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How Boomer Nostalgia Harms America

Book Excerpt: Yuval Levin, ‘The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism’

Evolution of Trump Voter
Artwork by Gary Locke
May 28, 2016

The baby boomers are the children of the World War II generation. They are generally defined as Americans born between 1946 and 1964, so they are now in their fifties and sixties; the oldest among them are entering their seventies.

They are a generation that has always stood out, first and foremost, for its sheer size: about 75 million Americans were born in those years, an era when the constraints of depression and then war gave way to an unprecedented economic expansion, and with it a sharp increase in rates of marriage and childbearing. In the twenty years before the baby boom began, the number of births in America hovered around 2.6 million per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During the baby-boom years, this figure climbed to 4 million per year.

The baby boomers transformed the age structure of American society. If you were to chart the nation’s population by age at different times over the past seven decades, you would find in each case a large bulge representing the baby boomers at different stages of life—what demographers have often playfully called "the pig in the python."

The demographic dominance of the baby boomers has always translated into economic and cultural dominance, too. Because they were born into a postwar economic expansion, they have been an exceptionally middle-class generation, targeted as consumers from birth. Producers and advertisers have flattered this generation for decades in an effort to shape their tastes and win their dollars. And the boomers’ economic power has only increased with time as they have grown older and wealthier. Today, baby boomers possess about half the consumer purchasing power of the American economy, and roughly three-quarters of all personal financial assets, although they are only about one-quarter of the population.

All of this has also made the baby boomers an unusually self-aware generation. Bombarded from childhood with cultural messages about the promise and potential of their own cohort, they have conceived of themselves as a coherent group to a greater degree than any generation of Americans before them. Since the middle of the twentieth century they have not only shaped the course of American life through their preferences and choices but also defined the nation’s self-understanding.

Indeed, the baby boomers now utterly dominate our understanding of America’s postwar history, and in a very peculiar way. To see how, let us consider an average baby boomer: an American born in, say, 1950, who has spent his life comfortably in the broad middle class. This person experienced the 1950s as a child, and so remembers that era, through those innocent eyes, as a simple time of stability and wholesome values in which all things seemed possible.

By the mid-1960s, he was a teenager, and he recalls that time through a lens of youthful rebellion and growing cultural awareness—a period of idealism and promise. The music was great, the future was bright, but there were also great problems to tackle in the world, and he had the confidence of a teenager that his generation could do it right.

In the 1970s, as a twenty-something entering the workforce and the adult world, he found that confidence shaken. Youthful idealism gave way to some cynicism about the potential for change, recreational drugs served more for distraction than inspiration, everything was unsettled, and the future seemed ominous and ambiguous. His recollection of that decade is drenched in cold sweat.

In the 1980s, in his thirties, he was settling down. His work likely fell into a manageable groove, he was building a family, and concerns about car loans, dentist bills, and the mortgage largely replaced an ambition to transform the world. This was the time when he first began to understand his parents, and he started to value stability, low taxes, and low crime. He looks back on that era as the onset of real adulthood.

By the 1990s, in his forties, he was comfortable and confident, building wealth and stability. He worried that his kids were slackers and that the culture was corrupting them, and he began to be concerned about his own health and fitness as fifty approached. But on the whole, our baby boomer enjoyed his forties—it was finally his generation’s chance to be in charge, and it looked to be working out.

As the twenty-first century dawned, our boomer turned fifty. He was still at the peak of his powers (and earnings), but he gradually began to peer over the hill toward old age. He started the decade with great confidence, but found it ultimately to be filled with unexpected dangers and unfamiliar forces. The world was becoming less and less his own, and it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he might be past his prime.

He turned sixty-five in the middle of this decade, and in the midst of uncertainty and instability. Health and retirement now became prime concerns for him. The culture started to seem a little bewildering, and the economy seemed awfully insecure. He was not without hope. Indeed, in some respects, his outlook on the future has been improving a little as he contemplates retirement. He doesn’t exactly admire his children (that so- called "Generation X"), but they have exceeded his expectations, and his grandchildren (the youngest Millennials and those younger still) seem genuinely promising and special.

As he contemplates their future, he does worry that they will be denied the extraordinary blend of circumstances that defined the world of his youth. The economy, politics, and the culture just don’t work the way they used to, and frankly, it is difficult for him to imagine America two or three decades from now. He rebelled against the world he knew as a young man, but now it stands revealed to him as a paradise lost. How can it be regained?

This portrait of changing attitudes is, of course, stylized for effect. But it offers the broad contours of how people tend to look at their world in different stages of life, and it shows how Americans (and, crucially, not just the boomers) tend to understand each of the past seven decades of our national life. This is no coincidence. We see our recent history through the boomers’ eyes.

Were the 1950s really simple and wholesome? Were the 1960s really idealistic and rebellious? Were the 1970s aimless and anxious? Did we find our footing in the 1980s? Become comfortable and confident in the 1990s? Or more fearful and disoriented over the past decade and a half? As we shall see in the coming chapters, the answer in each case is not simply yes or no. But it is hard to deny that we all frequently view the postwar era in this way—through the lens of the baby-boomer experience.

