Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture 9780231553810

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G E N E R AT I O N G A P

GENERATION GAP

WHY THE BABY BOOMERS S T I L L   D O M I NAT E A M E R I C A N P O L I T I C S A N D C U LT U R E

KEVIN MUNGER

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Munger, Kevin M., author. Title: Generation gap: why the baby boomers still dominate American politics and culture / Kevin Munger. Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053382 (print) | LCCN 2021053383 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231200868 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231200875 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231553810 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Baby boom generation—Political activity—United States. | Baby boom generation—United States—Influence. | Older people—Political activity— United States. | Conflict of generations—Political aspects—United States. | Political sociology—United States. | Cohort analysis. | United States—Politics and government. Classification: LCC HQ1064.U5 M836 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1064.U5 (ebook) | DDC 305.2—dc23/eng/20220110 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053382 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053383

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION1 1. THE PROBLEM OF GENERATIONS6 2. THE BIRTH OF THE BOOM20 3. BOOMER BALLAST IN AMERICAN POLITICS36 4. DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN POLITICS48 5. DREAMING OF A BOOMER CHRISTMAS66 6. WHERE DOES IDENTITY COME FROM?79 7. THE EMERGENCE OF COHORT CONSCIOUSNESS95 8. THE ISSUES: ZERO-SUM COMPETITION123 9. TECHNOLOGY AND ALIENATION144 CONCLUSION163

Notes 177 References 187 Index 201

G E N E R AT I O N G A P

INTRODUCTION

T

he American dream is that our children will enjoy better lives than we did; the modern world is built on this idea of progress. The metaphor of government-as-parent does not always work, but there are important parallels between progress at the level of the generationas-family-unit and progress at the level of generation-as-contemporaneouscitizens. Governments of all stripes justify their good governance by delivering economic growth and raising standards of living. But this progress has come with serious costs. We have exploited the resources and labor of other countries and pillaged the environment. Regardless of whether any of that was worth it, it seems the consensus now is that all the nations of the world can achieve Western prosperity if they adopt the correct institutions and the most modern technology. There is a branch of social science that we might broadly call liberal positivism. Its central aim has been to understand what these institutions are that bring prosperity. When Adam Smith titled his most famous work An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he meant it. From the outset, however, even a social scientist of Smith’s caliber could not simply impose the ideal institutions on a nation. Many obstacles, not least the biological realities of humanity, get in the way. In his 1928 essay “The Problem of Generations,” the German sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote about how Smith’s contemporary David Hume first

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drew the connection between governments and people: “Only because mankind is how it is—generation following generation in a continuous stream, so that whenever one person dies off another is born to replace him—do we find it necessary to preserve the continuity of our forms of government.” Hume translates the principle of political continuity into the biological continuity of generations.

T HE PROBL EM OF GENE R AT I ON S

Mannheim’s essay anticipated the central ontological conflict, that of generations, in the contemporary United States. He describes two broad epistemic approaches to understanding generations: the positivist and the historical romanticist. The positivist approach is concerned with numbers and patterns. It seeks a science of generational development and displacement. Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, was partly motivated by a desire to model the tempo of human progress using the mathematics of generations. Mannheim argues that generational analysis is an ideal starting place for the positivist: “There is life and death; a definite, measurable span of life; generation follows generation at regular intervals. Here, thinks the Positivist, is the framework of human destiny in comprehensible, even measurable form. All other data are conditioned within the process of life itself.” Despite the neat structure of generational data, contemporary social science has paid little attention to generations. Part of the explanation may be the explosion of other kinds of data with the rise of computation. The discovery of some thorny statistical challenges in the 1970s may have discouraged positivist researchers. Or perhaps the progressive humanism that predominates among social scientists has blinkered them in its insistence on the fundamental equality of all humans. This moral premise has been a powerful remedy to the essentialist tendencies of social scientific positivism. The uncritical reification of what can be easily measured left a shameful legacy of scientific racism. But the simple fact is that there is no fundamental equality among humans at any given time, even if there is fundamental equality “in expectation,” or averaged across the life cycle. We fully acknowledge this

INTRO D U C TIO N3

inequality when it comes to minors, establishing strict laws and rules designed to protect these humans who clearly need protecting. It is also true that people change continuously throughout their lives, in ways that are relevant to social science. The age composition of a country has huge effects on its economy, politics, and culture. And the age composition of a country rarely changes quickly, making this line of inquiry uninteresting for social scientists aiming for “policy impact.” The contemporary appeal of generational analysis to the romantic-historical social scientist is more obvious. We share our experience of the world with people who share our experiences. Events crystallize this phenomenon—“Where were you on 9/11?”—but the accumulation of the everyday is more profound. There is a unity that comes with generational identification, a capacity to reject what came before and to dream of what is possible. Mannheim cites the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote that “The inescapable fate of living in and with one’s generation completes the full drama of individual human existence.” A beautiful turn of phrase, but consider Heidegger’s context. He was born the same year as Hitler, and he never opposed Nazism. Romantic-historical generational unity enables the construction of the Other in other generations. We are the center of action. Older generations are in our way, and younger generations are pitifully unable to function in the world we created. Like Mannheim, we can synthesize these two approaches. The positivist constrains the excesses of the historical romanticist with data. And when the positivist has no data, the romanticist can offer the experiences of people living in their generation. Most political science works in the positivist mode. The primary method of this book is to combine a wealth of historical data with novel survey evidence. These surveys attempt to understand the experiences of the surveyed in more qualitative terms, a stepping stone bridging our data and the romantic self-perceptions of people as members of generations. But some of what I argue cannot be defended on these grounds. I am deeply invested in exploring the limits of positivism imposed by the explosion of complexity and dynamism that results from our location in time—the 2020s—at the center of one of the most important informationtechnological revolutions in human history. This book takes these epistemic limits to heart and makes claims that are beyond the evidence that

4INTRO D U C TIO N

can be furnished by the past. The internet’s capacity to reshape human society is necessarily beyond our experience. The thesis of this book is that technological progress has produced an inflection point in both the positivist structure of generations and the romanticist spirit of generations, between objective data and subjective identity. These two methods of inquiry can explain older and younger generations, respectively. The Boomers have been around long enough that we have plenty of statistical data with which to describe their trajectory, but the youngest generations are still becoming themselves, producing an energy signature that is not yet intelligible to the positivist but that we can encounter as a zeitgeist. It is a bit of historical bad luck that this is happening at the same time, in the 2020s. But I argue it means that generational conflict will define the politics and culture of the United States in this decade. We can measure the crisis in our positivist generation, the Baby Boomers. They are the largest and most powerful generation in American history. Because of their prominence in the construction of the dominant postwar institutions that still govern our society, they maintain outsize formal power. In their sheer numbers, unprecedented economic success, and the timing of medical advances, they also maintain outsize electoral power. Comte suggests that to lengthen the life span of the individual would mean slowing up the tempo of progress “because the restrictive, conservative, ‘go-slow’ influence of the older generation would operate for a longer time.” This is precisely what the generational actuarial table shows. Both Houses of Congress are the oldest in history. The Boomers held the presidency for twenty-eight consecutive years before losing it to Joe Biden, who is technically one year too old to be a Boomer. The number of living retirees in the United States will peak around 2026. Boomer ballast is a powerful brake on the tempo of progress. The crisis in historical-romanticist generations has begun to appear. The emergence of the idea of “Millennials” into the national consciousness started to pick up steam around 2013.1 Trends in Google searches for the term have closely anticipated interest in the great Millennial albatross, the phrase “avocado toast,” ever since. It is no accident that Millennials resent the labels and stereotypes thrust on them by their Boomer elders. The material conditions of Boomer power

