By Todd Davis
When I was a child, JCPenney was a destination location. My parents would herd my sister and me in the Plymouth Duster and head out to the Shopping Mall twice a month. Our JCPenney was in the Mall. As far as I knew, all JCPenneys were in malls. Malls were filled with fountains and stores then, wondrous temples to capitalism where you could buy things. There were no Walmarts or Amazons. There was JCPenney and Spencer’s (we weren’t allowed to go in there).
I don’t remember much about what JCPenney sold then, being a child, except for the suit department in the men’s clothing section. This was where my dad bought his suits. I wasn’t sure what my father did; maybe my parents explained it with words like advertising or production design. An older me would associate it with Mad Men, although to be honest I’m sure I didn’t think about it much at the time. All I knew was he wore a suit to work, and you bought suits at JCPenney.
JCPenney usually had two men in suits working in the area where you buy the suits. Can you imagine that? This was a profession. I assume the guys received a commission on every suit that they sold. They weren’t kids on their phones. They weren’t aboriginals from Haiti looking at you with simmering hatred. They were the type of guys who no longer exist in retail stores. Men who could size you up after looking at you and pick out the right type of fit and style, putting you in the perfect suit.
The whole process was commerce as art. And it would take a while. Fun at first, I would quickly grow bored and resort to enacting scenes in support of the Rebel Alliance, dodging between rows of clothes. My father, though, was getting the Julia Roberts treatment in Pretty Woman. Try this one. Have you considered a double-breasted jacket? How does that feel in the shoulders? We will tailor that out, only $10 more with the purchase. My father, never one to express his emotions, must have immensely enjoyed the process, how could he not?
Afterward, he would take us all out to eat at York Steakhouse, which was a cafeteria-style restaurant inside the Mall where you’d take the items you wanted, a baked potato, a strawberry parfait in a fancy glass, then bring it to your table. To a child, it seems so dark, cozy, and vaguely knight-themed at York. Usually, I was restricted to what I could order at restaurants at the whim of my parents, but at York I was always allowed to get the sirloin tips. Only much later did I realize that this was a reward from my father for having to wait hours for the suit selection.
My father was a Boomer. As a member of Gen X, my generation had core conflict with Boomers for years. Real fathers and sons stuff that was usually left unresolved. I have a text thread with my primary high school friends, and of the four of us, three of our fathers are deceased. A lot of Boomer men never made it to 2026 to hear the ire directed at them.
You can’t scroll a social media feed for thirty seconds these days without someone blaming Boomers for something, anything. Boomers caused the housing crisis (didn’t The Big Short explain how the housing crisis happened?). Boomers are responsible for too much immigration. Or Boomers are responsible for not enough immigration. Boomers are the reason burritos cost $20 at a restaurant. It goes on and on.
I read this nonsense, and it is nonsense, and think, my dad was just a guy who wore suits he bought at JCPenney. Most of these people spreading anti-Boomerism have never been inside of a JCPenney. They would certainly never buy a suit from there. Isn’t posh enough. You see, they want to skip around the Monopoly board and go right to Park Avenue, where they buy suits from Prada.
Boomers aren’t even restricted to being actual Baby Boomers. Now people suggest that Boomers are a “mindset”. Fairly soon, when the actual Boomers are gone, my generation, Gen X, will be called Boomers. We will be the targets of the mob.
I have another word for Boomer – it’s called Kulak. The word is Russian, meaning “fist”. It implies someone who is tight-fisted or avaricious. Kulaks were the proto-middle class of Russia. They were relatively affluent (by Russian standards) peasants who had risen above the extreme poverty brought about by serfdom, which was outlawed in 1861. By 1929, Josef Stalin had instituted a state policy to liquidate the Kulaks as a class. A campaign, known as Dekulakization, weaponized a series of escalatory, brutal laws and decrees that systemically destroyed the Kulaks.
The Soviets intentionally left the definition of what made someone a Kulak vague so literally anyone could be swept up in the purges. You could be branded a Kulak if you had extra horses or cows. A slightly larger plot of land than your neighbors. This could be as few as a couple of acres more. If you hired someone to work your acreage, you could be called a Kulak. Ownership of modern farming tools, such as a plow, defined you as a Kulak.
Whatever the definition of the day, the Kulaks were destroyed as a class, and the Soviets used intense propaganda to turn the country’s landless poor against them. The result was private land seizure on a spectacular scale. Around 30 million hectares of private-ownership land were taken from Kulaks by the Soviets. That’s about the size of Illinois. Destroying the successful farmers had a predictable result – the food chain collapsed, leading to the 1932-33 famine in Russia that killed around 7 million people. Between 1.5 and 2 million Kulaks were arrested and sent to gulags. Well, if you were lucky, you were sent to a gulag. The unfortunate were sent to places like Nazino Island.
