Call this a pet theory. I’ve been wondering how boomers inherited pure Americana, yet turned into this majority that despised their own children and country, rebelling against their namesake. We already know Fabian socialism was fighting a quiet war over government control since right before the world wars, that the churches were being indoctrinated by Zionism during the same time frame.
What isn’t quite as clear is how the boomers became quasi hedonist/ nihilists which only solidified over time. There’s multiple facets you could point to like the sexual “revolution”, drug use, hippy culture, etc. these however don’t explain NeoConservatism which was/is overwhelmingly supported by Boomers, or how community disappeared overnight during the boomers reign as adults.
I would argue something different, the fallout of communism/ socialism in America created a fallout from tribalism/ community as a second order effect. “Rugged individualism” became nihilistic individualism which neocons embraced in totality, “you are only responsible for yourself, heritage means nothing, blah blah bootstraps”. This was/is the defining creed of the boomer “right”. This is where the “propositional nation” and “creedal nation” nonsense comes from. This is also why the left and right were nearly indistinguishable on immigration where H1Bs and illegal amnesty were actual neocon babies. (Reagan said he would grant amnesty years before the bill and “dem betrayal”, George Sr favored a second wave of amnesty, etc).
So you might think on the flip side of neocon boomers, the neoliberals, that if they were opposing force that they would be the “communal” party. Which is partly true, this is why leftists of the time created the NIMBY laws and why even today the wealthy left lives in overwhelmingly majority white gated neighborhoods. What the neoliberals would not do, however is support Americana, that was their great evil, and the best way to destroy it was “diversity”/ multiculturalism. It is societal nihilism versus individual nihilism.
This also supports why both the boomer left and right despises Nazis in totality and was their unifier. The neocon right sees Nazis as racial socialists, which is in opposition their founding myth of nihilistic individualism. The neoliberal left sees Nazis as racial nationalists, which is in opposition to their founding myth of societal nihilism.
What happened to the boomers makes perfect sense from a temporal and civilizational perspective.
Civilizations rise because they're based in truth, hard won truths which are built upon over time. As a civilization rises more and more, the people mostly men) rightfully and naturally pursue greater means and ability to protect and provide for their wives, children, neighbors, and people. Inventions are invented, progress is made (not how the far left/globalists use the term), social constructs are created and/or strengthened, and iterative improvement is made over time, to facilitate better lives for the people. This natural improvement naturally pervades all of life, which over time makes life easier for people.
Hard won truths are won precisely when and because life is hard. When we make our lives easier, those hard won truths are valued less. Through ease and comfort, we're less likely to value truth, less likely to embody it, believe it, speak it, support it, pass it on to our children, vote for it, and pursue it further. Ease and comfort are the death knells of success, whether it be individually, communally, or civilizationally. In terms of civilizations, this is when weak men begin to take power.
Ease and comfort enables falsehoods, lies (especially comfortable lies), weakness, degeneracy, corruption, and evil to take root and proliferate. The institutions of power are initially infiltrated and corrupted by weak men and subversives. The cancer grows and spreads over time.
The corruption and weakness started before the boomers, but the "progress" made under their tenure was definitely the most profound. Don't forget that the boomers were the most propagandized generation. They didn't have the internet to speak and exchange information freely, free from the control of the evil in power. The government, schools, news, and media were all entirely controlled and corrupt when they grew up, a complete monopoly on information control that was used against them, which is one of the reasons why they're so hard headed. The other, bigger reason is that civilization was still peaking under their tenure, and they were able to accrue mass wealth for themselves that their grandparents and grandchildren couldn't/can't dream of any longer. They got theirs, and most of them still live comfortably in their cushy jobs, with a 401k, a paid off house, and closing in on a comfortable retirement. Comfortable people don't question what they believe.
This is why falsehoods and lies began to proliferate under the boomer's tenure. Things like individualism, rampant drug use, the sexual revolution, feminism, no fault divorce, hedonism, egalitarianism, race blindness, sending everyone to college, pushing kids far away from the home, prioritizing money over all else (mammonism), zionism, judeo-Christianity, pacifism, Western interventionism, White racial guilt, idol worship of all things non-white (especially blacks), etc. were accepted because the boomers were living in luxury, no matter how many "woe is me" stories they try to tell. They were living in the peak of Western civilization, and didn't realize it. They were made comfortable, and are still mostly living in comfort, which is why they were so easily duped, and remain duped. The lies they were being fed still made sense, and their world wasn't, in their eyes, being upended by those subversive lies. Remember that the things they accepted didn't originate from them, it was pushed upon them. They easily accepted it, because of the circumstances they were living in, but the natural ebbs and flows of civilization were absolutely taken advantage of by the evil at the top, so they could accrue more power and control.
I think that nihilism began to take root during the boomer generation, but didn't become widespread until their children and grandchildren became of age (80s, 90s, and 00s), precisely because of the corruption the boomer's accepted and partook in, facilitating and emboldening the belief in nihilism. This came at the exact same time that Western civilization began to stagnate and begin to slide downward, under the weight of all the lies, inflaming the belief in nihilism.