It's a Boomer, Boomer, Boomer, Boomer World

Much of what we think of as American culture is really just the cultural preferences of white Boomers

It’s the Boomers’ world. The rest of us are just living in it.

As Yuval Levin put it in The Fractured Republic, the Boomers “have not only shaped the course of American life through their preferences and choices but also defined the nation’s self-understanding…We see our recent history through the boomers’ eyes.” Reflecting on life in the shadow of the Boomers, Tanner Greer observed, “Americans of our age live imprisoned in the world of the Boomers.”

It’s popular today to criticize the Boomers as the source of all ills in our country. But while they deserve their share of the blame, the Boomer is a Janus-faced entity. They empowered the craziest of politics, but have also been the political ballast holding back some of the worst of that crazy. They rebelled against and ultimately undermined our institutions, but are the last generation of competent institutional leaders and doers we have in many cases.

Jeff Giesea writes, “In my smartest political circles, we sometimes talk about what I call the Boomer Paradox: boomers are holding society back, but they also are holding it together.”

Boomer realities are also more complex than Boomer stereotypes. Yes, there are a lot of Boomers who are spending their time and money on themselves in retirement, not helping with their grandchildren the way their own parents helped them with their kids. But there are also plenty of Boomers who are driving hours each week between their home and the two different cities their kids live in to babysit grandchildren on behalf of Millennial kids who are taking advantage of their generosity. My parents, who’ve been gracious to my family, certainly don’t fit the negative stereotype here.

Yet generational stereotypes do hold some truth as well. I’d certainly admit as much for my own Generation X.

Boomers are incredibly solipsistic. It’s hard for anyone to see the world from somebody else’s shoes, but the Boomers are exceptional in their refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of anyone’s views but their own. I’m frequently struck by how Boomers, especially from the older cohort, simply cannot understand how anyone could possibly see the world differently from them. They are honestly confused by it. To them, their own perspectives are simply the obvious truth.

When combined with the fact that the world basically revolved around their generation for their entire lives – and in many ways still does – this solipsism has left them uniquely ill-equipped to lead successor generations. They don’t understand younger generations. They don’t respect those other generations’ perspectives. They don’t think anyone else could possibly be as good at leading as they are. That’s one reason they are still often clinging to power well past the previous generation’s retirement age. Donald Trump’s claim that “I alone can fix it” sums up the mindset well.

As a result, as they’ve dominated American political and institutional life since the early 90s – one might mark Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 as the watershed moment here – they’ve run it in ways that center their own interests. They failed to build up and empower next-generation leaders, and failed to build a world for younger generations to flourish (even if it is still very materially prosperous in many ways). We see this perhaps best in the nation’s $37 trillion national debt, almost entirely accrued on the Boomers’ political watch.

But even more so than debt or wrecked institutions, the Boomers’ ultimate legacy will be mass immigration. The original Boomer generation was overwhelmingly white, probably around 85%. When the Boomers entered their 20s around 1970, America was at its lowest foreign-born population share ever. Yet they created a world in which their own children will be turned into racial minorities. There’s an analogue in the black experience, as many of the most prestigious affirmative action positions in theory earmarked for American descendants of slaves, those who experienced true generational discrimination and disadvantage, have instead been given to foreign blacks. Boomers didn’t pass the 1965 immigration law, but they presided over the demographic transformation of the country, and while they’ve been in charge, they have refused to actually enforce our immigration laws.

This demographic change, whether one sees it as positive or negative, will be the determining factor of post-Boomer America. Much of what we think of as American culture is really just the cultural preferences of white Boomers. When they pass from the scene, it’s easy to imagine a dramatic cultural rupture.

The recent furor over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding is but a small example. The core customer of Cracker Barrel is a white Boomer, a group that’s literally dying. Today’s Cracker Barrel dining rooms might be more multicultural than ever, but there are also far fewer customers eating there.

A slew of institutions that have catered largely to white Boomers – or depended on them as donors or volunteers – will be facing a major transition in the coming years. This includes many evangelical churches and organizations.

Generational turnover will have big implications. Some Boomer legacies, like the national debt, will be a millstone for their successors. But the American genius has always been in its protean nature. Our country creates and recreates itself again and again. We have the world’s oldest written constitution because we’ve successfully created new constitutions within the existing forms. We successfully absorbed waves of immigration in the past.

Whatever it looks like, post-Boomer America will be very different from the country many of us have known. That will be disconcerting to people who are very attached to the America of their childhood. But it’s worth remembering that much of what we’ve thought of as America is not the full breadth of our country’s past, but merely mass culture Boomer America. If we can escape the Boomer prison, there’s no reason we can’t build a great future that’s still very much America, even if it is also very different from what came before.

This essay was originally part of an American Reformer symposium on the Boomers.