Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
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.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
About the same on my street. When we moved in over 30 years ago we were the youngest ones on the street. As the older people died off their kids sold the houses. They didn’t move in, they sold them. Now we are the oldest, or there about.
The left got a lot of you to adopt the idea and the new name “The Greatest Generation”, that was smart of them and it works.
“don’t blame the 25-year-olds for this mess”
Then twenty-year-old Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona voters often don’t have clean hands.
Trump is a boomer, a pretty good example of a boy from the outer boroughs of NYC in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.
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.
Caldwell identifies one version of Boomer thought, but the Boomers were born at the moment of "Victory culture" which glorified the American past. Boomers might have started the guilty, self-lacerating view of American history, but it was later generations that really went in for it. As for modern feminism, it wasn't Boomers who launched it but the disappointed women of the "silent generation" and "war babies" who started it. Later generations carried it much further than the Boomers did.
Caldwell was born in 1962, so in writing about Boomers, he’s writing about his own generation, more or less. Bob Novak is his father-in-law.
Optimize your attitude, your skills and your place.
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.
What Boomers believe that stuff?
Maybe #3, depending on how you define "youth".
And now, thanks to the socialism many of them hold dear, they are being routinely euthanized.
“...Where would all these younger people be without us “Boomers”?????”
To these younger people...”You’re Welcome...”
Bovine excrement.
I learned patriotism from my WWII GI father, and never abandoned it, when I was a young liberal and when I wised up before I was 40.
I still want to treat women differently, with respect and honor, even when my daughter says it makes me look like a creepy perv--[bleep] it, I grew up learning to respect women and I still want to, even if they become bluehaired and disrespectable.
I have wanted to be old since I was a teenager; I saw in the elderly the wisdom of age and the respect from the young, even if today the young no longer respect us.
In short, I am the exact opposite of the supposed Boomer, and I suspect there are millions and millions like me.
In 1968 the Democrats won 47% of the (21) to 29 year old vote
The only time the Democrats won a majority of the youth vote in the boomer youth time was after Watergate, when Carter won 51%
Nixon won 52% of the 18 to 29 year old vote in 1972.
In 1968 the Democrats won 47% of the (21) to 29 year old vote, in 1972, they won 46% of the 18 to 29 age group, in 1976, after Watergate, and with the weak, moderate (and under suspicion) Ford, against what appeared to be a social conservative Southern Democrat with a strong military back ground, the Democrats picked up 51% of the 18 to 29 year old vote.
In 1980 Democrats got 44% of that age group, 1984-40%, 1988-47%.
It wasn’t until 1992 that the under 30 age group (without boomers) became a Democrat voter group, George W. did get 46% and 45% though.
The 66% of the under 30 vote that Obama won in 2008, was unprecedented.
When I read this screed of ungratefulness, I am convinced MOST of these spoiled and entitled offspring SHOULD have been aborted or strangled at birth.
What choice did we babies born to the World War II generation have to be born?
The author of this trash seems to delight in the coming deaths of his generation’s parents.
Reading this hateful essay should make Baby Boomers want to burn their houses and other assets to the ground so such soulless offspring INHERIT NOTHING.
Will we Boomers be reduced to “kill or be killed” by scoundrels like this?
The quicker we Baby Boomers die, the happier this prick will be.
This author never heard of the Fifth of the Ten Commandments to “honor thy father and thy mother.”
A lot of Us boomers, not I, left these kids in day care at 6 weeks old
We’re seeing part of the emotional toll on that
A kid suffers grief chronically when left without mom
People complain that boomers own too many homes and won’t move out or sell…
It’s never mentioned that someone is going to inherit those homes (and soon)
They don’t disappear when the boomer dies or goes to assisted living etc.
I knew a boomer who never married no kids. Well he had heart attacks and had to live in rehab but kept thinking he’d return to his very nice house. It stayed empty for years. Just the kinda guy people complain about. (The notion of private property being marginalized)
Well he died. And his sister inherited the house. She is selling it.
As so many often do they think generational problems are what caused this mess we are in. The progs have done a great job of brainwashing so many into thinking like this, and they have all the CYA they need to continue destroying everything.
Um, the 26th Amendment wasn't ratified until July of '71 and Johnson's term ended in '69.
That "Bumper crop of 18-year-olds" (I was one of them) had already been drafted and served a couple of tours before they had a chance to do anything more than protest.
Are you going to assert that Boomers never protested the Vietnam War?
Before I retired I was working in an office environment. It was an IT department and we had a fair number of Indian employees.
As was my habit, I was holding the door for a group of Indian women. One of them got right in my face and demanded, "Why do you do that?"
"What?"
"Why do you hold the door like that?"
"I'm honoring you as a woman. I believe women should be held in high esteem."
"REALLY ???" She had a big smile on her face.
After that whenever I held the door for them she would look me in the eyes and smile ear to ear.
I think in Indian culture, the younger people hold the door for the older people. And I was quite older than them.
That was complete nonsense, who is the idiot that wrote it?
I don’t blame any age group for anything, there are good and bad people in every age group. Utter stupidity.
If the Boomers wanted something they worked for it.....
Hillary Clinton, Stephen Stills and others of their ilk are not representattive of the 75 million Boomers who were sired and raised by “The Greatest Generation”.
They are the leftist outliers who cheated and whined all the way to the top.
Meanwhile the other 75 million worked to fuel the greatest economic expansion in history and to build the nation from a population of 141 million to 341 million.
The boomers I know are liquidating everything they have and are spending it all. My uncles are taking literal the words “the last check I write or is written for me will bounce”. Boomers are the most selfish generation and have left this country trying to in ruins. You will not be missed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.