show aired for seven seasons starting with the george w. bush presidency. this essay is about the power of television. what are your critiques? helen: dee dee myers said that "west wing" went on tv at the time of impeachment. she is actually under rating that. aaron sorkin has said in interviews the moment he pressed finish on the pilot script, within 24 hours of the monica lewinski story breaking. when he pitched the story to nbc, they sat on it for a year, because they said, "we cannot go on with this now, because nobody wants to watch a show about white house staffers during the impeachment." i have my own personal sense of the timeline of "the west wing," because i am exactly the right age that my peers are -- the people i knew in the political union went into politics because they watched "the west wing." they watched in high school and decided, "this is what i want to do with my life." living in washington, d.c. where , living in washington, d.c. ., where i do now, there are an awful lot of people of whom that is true. i don't know if that is disturbing to the rest of america to know that they are being ruled by a ruling class that shows their careers because of a tv show, it is true. the tragic irony of that is that aaron sorkin is not himself and especially political person. that is the substance of my critique. he has said over and over again he did not make "the west wing" because he cares so much about politics. he just likes the sound of smart people debating. smart people talking to each other. that rat a tat tat. it just seemed like politics would be a good venue for having smart people talked to each other. he was almost a pied piper to my generation, drawing people into politics without himself carrying all that much about it. -- caring all that much about it. susan: that sounds like a good thing, drawing people into politics. where's the problem? helen: the problem is that this idealism is essentially false. that this idea of going into politics because you are going to change the world, the rosy world of "the west wing" is very different from the nitty-gritty of how you actually get things done in washington. you get people who are almost naïve about politics because their view of what they do was shaped by "the west wing." if you watch the show, you will notice there are many ripped from the headlines examples. dee dee myers was a consultant on the show, and they fed sorkin stories from their own times. you will recognize that storyline is based on something that happened in 1996. the more storylines you notice , the more it becomes clear sorkin changed the ending. sorkin took these stories from the clinton years and gave them a happy ending. there was an instance where -- a funny story from the clinton years is a phrase from the communist manifesto was dropped in the state of the union address, and it went through nine different drafts before an intern said, "are you quite sure we want to be quoting karl marx in the state of the union? we might get in trouble for that." whereas in the west wing, they catch the quote right away. he altered history in order to make it all come out right in the end. the truth is any real politics, things do not always come out right in the end and the noble idealists do not always win in the end. and if you go in thinking that they will, you are going to make some mistakes. susan: would you say, as the people who were inspired to go into politics as a result of the politics, would you say they were like-minded in their ideology orders across political ideologies? helen: i really want to be fair to aaron sorkin. he did his very best to not make "the west wing" an exclusively liberal show. he brought in republican consultants, veterans of bush one. he tried to write republican characters who were noble and just as high-minded as his liberal characters. , democratic characters. so he really tried to be fair. but the truth is if you watch the show, it did not come off because so many of the people -- it is hollywood. it does have a liberal slant. so despite his best efforts to make it high-minded, i do not think he quite succeeded. susan: i could not help but think, when i was reading that it was nbc who gave us "the west wing," but, starting in 2005, they also gave us, "the apprentice," staring donald trump. here is another program that had an impact on politics. do you have any thoughts on that? helen: if you wanted to put the change in politics and the last 30 years into a sentence, you would say it has become tvified. it has become a lot more of a reality show, but i do not think that is a good thing. there is a funny story that armando iannucci tells. he is the guy who was the creator of "veep." he says when he was researching, he went to the obama white house and looked around to get a sense of how it is in the west wing. he said the people who showed him around pointed out little things in terms of "the west wing." they would say, "that is the desk where josh would work." he was thinking to himself, "no. those are fake people. it would be better for you to say that is the desk where i work, because you are real. why are you thinking of your own job in terms of this tv show from 1999?" it is really not very good to think of your job as a tv show if you're working in the west wing. as the story shows, that is how people think of it. susan: both of these series aired at a time when television was the dominant entertainment medium in american households. today, it is a multitude of streaming services and cable networks and lots of