INTRO D U CTIO N5

make resentment inevitable. Even before the name “Millennial” stuck, they were called the “Echo Boomers.” They have always been defined in opposition to the Boomers, their culture and politics restrained by the Boomers’ gravitational pull. We can see this oppositional spirit of younger generations in two places. The first is their increasing diversity along essentially every dimension, which contrasts with the distinctive racial homogeneity of the Baby Boomers. The second is the use of new technology to create spaces for cultural creation and political discussion free from Boomer influence. Gen Z—those born from the midnineties to as late as 2010—is the least white, least straight, and most online generation in American history. They were the first generation to be raised on an unlimited diet of potent nontextual media created by their peers rather than by their elders. Gen Z could therefore make a radical break from the rest of society while that society still exists. The art historian Wilhelm Pinder understood the progressions and revolutions of the art world in exactly these generational terms. He argued that art was driven forward by a shared spirit among a cohort of artists. Different generations live at the same time but do not share the same spirit. This “non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous” means that the experiences of the world on any given calendar date can only be shared among young people in similar stages of life. The internet-native Gen Z stands outside the Boomer-dominated culture and politics of the long twentieth century. And they look on, horrified, at the dysfunctional institutions and ravaged natural environment that are their inheritance.

1 THE PROBLEM OF GENERATIONS

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new  cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —ANTONIO GRAMSCI

We are now trapped in a world of kids. Old kids. The disappearance of patrimonial transmission means that an old guy today is just a useless ruin. The thing we value most of all is youth, which means that life automatically becomes depressing, because life consists, on the whole, of getting old. —MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

The young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. —GRETA THUNBERG

O

ver the past 250 years, the United States has enjoyed more political continuity than any other major nation. And over the past seventy-five years, since the end of World War II, that continuity has anchored itself in a single generation, a source of immense demographic gravity: the Baby Boomers.

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The collective experience of Americans alive today is one of stability. We have lived relatively calmly amid the rise and fall of empires, bloody civil wars, explosive economic growth, and accelerated technological progress. And we have grown convinced of our own inevitability, especially of the specific norms and institutions that the Boomers created. The 2016 presidential election was a shock to this system, but the system reasserted itself four years later. The spectacle of the two oldest presidential candidates in history playing out on revolutionary new communication technology illustrates a central tension in the United States today. It feels like the time has come for the twilight of the Boomers. The American dream is no longer true in the way it was for more than a hundred years: the average Millennial will earn less money than their parents. Generational legitimacy through progress has faltered. Young people are creating their own worlds using smartphones and the internet, which are less and less connected to the old world. Postwar political politesse is evaporating. The reputations of once-revered institutions—everything from universities to the Supreme Court—are crumbling. Even the pantheon of the American civil religion is beginning to crack. It feels like the cusp of a revolution—a new world waiting to be born. And yet. Boomers still control both major political parties, the center of electoral power, all of the major institutions (except tech companies), the mass media, the majority of wealth, and huge amounts of real estate. Far from going away, the power of the Boomers will increase over the next five years as more of them retire and spend more time and energy participating in electoral politics and consuming culture and media. At the earliest, Boomer power will peak sometime in the late 2020s. I call this phenomenon “Boomer ballast.”1

BA L L AST

Unless you have recently traveled via sailboat or hot-air balloon, the word ballast may be unfamiliar. Both these vessels float, and the term refers to the excess weight they carry to prevent them from being too easily driven off course or capsized by the currents that drive them forward. This is a

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balancing act: too much ballast and they sink like a stone, but too little and they cannot be controlled. Most single-person vehicles today have little need of ballast. A car, for example, usually sits solidly on the ground; it moves forward by an internal motor rather than needing to harness uncertain elements for propulsion. Power steering gives the driver precise control over the car’s direction, and our eyes can easily and immediately track the effect of turning the steering wheel. Unfortunately, running a large, complex institution like a nation-state is more like sailing a boat than driving a car. The cliché of referring to the “ship of state” is not a coincidence; in fact, the English word govern is derived from the Latin gubinare, which was used to refer to both the action of steering a ship and governing a polity. Unlike the precise motorist, the person at the ship’s helm can hope only to keep the vessel pointed in the right direction, adjusting to ever-changing conditions and unknown currents. When a new situation arises, the state can respond by implementing new policies, but it is almost impossible to know the effect of those policies in much detail. It would be silly to say that ballast is intrinsically helpful or harmful. It keeps the ship stable and makes it slower, less responsive; stability and speed are two sides of the same coin. Traditional societies where nothing ever changes, where innovation is crushed underneath the weight of the past, eventually either implode or face destruction by more dynamic societies; too much ballast is a problem. Radical societies where nothing is taken for granted and the rules change overnight tend to fragment into smaller pockets of stability or descend into chaos; too little ballast is a problem. Most debates about politics are over what kinds of policies the government should adopt. Which direction should we steer the ship of state? The wonky, technocratic mood that governs these policy debates can sometimes give the impression that governing is simply a navigational problem, one that can be solved with better engineering. Given that policy makers really do need to make decisions, this style of analysis serves a valuable purpose. The problem is that the ship of state is not at all fixed. Nations and societies are made up of individual people, each of them unique, but they all follow the same arc from infancy to old age. The ship of state is the Ship of

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Theseus (the ancient Greek thought experiment in which every individual plank is gradually replaced), and the task of government is to steer this protean vessel, always adjusting to both the changing environment and the shifting composition of the ship.

BOOMER BAL L AST

Steering is immeasurably more difficult if the person at the helm is unaware of how the ship is changing or even that it is changing at all. Thus, my aim in this book is to establish that the Baby Boomer generation is more powerful today than any previous generation at this point in their life cycle and to trace out the implications of this Boomer ballast for the next decade of American politics and culture. The first half of the argument entails describing the various historical trends that have combined to produce Boomer ballast. Most important is demography, the actual distribution of human beings in a society. I will use two distinct demographic lenses. The first is the age pyramid, the raw distribution of the ages of people in the United States. We are older than ever before and getting older. The second demographic lens is cohort or generation, the way that people born in the same range of years have similar experiences, preferences, and beliefs. In a given time period, the distinct effects of age and cohort are impossible to tease apart. I will argue that the Baby Boomers are important for understanding the recent past and near future, sometimes because of their experiences and proclivities as Boomers, sometimes as people late in the life cycle. It would be more satisfying if I could analytically separate these two types of causes and estimate the relative magnitudes of their effects; unfortunately, this is statistically impossible with the data that exist. Regardless, the combined effect of these two causes is Boomer ballast, the unprecedented concentration of raw demography, wealth, cultural relevance, and accumulated historical experience in a single generation at the top of the age distribution. Our ship of state thus has more ballast than ever before, rendering us unusually stable and slow to adapt. The effects of Boomer ballast are not uniform. How they play out in each sector of society depends on the institutional setup of that sector