The boomers’ self-image casts a giant shadow over our politics, and it means we are inclined to look backward to find our prime. More liberal-leaning boomers miss the idealism of the flower of their youth, while more conservative ones, as might be expected, are more inclined to miss the stability and confidence of early middle age—so the Left yearns for the 1960s and the Right for the 1980s. But both are telling the same story: a boomer’s story of the America they have known.

The trouble is that it is not only the boomers themselves who think this way about America, but all of us, especially in politics. We really have almost no self-understanding of our country in the years since World War II that is not in some fundamental way a baby-boomer narrative. That is why younger Americans so often find themselves reenacting memories they do not actually possess, and why our nation increasingly behaves like a retiree.

Understood in this way, our national mood over the past fifteen years begins to make sense: it’s a mood of fatigue, of an unwillingness to accept the fact that changes and challenges are always coming and going, and that the moment of hope and achievement so cherished in memory by the boomers did not in fact resolve anything in a permanent way. How can we still be fighting these fights and facing these problems? Why could our glory days not last?

This is not quite to say that our mood has been detached from reality. The concerns we express through nostalgia speak to very real problems. And yet that nostalgia is not the best way to understand those problems. That the baby boomers so dominate our national memory and self-image means that we don’t think enough about what came before the golden age of the boomers’ youth, and that we don’t think clearly about just how things have changed since that time. We use the era of their youth as a benchmark for normality, which keeps us from seeing how very unusual it actually was.

America needs to be careful not to let aging baby boomers define its outlook. We cannot afford to farm out our vision of the future to a retiring generation. We can already see some indications of where that will lead: our political, cultural, and economic conversations today overflow with the language of decay and corrosion, as if our body politic is itself an aging boomer looking back upon his glory days.

We must resist this narrative of decline, which leads us to attribute the economic growth and social cohesion that characterized midcentury America to a kind of youthful energy, and the contemporary diminution in both to something like senescence. The median age of the U.S. population is certainly older now (roughly thirty-seven years old) than it was in the 1960s (just over twenty-nine years old), and a growing proportion of Americans are elderly. This demographic fact bears on the state of the country, of course, but it is not the essence of the problems that most trouble us.

Far greater changes are afoot. And they are changes that we must strive to understand as creating circumstances that are in some important ways new, and fresh, and full of possibility, rather than just a kind of winding down. The world is always new for the young, and we do young Americans a great disservice to understand it only through the eyes of their elders. We are living in a time of change, and therefore a time that is as much a beginning as an end. But we will only be able to think clearly about what is beginning, and about how we can make the most of it, if we can pull ourselves away from lamentations for a lost youth.

The baby boomers’ grip on our national self-image will surely loosen in the years to come. The boomers are no longer as numerically dominant as they once were. In 2015, they constituted 24 percent of the population, while members of Generation X (born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s) made up 21 percent and the Millennials (born after the early 1980s) 27 percent, according to census data. Rising generations of Americans will soon need to look around and build their own understanding of the present, and sense of the future, that do not take mid-twentieth-century America as their benchmark.

If we are to do that successfully, we will need to begin by understanding the particular distortions to which the dominance of the boomers has left us prone. Otherwise we risk not only failing to come to terms with the present, but also failing to properly learn from the past—and even from nostalgia itself.

Nostalgia, after all, is by no means all bad. And the analysts, scholars, journalists, and politicians who bemoan how things have changed in this half-century are pointing at some important truths about both the past and the present. We must be careful not to dismiss what they see, but also not to ignore what they miss. As the political theorist Peter Augustine Lawler has put it, "all reputable social and political analysis deploys selective nostalgia." The trouble is that ours is frequently selective in the wrong ways, and is so intense as to be blinding.

To learn from nostalgia, we must let it guide us not merely toward "the way we were," but toward just what was good about what we miss, and why. Political scientist Mark Henrie has put it this way:

In the face of loss, the human good is vividly revealed to us. We lament the loss of goods, not the loss of evils, which is why lament illuminates. Is it not striking that whereas antebellum Southern writers championed both the economic and moral superiority of the "peculiar institution," postbellum Southern conservatives typically did not lament the loss of slavery? Rather, the latter lamented the loss of gentility, gallantry, domesticity, and the virtues of yeomen agriculturalists. Although it may be true that nostalgia views the past through rose-colored glasses, such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good.

Many of those who assess our contemporary circumstances through various nostalgic lenses understand this facet of their own thinking, even authors who hail from among the baby boomers. But for all their caveats, the prescriptions of writers from this generation are generally backward looking, because their standard is a particular point in the past. It is a time from which today’s America has much to learn, but also a time that was the actual scene of their own youth: a time when they believe they and their country both reached a peak.

That time existed. It was not a dream. But it was not the paradise that some now suggest, and it was made possible by a set of circumstances— historical, social, economic, political, and cultural—that are no longer with us. As we will see in the next several chapters, those midcentury circumstances constituted an inevitably fleeting transition: a highly consolidated society in the process of liberalizing. No combination of public policies could re-create them. No amount of moral hectoring will, either.

Instead, we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming. And we should apply the lessons we learn to the essential work of economic, social, and political reform.

To begin to escape our overpowering frustration, then, we should try first to better appreciate the real strengths and weaknesses of the midcentury America that still so beckons to us, and to better grasp the nature of the transformation that was then beginning and is still underway.

Adapted excerpt from The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism by Yuval Levin. Copyright © 2016. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.