What do all these baby boomers really have in common?
It’s easy to talk a great deal of rot about when you start generalizing about generations. Witness the recent mania regarding Tom Brokaw’s beloved “Greatest Generation.” Yes, those individuals who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II were certainly courageous in guiding America through the two worst crises it ever faced. But does that really make them any more or less greater than, say, the generations that fought the Civil War, or the Revolution, or who pushed the American frontier through to the Pacific?
Just what are we talking about when we use the word “generation,” anyway? I’m sure that those older Americans who were around in the 1930s and ’40s thought that they had something to do with saving the country, too. For that matter, it used to be that a generation meant thirty years, but with the pace of change today, a generation—like a dollar—just ain’t what it used to be.
The famous “baby boomer” generation, for instance, refers to little more than a demographic anomaly, a period of exceptionally high birthrates that occurred from 1946-1964. To search for any greater, common denominator that those dates is to venture into some tricky waters. How much, for instance, does an individual who graduated from college in 1967, really have in common with one who graduated in 1985? Nearly all of their popular culture reference points and tastes are different, which in modern America constitutes an unbridgeable gulf. This type of generational confusion can have all sorts of unintended consequences, as when many on the right managed to convince themselves, for instance, that the Clintons were feckless, amoral hippies. The rest of us tended to recognize them as what they were, that much more common boomer archetype known as the yuppie.
Yuppies, hippies—can there any defining characteristic to a “generation” that produced such disparate stereotypes? Well, maybe there is: insecurity.
In a recent article, New York Times business analyst Louis Uchitelle examined the highly conflicted attitude many Americans seem to have about how they live now, and what their future will be.
“…can it be that living standards are actually slipping in America? No economist, demographer or historian would make that case,” Uchitelle points out. “Living standards, after all, almost never go backward, at least not in a material sense. Indeed, the economy today is growing, consumer spending is plentiful, and new technologies…make life better than ever, as they do in every generation.”
Yet Uchitelle also points out a central paradox of our time—and generation. While nearly 90 percent of Americans cited in a Gallup poll expressed themselves as “satisfied with their standard of living,” some “25 percent of the nation’s families also worry all or most of the time that they won’t be able to pay their bills,”—a figure that has increased sharply over the last few years.
Americans are satisfied with how they live, but afraid they won’t be able to pay their bills? Uchitelle attributes this seeming contradiction to the circumstances of working life, in the age of downsizing and “reinvention.” Job security, corporate pensions and health care, and steadily rising wages are all increasingly things of the past. Even the most basic, long-term economic trends have become unpredictable. From 1973-1995, the nation’s productivity was sluggish, and real hourly wages did not increase at all. Since 1995, productivity has shot up—but since 2000, wages have not kept pace. In the twenty-first century, median family income has actually declined in the United States.
The years the boomers grew up in, by contrast, were ones of almost unprecedented wealth and security, in American life. The period from just after the war until the oil shock of 1973, as Uchitelle also points out, was one of nearly unbroken prosperity—and a prosperity that was almost universally shared. Productivity rose by close to 3 percent a year, with incomes not far behind.
There were many reasons for this prolonged economic surge, including the release of pent-up buying power from the war, cheap energy, a steeply progressive tax code, and lingering protectionism. America imported relatively little, and even if we had wanted to import more there was nowhere to import import it from, what with most of the globe still recovering from World War II.
But American capitalism has generally been dynamic; what was unique about the postwar years was how sustained our economic growth was, and how widely we shared in it. The boom was really a product of a greater consensus than we have ever seen before or since in American society. Business—especially big business—had come to more or less accept the idea of a regulated economy. American unions reached their zenith, as 35 percent of the industrial workforce, and the bitter labor wars that had plagued the economy for some seven decades were increasingly replaced by amicable settlements. Corporate health care plans and generous pensions became commonplace. Tremendous economic power passed over to the federal government, and social welfare programs expanded exponentially. For the first time, Americans had some real insurance against illness, old age, unemployment. And even ostensible conservatives such as Richard Nixon famously proclaimed that “We are all Keynesians now.”
