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Posted on 12/03/2025 10:48:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Shortly after Christmas, the oldest baby boomer will turn 80. The 75 million people born between 1946 and 1964 who have dominated the American political imagination since the Eisenhower administration are starting to fade from the scene.
Anyone who has felt oppressed by the baby boom – and this includes virtually every non-senior citizen in the country – will complain that it’s about frickin’ time. If the boomers are only now losing their influence, they long ago lost their marbles. What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But maybe it was the indignant boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell over the Covid “misinformation” to which Joe Rogan allegedly gave vent in 2022.
Although this pair of Woodstock-era Canadian singer-songwriters are slightly too old to belong to the baby boom proper, the crusade to which they were summoning their fans was a perfect example of the boomer style, with its sanctimony, its performative dudgeon, its imputation of ignorance and immorality to anyone who disagrees – all in the service of a questionable proposition.
Spotify executives must have agonized for nanoseconds over how to respond to this “either-he-goes-or-we-go” ultimatum. Should they cut loose Rogan, the most listened-to talker in the fastest-growing audio-streaming genre, with a political influence to match? Or should they part with two folk singers whose Spotify fanbase (however numerous their listeners elsewhere) probably consists of 11 septuagenarians sniffling in front of their toasters in retirement communities across Arizona? Hmm. The Spotify execs didn’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows.
Looking at the boomers these days, it is natural to ask how anybody could ever have been pushed around by such a feckless and unconvincing bunch. The answer is an actuarial one. It wasn’t the boomers’ powers of persuasion that enabled them to rally the country behind a succession of dim ideas, from complex derivatives to the Iraq war. It’s just that they were numerous enough to be demographically invincible. If the boomers wanted something, they got it, by force of numbers, and this was as true when they were six as it was when they were 60.
Before they could even talk, society was being reconfigured around them, for better and for worse. By 1964, all 75 million boomers had been born – and the United States had only 191 million people in it. Boomers made up about 40 percent of the country. What sort of parents wouldn’t have voted for a vast expansion of secondary and university education to speed their kids’ way into the upper-middle class? On the other hand, a bumper crop of 18-year-olds stretching as far as the eye can see did nothing to reduce Lyndon Johnson’s crazy ambition to fight a war in Vietnam, where tens of thousands of boomers would die.
Although no one ever sat down and calculated it, this critical number – 40 percent – would give a rough idea of baby-boom power as the generation passed through the various stages of life. Boomers started voting in the 1966 elections, and by the time Ronald Reagan chased Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, they were casting 40 percent of the votes. Two years later they were at 43 percent.
The boomers were sometimes polarized on major issues, it is true. But on any matter that united them, it required a near-unanimous resistance movement to stop them. That is why politicians made the country liberal on sex in the 1970s, when the boomers were mostly in their twenties; business-friendly in the 1980s, when the boomers were mostly in their thirties; and investment-friendly – starting with Bill Clinton’s second term – in the 1990s, when the oldest boomers were entering their fifties.
This was important, because the boomers’ command over the economy would wind up more impressive than their command over the political system. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the boomers were between 25 and 43, entering their most energetic adult years just as America was being called on to write the rules for the global economy. When they were in their prime, in the prosperous 1990s, they made up well over half the workforce.
This is going to have a startling consequence. The baby-boom vision of what American society is about has been embraced almost unanimously by all society’s institutions since about 1968, when the oldest boomers were graduating from college. Boomers quarrel over the details of this vision, but not over its basic tenets, which seem to be: 1) The main thing that happened in American history is slavery; 2) There is not much difference between men and women; 3) Youth is the best part of life.
Through their preponderance in the marketplace and the voting booth, boomers have been able to sell these propositions to the American public as the merest common sense. But they are no such thing. For most of American history they were considered outright untruths, and most non-boomers probably think of them as such today.
There is going to come a moment when the boomers’ political power falls below the threshold necessary to prop up this vision of things. It could happen before the next election. And then something is going to happen that no one has given much thought to: control over our politics and our culture is going to pass to a non-baby boom generation – perhaps a much younger one – that looks at the world in its own, totally different way.
But now the boomers, submerged beneath immigration and colliding with mortality, make up only about 20 percent of the population. Each year, 1.8 million of them die, and that number is set to rise steeply.
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By the way, it’s nice that you know who lives on your street. On the street I grew up in Rochester, NY in the 50’s and 60’s, we knew everyone in every house, and had been in just about all of them at some point in our lives. That isn’t the norm today.
I turned 21 in 1968. That's the first year I was able to vote.
Not this 1947 boomer. The best part of my life began when I retired 22 years ago. Haven't looked back since.
I never knew any of my grandparents. I always felt like I'd miss out on a lot because it it. I learned patriotism from my father who came here from Holland at 8 years of age in 1913 with his two brothers and their parents. He was naturalized in 1920 with the rest of the family except his mother who had died a couple of years earlier. His youngest brother served in the U.S. Army in WWII and died in 1946, the year before I was born. My mother came here as a little girl from Ontario, Canada with her only brother, and their mother. She met and married my father in 1936. Their first child was born four years later. Three more followed, me being the last. Her brother served in the U.S. Army in WWII as well. My only brother enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam 1966-67. They are all gone now. My father told us when we were younger, to never do anything that would put our freedom in jeopardy. Although he was an FDR Democrat, he was a good man and taught us to love this country and the freedoms we enjoy. He died in 1978, and it wasn't long after that, that I woke up politically, started voting Republican, and have never stopped since.
