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Generational Politics and the Presidential Election, Part 1: Excluding Baby Boomers |
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The seven presidents who served between 1960 and 1992 were all born in a sixteen-year period between 1908 and 1924. Of John Kennedy (b. 1917), Lyndon Johnson (b. 1908), Richard Nixon (b. 1913), Gerald Ford (b. 1913), Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), Ronald Reagan (b. 1911), and George H.W. Bush (b. 1924), all served in the US military in some capacity, and most served during World War II.
All these men formed part of what Tom Brokaw called “the Greatest Generation.” From their long dominance in American politics, we can see just how pivotal the war was in shaping contemporary America. In fact, their moment may only have ended because of old age; Bill Clinton never achieved a majority against either Bush or Dole (b. 1923, served from 1942-1945).
It’s interesting, then, that the generation that came of age in the 1960s - another powerful era in our cultural history - may have a relatively short run in the White House. The Baby Boomers may in the end only be able to count two presidents and sixteen years in power versus the WWII generation’s seven presidents and thirty-two years.
American voters have spoken this year, it seems to me, against the Baby Boomers. Though Obama, born in 1961, might technically be a Boomer, he missed a number of the cultural and political events that defined the Boomers as I think of them. The Boomers I know were children when JFK was assassinated in 1963; Obama was a two-year-old toddler. When the Democratic National Convention turned sour in Chicago in 1968, he was seven. When Woodstock drew crowds of hippies to rural New York state, he was eight. Obama wouldn’t go to college until 1979, by which time America had long since withdrawn from Vietnam.
For his part, John McCain (b. 1936) belongs to an in-between generation, too young to remember much of the Depression and too old to have participated in the youth movements of the 1960s.
I think that the marginalization of Baby Boomers in this election is not accidental. While the Boomers I know, including my parents and their friends, are generous and kind people, the perception of Boomers that circulates in our culture is that they are selfish and shallow. Books like David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise essentially suggest that Boomers sold out on their youthful radicalism to embrace a consumer culture, often a commodification of their own heyday. In other words, the people who moved to communes in the early 70s to live off the land are today’s Whole Foods shoppers.
The last sixteen years of presidential politics, sadly, have only confirmed the stereotypes of Boomer superificiality in many Americans’ eyes. The ethic of civic participation that marked much of the World War II generation seems to have skipped over the Boomer leaders. Many will remember Bill Clinton and George Bush as overgrown boys, pot-smoking, cocaine-snorting, women-chasing, drunk-driving, and lacking a sense of seriousness. Both men have shattered their own legacies in the service of what many perceive as a selfish drive for power. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, which seems to stand for nothing but her own ambition, has further eroded the political credibility of Boomers.
Voters are getting tired, I think, of watching Boomers fight their political battles. Here I run into the limitations of my own memory, but it seems to me that the elections of 2000 and 2004 - where Boomer faced off against Boomer - produced more apathy than the previous cycles. Bush, Gore, and Kerry had their share of passionate supporters, I suppose, but among my peers these men were regarded as exceptionally uninspiring. Their generation’s angst about the Vietnam War does not resonate with us; the 2004 election, in my view, was a referendum on Vietnam, ironically fought between a draft-dodging hawk and a conflicted veteran. And that’s not a battle I was interested in fighting. Hopefully, this election will spell the end of that particular ideological struggle.
For the last few months, we’ve heard endless chatter about racial and gender divisions in America. All that’s hogwash, in my view. The inability of pundits to factor in regional differences when they talk about “working class whites” shows the futility of this particular analysis. And we never hear about the complex demographics that would shatter all of the simplistic categories. How do young white women vote, for example? I bet they break Obama, and I bet that shatters the stereotypes. Maybe that’s why the pundits don’t talk about it.
The salient division in my eyes is age. In primary after primary, younger voters have demonstrated that they are ready to move past the Boomer years. In the general, I anticipate an Obama victory, in large part because voters will likely decide to move beyond McCain’s generation - and Vietnam angst - as well. Why should we keep debating the merits of a war fought long before our births, whose conclusion, while perhaps damaging to some Americans’ pride, clearly did not negatively impact our country’s fortunes?
I wonder what the political fate of my own generation will be. There’s been a lot of noise about the “Millenials” recently - our voluntarism, our internationalism, our quiet but forceful sense of civic participation. It is possible that in our approach to politics and the world we resemble our grandparents’ generation more than our parents’. Is the Iraq War, or perhaps more importantly the sad saga of the Bush years, a defining moment in our culture similar to the 1940s and the 1960s? I think that would be going too far. But we may produce a few leaders of our own. I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.
I don’t believe the problem is the Boomers; the problem is that centralized power naturally grows and gets co-opted by the power elite. It is critically important that younger generations get clear on this while there is still time.
From my column “How the Baby Boomers Almost Saved the World…and why they failed” –
http://www.strike-the-root.com/71/allport/allport7.html
To say it plainly: Boomers, as a group, failed to understand that love and freedom require each other.
Like millions before and since, Boomers were seduced by the idea that compassion can be imposed at gunpoint by the State %u2013 not that this scam is ever described so directly by proponents.
Emphasizing love at the expense of freedom leads to horrors, because freedom is a necessary part of love. Even seemingly minor reductions in freedom begin the process of corrupting love, because love and coercion are polar opposites. More of one always means less of the other.
For that reason, it is equally true that freedom without love also leads to horrors. A free society absolutely requires a sense of connection with others (love) to function. A million people who don%u2019t give a bleep about each other will never create a healthy, functional free society, no matter how many of them have read Ayn Rand.