A specter is haunting the United States — the specter of “total boomer luxury communism.” Or at least that’s what conservative pundits want younger generations to think.
Conservative writer Russ Greene coined the term “Total Boomer Luxury Communism” (TBLC) in July 2025 as a cynical riff on the utopian left’s vision of a post-scarcity “fully automated luxury communism.” Greene elaborated on the TBLC idea in a December essay in the American Mind, one of the house organs of the Claremont Institute.
Founded in 1979 as a quixotic fusion of Barry Goldwater’s free-market fundamentalism and Leo Strauss’s conservatism, Claremont has become one of the most influential institutional champions of Trumpian “national conservatism.” When parts of the Right questioned Donald Trump’s conservative bona fides in 2016, the institute published Michael Anton’s viral essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which urged conservatives to “charge the cockpit” — that is, vote for Trump — or “die.”
In return, Trump stocked his administration with Claremont alumni — the self-styled “Claremonsters” — across both terms. The institute’s largest donor, hedge fund manager Thomas Klingenstein, believes that conservatism is locked in a “cold civil war” against “woke communism” and “social justice.” As Vice President J. D. Vance recently quipped, Claremont is “the only group maybe in California that makes me seem like a reasonable moderate.”
Greene is CrossFit’s former director of government relations and the current head of the Prime Mover Institute, an energy-industry group that has called for repealing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Carbon Pollution Standards.
“The essence of TBLC,” Greene writes, “is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer.” The result, he argues, is a cohort of retirees living in a “Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning,…
Auteur: Josh Mound