choice. is it still possible for a series, a video series to have as much impact as you think the "the west wing" did? helen: i do, actually. one thing that aaron sorkin has been criticized for his being a bit of a fuddy-duddy and being net-phobic. he has dropped into a lot of his shows denigrating comments about online news, things like gawker. he is clearly much more comfortable in the old media. you almost get the sense he would be happy to be back in the good old days when there were three networks and that is it. i think people tend to go too far in the other direction and overate the importance of online news. i think that television and hollywood and movies still have an immense amount of power, more even than politics. you know, it's -- the decisions made by hollywood film producers and writers are, in many ways, more important than the ones made by people in the west wing. i think aaron sorkin's grandiose sense of the power of tv is entirely accurate. susan: the next of the six profiles i'm going to highlight is camille paglia. who is she? paglia is ale humble professor. she is a public intellectual of the kind that is rather old-fashioned today. there are not that many celebrity professors. she is one of the last ones. she burst onto the scene in the 1990's with a book called "sexual personae," which became a best-selling phenomenon. rather unusual for, you know, a doorstop book of , but that isicism a testament to her rhetorical power. she is really inventive, and when she ventured into punditry and started weighing in on day-to-day culture, in addition to her academic work, she made herself a celebrity commentator , quite deservedly, because she is a really brilliant writer. susan: so what is your critique of paglia? helen: if you were to look at the accomplishment of her, probably her greatest one is the idea that popular culture is just as legitimate a subject of academic inquiry as the great classics. that was really an uphill battle for her in the 1990's, when she was saying madonna is just as legitimate a subject for me to be thinking about as a professor as milton. but, i think that the consequences of that revolution, of bringing pop culture into the academy and overrating its importance and its substance, had been that, nowadays, you have lots and lots of professors in the academy who know pop culture and nothing else. they get their phd in "sopranos" studies, because thanks to the camille paglia pop-culture revolution, you can do that now. she is an immensely educated woman. she knows her milton and spencer. she was bringing that extremely educated mind to bear when she thought about things like madonna, but by elevating pop-culture in the way she did, she has yielded a generation of younger scholars who do not have that grounding. and so i think it was probably a mistake for her to elevate pop culture and visual culture and movies and tv to the same level as the great classics. susan: let's hear camille paglia in her own words. this is from 2017. she was discussing her book, "free women and free men." prof. paglia: i was not one of what we would call pro-sex feminists. in the 1970's, i loved "charlie's angels." i loved "cosmopolitan" magazine. meanwhile, the other feminists were occupying helen gurley brown's offices and wanting the whole magazine to be shut down. there is no way i could be taken into the women's movement. i was drummed out of it from the start. people who think she was made by feminism -- i was not made by betty friedan. bettyay in the book, friedan did not create germaine greer in australia, and she did not create me in upstate new york. it is about time people realize the transformations in women that happened erratically in the mid-20th century were not entirely due to the women's movement. susan: in the chapter, you not only talk about the more or less dumbing down of academia, but you also talk about the great rise in pornography as acceptable in our culture. what do you see as camille paglia's role in that? helen: well, she talked in the , in the clip you just gave, about feminism. i think that is one reason why a lot of political conservatives really like her because she was a slashing enemy of the second wave feminists. it was wonderful to see her take them down and her line, she saw them as uptight. but i think that is a case where conservatives have thought "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." that is not really the case with camille paglia. she is a pro-sex feminist, she calls herself. it was very effective when she was trying to take down the second wave. led her to be naïve, in her own way, about what would happen in the aftermath of sexual liberation. she has said she loves pornography, she loves prostitution, because she thinks they are liberating. but however that may have looked to her from the perspective of the 1970's, for a millennial growing up in time of streaming video, we live in the most porn -saturated generation in all of human history. that's not an exaggeration. it has had lots of toxic effects camille paglia should have been able to see, but did not. susan: such as? helen: pornography today is a lot more toxic. in addition to being a lot more widespread. people are seeing it at younger ages. more people are looking at it. the rise of streaming video did something very bad to the pornography industry. because all the video is available for free, the producers are no longer able to compete on price. and so in order to get their product eyeballed, the only dimension they can compete on is going