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and, in particular, the rigidity or flexibility of those institutions. Generally, the more rigid institutions will see longer periods of Boomer dominance as younger generations struggle to make headway. This is the case in electoral politics in the United States, where the two major parties are still controlled by Boomers and no youth-oriented third party is viable. The sectors with more flexible institutions, like media and culture, will still see older institutions run by Boomers, but new information technology will allow younger generations to begin building their own institutions that can grow in prominence as the legacy companies fade into irrelevance. I examine this process with respect to cable news and upstart youth media centered on YouTube. The second half of my argument takes these descriptive facts and explores what might be done with them. The key question facing American politics in the 2020s is whether the growing demographic, cultural, and economic power of younger generations can be effectively mobilized to apply pressure to the political system and have their preferences represented. The mechanism by which this could happen is what I call generational consciousness: a sense of shared identity and purpose among Millennials and Gen Z. Group-identity explanations are increasingly prominent in the study of electoral politics, and I first discuss the social and technological conditions that tend to produce generational consciousness. I then present novel survey-derived experimental evidence that younger generations indeed seem to have a sense of shared identity and are willing to take political actions to advance a common agenda. Again, the central obstacle to seeing this agenda represented in national political discussions is the iron grip of the two-party system. When younger generations succeed in shaping one of these two parties, however, we should expect to see the central political cleavage shift to the zero-sum competition over federal budget priorities. Younger generations report the most important issues facing their generation as student loan debt, housing prices, and climate change; Boomers are worried about Medicare, pensions, and Social Security. A looming budget crunch caused by demographic shifts threatens the funding structure of these Boomer issues, and when it arrives, the decision whether to bail them out or to address student loan debt and climate change will be a pivotal political issue.

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Having established the contours of my argument, let’s take a step back and discuss the specific anomalies that cannot be easily accommodated into existing ways of thinking about American politics.

WHY WE N EED “BOOMER B A LLAST ”

The central novelty described in this book, one that will be with us throughout the 2020s and into the 2030s, is the elderly American, the Baby Boomer. There are tens of millions of them—alive, alienated, and active. They are alive because of the progress they helped bring about. Life expectancies have been extending for centuries, including life expectancy conditional on reaching old age. The fruits of this progress coincide with the aging Boomers. The age distribution of the United States is top-heavy and getting heavier: in terms of either absolute numbers or percentage of the adult population, the peak concentration of retirees will occur sometime in the late 2020s. This fact is difficult to fit into any of the dominant models of politics or economics. Communists and capitalists alike think in terms of economic structures, not age demographics. The ideologues who dominate the discourse have ignored the issue. But our age transformation is inevitable. The nation has simply never had to think about this many people over the age of eighty before. Today, they represent a growing proportion of the population—and an even faster-growing proportion of voters. They are alienated by design. In other cultures, elders receive a degree of deference or respect for their role in ensuring familial cohesion and for the wisdom of their accumulated experience. But in contemporary U.S. culture, old people are seen as bad for progress, and progress is the dominant model of liberal capitalism. Declining mental and physical plasticity throughout the life cycle makes the elderly less useful as workers. The cold logic of the market that equates value with productivity does not valorize the elderly. Older people are also less likely to change their minds. When the world changes, they’re left behind. On topics from gay marriage to marijuana legalization, the Baby Boomers have been routed. The very existence of the elderly serves as proof of progress’s limits: no matter how quickly the

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views of younger generations change, older generations stubbornly keep median public opinion in place. Indeed, the dominant perspective of many young activists is that they wish Boomers would just go away. But they won’t go away. They are, by far, the most active elderly generation in history, and they dominate the economic, cultural, and political spheres like never before. They reaped the benefits of decades of broadbased economic growth, and now they own a shocking amount of the nation’s wealth and housing stock. This advantage gives them a baseline of stability, free time, and disposable income with which to influence the other spheres. The media institutions from the broadcast era of communication technology, the middle eighty years of the past century, are increasingly attuned to the preferences of this powerful consumer bloc. Cable news has experienced a renaissance even though almost nobody under forty watches it. In an atomized era, when physical sociality has collapsed, identities are increasingly formed through overlapping media consumption habits (compounded by COVID-19). The fact that Millennials and Gen Z can create their own media—by, for, and about other young people—implies a degree of intergenerational polarization that was impossible under the limited media choices of the broadcast era. This polarization might be constrained to media-informed intergenerational sniping (“Millennials are killing the diamond engagement ring industry!”; “OK, Boomer”) if the economic pie had continued to grow at the rate it did when Boomers were entering the workforce. But declining economic fortunes mean that conflict between the young and the old for financial resources is inevitable. In fact, it has already begun, as Millennials push for student loan debt forgiveness and green energy policies while Boomers nearing or past retirement insist on bailing out Social Security and pensions. This conflict will only accelerate as younger generations question the Boomers’ place at the top of our social and political order. These questions cannot be easily asked; they are the long-standing “third rail” of politics. To question the Boomers is to raise the specter of so-called death panels, the conspiracy theory from the early 2010s that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act would ration health care among the elderly. The political asymmetry that produced this issue is not a coincidence. Conservative broadcast media is targeted directly at the elderly. While it is unavoidable and in fact desirable that all sectors of society have

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their interests reflected in media, this relationship has often turned predatory. The primary strategy is to terrorize, to reinforce fears of national decline, which is especially potent in the contemporary climate. But it was not until the internet and social media permeated society that elderly politics became the force that it is today. The internet and social media have democratized the capacity to create media. The term democratize has a few meanings. It is generally used to mean “make accessible to everyone,” which is true in this case. But media has been transformed—overnight, in generational terms—from an aristocracy to a democracy, with all the messiness that comes with it. The democratic mass internet has not had time to create healthy institutions or norms. The aging, powerful Boomers are far from technologically savvy. The supercharged capitalism of online media has rapidly discovered their information-verification weaknesses, exploiting them for attention and cash and degrading the overall quality of the major internet platforms. Facebook has become unusable for many purposes, and public behavior on the platform is dominated by cruel, inane, and hyperpartisan content designed to prey on the elderly. Most pernicious, perhaps, has been the feedback loop between social networks and the cable news channels that still dominate Boomers’ attention; the former have revealed a tolerance and even demand for more and more extreme political content. The political media ecosystem favored by Boomers is especially important for the democratic process because of the serious gap in voter turnout between the young and old. The situation among the political donors who play an outsized role in selecting candidates and influencing their platforms is even more extreme. The AARP’s publication remains the nation’s highest-circulation magazine; the political focus of this media giant is to prevent even the faintest mention of reforming Social Security, which means that younger generations are inevitably left holding the bag. Nowhere is the contemporary gerontocracy more obvious than in the elected officials in Washington. In 2014, we broke the record for the oldest Congress in American history. We broke that record in 2016. And then again in 2018. And yet again in 2020, when the majority of the incumbents who lost the election were replaced by someone even older. In 2016, at age seventy, Donald Trump became the oldest president ever elected. In 2020, at seventy-eight, Joe Biden shattered his record.

