On Life in the Shadow of the Boomers

Ideology, which was once the road to action, has become a dead end.
—Daniel Bell (1960)

Yuval Levin’s 2017 book Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism has several interesting passages inside it, but none so interesting as Levin’s meditation on the generational frame that clouds the modern mind. Levin maintains that 21st century Americans largely understand the last decades of the 20th century, and the first decades of the 21st, through the eyes of the Boomers. Many of the associations we have with various decades (say, the fifties with innocence and social conformity, or the sixties with explosive youthful energy), says Levin, had more to do with the life-stage in which Boomer’s experienced these decades than anything objective about the decades themselves:

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 witness 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 is 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 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. [1]

When I first read this passage in 2018 I experienced it as a sort of revelation that suddenly unlocked many mysteries then turning in my mind.

To start with: The 1950s did not seem like an age of innocent idyll or bland conformity to the adults who lived through it. It was a decade when intellectual life was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Consider a few famous book titles: Orwell’s 1984 (published 1949), Hersey’s The Wall (1950), Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Chambers’ Witness (1952), Miller’s The Crucible (1953), Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) were all intensely preoccupied with the weaknesses of liberalism and the allure of totalitarian solutions. For every optimistic summons to Tomorrowland, there was a Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Richard Hofstadter ready to declare Zion forever out of reach, hamstrung by the irony and tragedy of the American condition. Nor was it the wholesome era of memory. An age we associate with childlike obedience saw its children as anything but obedient—witness the anxiety of the age in films like The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Blackboard Jungle (1955). This age of innocence saw the inaugural issue of Playboy, the books Lolita (1955) and Peyton Pace (1956) hitting the New York Times Fiction best seller list, the Kinsey reports topping the Non-fiction best seller list, and Little Richard inaugurating rock ‘n roll with the lyrics

Good Golly Miss Molly, sure like to ball
When you’re rocking and rolling
Can’t hear your mama call.

And that is all without considering a lost war in Korea, the tension of the larger Cold War, and the tumult of the Civil Rights revolution. We may think of the 1950s as an age of conformity, purity, and stability, but those who lived through it as adults experienced it as an age of fragmentation, permissiveness, and shattered innocence.[2]

Levin explains why our perception of the era differs so much from the perceptions of the adults who lived through it. We see it as an age of innocence because we see it through the eyes of the Boomers, who experienced this age as children. But his account also helps explain something else—that odd feeling I have whenever I watch Youtube clips of a show like What’s My Line. Though products of American pop culture, those shows seem like relics from alien world, an antique past more different in manners and morals from the America of 2020 than many foreign lands today. However, this eerie feeling of an alien world does not descend upon me when I see a television show from the 1970s. The past may be a different country, the border line is not crossed until we hit 1965.

This observation is not mine alone. In his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, Ross Douthat describes it as a more general feeling, a feeling expressed in many corners on the 30 year anniversary of the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. The plot of that film revolves around a contemporary teenager whisked back via time machine to the high school of his parents, 30 years earlier. When the film’s anniversary hit in 2015, many commented that the same plot could not work today. The 1980s simply seemed far too similar to the 2010s for the juxtaposition to entertain. Douthat explains why this might be so:

A small case study: in the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.” The joke was that the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s could be passed off as a genuine alien visitation because it would seem so strange to the ears of a 1950s teen. But thirty years after 1985, the year’s biggest blockbuster was a Star Wars movie about Darth Vader’s grandkid… which was directed by a filmmaker, J. J. Abrams, who was coming off rebooting Star Trek… which was part of a wider cinematic landscape dominated by “presold” comic-book properties developed when the baby boomers were young. A Martina McFly visiting the Reagan-era past from the late 2010s wouldn’t have a Vader/ Vulcan prank to play, because her pop culture and her parents’ pop culture are strikingly the same….

by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

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