to greater and greater gonzo feats of insanity and making things just more depraved. that is the only way they can kind of set their product apart in a saturated market for pornography, as exists now in places like red tube. but what that does is leads to a ratcheting of up and up and up. if you hear "pornography," and you are thinking, like, a 1970's playboy spread, that is not what is out there right now. it is a lot more dangerous and deforming to the sexualities of young people, especially when they are fed a constant diet of it from the age of 13. that is definitely one thing that is different between her camille paglia's day and ours. susan: the first age american children encounter pornography is generally about 11. so ultimately, what is the impact on humans being exposed to pornography at that early age? what do you see as happening for , for example, your children going forward? helen: yeah. [laughs] i'm terrified. although, hopefully by the time, my children are that age things will have changed. sexuality -- think of it as a river carving out a canyon. you know, if you form certain habits, they might be a matter of choice when you're young, but if you persist in them, they become deeper and deeper and harder to get out of. that is why so many millenials talk about pornography in the language of addiction. they feel like they are addicted to these videos, because it is just very hard to break these habits, once you have formed them. if you are being formed by videos that are more and more because of the dynamic that i just explained, that is going to make people sexually different than any other generation, and that is why you see a lot of millenials with really deformed sexualities. susan: this is a chapter on academia on feminism. i am wondering about the #metoo movement, whether or not that is a product of the millennial generation, and how that intersects with the rise and exposure to pornography and in society. helen: yeah, it's -- in many ways, the #metoo movement was the result of the kind of liberation that camille paglia is talking about, because when she has her line of pro-sex feminism, that does not just liberate women, it liberates men as well. it turns out when you liberate men to act on their sexualities, it is not always pretty. sometimes they do bad and toxic things. i think she has consistently underrated the damage caused by sexual harassment. she is a very great believer in girl power, and she has this idea women should be able to shut down sexual harassment just and empoweredrful and telling men, "don't you dare do that," when it does not always work that way. she wrote a book about "the birds," the alfred hitchcock movie. and that is a movie that had a notorious case of sexual harassment going on on the set, alfred hitchcock torturing an hedren, because she would not go to bed with him. camille writes as if tippi hedren should have been an empowered woman and told alfred hitchcock no and stood up to the torture, and it was not that big of a deal. , in a way that downplays how traumatic that moviemaking experience was for tippi hedren. i think her inability to talk honestly about hitchcock's sexual harassment is an encapsulating example of what is naïve about her pro-sex feminism. susan: the next one i wanted to focus on is al sharpton. if you look at the c-span library, there hundreds of videos covering him over the course of his career. he is in front of cameras frequently. the one we chose is quite recent, august 28, 2020. the national action network rally at the lincoln memorial in the wake of george floyd's killing and the protests that ensued. let's watch. [video clip] rev. al sharpton: they keep telling me about how it is a shame that black parents have to have the conversation with our children. how we have to explain, if a cop stops you, don't reach for the glove compartment. don't talk back. the conversation. well, we have had the conversation for decades. it is time we have a conversation with america. we need to have a conversation about your racism, about your bigotry, about your hate, about how you would put your knees on on our neck while we cry for our life. we need a new conversation. [applause] susan: al sharpton, you write, is different from some of the other people that you profiled, because he grew up wanting to be exactly what he was, a minister. where others had an arc of their lifetime of change. what are al sharpton's accomplishments? let's start with that. helen: yeah, he has certainly been very consistent. he is doing the same thing now that he has been doing for the past several decades. that longevity is a testament to his effectiveness. he has the kind of guy where if you have got some kind of racial conflict in your town, you can where there has been an ambiguous police shooting, you can get him on the phone, and he will come right there. there are a dozen -- or dozens of examples. but in the clip you just gave, i think that is a great illustration of the downside of that consistency. he is still talking today as if race relations have not changed since he first became a campaigner in the 1960's. that there has been no progress. he is just running the same old playbook. and so i think that is the biggest weakness of him as a civil rights campaigner. however effective he may be at it. susan: his chapter is also a discussion by you on the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. can you talk about those two concepts and how effective each is? helen: yeah. there are two kinds of leaders, basically -- transformational