I think that this current generation (and maybe millennials) have eliminated GenX from history...
It’s like we don’t exist anymore, not that I am complaining, lol.
Teachin' the many grandkids. Don't worry about it.
“Twas the greatest generation that supercharged divorce, voted in immigration reform, banished the Bible from public schools, opened the door to porn. All the devil’s doing, he operates in all generations.
Stopped Nazism and Communism from conquering the world with heroism unmatched in history.
My parents never saved an inheritance for their four kids. They didn't have it to save. We never even had a car. My father worked on the NY Central Railroad for over 50 years when he died. He had a lousy $1,000 life insurance policy, enough to bury him and pay for his funeral. My mother had no life insurance. She'd been a housewife her whole life. She left her body to the University of Rochester Medical School when she passed, because she didn't want to be a burden on us kids. When they cremated her body and returned the ashes to my sister who lived in Rochester at the time, she paid for the funeral service, and burial of her ashes next to my father. My brother and I, along with his wife and children cleared her apartment out.
I raised two sons alone, never owning a home because I couldn't afford one. They are now in their 50's. Neither of them owns a home, nor would want to. And they have no kids which is fine with me. Anything I have, I earned myself. There is no law that says you have to work your ass off your whole life to provide for your children, then make sure you leave something to them at the end. My kids will get nothing but a $50,000 life insurance policy to split when I die, and whatever they can sell at an estate sale. Then they are on their own, like I and my siblings were all those years ago when my parents died.
And kicked out every leg of the chair of the legacy that had given them the fortitude , leaving that busted culture to their children. Need I mention the Great Society that destroyed the black family? I never bought into the whole generational meme anyway.
Boomers might be the generation who lost the most men fighting Communism.
“””””Ike was Pres. from 1953 to 1961 - that would make the “guy” born in 1946 - 7 to 15.”””””
Yep, and the boomers didn’t even dominate the music of the 60s, and nothing of anything of the true adult world.
The first presidential election in which all boomers could even vote was 1984.
You seem to think that boomer parents were wealthy. I sure as hell wasn't, and neither were my grandparents. I never knew any of them. They all died before I was born in 1947. My grandparents came to this country poor from Holland and Canada, and died with nothing. My father came from Holland in 1913 at 8 years of age. His mother died of TB not long after they came here. His father was killed by a car driven by a woman as he was walking down the road back to the rail car he was living in. That was in January 1944, the month before my only brother was born.
My mother was probably 3 when she came here from Canada in the 1920's. Her mother was divorced when she arrived. She worked as a housekeeper in a Rochester, NY hotel until she got sick and went back to Canada in 1946. She died on the operating table in Kingston the December before I was born. She had nothing to leave my mother except a teapot, and glass-cut cake plate which I still have. From doing family research, I discovered it was my great-grandmother who paid for my grandmother's funeral. My mother never knew that her own grandmother was alive when her mother died. If she knew, she never mentioned it, and I know she never corresponded with her.
My father went to the 4th grade, and worked on the NY Central Railroad for over 50 years when he died at 73, about 7 years after he'd retired. They'd sold the home when my father retired, using the money to pay off all their bills, and moved into an apartment. My father had a $1,000 life insurance policy from the railroad when he died in 1978. That was enough to buy a casket, bury him and buy a headstone.
My mother came to live with me and my sons after he passed, and stayed with me until I took a job with NY State in 1980 which required me to move 3 hours away. She returned to the Rochester area, closer to my siblings, and lived in senior citizen housing until she passed. She'd been a housewife her whole life and died with nothing in 1990 at the age of 69. Anything she did have was mostly hand-me-down furniture from us kids. She got about $300 a month as a widow from my father's railroad pension, and was eligible for Medicaid and Food Stamps. We did help her financially until she passed. She had no life insurance, so she donated her body to the U of R Medical School. A year later my sister who lived in Rochester picked her her ashes, and paid for the graveside service and her burial next to our father. There was nothing left from either of them to give us kids. And we didn't expect anything to begin with.
I'm 78, been divorced for 46 years, raised two sons on my own. I never owned a home because I couldn't afford it when my kids were young. By the time I had a career and could afford one, they were getting ready to leave the nest. My sons are now 54 and 59. I've helped them financially through their lives. Neither has children, which is fine with me. Neither has ever owned a home because they don't want one. I have no savings, no stocks, bonds, nothing, other than what's in my apartment. I never had gold or jewels. Never owned a diamond ring. I would have probably already hocked it if I did. My kids will have to be satisfied with splitting a $50,000 life insurance policy between them. After that, they are on their own.
Nasty little punk certainly paints us Boomers with a broad brush.
It is also the generation who celebrated Communism the most as well as spitting on the military the most.
This guy needs to get a second job ... save money and pay almost all cash for used car ... buy his clothes on layaway ... buy On Sale groceries on pay day etc, etc .... like we Boomers did.
Beginning with Johnson’s Great Society commencing via his Inauguration Speech. 😡
I don’t think so, but they were the last great American warrior generation with their 10 million men serving, and them making the Vietnam War an overwhelmingly volunteer war and being the generation to eventually defeat Russian Communism.
You should see the posts on Nextdoor ... new mother’s asking TOTAL strangers for child care help for their NEWBORNS!!!!
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