Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.
Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.
So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.
When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.
Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished.
Doesn’t seem too dire at all. We’ve all known we’ve been living beyond our collective means, just like we’ve all knew the housing bubble couldn’t continue forever. We’re about to have to face that reality.
[blockquote] Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. [/blockquote]
J’accuse Brooks, Krugman, Noonan, Rich, Will, Dowd, et al. These critics who are constantly sniping at anyone who ventures to step into the arena or lift the burden of their neighbor. These martini-swilling, scum-sucking, life- draining parasites are plague and pestilence to anyone – liberal or conservative – who dares to strive and achieve. I am sick to death of them.
[blockquote] It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, France
April 23, 1910 [/blockquote]
“The end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968”
That’s preposterous. In 1968 the oldest Boomers were 22 years old and had barely begun to vote; the youngest were 4 years old.
#2, that is a wonderful attack on the messenger (possibly deserved, though Mr. Brooks is one of the few moderate opinions at the NYT), but what about his message? I find it overly dire, as our host does. But there is some truth to it … some truth. Yes, our baby boomer generation has not done all it could. We were saddled with a new way of being raised as children – Dr. Spock and the importance of self concept over everything else – and with a military draft and an unpopular war in the beginning of our adulthood, that we were not allowed to win by the last vestiges of “The Greatest Generation.” They were the “greatest” for their sacrifice during WWII, but their later activity was not so great – the materialism and racism of the 50s that the boomers had to deal with in the 60s and 70s. How many boomers turned on and tuned out as result of the hypocrisy of their elders. The boomers filled the Peace Corps, supported civil rights, integrated our schools and businesses and decried racism. But in the midst of the good was the evil of liberalism – the lack of definable standards that our elders knew and used. When schools were integrated, standards were lowered and Dr. Spock’s teachings said that children’s self concept was more important than their achievements. So lies in schools became common place as students were passed from one grade to another, without achieveing what they needed, to protect their self-concept. Those lies graduated into colleges and businesses and especially into government. Certain people could not longer be terminated from employment because of who they were (what race or gender, later age and ethnicity and late sexual orientation), instead of employers being able to use tried and true standards of merit and achievement. Soon, people could no longer hire others, based on merit and achievement, unless other factors were given preference. Elections and appointments in government became based on matters other than merit and achievement – look at the judges appointed throughout this country; cabinet positions; Federal employees. And finally, the ultimate happened – political correctness – speech and thought became subject to standardless guidelines – if it can in anyway be found to be negative for a minority group, it is socially outlawed. The boomers have been basically split since the 60s between those who were “responsible” to the old standards of their parents and those who rebeled against them and against the established order of The Greatest Generation and prior generations. The former have been politically allied with The Greatest Generation and their some of Gen X conservatives, until now, to maintain the old order in political and economic terms for the country. Brooks is correct, that as of today, the old order is finally dead and the new order has arrived … but that new order is not Gen X … it is still the rebels of the boomer generation (the same as it is in TEC) who have finally gotten their way. Mr. Obama is a product of his hippie mother. He is not a product of Gen X. His socialism is straight from the hippies of the late 60s and early 70s. And he (and his ultra liberal Congressional cohorts) will have their way, and it may take over 10 years to undo what they will do socially, economically and politically, if it can be undone, which is a big question. Like many of the more conservative commentators in recent days, I see an Old Europe socialism descending on our country, while enterprising economies like China, India and Brazil kick us to the sidelines. All is not well with the State of our Union.
Just what I was going to say. The standard definition of the Baby Boomers is that generation born between 1946 and 1964. In 1968, the oldest of that generation was 22. They were dominating the political scene? And Barack Obama was born in 1961. How is he not a Baby Boomer?
I trace the mess back to the start of the MBA being thought to be a legitimate and meaningful degree.
I agree with Catholic Mom. He is a Baby Boomer – the problem is in the span of time that makes up the “Baby Boom.” I’m 45 (born in ’63) and, while I have friend who are Baby Boomers also, some of them are literally old enough to have given birth to me (albeit in their teens). Their experiences are different, music, clothes, social upbringing – yet we’re of the same generation? There should be a different name for those born in the ’60s me thinks.
