It’s not exactly clear when the term “boomer” became a pejorative, but it’s fairly recent. Once upon a time, there was respect for elders. Today, despite their impending mortality, they must be held in contempt. Now, a new book takes boomer derision to a whole new level. “A Generation of Sociopaths—How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America” by Bruce Cannon Gibney attacks an entire generation, holding it “jointly and severally liable” for pretty much every major problem facing the United States today.

Gibney, born in 1972, has to be savvy enough to realize that his screed, scrupulously if selectively researched and written with just enough vitriol to make it a page-turner, would not sell nearly as many copies or attract nearly as much media attention if it had a more nuanced title. But when evaluating the causes of failed public policies, assigning explicit blame to one group of people is just a scapegoating tactic. It is the recourse of demagogues.

To begin with, the post-World War II generation dubbed “boomers” spans a period of years greater than any subsequent generational categories. Babies born from 1946 through 1964, a full 19 years, are all considered “boomers.” If Gibney had been born a mere eight years earlier, he would be a boomer himself. Were 1972 babies born into a country substantially different than 1964 babies? For that matter, exactly how much would a baby born in 1964 have in common with a baby born in 1946?

It’s useful to attempt to categorize generations when you’re trying to make sense out of how our culture has evolved and how people born in different eras faced different challenges. But their utility dwindles the moment we forget that all of these classifications are arbitrary. It’s fair enough to select 1946 as the year to commence a new generation. A horrific war had just ended, and returning veterans came home to marry and start families. They had a lot of children in those years immediately following the war. Babies born in 1946 are going to turn 80 next year, and right behind them are approximately 75 million more boomers. The youngest among them turned 60 last year.

And these impressive numbers seem to lie at the crux of the beef with boomers. There are too many of them, they had easy lives, they dominate politics, and now they’re old and hanging on to all the wealth and entitlements. And, by the way, they gave us the national debt and climate change, among other catastrophes.

The problem I have with Gibney’s book is not his dry humor, which I appreciate, nor his opportunistic decision to develop a polarizing argument in order to sell more books. The problem is that he picked the safest target in the world. Gibney could have written a book, rich with data and unambiguous in its condemnation of any other group, and he would have been castigated and ignored. If his target had been blacks, transsexuals, Muslims, or Jews, he would have committed career suicide. But boomers, who are old and overwhelmingly white, are fair game.

But this is still playing with fire. It validates anti-white racism, pairs it with generational resentment, and encourages further polarization. It paves the way for escalating scapegoating, particularly if the economy falters. If Americans are ever reduced to truly desperate conditions, it will provide intellectual ammunition for much worse. An easily forgettable but all-too-accurate counterargument to Gibney’s boomer bashing is that the challenges facing America’s younger generations are both nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault. The causes are circumstantial, driven by an economic and cultural historical momentum that individuals and groups, and generations can influence but can’t possibly stop.

For example, after WWII, America was the only intact industrialized nation on earth. Of course, there was unprecedented prosperity. This lasted for several decades, but the changes that have befallen subsequent generations are not the fault of “boomers.” The decline in birth rates was due to the widespread introduction of a birth control pill, combined with an escalating cost of living and a 1960s counterculture revolution, followed by 2nd wave feminism. Gibney is invited to investigate the causes of each of these mega-trends. He will find little to point at “boomers.”

The birth control pill was a product of a new technology. The cost of living started to rise as the rest of the industrialized world recovered from WWII, forcing American workers to accept lower wages in the face of foreign competition. The cost of living has also continuously risen thanks to environmentalist-inspired overregulation. This has stifled our ability to build homes or develop any of the enabling energy, water, and transportation infrastructure that homebuilders once took for granted.

Should Gibney wish to further evaluate the role that environmentalism has played in making America unaffordable to young people, he may find himself in the company of many Democrats who are belatedly realizing we have regulated ourselves into paralysis. Another new book, “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, attempts to explain how big government and environmentalism have tied the U.S. economy up in knots, disproportionately harming the younger generation. The solutions Klein and Thompson propose aren’t nearly enough and may indeed just cause more problems, but at least they’re asking the right questions.

There is very little that boomers are being blamed for that isn’t either arguable or clearly just circumstantial. Boomers can’t help being born, much less being born in great numbers. They didn’t start WWII; the seeds of that conflict go back to the generations of their grandparents and great-grandparents. And this so-called “greatest generation,” coming of age during the Great Depression and WWII, were themselves victims of circumstances they didn’t create. But they didn’t spend the best years of their lives complaining about their parents’ generation. They did their best to make the world a better place. And like all generations, their contributions were good and bad.

Similarly, it wasn’t boomers who got America into the Vietnam War. For better or for worse, it was the Greatest Generation who did that. The Greatest Generation also launched the War on Poverty, an expansion of the welfare state that has done more harm to African American communities than any subsequent, alleged lack of “empathy” on the part of boomers ever could.

Gibney, along with every other boomer basher, would do well to ponder the likelihood that historical and economic trends are driven by ideologies that transcend generations. The utopian designs of socialists and the panic-driven “climate solutions” of today’s environmentalists both come with authoritarian agendas that reward corporate monopolies and government bureaucracies, leaving everyone else in the cold. Turning younger Americans against their grandparents does not address these larger and more relevant causes of their misfortune. But it does sell books.