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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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Right now, "Boomers" hold 51% of the wealth in this nation. The youngest "Boomer" is 61 years old.
If you consider Congress overall, combining both chambers: "Boomers" make up roughly 43–44% of all voting members.
5 out of 9 justices are Boomers
That’s roughly 55.6%
Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump are all Boomers.
Gen X? The forgotten generation.
If you notice ever since the '80s, we have shifted to the Left in this country.
America moving left began long before the 80s, try the mid 1800s, and the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s get left out.
You are simply too stupid to realize your fav politicians sold your azz down the river via NAFTA and other pgms insuring jobs are impossible to find. But, given the intelligence of your generation it was relatively easy for them.
I grant that the Gen-X and Gen-Z people are pretty much screwed.
If they finally do vote for an explicitly socialist system to confiscate the Boomers' stuff, they will find that the government beat them to it and has taxed it all away.
And that Socialist Free Stuff Club? Well, to paraphrase George Carlin: "It's a big club and they are not in it".
After WWII, can't blame them.
They wanted their children to live the "good life".
Queen Elizabeth II made the same mistake in the UK, her children are a bunch of parasites. And guess what? They're "Boomers" too.
Elizabeth's formative years were during the war.
I’m going to sell my house to a conglomerate just to piss off azz holes like canckles here from having a chance to buy it.
Millennials appear to be similar to Boomers.
You can see the mentality.
Gen X seems to "get it". And you can say the same thing about young men from Gen Z.
There are more “I”, “me”, “my” and “mine” in this thread than an Obama speech. No wonder they are so hated.
Many cultures elders try to make sure their progeny have a better future. Our elders turned out to be locusts.
Millennials are the successors to the Boomers. And they are effectively running many large organizations right now. They are the ones who will benefit from the Boomer Hate direction. Well, at least some of them will benefit.
They will be the ones egging on the Gen-X and Gen-Z people while continuing the system that is ripping them off.
It is all a nasty distraction.
It ends when the entire system falls apart from unsustainable debts and hyperinflation. The traditional corrective measures are war, famine, pestilence, and death. Gen-Z gets tasked with rebuilding a new system from the rubble.
Maybe we should be nicer to them.
RE: Nasty little punk certainly paints us Boomers with a broad brush.
He himself is a boomer.
These recent generations following the boomers grew up with advantages and luxuries we never dreamed of having.
And divide and conquer is democrat SOP. And you all have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
What a bunch of ingrates you guys turned out to be.
Maybe instead of just being keyboard warriors, you could actually fix the alleged problems you’re faced with.
The martyr complex does not wear well with the entitled younger generations who have been given so much and don’t appreciate it.
AOC is a perfect representative of a Millennial.
Millennials were raised by "Boomers".
Yeah, that's not a good thing.
At least the Greatest Generation was patriotic even though they did a lousy job raising their progeny.
Millennials were taught not to be patriotic.
The non-boomers complaining about everything they don’t have shows a very entitlement mentality, ungrateful attitude.
They act like they’re the first generation to ever have difficulties and trouble affording a house.
My kids are going to end up with an inheritance I never dreamed I could leave them. For that matter, they’re way better off financially than mr. mm and I were when we were their age.
The problem I see with the younger generations is lack of self-discipline with finances, my youngest being quite the exception. That girl can save money like nobody I ever saw. She just knows how to budget, save, and when to cut out the Starbucks and new phone every year. She does her own house maintenance to save money, too.
The younger generations have valid reasons to complain. The opportunities are simply not there for them unlike previous generations. Unless of course, they happened to be born in a wealthy family.
The estimated average age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. was 26 in 1950, 28 in 1980, 32 in 2000, and 40 in 2025.
First not to set the next generation up for the future?
Exactly what planet are you from?
You have no idea of the history of the people of the past generations. How people were mostly starting off with nothing. And starting young.
Working any job they could find, factories, mining,fishing, sailing...
Spending too much time in hallmark movidom.
In 2025 inflation‑adjusted dollars, the typical U.S. home cost about $92,000 in 1950, $185,600 in 1980, $225,000 in 2000, and $462,206 in 2025.
I’ve watched my non-rich kids and their non-rich friends navigate these times. Anyone with ambition, self-discipline, and a good work ethic can make it just as we had to at their age.
There’s far more involved than just the money.
All this blame the boomers hysteria is just them wanting to blame SOMEONE for the mess they’re in. And it’s easier to blame others than exercise some self-control and self-discipline and just do what you NED to, not what they WANT to.
The best I can do is to help some of the Gen-Z people that I work with to succeed at what they are doing. They are still flexible enough to unlearn the most destructive ideas they absorbed from the education system and popular culture.
The ones I see are very good workers and some have entrepreneurial mindsets. They adapt very well to changing circumstances and have good prospects if the older generations do not sabotage them. Maybe even if they do.
I am not sympathetic to the Gen-X and Millennial people when they take up the Boomer Hate idea. They are looking for freebies from the "wealth pump" system, which is falling apart all around them. They are too late to get in on the grifting positions which were always a sucker game anyway. And they are looking to blame somebody else for their own mistakes.
There are stupid and evil people in every generation. The key thing is to not leave them in charge of other people. The next generations need to improve their abilities to make those judgements.
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