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Gerontocracies have some merit; people who have had more time to accumulate wisdom and social capital are good candidates for directing a nation based on experience. Although increased life expectancy has changed this dynamic somewhat, the basic idea behind giving Supreme Court justices lifetime appointments is that the legal system is an area in which we prioritize the accumulated knowledge of the elderly over the dynamism of the young. But our electoral system amplifies the power of Boomer ballast by rewarding seniority among sitting members of Congress and enabling high incumbency rates. This system makes the most sense in societies that are generally stable, where the past is likely to be similar to the future, so that the experience of old people can be directly applied to the present. The United States is at its most gerontocratic while the world is in upheaval, amid the most important revolution in the history of communication technology. Donald Trump blazed an unprecedented path as a politician because—I am mostly serious about this—he was the only Boomer who understood how to use social media. Ironies and contradictions abound in any discussion of the generational politics of the 2020s. The Boomers enter retirement at the height of their political and economic power—just in time to see the younger generations disparage their accomplishments. Our culture fetishizes youth, but new communication technology has given a last burst of relevance to the elderly—at a cost. The digital world is overloading their analog psychic defenses with a never-ending parade of political crises recommended by trusted friends and family. For decades, the dream job to which more children aspired than any other was “astronaut.” Today, according to a recent survey of eight- to twelve-year-olds, it is “vlogger/YouTuber.”2 But while the children will never remember the past, Boomer ballast is reflected in the scope of the political imagination. Remember that before the marketers decided on the term “Millennials,” they called the cohort “Echo Boomers”: we are literally living in the past, fighting over which imagined future to pursue. The Millennial exceptions prove the rule. One exceptional Millennial politician is undisputedly Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman of color who can inhabit online spaces with a fluency that cannot

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be faked. As the identities that have long been central to the construction of the white American subject—geography, extended family, religion, bowling-club member—fade away, subtly demarcated internet habits become the relevant symbol of group identification. Internet culture enhances the phenomenon of generational identification. The labels imposed by demographers and embraced by marketers have been increasingly internalized by the people they describe. These shared labels make generational politics possible, powered by this sense of membership in a group. I call it “generational consciousness.”

GEN ERATION A L CON SCIOU SN ESS

Each year, thousands of political polls report their results broken down by the respondents’ age or generation. Likewise, nearly every quasi-experimental analysis of voting or policy preference either focuses on age or statistically controls for its effects. Generations have been central to several major research programs, including those on postmaterialism, long-term cultural and political change, and long-term turnout decline.3 But in most cases, pollsters and researchers treat a generation as an ascriptive group— by which I mean a group that is readily recognized (even if there is some debate about boundaries) and wherein group membership is correlated with life chances, values, and political outcomes. Among ascriptive groups commonly studied by political scientists, only a small subset also represent collective political actors. These groups’ members know they are part of a group with common interests and develop identities that are salient enough to drive common and coordinated political action. For example, they include the European working classes during many periods of the twentieth century,4 African Americans since the end of their enslavement,5 and evangelical Christians in the United States from the mid-1970s to the present.6 Surprisingly, even researchers who give generations a central place in their research programs rarely consider whether the members of a generation who think of themselves as members of a group view that membership as a salient part of their identity. A nascent body of work shows that a political candidate’s age is important for voter evaluation, with voters

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generally expressing a preference for politicians close to their age.7 But the role of generation in this process is not yet established. This book argues that contemporary generations show many of the hallmarks of collective political actors. This situation creates an entirely new way to understand generational politics in the United States—by establishing generation as a newly relevant form of identity and pressure group. James Madison understood social factions as centripetal forces that can break down a democracy. Citizens became a faction, he argued, when their overzealous pursuit of group interests had the potential to trample the rights of others. The dangers are especially great when a faction constitutes a majority or otherwise controls sufficient political resources to act like one. Early political scientists did not speak of factions but instead of political cleavage groups, which they recognized as engines of political change.8 Class conflict, for example, gave rise to child labor laws, voting rights for the propertyless, workers’ rights to bargain collectively, and the fortyhour workweek. Likewise, collective action by Black Americans culminated in a civil rights revolution whose formal rights were extended to other groups, like the disabled. For better and worse, group conflict is central to democracy. Each line of cleavage presents an opportunity for change, threats to the status quo that generate feelings of threatened status among dominant groups.9 The most dramatic changes are associated with ascriptive groups that transform into collective actors, whose members are aware of their identities and common fate and who deliberately advance their interests through coordinated actions such as protests, civic participation, organized interests, and voting. Scholars disagree on how to distinguish between an ascriptive group and a collective actor. Scholars of working-class politics often distinguish between a class in itself and a self-conscious class for itself.10 Other works on class and especially on race have focused on concepts like group consciousness or group solidarity.11 The terminology is important, and some concepts developed in one research program (like African American race consciousness) might fit imperfectly when applied to others. But there is nevertheless broad agreement that collective political actors are not the same as merely ascriptive groups. Collective political actors have a strong group identity, believe their fate is linked, widely

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agree on their political agenda, and are willing to take political action to advance their interests. Generational cohorts are importantly distinct from other types of collective political actors, however, because of the nature of time. Their numbers are in permanent decline; in the long run, they’re all dead. This cruel reality means that generational collective actors are damned even when they succeed. The better a given cohort bends political and social reality to its will, the more it is hated by its successors. The problem of time inconsistency is especially acute when politics is fragmented along generational lines.12

BO O M ER BA L L AST, COHORT CON SC I OU SN ESS, A N D DIGITA L POL IT I C S

My aim in this book is not to develop or test universal theories about the role of generations in American politics for the simple reason that I do not believe these universal theories can explain much outside of the contexts in which they are developed. The challenge of differentiating the effects of age, time period, and cohort (the APC problem) is a statistical nightmare—especially because the data we have access to generally only go back a few decades. That said, it is useful to compare younger generations against today’s Boomers and Silent Generation at the same point in their respective life cycles when possible (this is primarily the case for administrative data like household wealth and voter turnout; richer survey methods are more recent). My argument does not rely on resolving the APC problem. I believe that a confluence of largely unrelated factors will cause generational conflict to become a central cleavage in U.S. politics in the 2020s. This means holding fixed the time period of analysis and treating age and cohort as two distinct types of causes of the present generational conflict. I hope to provide tools for thinking about how generational politics is and will continue to be affected by raw demography, growing longevity, and unequal power accumulation alongside the rapid evolution of communication technology and the development of online communities, which will enable younger generations to ignore geography and the need

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to gain knowledge from elders. The two main “causes” in this book are the accumulated power of the Boomer generation and the information technology revolution; the tension between these causes is the main “effect,” generational conflict, played out in the realms of politics and culture. This conflict has a zero-sum dimension, as all the generations jostle over a fixed fiscal budget, with mutually exclusive preferences. Boomers want more money for Medicare and Social Security; Millennials and Gen Z want money for student loan debt forgiveness and climate change amelioration. But the tension between Boomer ballast and the internet revolution is potentially even more concerning for the viability of the United States as a system: older societies are less flexible, so we will retain preinternet norms and institutions long after they cease to be appropriate. This insight comes from the classic 1963 book The Nerves of Government, by the political scientist Karl Deutsch, which conceives of government through the analogic lens of a brain—or, updated to today, as a computer. The book is broadly concerned with communication, the way that information flows from citizens to the government, within the government, and then back to the citizens in a circular, causal feedback loop. In contrast to many of the broad accounts of government—before or since— Deutsch conceives of government as essentially cybernetic and thus primarily concerned with adapting to a perpetually changing environment. He argues that the key problem presented by this dynamism is an unresolvable tension between the openness to new information required to adapt and the commitment of societal resources required to address present problems: “In addition to being invented and recognized, new solutions and policies must be acted on, if they are to be effective. Material resources must be committed to them, as well as manpower and attention. All this can be done only to the extent that uncommitted resources are available within the system” (164). Applying Deutsch’s framework to the biological realities of the human life cycle, we see that our society has an unusual degree of resources already committed. The government can change the shape of the demographic pyramid only decades in advance. And the present Boomer ballast means that a disproportionate amount of our economic, social, and political human capital is invested in an illiquid response to the postwar, twentieth-century environment. Our demographic structure, compounded by our economic fortunes, granted us an unusually high degree of adaptability. And we flourished.