It depends on whether you were a punk rocker or a hippie.
[blockquote]For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.[/blockquote]
Like Sen. Obama, I, too, am 47 years old. Ann is right: my 62 year old cousin IS old enough to be my mother, and she is in no way my cultural contemporary.
Wikipedia suggests that Sen. Obama and I would have fit squarely within Foot’s original definition of “Generation X” and, indeed, the table on that page seems to ‘officially’ put us there.
I certainly agree that it is misleading to put Sen. Obama in the same cohort as people that evaded the Vietnam draft, etc. I disagree with Ann, however, on whether our cohort needs “a different name”. The whole business of preoccupation with ones ‘generation’ is an obnoxious habit that was unusual before 1968 and unnecessary in 2008.
[blockquote]When historians look back at the era that is now closing, they will see a time of private achievement and public disappointment. In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life. Private citizens, especially young people, repaired the social fabric, dedicated themselves to community service and lowered drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.
Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. [/blockquote]
It says a lot about David Brooks that he doesn’t see the connection between these two phenomena.
That said, how much does Mr. Brooks think the State needs to bloat before it is said to have “flourished?”
Albany+, The MBA is a professional degree, and a gateway to a certain set of employment opportunities, nothing more (like a JD). It’s not designed to give the recipient a particular worldview, and in my experience there’s a lot more variation between MBAs than between MBAs and non-MBAs. Trashing MBA holders as a class is about the same as trashing seminary graduates as a class… some truth in it, but in some cases unfair and generally uncharitable.
TWilson,
Your point of correction is deserved. What I perhaps should have said is how I first noticed a boomer culture change around the time that this previously rarely pursued or talked about degree became a “must have.” It was also the beginning of “downsizing” and other basic contempt for the social contract. All of a sudden there was a shameless appetitive breed of boomers out there and it wasn’t very pretty.
The very solid demographers, Strauss and Howe — [i]e.g.[/i] ‘Generations’ (1991) and ‘Fourth Turning’ (1997) — define the end of the Baby Boom (and all generations) by cultural events. In this particular case, anyone old enough to remember anything about World War II, or young enough [i]not[/i] to remember the Kennedy assassination … is not a Baby Boomer.
They have also stated that a given generation reaches its peak of political power just as its first cohort — in this case 1943 — arrives at classic retirement age. 1943 + 65 = 2008. There you have it.
The distinction we want in this context is the distinction between and Apollonian and a Dionysian society. The Boomers, to be sure, were at t he heart of changing America to a Dionysian culture, but the seeds had been spread long since. BY the end of WW2, there was a widespread attitude that we had gotten through the worst of the worst and it was time to live the good life, which meant money and entertainment – in short, self indulgence. The young 60’s and 70’s added increased drug use and casual sex and the general belief that if it felt good, it was good. Over 40 years, the accumulation of middle class wealth and the widespread concept of “do your own thing” had created a new level of solipsism. When this is added to the narcissism that grew out of the belief that immediate gratification was a right, we had a new culture which placed its emphasis on feeling as the test of one’s reality since it was one’s feeling that informed your whether you were being gratified adaquately. This hasn’t changed; indeed, as you know, it has intensified. It was out of this narcissistic culture that the homophile agenda grew, the accidental confluence of the long standing homosexual culture of gratification at any cost and the children of the wealthy middle class who had come to believe this as the raison d’etre for their existence. See here Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissism.” Od the Apollonian culture, space only allows me to say that “know thyself,” which is at the heart of an Apollonian culture was replaced by “Live your feelings.” L
[i]In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life.[/i]
Franchisation of America has made it a more interesting place? I doubt it. I hate the uniformity, that one city’s malls are just like another city’s malls. I miss the local flavor of many places, the closure of mom & pop hardware stores.
I’m 45, but I still remember how we would always go to “Charlie’s” whenever we had some home improvement problem. It was an Ace hardware store, but it was owned by Charlie and he helped us in so many ways. I have missed Charlie for many years now whenever I am gnashing my teeth in some massive anonymous home depot trying to get some help or find someone to answer a question. Blech.