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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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Since I am a boomer and don’t like to read illiterate babble by an illiterate person, I did not finish it.
There has never been one single generation in American history that has controlled the levers of power in any field. The World War II generation was in the mix until the 80s; political world much, much longer, and still are.
The unversity radicals appear to be much younger than boomers.
The event that started the decline of the U S was the Vietnam war and no boomers were involved except to fight and die, in some periods as many as two hundred per week dying, not counting the injured.
The seeds of the decline of the Western world were identified by C S Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man, published in 1943. It is uncanny what he predicted.
“””””What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.”””””
In that 2016 election Hillary won 45% of the white 50-64 year old vote and 44% of the white 65+ vote according to Pew studies of validated voters.
Bullshit! End of story!
LOL listen to this azz wipe. The same generation that says leave the 2M Somalis alone, with their 3rd grade education living off US taxpayers X 38 family members for 70 years. Mo Ron…
Woodstock-era losers were the start of the every 6 week sore the reappears on logic.
Why the heck shouldn’t they spend all their $$$? It is their money!
Go earn your own bucks...
Day care predates boomer political power, it started in the 1940s.
“John F. Kennedy, in a message to the conference, expressed his awareness of the problem, stating, “I believe we must take further steps to encourage day care programs that will protect our children and provide them with a basis for a full life in later years.” Kennedy’s message, along with subsequent statements, implied that his administration sought a broad-based approach to child care. In a widely circulated report, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women acknowledged that maternal employment was becoming the norm and pointed out that child care could not only help women who decided to work outside the home but also serve as a developmental boon to children and help advance social and racial integration.”
(snip)
“in two welfare reform bills, passed in 1962 and 1965, Congress linked federal support for child care to policies designed to encourage poor and low-income women to enter training programs or take employment outside the home.”
:: I’m A proud boomer. So is my husband. We built this country. We added value. ::
Boomers ,,, WE, made the USA the greatest military force in the history of the world while making the US the greatest economy in the history of the world.
All while working hard to “give our children a better chance at success.”
Yeah ... we frittered that all away by saving money and collecting social security at 59&1/2. /sarc
Not to nitpick, but the nationwide 18 year old vote amendment wasn't ratified until 1971. In 1966, if memory serves, 20 year olds could only vote in GA and KY. That amendment (26th) is one of the most forgotten ones.
I can kind of see his point. From the 1960s through the 1980s, most of Congress were WWII veterans. By 2015, they were all gone. Boomers are another big bump passing through the snake now.
There is no way around reality. The boomers extracted everything from this country and left the debt and everything we are dealing with today for all the younger generations to deal with. I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the most selfish generation. And it’s not all your fault. The greatest generation has a lot of the blame for raising the most selfish self absorbed humans this country has ever seen. Everything that came from your generation has ruined this country and we have to clean up this mess, if it can be cleaned up. If you are lucky you will leave this world unscathed, cause if the millennials have their way, there will be retribution.
Yes to one that cannot make change or know with certainty what a woman is.
That don't know the significance of the big hand and the little hand or will not be able to read old letters left to them because they are in cursive writing.
"Idiocracy" is modern day prophecy. /great sigh
“You?”’ I’m generation Jones and have never owned real property.
Most of my kids own their own homes! But I never have.
There are millions of boomers. Many are on this site. Founder JimRob is a boomer. Donald Trump is a boomer. There are millions of great boomers to miss.
How foolish to dismiss an entire generation because some among the millions are not saving an inheritance for their kids. Every generation has buttheads.
80 is the new 30.
Why the heck shouldn’t they spend all their $$$? It is their money!
Go earn your own bucks.
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Hey, I agree, but boomers are the first generation to not care about leaving their family set up for the future. Again, cementing just how selfish they are. Hey man, just own the selfishness. It is what it is. Instead there are people who get all butt hurt when they hear the truth,
Too bad it will not help them in any way.
The people truly running things are men in their 40's and 50's. It has always been that way in the past and still is today. "Those people" are not Boomers.
To be sure, there are still a lot of senior executives in their 60's and 70's hanging on to their positions. They are mostly phoning it in and approving all of the critical decisions made by their staff.
The people ripping off the Gen-Z folks are Millennials and Gen-X folks. They inherited a system of grift and wealth extraction that has been built up for the last 80 years or so and they are only trying to keep that machinery running a while longer. They will not succeed.
If there is any good news, as the Boomers die off and the illegal immigrants get expelled, housing will get much less expensive for the younger generations. That is what happens when you have 65 buyers for every 100 houses that come on the market.
Sorting that out will be very messy.
It’s called generalizing. Of course there are gonna be outliers but the majority of boomers , well, I’m not gonna rehash.
You must’ve got cut out of a will.....
This Boomer has a nice nest egg for his two sons.
“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.”
For the love of God someone call the wambulance!!!!
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