TH E P RO BLE M O F GENE RATI ON S1 9

But the boom in adaptability led naturally to a bust. In normal circumstances, this would still entail some future cost, as we had fewer untapped resources to devote to new problems. Our society is like a sluggish laptop with too many browser tabs (those notorious memory hogs) open, too many resources devoted to maintaining things as they are, to be able to do new things quickly. The advent of the internet deepens the problem of our present overcommitment. This is a world-historical revolution in communication technology, comparable only to the printing press in magnitude and to broadcast television in breadth; the combination, I believe, is unprecedented. It will take decades for the full implications of the internet and related technologies to filter through and fundamentally reshape human society, but Boomer ballast means that this process is stunted in the contemporary United States. To deploy new “solutions and policies” suited for the digital age, we will need to move beyond the inherited structures of the twentieth century. The biological passing of the Boomers is inevitable, but the organizations and structures they built or reinforced will long outlive them. Deutsch sees this as an inevitable challenge facing societies that hope to thrive beyond a single human life span, and he warns us to “avoid the idolization of ephemeral institutions” (140). We must be willing to acknowledge that institutions designed for past times and generations cannot possibly take advantage of contemporary technology and the human social structures it makes possible. And we must also ensure that the conditions are right for new generations to build institutions in their place. A final quote from Deutsch, before we dig into the details of Boomer ballast: The demobilization of fixed subassemblies, pathways or routines may thus itself be creative or pathological. It is creative when it is accompanied by a diffusion of basic resources and, consequently, by an increase in the possible ranges of new connections, new intakes, and new recombinations. In organizations or societies the breaking of the cake of custom is creative if individuals are not merely set free from old restraints but if they are at the same time rendered more capable of communicating and cooperating with the world in which they live. In the absence of these conditions there may be genuine regression. (171)

2 THE BIRTH OF THE BOOM

Cushioned by unprecedented affluence and the welfare state, he has a sense of economic security unmatched in history. Granted an ever-lengthening adolescence and life span, he no longer feels the cold pressures of hunger and mortality that drove Mozart to compose an entire canon before death at 35; yet he, too, can be creative. Reared in a prolonged period of world peace, he has a unique sense of control over his own destiny—barring the prospect of a year’s combat in a brush-fire war. Science and the knowledge explosion have armed him with more tools to choose his life pattern than he can always use: physical and intellectual mobility, personal and financial opportunity, a vista of change accelerating in every direction. — T I M E , 1967

“O M PH ALOCEN TRIC & SECURE. W HAT MA K ES T HE MA N OF THE YEAR UN I QU E? ”

There is a cliché about how Millennials are entitled due to a childhood of “participation trophies”; Boomers who hold this view should recall that their entire generation won Time’s Person of the Year Award . . . simply by being born.

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M21

That award has evolved considerably over the past century, and while the periodical news magazine no longer possesses the clout it once did, this central feature is a useful standard to measure perceived influence across time. Even its gimmicky choices have generally held up; they selected “The Computer” in 1982 and “You” (for social media) in 2006. In 1966, two years after the babies stopped Booming, the magazine selected “The Inheritors” as the Man [sic] of the Year, referring to “the man—and woman—of 25 and under.” The article also effusively described the bounty of the world “The Inheritors” were born into and was uncannily prescient on the cultural evolution to come. Entitled or not, Millennials are definitely not experiencing “economic security unmatched in history.” Dancing around the edges of the Time article is, of course, the great shame of American history: the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism. The Boomers’ youth took place throughout the civil rights movement, and the article generally places them on the right side of history: “Though he retains a strong emotional identification with the deprived and spurned citizens of his own and other societies, he recognizes that the civil rights revolution, in which he was an early hero at the barricades, has reached a stage at which his own involvement is no longer vital.” Black Americans, suffice it to say, did not have the luxury of substituting “emotional identification” for the active struggle for liberation. The implied “he” in the Time article is white—and not by accident. In fact, the Baby Boomers are the whitest generation in American history, through a combination of immigration restrictions, the deracialization of groups like Irish and Italian Americans, and the unequal distribution of resources among the parents of Black and white Boomers. This chapter summarizes and updates the long-term trends that produced the basic conditions for Boomer ballast, the components of my story that were predictable from the beginning. These demographic and economic trends are all compounded, today, by the development of modern health care and nutrition. These numerous, wealthy, and overwhelmingly white Boomers can expect to spend more time in retirement than any generation before them. Some confluence of these baseline facts—along with the Boomers’ perception of themselves as a world-defining generation, creating both the defining institutions of postwar America and the countercultural

22TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

revolution that has defined the space of cultural politics in much of the West for decades—was necessary for today’s Boomer ballast. As a social scientist, I am somewhat frustrated by the limitations of this style of analysis: I would like to know, for example, whether we could still expect to see the same result if the generation were just as large and healthy but had experienced an economic crisis in their early adulthood. This style of historical analysis cannot answer these kinds of counterfactual questions, and I cannot provide a conclusive formula to predict whether we will see “Gen Z ballast” in the 2070s. Instead, I hope that developing this metaphor will help clarify the current conditions of the United States. Before digging into the details, I will address a key objection: these generational labels are arbitrary constructions of marketers trying to carve up the demographic marketplace and have no relation to reality. There is some merit to this objection, although my data throughout the book demonstrate that there are important generational phenomena at play in contemporary U.S. politics. A more specific critique is that the Baby Boomer label, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as people born between 1946 and 1964, is misleading: there is a historically unique generational cohort, but it is defined by those born between 1940 and 1955. The early Boomers, in fact, have more in common with World War II babies than with younger Boomers who hadn’t finished middle school by the time the Vietnam War ended. For some lines of analysis (the political demography in chapter 4, for example, and the sections on wealth accumulation and political socialization later in this chapter), this critique is broadly correct. However, through the lens of media consumption habits, fiscal policy priorities or cohort consciousness, the standard cohort breakdown is more useful. My goal is not to adjudicate between these two categorization schemes, however, but rather to make the case that a variety of sometimes unrelated trends led to generational conflict in U.S. politics in 2020. Acknowledging these limitations, I will argue that these generational labels are still important for both how citizens understand themselves and for defining trends in politics, economics, and society. Given the longterm nature of demography as a causal variable, then, this is the first question to answer: Why is all this happening now?