leaders and transactional. this is al sharpton's concept, how he thinks about his own leadership. a transformational leader changes the way people think. martin luther king was a transformational leader. he was out there changing minds, altering people's hearts. a transactional leader is something much more humble. he is a dealmaker. he tries to forge compromises. and one of the greatest revolutions that the boomers accomplished was saying that transformational leadership is the only good kind. , that transactional leaders should be looked down upon. they are compromising with the enemy. there is no nobility in that. they are sellouts -- sellouts is what a transactional leader is. but the truth is that transactional leadership is really important. if you have got groups of people that disagree and you need to make a deal, you need to make compromises. you need somebody willing to sacrifice a little bit of the idealism and just get a deal accomplished. and so by denigrating transactional leadership, the boomers have made it a lot harder to reach satisfactory compromises. al sharpton, i think, is definitely trying to be a leader in transformational mode, at the expense of worthwhile compromise. susan: you do reference the difference between a civil rights leader like al sharpton and the black lives matter movement leaders. what is the difference? in how they operate and the potential for success in changing society. helen: the difference is entirely to sharpton's advantage. he outclasses them in so many ways. in terms of the black lives matter leaders, i would take him over them any day. the difference is a matter of democracy. al sharpton, even his bitterest enemies know that he is a leader with a following. his the kind of guy who can get people on the phone. he can get people down to his rally. he ran for mayor of new york city in the 1990's, he very nearly won the democratic party nomination. you know, and it was not just the black vote that got him there. thousands of people came out and pulled the lever for al sharpton. ckesson,ast, deray m one of the black lives matter leaders to come out of ferguson, tried his hand at a democratic contest and wanted to run for mayor of baltimore, and got something like 3000 votes. 3%. he did not do well in the democratic spread. the power of the black lives matter movement comes from social media, but that does not translate to actual people with actual democratic support. whatever else you want to say about al sharpton, he has that. susan: what you think about the numerous protests that have arisen during 2020 and their power to affect change in society? helen: i am quite critical of them. and i think that there is a -- i think they come from a place of anxiety, to be honest. at the time, in the golden age of the civil rights movement, the race problem in america was a matter of black-and-white. today, that is no longer the case. you know, hispanics outnumber blacks by almost two to one. in many states, asians outnumber blacks. we live in a multicultural america rather than just a black-and-white, biracial america. that changes the civil rights conversation drastically. a lot of the black issues no longer loom as large as they did, because it is no longer a matter of two races, it is multicultural. there is anxiety on the part of activist thinking, does this mean our day is over? does this mean we no longer are the most important minority in america? that we can no longer rush to front of the conversation, when america is talking about racial issues? because there is that anxiety , that their issues may longer be of such preeminent importance, the way they were in the 1960's, that they need to be really need to be as loud as possible, as they can be, and have this huge movemen,t before people say your issues are not as important. we need to talk about hispanic america and asian america. the fear of becoming multicultural america. people talk about white anxiety being a driver of racial issues. that is a kind of anxiety that is underreported and is fueling a lot of the current protests. susan: one of the other tangible results of this year and in the area of civil rights and race relations has been the removal of confederate era symbols across the country. in the "american conservative" magazine, you wrote, "i used to side with the people who wanted to tear down all the confederate monuments," indicating you have changed your mind on this. why? helen: because i used to trust it would stop there. that the people who wanted to tear down robert e lee would not then demand tearing down thomas jefferson and george washington as well. i think the last year has shown that that was overly optimistic on my part, that the people who wanted to tear down the monuments in virginia would not stop at robert e lee, and they are going to tear down columbus, and ulysses s grant, who owned a slave for about five minutes, you know, despite being a great union general. toppled thist year. so just a lot of the trust that i had in people who were proponents is gone. that's really where that is coming from. susan: does each generation have the right to decide its own heroes? helen: the danger of answering yes to that question is that it means that everything is always up for grabs, and you lose any sense of historical continuity. what that leads to is a great sense of arrogance on the part of the young. you know, we can reinvent history every five minutes, if we want to. we do not owe anything to our ancestors. and the truth is that i think we do owe a lot