I was a grown-ass man by the time planes slammed into the World Trade Center in 2001, and I was nearing forty years of age when the economy collapsed in 2008. Those were enormous events in my life, but they weren’t formative. In many ways, my life in politics has been an effort to battle the way we reacted to those traumas because I think they made most Americans go a little crazy. This is a Generation X type of reaction. It’s a lot different from how younger generations have responded, and this has created a chasm in our culture and even among progressives on the left. Here’s how Maggie Astor of the New York Times describes it:
The oldest of them were just out of college on 9/11; the youngest were not yet born. Over the two decades that followed, they all came of age under storm clouds: of war, of recession, of mass shootings, wildfires and now a pandemic.
The result is perhaps the most profound generational gap since the 1960s: between the Generation X, baby boomer and Silent Generation voters who remember one world, and the millennial and Generation Z voters for whom that world never existed.
I never really thought my generation would be lumped with the Silent Generation since the most fundamental fact of my youth was that the 1960s had ruptured everything. Today, people can look back to the early years of the century and see a recognizable America. Growing up in the 1970s, the 1950’s might as well have been the 1850s.
But I do see the point Ms. Astor is making. You can see the generational gap between Generation X and the Millennials in the massive difference in who they support for the Democratic presidential nomination. And you can see the discomfort Millennials and Gen Y folks have with not getting their way. They’re coming into their own, but it’s Gen X’s time to run the country. We’ve waited patiently for the Boomers to pass the torch and we won’t be skipped over.
At the same time, nothing is ever going to be same after the coronavirus pandemic is over. The old debates about big and small government are over. Many of the death-grip battles of the Boomer generation will be set aside or diminished in importance, and that’s been a lifelong goal of Gen X’ers.
I think we will discover the our destiny was to serve as a bridge between the old and the new rather than a force in our own right. We’re here to keep the porridge from getting too hot or cold. For the next twenty years or so, Gen X will have the most power in the country, but we’ll be living in a world we hardly recognize. It’s a big responsibility, it’s not what we expected, but I think we’re up to the challenge.
You can see the changes over time, and Gen X is indeed the bridge:
That chart is striking. Thank you!
Here’s another one that I like
I think you are, too (fwiw).
The mutual incomprehensibility between the younger generation(s) and the “olds” today reminds me of what I’ve read and seen about the “generation gap” of the 1960s and 70s. Some of it is the inevitable differences that result from different formative experiences. Some of it is the result of massive demographic changes, especially—in the case of boomers and millennials—relatively large cohorts.
My generation has been such an incredible failure on so many levels.
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Care to elaborate ? Maybe we have relatives there somewhere.
Although I was very young, I still (very vaguely) remember the 1970s, and the feeling that ultimately the government was responsible for things, and that no matter what the circumstances, someone somewhere in the Federal government had thought things through and probably had a plan. This was probably a faint sense of the seriousness of the government at the tail end of the cold war, and before the classical liberalism of the postwar era was rejected by Reagan in the 1980s. It’s an almost dead ember, though, a memory of a memory. I feel that my entire adult life has involved watching us slowly destroy what we had.
Here’s a book that predicted this:
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTGY-uoCCCoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=generations&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjwhsiHsrHoAhWCpp4KHRIgACcQ6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=generations&f=false
It wasn’t specific about the event which would catalyze a major transformation but it predicted there would be an event. It left open the possibility that the event or crisis could be wasted, depending on how people responded. The book posited that there are four recurring types of generations which leads to certain types of events recurring every 90 or so years. If true, this could be our version of the Great Depression.
It also posited that each generation would assist in a manner that would be similar to the last time around. So the Baby Boomers would be similar to the generation of Victorians who provided a certain kind of visionary leadership through the Depression and WWII. The next generation, which in our case is Generation X, would be the administrators who carried forth that vision. The next generation, in this case the Millennials, would be the foot soldiers in the coming effort. The previous version of that generation were the ones who served as soldiers and on assembly lines and in hospitals during World War II. And the next generation would grow up in the shadow of these great events and be shaped by it. That would be the generation of my 87-old-dad which was pulled during its adult years between the dominant generation above (the Great Generation) and the one below (The Baby Boomers).
Hope we don’t allow this crisis to go to waste. I don’t think we will because we won’t be able to. If we responded like China and brought it to a quick end, we could gloss over it and return to a version of the old normal. But we’re not able to respond as they did. We’re following Italy right into the bomb crater they’re in. If there was any question about that, it ended for me when I saw pictures of young people massing on Florida beaches, completely oblivious to Covid-19 concerns and the Florida governor refusing to shut down the beaches. That will change but it will be too late. We’ll continue to act too late, again and again, as this crisis unfolds. The numbers in New York and New Jersey are exploding. It’s growing exponentially everywhere — here in Washington state for sure. But it’s growing close to ten times as fast in and around Manhattan. Our nation has been so individualistic for so long, we’re not capable of acting collectively to an adequate pitch. Those old ways are starting to come into focus through a new prism or paradigm under a label called “selfish”. Has been a long time coming.
I think I am missing it. The Greatest Generation was 1910 to 1924, Silent generation was 1925 to 1945, silenced due to turmoil. Then came Baby Boomers and followed by gen x.
The author posits that generational types repeat and that there are four. In his view, the Silents didn’t go to 1945 when the Baby Boom began. There was a submissive generation in between. He posits that every other generation is dominant. So the Silent and Baby Boomers are dominant while the one in between and Gen X are submissive, which might best be understood as functions of or in reaction to the generation that came before. Thus, the Millennials would be the next dominant generation and, he predicted, they would be shaped by this in a way that rendered them similar to the Silents.