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M23

THE AGE PYRA MI D

The first use of the age pyramid chart to map the age and gender breakdown of the population was in an 1874 statistical atlas of the United States. At the time, most states took on the now-familiar pyramid shape that gives this figure its name: lots of babies at the bottom and a much smaller elderly population at the top. But the shape is not inevitable. For instance, the original plot showed huge bulges in the young adult male population for western states like Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. They didn’t call them “cowboys” for nothing.

Age

1920 100+ 95–99 90–94 85–89 80–84 75–79 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 0–4

Gender Female Male

10M (a) FIGURE 2.1  The

5M

0 Population (in millions)

5M

10M

changing shape of the age pyramid of the United States over the past

century. Source: Author visualization of census data.

Age

1940 100+ 95–99 90–94 85–89 80–84 75–79 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 0–4

Gender Female Male

10M

5M

(b)

0 Population (in millions)

5M

10M

Age

1960 100+ 95−99 90−94 85−89 80−84 75−79 70−74 65−69 60−64 55−59 50−54 45−49 40−44 35−39 30−34 25−29 20−24 15−19 10−14 5−9 0−4

Gender Female Male

10M (c) FIGURE 2.1  (continued )

5M

0 Population (in millions)

5M

10M

Age

2000 100+ 95–99 90–94 85–89 80–84 75–79 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 0–4

Gender Female Male

10

5

(d)

0 Population (in millions)

5

10

Age

2020 100+ 95–99 90–94 85–89 80–84 75–79 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 0–4

Gender Female Male

10 (e) FIGURE 2.1  (continued )

5

0 Population (in millions)

5

10

26 TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

Still, the term age pyramid stuck because it defined the default shape of a mature human population for decades. Historically standard rates of childhood mortality (much higher than today) and mature adult death from disease meant that the main demographic story was a funnel. There is a nontrivial chance of dying at each age, and so there are fewer thirty-year-olds than twenty-year-olds, fewer seventy-year-olds than sixty-year-olds, and so on. The 1920 census is the last year to show this pattern, so we will begin there. The first major demographic trend after the 1920s was a baby bust. The Great Depression, which hit in 1929, was catastrophic for the fertility rate and the childhood mortality rate. Fewer babies were born, and those who were born were more likely to perish. Millennials who are delaying starting families due to the economic uncertainty of the Great Recession should remember that things have been much worse. The 1940 census shows a distinct mound driven by a decline in the number of children under fifteen. It is from this slim baseline that the postwar Baby Boom looks especially dramatic. Fertility rates decreased during World War II—which American soldiers abroad were no doubt pleased to hear—but then exploded when they returned home. The booming economy and targeted social and economic programs of the postwar era buttressed this boom. So, by 1960, the new wave of infants had made the age pyramid look more like a pagoda. By 2000, the “echo boom” that we now call the Millennial generation is clearly visible, but it was much smaller than the Boomer one. By 2020, the center of “age gravity” had shifted to people thirty-five to forty-five years old. The pyramid has today become a pillar. Boomer mortality combined with net positive immigration for Millennials means that Millennials are now the largest generation, but Boomers are still an unprecedented bulge at the top of the age distribution. This scenario would not be possible if not for the increased longevity that Boomers were the first to enjoy.

ECON OMIC POW ER

The American dream, if it has any concrete definition, is that children will have a higher standard of living than their parents. The economist Raj Chetty and his team at the Equality of Opportunity Project provide

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M27

convincing evidence that this “absolute income mobility” has been falling steadily in the postwar era. Figure 2.2 plots their data. The decline is dramatic. Absolute income mobility has now fallen to just 50 percent. Today, people who were born in 1985 are as likely to be poorer than their parents as they are to be richer. But the other end of the time series is even more striking. Among people born during World War II, an astonishing 90 percent went on to earn more than their parents. To put this figure into perspective,1 this 90 percent peak was as high as any nation has ever experienced. But both the rate and magnitude of the decline in absolute mobility has been higher in the United States than anywhere else, with the exception of Russians who came of age just before the fall of the USSR. The only nation currently experiencing peak absolute income mobility is China. The Boomers were born into a world of famously broad economic growth and political stability. A uniquely high percentage of this generation lived the American dream. Their formative years were prosperous, and year after year they continued to move upward. They worked their

% richer than their parents

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5 1940

1950

1960

1970 1980 Source: Chetty et al (2017)

FIGURE 2.2  The

decline of the American dream: The percentage of children who go on to be richer than their parents has been falling steadily since the end of World War II, finally reaching below 50 percent for the oldest members of the Millennial generation.

Source: Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang (2017), “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science 356(6336): 398–406.

28 TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

Average GDP per capita growth

way through college, they could afford a mortgage on a starter home, and they got married and had kids (though not as many as their parents did). Chetty’s analysis suggests a significant decline in absolute income mobility within the Boomer generation, such as how the cohort born between 1940 and 1955 has more in common than later Boomers do. The youngest ones are barely more likely than subsequent generations to be richer than their parents. To some extent this is because they are the children of the World War II generation that already experienced significant upward mobility. In any case, this study reminds us that these generational categories are porous and far from deterministic. Another way to measure the economic experiences of a generation is through the growth in the GDP per capita. If we do that, as in figure 2.3, it

20

2 year 4 year 6 year 8 year 10 year

10

0 Baby Boomers, 1946−1964

Generation X, 1965−1980

Millennials, 1981−1996

FIGURE 2.3  Economic growth after a generation turns eighteen: The growth in the country’s economic output was consistently stronger for Baby Boomers than for Millennials in their respective early years on the job market.

Source: Author visualization of data from Bureau of Economic Analysis: FRED series GDPCA.

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M29

looks like the Boomers again had excellent luck, with average growth over the first two years of their adult life at around 5 percent of GDP (in black) and over the first ten years at nearly 30 percent. Gen X had only slightly worse luck, so it is clearly the Millennials who entered the workforce at the wrong time. Figure 2.3 shows a staggering drop-off in average growth rates at the beginning of the Millennial cohort, and long-term growth has stayed low.2 One weakness of GDP as a metric of economic health is that it does not reflect what matters to citizens as workers: wages, the likelihood of working in a union, benefits like health care or time off, the tightness of the employment market, and geographic distribution of jobs. The back cover of Malcolm Harris’s book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials features the now-famous graph of the divergence between GDP and real wages. Although economists debate the definitions and the magnitude of the divergence, there is no denying that these indicators moved in parallel between 1947 and the mid-1970s but have since split. GDP is still the most important figure for citizens as investors, though, so figure 2.4 explains part of the gap in wealth accumulation across generations. Besides an individual’s portfolio, many institutions—everything from pension funds to university endowments—rely on the increase in aggregate stock performance to finance their operations. Declining GDP growth explains much of the crunch facing current generations. Not everyone can secure their nest egg with meme stocks and Bitcoin. All of this is suggestive evidence of the disproportionate economic fortune of the Baby Boomers, but it is not conclusive. We have not yet observed the full course of wealth accumulation throughout the life cycle of younger generations, and we do not have detailed data for older generations. Figure 2.5 shows generational wealth by calculating the proportion of the total national wealth held by each age cohort. The Boomers are the clear winners. At the earliest data point, the median thirty-five-year-old Boomers controlled just over 20 percent of the country’s wealth. At the same age, Gen X controlled around 10 percent. And this gap has only opened wider as the generations have aged. At forty-five, Gen X’s wealth share was just over 20 percent. For forty-fiveyear-old Boomers, it was nearly than double that: 40 percent. As Gen X icon Bart Simpson might put it: “¡Ay caramba!”