Also called Cannibal Island, which tells you what a charming place this is going to be, Nazino Island was an uninhabited place where 7,000 or so former Kulaks and others, almost all innocent people, were sent. By innocent I mean, sure, you might have left your papers at home to attend a soccer game, but that crime could get you sent to an island in Siberia that had no infrastructure or, you know, food.
You see, when the Soviets began shipping people to Nazino, no actual camp had been built. “Prisoners” were dropped off at the island with 200 mg of raw flour (at Auschwitz, a decade later, inmates were given twice this, and we know how deplorable things were there) and told to survive. No cooking utensils, no shelter, no clean water. Within days, gangs formed to steal flour. Days after that, gangs started securing the only source of food available – people.
Horror stories abound. The camp was closed several weeks later after it descended into a Dante’s Inferno version of Lord of the Flies. A Soviet official, Vasily Velichko, compiled a report from the testimony of the 2,500 survivors and submitted it to Stalin. Both the report and Velichko were buried, the story of Nazino only coming out in 1988. The survivors were sent to other camps. No restitution was made then, or today. Russian courts continue to deny claims against the state by gulag survivors and their descendants.
All of this happened in Russia. Could it happen in the United States? These historical examples demonstrate the dark, repeating pattern that emerges when an abstract class enemy is blamed for systemic social frustration. It is a logic that thrives on simplification, turning complex national challenges into a targetable, singular villain. While American institutions have historically resisted such rigid class warfare, the current climate, where organizations like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) are increasingly vocal about reordering society based on these very lines, suggests that the mechanisms of scapegoating are alive and well. When “Boomer” becomes an ideological label for all resistance to change, it risks creating the same dangerous, monolithic enemy that historically preceded far more coercive movements.
As the term Kulak became an elastic ideological label in late 1920s Soviet Russia, Boomer has become shorthand for perceived greed, hoarding of housing stock, or resistance to economic change. Turning a generation into a monolith or a mindset allows younger generations to blame a single, identifiable group for complex, systemic issues like inflation, housing shortages, and national debt. It would not be a stretch to envision a future where anyone resisting the DSA is seen as resisting changes that are only meant for the “betterment of America and a greater equality for everyone.”
The DSA is largely composed of downwardly mobile, overeducated intellectuals who feel locked out of power and disenfranchised by the current system. This is the exact class from which the Bolsheviks rose in Tsarist Russia. America, by some metrics, already is burdened by levels of wealth inequality that surpass the state of affairs during the Romanovs.
In the 1872 novel Demons by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he predicts a chillingly accurate vision of what these downwardly mobile intellectuals wanted through the character of Shigalyov. Written four decades before the Bolsheviks took power, Dostoyevsky, who for a time ran in these circles and was sent to a gulag himself eventually, had an uncanny prediction that surpassed the vision of all the governments imperiled by what was coming. Later, he has a character, Pyotr Verkhovensky, explain Shigalyovism in a speech.
He (Shigalyov) suggests a system of spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and it’s his duty to inform against them. Every one belongs to all and all to every one. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. In extreme cases he advocates slander and murder, but the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized the power and been despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalovism. Slaves are bound to be equal. There has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there is bound to be equality, and that’s Shigalovism!
Down with culture. We’ve had enough science! Without science we have material enough to go on for a thousand years, but one must have discipline. The one thing wanting in the world is discipline. The thirst for culture is an aristocratic thirst. The moment you have family ties or love you get the desire for property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll make use of drunkenness, slander, spying; we’ll make use of incredible corruption; we’ll stifle every genius in its infancy. We’ll reduce all to a common denominator! Complete equality! …Only the necessary is necessary, that’s the motto of the whole world henceforward. But it needs a shock. That’s for us, the directors, to look after. Slaves must have directors. Absolute submission, absolute loss of individuality, but once in thirty years Shigalov would let them have a shock and they would all suddenly begin eating one another up, to a certain point, simply as a precaution against boredom. Boredom is an aristocratic sensation. The Shigalovians will have no desires. Desire and suffering are our lot, but Shigalovism is for the slaves.”
The distance between the quiet, orderly aisles of JCPenney America and the ideological purges of the past is not as vast as we imagine. We trust in our property rights and legal safeguards, assuming they are fixed stars in our political firmament. But in an era where ‘Boomer’ functions as the new ‘Kulak,’ and our society grows increasingly enamored with the promise of forced equality, we must ask: are those safeguards truly immutable, or are they only as strong as the people who defend them? If we lose the ability to see one another as anything other than class enemies, we may find ourselves living out the nightmare Dostoyevsky warned the Russians about. They didn’t, or couldn’t, listen. Will we?
