Ask What Your Country Can Do For You

"On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they've done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it's been replaced by a cult of individualism. It's hard to overstate how damaging this is.
"On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they've only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it's a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along."

Vox updates the interview Sean Illing did of Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, as the book is issued in paperback.

And Jane Smiley reviews the book at The Guardian.