to history. we come into this world as inheritors of a great tradition and a great country. civilization, a great country. it is our job to, you know, first of all, to be grateful for that and to be good stewards of what we have inherited and pass it along. i think the boomers had no sense of continuity in that way. and i think that is something we need to recapture. so, no, each generation does not get to reinvent america on its own. we are a link in the chain, and we need to act like it. susan: so in those three examples, of the six in your book, "boomers," each of them has made contributions to society, but in your analysis, those are outweighed by what you call "irreparable harm." help me understand the final analysis of the people you profiled and what they have done to american society. helen: you're right that all of them are people of enormous accomplishment. i did not want to profile anybody who was just a total failure or anybody that i did not respect. i respect, and in many ways admire, all of the boomers that i profiled. as a writer, i was attracted to stories with a tragic irony to them. you know, where they tried to accomplish something great, and it had had effects contrary to their intentions that they did not foresee. that is the essence of good storytelling and good tragedy. so the accomplishment and achievement of these people is a crucial part of the story. but an example would be steve jobs. steve jobs contributed enormously to civilization, to human happiness. you know, anybody who owns an iphone owes a debt steve jobs. and it really came from a noble sentiment, on his part. he thought that computers could liberate human creativity and in many ways, they did. we certainly owe him gratitude for that. the trouble is it also enabled kind of the uberization of the economy. if you want to talk about millennial grievances and gripes, that would be at the top of the list. millennials are a lot more economically precarious, as employees, than any other generation in the last 100 years. that has been enabled by the very technology that steve jobs thought would set us free and . it has left us enslaved as uberized employees. so, you know, the two sides of the coin are inseparable, and that's a good example. susan: you describe the damage in your book that these folks and the trends around them as being "irreparable." when i read that, it made me think it does not give very much credit to the millennial generation and their ability to craft their own way in american society. helen: um, well, i will give you another example. if you were a time traveler, and you went from 1960 to 2020, one of the huge differences you would notice is the rise of women in the workplace. it used to be that three-quarters of families in america in the 1960's were single-earner families. today, it is about two-thirds dual learners. so that is a huge social revolution. i think, in many ways, there are a lot of millenials who feel like they are only in dual-earner households because they have to be. you know, the woman would say, "i would love to stay home and raise my kids, but financially, we could not make it work." i am a believer in what is called the two-income trap. what happened in the 1970's and 1980's, when women flooded into the workplace, was that it did not actually make their households better off, because it just led to a bidding war for middle-class amenities, like housing and cars, so that now the requirements for a middle-class life are more expensive, and you need two earners to get them. the two-income trap is the term that elizabeth warren coined for that. if you are a millennial thinking, that was a mistake, to tell women you have to be in the workforce in order to be a self-actualized human being, that was a mistake. we should dial that back and maybe say you can work if you want to, but it should not be an economic requirement. the problem is you cannot do that, because of the two-income trap, because financially, the economic reality is you need two earners for a middle class lifestyle. even if millenials think that was a mistake, we should go back, they cannot because of the effect of the two-income trap. there are a lot of things were millenials say we probably should go back, but they are not able to. susan: genie out of the bottle, more or less. helen: yes. susan: let me turn to politics. our country is about to be led not by a boomer but president joe biden will be 78, a member of the silent generation, as is nancy pelosi. mitch mcconnell is also a member of the silent generation. what is the impact on the country of a leadership structure, being a member not of the boomers but a silent generation? helen: i think we might have seen our last boomer president , and good riddance to bad rubbish. i would be perfectly happy if we never had another boomer president again. but i think that even when the personnel in d.c. is no longer boomers, we are still living in the boomers' world, and politics is still played by boomer rules. the hinge point at which that became true, when the ascendancy took over politics, was 1972, when the democratic party left behind the old style of liberalism, things like unions and a working-class sentiment, and sort of traded that for a new left mentality, where the left-wing party is dominated by identity politics interest groups. and kind of that is how the left-wing party sees itself. and the democratic party is still that way today. and that is why you have seen the dramatic shift. , where the left-wing party used to have an advantage