30 TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

400 375 350

Real GDP per capita Real GDP per full-time equivalent worker Average real wage, GDP deflator Average real wage, CPI Real median weekly earnings of full-time workers, CPI

325

1947 = 100

300 275 250 225 200 175 150 125 100 1947 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2014 FIGURE 2.4  The uncoupling of GDP per capita and median wage: Although the magnitude varies with the details of the economic indicators, there is no ambiguity that a thirty-year trend ended in the early 1970s.

Source: An Economic Sense (blog), “Why Wages Have Stagnated While GDP Has Grown: The Proximate Factors,” February 13, 2015, https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/02/13/why-wages-have -stagnated-while-gdp-has-grown-the-proximate-factors/. GDP per capita, GDP deflator, wages of full-time equivalent workers, and number of full-time equivalent workers are taken from BEA (FRED series GDPCA). Median wage and CPI are taken from BLS. All figures in real terms. Data accessed on February 10 and 12, 2015.

That comparison is skewed somewhat by the relative size of the generations. There were 76 million Boomers born compared to only 55 million Gen Xers, so it makes sense that the older generation would control more of the wealth. A fairer comparison is between the two largest and demographically better-balanced generations. The data will not contain a point of age overlap between Millennials and Boomers until 2023, but things look dire. Barring a massive departure from the trend line, Millennials

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M31

Baby Boomers Generation X Millennials

50

2019 Baby Boomers

Share of wealth (%)

40

30 2019 1990

20

Generation X 10 1992 0

2008 20

2019 Millennials 30

40 Median age

50

60

FIGURE 2.5  Share of national wealth, by generation: Older people have naturally had more time to accumulate wealth than younger people, so comparing different generations at the same point in their life cycle is apples-to-apples evidence of the Boomers’ advantage.

Source: Gray Kimbrough. 1990-2019 Q1 figures from Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/index.html https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1198703644721524744?s=20

will have accumulated significantly less wealth by age thirty-five than even the notably less numerous Gen Xers. By age thirty, Millennials still controlled less than 5 percent of the national wealth. Even without any major upheaval or collapse, the economic situation facing Boomers and Millennials could not be more different. Their mutual frustration with each other may stem in large part from this fact. Boomers “know” from experience that the American economy is fair (the white ones do, anyway—more on that in a minute), so the only explanation for Millennial struggles is that they have no work ethic and/or gumption. Older people have had decades of life experiences, and it is thus makes sense for them to be less likely to accept that those experiences are

32TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

irrelevant. Millennials, for their part, “know” that the economy is unfair and that Boomers could only have acquired so much wealth from fraud or exploitation. These realities of the American economy may have soured younger generations on capitalism, but it remains very much in place. Our economic system is geared toward satisfying the desires of wealthy consumers, so everything from art to politics, from sports to housing, is downstream of the distribution of wealth in society. And there remains an objective asymmetry in economic power between the generations, above and beyond the simple fact that older people have had more time to accumulate wealth. But this broad trend masks the reality that only certain Baby Boomers had access to the mechanisms of wealth accumulation. It is irresponsible to discuss trends in generational wealth without emphasizing their intersection with race.

RACE AND GEN ERAT I ON

It is illuminating to simply plot the number of Americans of each race at each age currently alive today, as in figure 2.6. The Baby Boom is today an almost entirely white phenomenon. For Hispanic and Asian Americans, it does not exist in current data. There are only the steady declines in population size with age that come from a combination of youthful immigration and mortality. U.S. attitudes toward race and policies on immigration explain why this is the case. For example, the parents or grandparents of some of these white Boomers might not have been “white” themselves. The rise in nativist sentiment following the immigrant waves of the late nineeteenth and early twentieth centuries raised the salience of many racial or ethnic categories. Immigrants from places like Ireland or Italy, or immigrants of Jewish ancestry, were not considered “white” and faced explicit discrimination. Over time, these groups were more or less assimilated into the dominant noncategory of whiteness, and their children and grandchildren appear in our data set as simply “white.” At the same time, government policies implemented in the early 1920s sharply restricted immigration based on country of origin, preventing an

TH E BIRTH O F TH E BO O M33

White 59 yrs 3.5

3.0

Population

2.5

2.0 Gen Z and younger (ages 0−22)

Millennials (ages 23−38)

Generation X (ages 39−54)

Boomer (ages 55−73)

Silent (ages 74−90)

1.5 Hispanic 12 yrs 1.0 Black 28 yrs 0.5

Asian 29 yrs Multiracial 4 yrs AIAN 28 yrs

0.0

NHPI 29 yrs 0

5

10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 Age

FIGURE 2.6  Distribution

of age and race: The Baby Boom is today an almost entirely

white phenomenon. Source: Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common -age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/. Data from U.S. Census Bureau.

analogous influx of people from Asia or Latin America. The effect of these restrictions played out over the next fifty years; although the historical percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born has stayed just a bit above 10 percent, the postwar era of the Boomers’ youth is a striking outlier. Figure 2.7 displays this long-term trend, which reached a low point in 1970, when just 4.7 percent of Americans were foreign-born. The upswing after 1970 was only made possible when these old policies were reversed (and only partially) with the Immigration and Nationality Act

Foreign-born U.S. population (%)

34TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

20

15

10

5

0 1800

FIGURE 2.7  The

1850

1900

1950

2000

decline and subsequent recovery in the percentage of foreign-born

Americans. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850–2000” and Pew Research Tabulations of 2010 and 2013, American Community Surveys (IPUMS).

of 1965. Hispanics’ and Asians’ structural exclusion from this country explains why the age pyramids show no evidence of a Baby Boom for these groups. Although these data are an important reminder of our nation’s sordid past with respect to racist immigration policies, figure 2.7 also helps us understand the perspective of native-born Boomers. Through no fault of their own, they were unlikely to have encountered immigrants in their childhood, and they have seen the percentage of foreign-born Americans triple in their lifetimes. This demographic reality is important to consider when discussing anti-immigration positions held by elderly Boomers today. Returning to figure 2.6, a tiny blip in the age distribution among Black Americans shows there are slightly more fifty-five-year-olds than fortyyear-olds. There was not a similarly large Black Baby Boom—vivid evidence of the racial inequality in the social and economic growth that defined the postwar era. Systemic racism prevented Black Boomers from accessing each of the key developments that produced the current glut of white Boomers. Many of their parents were denied access to the high-paying blue-collar jobs that expanded the middle class. The GI Bill, which greatly democratized access to a college education and homeownership among the parents of white Boomers, increased the gap in educational attainment between

THE BIRTH OF THE BOOM35

whites and Blacks, at least in the South.3 As a result, the increase in fertility among the parents of Black Boomers was lower than for white Boomers. On the other end of the life cycle, the “democratization of old age” is also a primarily white phenomenon. The average life expectancy for Black Boomers born in 1960 was less than sixty-four years, six years less than the expected seventy-year life span of white Boomers born in the same year.4 The access to resources that produced the white Baby Boom and the increased longevity of white Boomers has sustained their numbers. Black Boomers were systematically excluded from each of these increases, resulting in the tragically small bump in the age distribution of Black Americans in figure 2.6. Popular stereotypes about Boomer power being concentrated in “old white people” are to a large extent true. And I want to emphasize that it did not have to be this way. The strength of the Boomer-whiteness correlation is an important confounder for many analyses of contemporary American life. Raw breakdowns of the impact of either race or age on a number of life-cycle-related phenomena—from racial disparities in wealth accumulation, to age gaps in support for social policies, to the following section’s discussion of voter turnout—are always combinations of these two variables of central importance to U.S. politics. In the 2020s, age and race are always correlated. Although Millennials and Gen Z are frequently referred to as the most racially diverse generations in U.S. history, the converse is also true: today’s Boomers are perhaps the least.

