The Atlantic - October 2019

THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 31

police have linked him
to at least 6 0 homicides,
and he claims to have
committed 33 more.
According to Arntfield,
killers like Little have
benefited from the falling
clearance rate, which
he in turn attributes to
a handful of factors:
increased expertise (kill-
ers have studied other
murderers’ mistakes and
know how to fool cops,
for example by planting
false evidence), con-
strained resources (thanks
to stagnant salaries,
detectives in some areas
may be less qualified than
their predecessors), grow-
ing social isolation (which
can make potential
victims more vulnerable),
and greater geographic
mobility (which can make
dots harder to connect).
One illustration of the
last point can be found

in the trucking industry,

which has drawn scrutiny

from law-enforcement

off icials. As an FBI press

release put it in 201 6, “If

there is such a thing as

an ideal profession for a

serial killer, it may well

be as a long-haul truck

driver.” Truckers appeared

on the bureau’s radar

more than a decade ago,

when an investigation

revealed that women

were being murdered

along the I-4 0 corridor.

Since then, the FBI’s

Highway Serial Killings

Initiative has investigated

the murders of more than

750 victims found near

highways, and identi-

fied nearly 45 0 potential

suspects, a disproportion-

ate number of them truck

drivers. “The victims in

these cases are primarily

women who are liv-

ing high-risk, transient

lifestyles,” the FBI has

said. “They’re frequently

picked up at truck stops

or service stations.” Mike

Aamodt, the founder

of Radford University’s

Serial Killer Information

Center, says truckers are

well positioned to evade

detection. “The more

locations you’re operat-

ing in,” he added, “the

more diff icult it is for law

enforcement to see a link.”

Of course, would-

be homicidal maniacs

lurk in all kinds of jobs.

Bundy was a law student.

Samuel Little was a boxer

and an ambulance atten-

dant. In his book Murder

in Plain English, Arntfield

breaks down the top

serial-killer professions,

and finds that truckers

are joined by police

and military personnel,

forestry workers, hotel

porters, and warehouse

managers, among others.

In each case, the problem

isn’t so much the people

who fill the job, but the

job itself. The key ques-

tion, Aamodt told me, is

whether a given voca-

tion’s duties hinder or

enable killing on the side:

“The gas-station attendant

has no opportunity. The

long-haul trucker has lots

of opportunity.”

pretending you were wrong when the evi-

dence has proved you right, just because

the political tides have shifted. It’s the dif-

ference between humility and cowardice.

By defending policies that have

worked but are now ideologically out of

favor, Gen X politicians could combat

presentism, the recurring tendency—

especially among progressives—to con-

descendingly dismiss the ideas of the past.

Young activists disdainful of the

Clinton and Obama presidencies are

remaking the Democratic Party. But new

generations tend to overcompensate for

the failures of their predecessors. In the

1960s, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon

B. Johnson were so eager to distinguish

themselves from the isolationists of the

1930s that they forgot that an earlier gen-

eration’s skepticism of war—born from

the disillusionment of World War I—had

lessons to teach despite the necessity

of World War II. Heeding those lessons

might have kept America from losing

58,000 soldiers in Vietnam.

After the economic woes of the Jimmy

Carter years, Clinton-era New Demo-

crats were so determined to prove that

the party was not antibusiness that they

deregulated Wall Street in ways that

contributed to the 2008 fi nancial crash.

In the 1990s, many New Democrats

also dismissed labor unions because of

their belief in the free market. Today the

pendulum has swung again, and Demo-

crats eager for labor’s embrace are join-

ing with teachers’ unions to oppose a

charter- school movement that enjoys

overwhelming support from African

American and Latino Democrats.

As the in-between generation—old

enough to have witnessed the Clinton

era as adults but young enough to learn

from its failures—Gen X Democrats

could warn against the hubris of the

present, as Ted Kennedy warned against

Clinton’s endorsement of welfare reform

in the 1990s and older foreign-policy

thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Wal-

ter Lippmann warned against Johnson’s

escalations in Vietnam.

What matters most isn’t whether Gen X

produces a president. It’s whether it helps

America’s next president— whatever his or

her generation—learn from the past rather

than sneer at it.

Peter Beinart is a contributing writer at

The Atlantic.

were fi rst seeking offi ce—from the Iraq

War to mass incarceration— have failed.

Those failures laid the foundation for

the ideological revolts that have trans-

formed both parties since 2016, and

those transformations were overdue. It’s

a good thing that Donald Trump is more

reluctant to attack Iran than George

W. Bush was to attack Iraq. It’s a good

thing that Democrats are now contem-

plating massive infrastructure invest-

ments to stave off climate change.

But there’s a fundamental diff erence

between admitting you were wrong when

the evidence has proved you wrong and

NBC News. And Booker has dramatically
muted his support for them; the education
section of his campaign website makes no
mention of charter schools. When Los
Angeles teachers went on strike earlier
this year, in part to protest the expansion
of charter schools, Booker publicly sup-
ported them (though he didn’t link his sup-
port with their views on charter schools).

I

T I S L A U D A B L E when politicians

admit they were wrong to champion

policies that have failed. And many of the

policies that enjoyed widespread sup-

port around the time Gen X politicians

• POLITICS

Illustration by JAMES GRAHAM