among people without college educations, whereas now, people without college educations in the working-class, who, bizarrely, are voting for the right-wing party, which i think is a deep tragedy. the whole point of liberalism is championing the least advantage. d. if you are dominated by people with college degrees and earning the votes of people without college degrees, you have sold out the people you are supposed to be representing. as long as the left-wing party still looks the way it did post -1972 and is dominated by identity politics rather than the good old left-wing of unions and the working class, whether boomers or not, whether joe biden is president or not, it is still a boomer party and boomer politics we are living in. susan: the 117th congress will have 31 millenials in it, even though in 2019, millenials became the majority population in our country. why are there not more millenials in congress? helen: too busy trying to earn a living. [laughs] but i think that is another case where millenials who are in congress are not bringing a breath of fresh air. they are not really bringing anything new. it is almost disturbing to see how content many millenials are to just replay the old boomer style of politics. you know, they campaign for the same issues, have the same slogans, have the same mantras. it is almost a kind of decadence that we are stuck in this replaying the boomer reel. we still think of the 1960's as and the protests as being the height of american politics. we saw that get replayed this year. millenials went into the streets and had their own chicago 1968. i really wish millenials would move past this sense of replaying the same old boomer reel, and maybe they would have more success if they did and actually brought something new rather than getting stuck in the boomer world. minutes, iur last 10 wanted to tell our audience a little about you, helen andrews. this year, you tell readers you not only published your first book, but you also had your first child, in the middle of the pandemic. what was the year like for you? helen: yeah, it actually worked out very well for me, because while i was pregnant and not wanting to leave the house, i did not feel like i was missing out on a lot, because no one else was leaving their house , either. [laughs] yeah, it was surreal, but probably less surreal than it would have been otherwise, because i was living the pandemic lifestyle anyway. susan: you also tell your readers you recently lost your dad, and the book is dedicated to him. you describe your father as a "liberal southern lawyer of the atticus finch type," and you describe your mother as a bit of a hippie. how did a conservative thinker , like yourself, come from these parents? helen: yeah, it really is not an exaggeration to say my father was like atticus finch, not just because he was a southern lawyer , but he did accept payment in kind from indigent clients. it was not a bunch of collards from the cunninghams. it was a client who worked at a warehouse for books and was able to get a complete sense of the works of mark twain. a deluxe edition. he accepted that as payment. but, again, he was very liberal in an atticus finch way. "toif you go back and read kill a mockingbird," or you met my father, you would see how wide a conservative streak in there is in that particular brand of liberalism. it is very old-fashioned. i was able to draw the best of what he was able to pass on, which was not quite liberalism as it was practiced by , you know, my millennial peers. susan: why did you decide to go into journalism? helen: it happened by accident. i just sort of graduated from college without really much knowing what i wanted to do. in very millennial fashion, i had just started a blog, and, from that blog, was picked up by a few magazines, and i was drafted from the blogosphere. so it's a very millennial story. susan: the essay seems to be your preferred format, your primary format for journalism, which seems to run counter to the age of twitter. what is the power of an essay in conveying ideas today? helen: i think there is a real appetite for sustained thought. i think that, you know, but biggest writer phenomenon, when i was young and kind of a teenager and growing up, was david foster wallace. he was the best writer in america, according to all the young people i knew. he was a great practitioner of the essay. they are just finely crafted. some of the best essays that have been written in english. and incidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, he was also a great critic of soundbite, addictive media. he was thinking mainly of tv, but, gosh, he would have had a lot of things to say about twitter. so i think there is a sense among millenials, and has been, since david foster wallace's heyday, that the way we are consuming media and social media is bad for us. it is bad for our brains. i really hope as a writer i can offer an alternative to that and have essays that allow your brain to slow down and engage in substantive thought, which you really cannot do over the course of a tweet. susan: what would be the best outcome of your book in the intellectual community? as it goes into the marketplace. what would you like to see happen or the kind of conversation that it fosters? helen: i would really like some angry reviews. i want to get some real pans. i want people to be outraged. no, i do not think that is true. when i was writing it, i had to make a decision very early on. do i want to write a book for conservatives, or do i want to write a book