What brought about this grand consensus? The Americans of “the greatest generation”—the baby boomers’ parents—had, in John Kennedy’s words, been “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” The Great Depression and World War II had, however painfully, impressed upon many Americans the need for cooperation. The Cold War made it a habit. The fight against communism was used to justify everything from the building of the interstate highway system, to federal backing for the civil rights movement, to increased science education in the public schools.
Politics did not stop, of course. Politicians from Kennedy, with his non-existent missile gap, to the odious Joe McCarthy, with his fifty-seven, non-existent State Department communists, tried to exploit the Cold War in one way for another. There were critics of the grand consensus at both ends of the spectrum. Conservatives, about to embark on the long march to Reaganism, took to quoting Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and warned direly that liberalism was only a way station on that serfdom road. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, made the liberal argument that the mere consumption and “increased production is not the final test of social achievement, the solvent for all social ills,” and that we would be better off putting more of our immense, new, private wealth into public purposes. Cultural critics saw new menaces lurking in the shadows of all those new suburban ranch houses, everything from comic books, to feminizing mothers, to good old-fashioned indolence. Books and movies from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, to Revolutionary Road, to From the Terrace, to A Letter to Three Wives,to On the Road, worried that we were becoming a nation of faceless company men, wondering with Jack Kerouac, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
The answer was to the suburbs, and quite delightedly so. After years of deprivation and self-denial, Americans were thrilled with their new affluence. It may seem remarkable that an age lived under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation can be looked back upon nostalgically, but so great was the sense of security provided by the grand consensus that this is indeed the case for most boomers. It was all good, at least as long as the money lasted. And so great was Americans’ newfound sense of confidence that they felt emboldened to scrutinize their core beliefs and values as they never had before.
For the first time, American culture, and especially all those skeptical American artists and writers, became the predominant influence in the world. In a stunning expansion of human freedom, Americans launched grassroots movements that expanded the rights of women, ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor, and even prisoners. The President of the United States himself, Lyndon Johnson, advocated the creation of a Great Society that “is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work…but a challenge constantly renewed…” Americans came to challenge the grand consensus itself, seriously questioning a government they had previously trusted implicitly, along with all of its leading, institutional allies—corporations, universities, organized religion—and even the most deeply held customs and mores of their parents. Following Galbraith’s exhortations, the baby boomers set out to find something beyond than the carefully regulated, Keynesian utopia of ever-increasing production and consumption…
…and marched right into the Republican party. The singular characteristic of the baby boomers is how, in their coming of age, they have turned away from the security that their parents so labored to provide for them. This was in part out of necessity. The oil shocks of the 1970s brought the good times to an abrupt halt, and a revived and ferociously competitive world has deeply eroded our economic advantages. Yet twenty-first-century America, still dominated by the baby boomers, has embraced globalization much more eagerly than any other developed, First World nation. We have largely shucked off everything from trade barriers—once a staple of American life—to unions, to those corporate health care and pension plans, to reliable jobs and raises. The boomers have come to envision themselves, at least, as the ideal Republican entrepreneur, ready to compete in a brave new, winner-take-all society, mistrustful of any collective or governmental solutions to anything.
In practice, this new, conservative/libertarian consensus remains somewhat inchoate. The strong opposition to administration proposals to privatize Social Security indicates that Americans might not be quite ready yet to abandon all of their old security net. Further, generational entitlement battles loom on Medicare and Medicaid. There is probably an inevitable conflict between social libertarians and the religious right in the offing, and we are slowly, painfully re-learning that a sense of public obligation can be extremely useful for some tasks, such as winning a war. We have not abandoned the old Keynesian dream of ever-more production and consumption—but now we feed it with ever greater public and private debt, a course that must also have its endpoint.
Ironically, the baby boomers started life in a society where a great, material security provided the foundation for a series of daring cultural upheavals. In their maturity, they have used a dynamic culture to demolish that security. This is all they have in common, and ultimately they will be judged as all generations, and all individuals, are—by their ability to reach some synthesis between the idealistic dreams of their youth, and the appetites of their maturity.