It's the Baby Boomers' fault. All of it.

The milquetoast economy. The endless wars. The hyper-partisanship. And, most of all, Donald Trump's presidential run.

So goes an argument first advanced in 2007 by former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala and now renewed by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. The notion has caught fire on social media, giving Gen Xers and millennials an outlet for their frustration over this year's unprecedented, deeply disturbing election season.

The boomers, that massive post-World War II generation that's now heading into retirement, have helped define every decade since they came of age in the turbulent 1960s. These are the Americans who protested the Vietnam War and embraced the Civil Rights movement in their youth. They're also the ones who rolfed and snorted coke in the 1970s, and then went on to embrace Wall Street excess and credit-card debt during the Reagan and Clinton years in a vain desire to keep up with the Joneses.

And throughout their long, historic journey through life, they have maintained one thing above all else: it's all about them.

"The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history," Begala wrote in an influential 9-year-old Esquire article.

So, if you buy this characterization, it was probably inevitable the boomers ultimately would give rise to the presidential candidacy of famously self-seeking Donald Trump, a boomer himself whose core voter demographic is his own aging generation -- especially white, male boomers who believe they haven't gotten all they deserve from the world.

"I believe Trumpism is narcissism and demagoguery in search of an ideology; it's the ambition of one man," Bronze Star recipient and National Review staff writer David French recently said. "And in many ways, that's more dangerous and can be more dangerous than ambition for the sake of an idea."

Trump has overturned the political and cultural status quo over the past year, normalizing racist and sexist attitudes that have been largely kept out of mainstream politics for 50 years. The Republican nominee has also normalized a celebratory, Everyman anti-intellectualism that hasn't been advanced by a major political leader since Huey Long in the 1930s.

This surely hasn't been a surprise to Begala, a longtime political operative and commentator. Trump's modus operandi has been self-interested destruction, arguably the hallmark of boomers. Wrote Begala about his own generation in that Esquire piece:

"If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment -- not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the [2003] Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded -- a temporary association but not a team."

His chief point, made long before anyone other than Trump believed the real-estate magnate and reality-TV star could be a serious presidential candidate: that the boomers were the first American generation not to think foremost about the future -- the world their children and grandchildren would inherit -- but instead focused on the present. On themselves first and only.

"Boomers, coddled in their youth," wrote Milbank this week, "grew up selfish and unyielding" -- the very qualities that have come to define the U.S. political scene, on the left as well as the right.

"It's really the boomers that are driving the hyperpartisanship and polarization and gridlock," consultant David Rosen told Milbank, insisting the polarization and gridlock became a feature of the political process beginning with the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. "That's where you see the origin of the insane politics that we have right now," he said. "Trump is in some ways taking that style to its most absurd and ridiculous extremes."

Even if Trump loses on Nov. 8, as polls indicate he likely will, the United States next year still will be led -- for the fourth straight time -- by a boomer president. (Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was born in 1947.) This alone, the Gen-X Milbank argues, means we should buckle up and expect more crashes. Just consider the generation's track record, he writes:

Boomers inherited the sole superpower after the Greatest Generation won the Cold War -- and squandered U.S. influence with two long and inconclusive wars.

They gave us the financial collapse of 2008, the worst economy since the Great Depression, a crushing federal debt and worse inequality. They devoured fossil fuels and did little about global warming while allowing infrastructure and research to deteriorate. They expanded entitlement programs and are now poised to bankrupt those programs. Their leadership has led to declining confidence in religion, the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, banks and big business, schools, the media and the police. They may leave their children (the millennials) worse off than they were.

Millennials and their immediate predecessors, the Generation X crowd, are down with this view.

"A lot of Baby Boomers have a problem with letting others live the way they want to," one Redditor wrote in response to Milbank's column. "They don't seem to 'live and let live' very well."

Offered another:

"I'm now in my 40s but as a teenager and young adult I railed against the baby boomers all the time. Once, I was telling an older boomer friend that my generation's coming of age was like waking up after a party we never had, but still had to clean up."

Is a lot of this criticism unfair? Boomers surely will think so. A 2015 Pew Research Center report found that a whopping 66 percent of boomers believe they are responsible people, whereas only 24 percent of millennials had the same self-regard. About half of all boomers also viewed themselves as self-reliant, moral and compassionate -- with Gen Xers and millennials being much more self-critical in the same categories.

But don't worry too much, young Americans. Boomers might be angry, entitled and destructive, but they're also getting old. Said Rosen in the Washington Post:

"Hopefully, when Gen X comes to power it will repudiate the boomers and the entire legacy of this style of politics and move us toward something that is more pragmatic."

-- Douglas Perry