Three demographic groups contend in the political system and on the cultural landscape. The generation that came of age during World War Two, now in its late years, controlled the presidency and much of public life, from John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 until George Bush, Sr’s defeat in 1992 – a thirty-two year run. The baby boomers, thus far, have enjoyed a much shorter period – only sixteen years, from Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 until Barack Obama’s last year.
Despite their numbers and a cultural hegemony that would have put off Antonio Gramsci, the baby boomers are beginning to be pushed aside. They are not as geriatric as the WW2 generation – after all, they eat low-carb foods and work out occasionally – but they command much less respect. Obama (b. 1961, after the baby boom according to most demographers) outclassed a handful of boomers in the primaries and in the election overwhelmed the seventy-two-year-old John McCain, who was neither WW2 nor baby boomer but who might better fall in the latter category owing to his service in Southeast Asia.
The baby-boomer period is marked by self-congratulation in their putative achievements of ending discrimination and the Vietnam War. Well, that’s a lot of nonsense. The nation saw the injustice of second-class citizenship for people who had served in World War Two and Korea, and determined to move toward greater equality while the boomers were still wearing coonskin caps and telling Buffalo Bob what time it was. Key legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and Supreme Court rulings (Brown v. Board of Education [1954]) predate their participation in politics.
The antiwar movement was a critical part of the rise of self-indulgence; most participants were there for the fun, not the cause. The movement reached a zenith in 1970 or so but declined sharply thereafter. The war dragged on until 1973. So overwrought and misguided was the invective they hurled at the military – including average GIs – that today, even thoughtful criticism of the military is difficult to make without evoking memories of their irresponsibility.
The baby boomers entered regular politics in the mid-seventies, as their vanguard reached voting age in numbers, with the help of lowering the age to eighteen in 1971. Since then, the country has elected a series of presidents whose doodling on the pages of history has been less than memorable. The two baby-boom presidencies might be best remembered for scandals and foreign policy blunders.
Not coincidentally, budgets and deficits and the debt began to soar in the mid-seventies as a growing number of young voters and finger-to-the-wind politicians awarded entitlement after entitlement upon themselves. Restraint was simply part of the older generation’s con game that had been uncovered by Vietnam and Watergate. Nothing was too good for the new generation and too much was never enough. A “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch called it, came into being and has persisted to the present.
Though they suffered two-hundred thousand casualties in Vietnam, boomers failed to press for a rethinking of internationalist foreign policy, despite its obvious destructiveness in the early seventies and despite their growing numbers in government and academia. Avid consumerism took precedence over any idealism they once had and so American globalism – with all its inevitable folly and expenditure – proceeded, with only widespread cynicism slowing down interventionism here and there. But the debt from maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world and trying to manage the nettlesome affairs of the world continued to grow.
Foreign policy plodded along until the Iran hostage crisis (1979-81) led many boomers to conclude that peace had been given a chance and was found lacking. Military operations in Grenada, Panama, and Iraq in 1991 were splendid little wars that reacquainted them with their old militarist companion from whom they had become estranged since the late sixties. The country once again enjoyed the prestige of military power. Boomers asked only that future dalliances be short and uncostly and that their children know nothing of it. In a mind-boggling paradox, one best comprehended by veterans, recent military actions have been initiated by men who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War.
The boomers’ successors have yet to form an identity and attach mythic adornments to it. They barely have a presentable name yet. “Gen X” conveys lack of identity more than anything else. “Generation Next” merely states the obvious. An identity might be based on seeing themselves as unfairly saddled with immense debt. The me-generation has given you a bill of 11 trillion dollars and counting. How about the Debt Generation? Kerouac might have liked it. He didn’t care much for the expansion of government and the conformity it brought along, modest though it was when he was out on the road.
The post-boomers will have to reexamine national policies through an eye undistorted by the romanticization of world power and the Great Society – an eye made more acute by the national debt about to crash down upon them. What has globalism brought besides further involvement in distant countries with dubious relevance to the security of a country surrounded by friendly neighbors and immense oceans? What benefits have been gained by decades of social spending that has eliminated poverty as ably as the invasion of Iraq has terrorism? They might also ask if there is a connection between the culture of narcissism that gelled in the seventies and the greed, ethical lapses, and criminal activity that led to the collapse of the economy – and to far less opportunity for the young.
Those questions will likely be at the fore of the campaign in 2012 as both major parties (and smaller insurgent ones as well) contend, probably amid a fiscal crisis, for the post-boomer generations, which by then might comprise the majority of eligible voters. The post-boomers might can complete the baby-boomers’ fall from the heights of cultural and political power where they have dizzily strutted about and repeatedly indulged themselves. Then Generation Debt will be the first Americans since the Depression who had to face hard fiscal realities.
~ ©2009 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a recovering baby boomer who knows where he was when JFK was killed, saw the Beatles live, and served in Vietnam – the Triple Crown of his generation.