for everybody? you know, if you want to sell copies, there is a lot to be said for writing a book just for conservatives. you know, you can -- what is called "red meat." you can read a "red meat" book that will gratify people's sense of outrage. but i made a decision not to do that. i know there are a lot of liberal millenials out there who are suffering too and have a vague sense that something about the world they are living in just is not right, and they cannot quite put their finger on it. i wanted to present my answers to those questions in a way that a liberal reader would not have an allergic reaction to. so that would be my hope, if this book is able to cross ideological lines in that way. and, admittedly, i have my own aretical beliefs, and they conservative beliefs, but this is not just a book for conservatives. susan: do you anticipate hearing from any of the five that you profile who are still alive? helen: i approached a few of them to see if they were interested in talking to me, but i did not get any bites on that. i hope that they think i have treated them fairly. so if i get an angry response from any of them, i will be a little bit disappointed. i hope that they -- well, some of them, i hope, are flattered, but i hope they all, at the very least, think that i have told their stories fairly. but if any of them want to do promotional events for my book tour, i would be happy to debate them. i think that would be very good for sales. susan: over the past few months, you have frequently been on panels, representing your support for president trump. as we get to the closing days of his presidency, i wonder what you think his legacy will be. helen: i am, today, four years later, very proud to have supported president trump in the primary and the 2016 election. i think that there are a lot of issues that the republican establishment did not want to touch. things like trade, things like immigration, things like skepticism of foreign adventurism that were untouchable before he came along and started talking about them. and whether or not he succeeded in making progress on any of those issues and any of the agenda items i care about, at the very least, they are in the conversation now. i think it will be impossible to go back to the world, the pre-trump world, where republicans could get away with never talking about trade or immigration or foreign wars and ignoring the passionate beliefs of their base, which were contrary to the beliefs of the republican elite. so i think a lot of people who were being ignored for a long time are not going to be ignored anymore, and we have donald trump to thank for that. and, so, for that, i feel a deep sense of gratitude to him. susan: of the 74 million who voted for president trump, where do you think they will find their voice, politically? helen: i don't know. is tulsi gabbard going to run? [laughs] i think that a lot of the people that voted for trump used to vote for democrats. there were a lot of people who voted for obama and then voted for trump. and so right now, the question is whether they will go home to the democrats or stick with the republicans, and i would be afraid that they would go back and start voting for the democrats again and be a that it would be kind of a one-time thing, and the republicans would not be able to get their votes anymore. but, thankfully, the democratic party is going so far off the left-wing deep end, that i think that is unlikely to happen, which is probably bad for america, but looks good for the republicans. [laughs] a home oney will find the right, and i hope the right can change and grow, in order to make room for them, because they would be a very worthy part of any conservative coalition going forward. susan: helen andrews' new book is called "boomers: the men and women who promised freedom and delivered disaster." available where you buy books in mid-january. thanks much for giving c-span an hour. appreciate it. helen: thank you. ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2021] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> all "q&a" programs are available on our website or as a podcast at c-span.org. you are watching c-span, your unfiltered view of government. c-span was created by american televisio cable companies in 1979. today, we are brought to you by these telogen companies to viewa public service. when the house comes in today, they plan to introduce an article of impeachment against president trump, a censure resolution, and other measures related to last week's assault on the u.s. capitol. later today, house democrats pulled a conference call on how to proceed with impeachment. today on "washington journal," ethics and public policy center senior fellow and washington post columnist henry olsen on the future of the republican party. then we hear from brookings institutions william galston about the possible ways to curb president trump's power in the final days of his administration. we take your calls, texts, and social media comments. "washington journal" is next. ♪ host: good morning. it is monday, january 11, 2021. house speaker nancy pelosi said the house will move to impeach president trump this week if vice president mike pence in the cabinet do not invoke the 25th amendment first. the democrats hope republicans are ready to split from president trump after last week's attack on the capital. we are hearing from just republican viewers only. do you think president trump should be removed from office?

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