R With few exceptions, then, all the trends that created today’s Boomers go back decades. Historically, other generations have faded from relevance as they reach retirement age. The factors that empower a given group fall away in time. In the past, older generations have seen their numbers dwindle, their economic power wane, and their cultural relevance decline. But the Boomers are unique on each of these dimensions. Their numbers have declined less, their economic power has only grown, and their cultural relevance—or their insistence on it—persists. Like the frog in the slowly warming pot, American politics has grown accustomed to the concentration of power the Baby Boomers hold. The rest of this book explores the consequences.

3 BOOMER BALLAST IN AMERICAN POLITICS

T

he 2020 presidential election was a gerontocratic spectacle. The combined age of the two major party candidates—Donald Trump at seventy-four and Joe Biden at seventy-seven—was 151 years old. This shatters the previous record of 138 years old, which was set all the way back in 2016 by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. These are not anomalies; they are trends. In 2017, the oldest House of Representatives in history was inaugurated. The oldest Senate in history is currently in office, surpassing the record set by the previous Senate in office between 2018 and 2020. The 2019 Supreme Court’s mean age of seventy was eclipsed for only a few years in the 235-year history of the institution. These stark statistics are not mere curiosities; they are crucial inputs to the function of the United States government, still (debatably) the most powerful entity in the world. Within the political realm, there are two primary pathways by which the raw demographic and economic force of the Boomer generation operate: democratic demand and political institutions. In a democracy, the government is supposed to represent the will of the people. Given that there are so many Baby Boomers, their strong representation makes sense. But several electoral factors inflate this basic relationship. First, voter turnout is highly unequal throughout the life cycle, with older people voting at higher rates. Second, each subsequent generation votes at lower rates than older generations, and there were

B OO M E R BALLAST IN AM ERICAN POLI TI CS37

specific policies and reforms—even a constitutional amendment—that gave Boomers a leg up in voter turnout. Third, the voters are not the only source of democratic demand: political activists and, increasingly, political donors are also major drivers of political action. The Boomers’ advantage in postretirement free time and accumulated wealth gives them outsized power through these channels. Our political institutions include electoral institutions like the six-year Senate term, gerrymandering of House districts, and the Electoral College (all of which are part of the branches of the federal government discussed in the next chapter), but the universal institution that sets us apart from the vast majority of democracies in the world today is what political scientists call “single-member district plurality” voting. In contrast to the proportional representation that predominates in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa (in other words, the entire world), the electoral system of the United States uses winner-take-all voting. That is, a Senate election in which one person wins 50.6 percent of the vote produces the same outcome as one in which one person wins 70 percent. Political scientists have identified many effects of our plurality voting system—overall, in my estimation, it’s bad—but the most relevant effect is that these systems can only have a few viable parties. Usually two. This makes it impossible for there to be a distinctly youthful party, as are common in the Green parties of Europe. The demographic, economic, cultural, and democratic advantages are calcified at the point of maximum Boomer ballast: leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties.

VOTER TURNOU T

As of 2016, there were seventy-four million Boomers and only seventyone million Millennials. By 2020, due to a higher death rate among the elderly and youthful immigration, those numbers were essentially reversed.1 If sheer demographics were everything, this would mean that Boomer electoral power had already peaked. The population dynamics suggest that this peak was long ago: as a percentage of the voting age population, Boomers peaked in the early 1980s and have been in decline ever since. (An oft-repeated talking point among the Democratic Party is

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“Demographics are destiny”; if Millennials behave themselves and wait long enough, the party will be forced to listen to them.) The naive timescale thus suggests that the twilight of the Boomers is coming soon—certainly by 2024. But the dynamics of the 2020 election, which saw the highest-ever combined age of the two major presidential candidates and an increase in the mean age in the House, suggests that this timescale is unrealistic. Part of the reason is voter turnout. In terms of sheer votes cast, Boomers are still the dominant generational bloc. Older people have voted at higher rates than younger people for decades, a phenomenon observed in most advanced democracies. In the United States, this trend is especially pronounced in midterm elections. Knowing that, we can make some predictions. For instance, people over sixty are projected to comprise 40 percent of the 2030 midterm voters, compared to 32 percent in 2002.2 Voter turnout begins to decline at some point in life, however. Figure 3.1 plots the average turnout percentage for people at each age over the past four presidential and midterm elections from 2002 to 2016. Be careful, though: this chart does not differentiate between age and cohort effects and tells us nothing about whether the Boomers are distinctive. The first thing to notice is the well-documented bump for presidential elections. Fewer than 20 percent of eighteen-year-olds voted in midterms, but almost half of them voted in presidential elections. The size of this gap generally declines among older people, meaning they are three times as likely as the youngest people to vote in midterm elections and almost twice as likely to vote in presidential elections. There is also strong evidence of a decline in turnout among the oldest of the old. The final data point includes everyone eighty-one or older, which is why the drop between eighty and eighty-one is so exaggerated. But even the penultimate data point, the eighty-year-olds, sees a noticeable decline. Contemporary medical and social practices have made it possible for voter participation to hold steady at their highest levels throughout peoples’ sixties and seventies, but there are limits. According to the political scientist Phillip Converse, “Non-voting among the young seems more important than non-voting among the very old for the practical reason that it seems more remediable.”3 There is, of course, a generational component to the turnout story. Although the slope of the age-turnout graph in the United States has been

BOOMER BALLAST IN AMERICAN POLITICS39

Midterm elections

100

Presidential elections

Turnout (%)

80

60

40

20

0 20

40

60

80

Age FIGURE 3.1  Voter

turnout by age, 2002–2016: Turnout is consistently higher among older voters, with an especially pronounced difference in midterm elections. The final point combines everyone 81 years and older.

Source: Adapted from Charles Franklin, “Age and Voter Turnout,” Charles Franklin (blog), https:// medium.com/@PollsAndVotes/age-and-voter-turnout-52962b0884ef. Data from the Current Population Survey.

consistent, there is a downward intercept shift for each new generation. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey that goes back to 1978, figure 3.2 plots the voter turnout for each generation in a series of age brackets. For example, the third column indicates that a generation is in the “thirty to thirty-four” age range, and each data point plots voter turnout for a different generation. Holding age fixed in this way, we can see the steady decrease in turnout for each consecutive generation. This is far from inevitable, however, and it is possible that younger generations will begin to increase their voter turnout. The 2018 midterm

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70

Voter turnout (%)

60 50

Silent Boomer Gen X Millennials

40 30 20 10 0 18–24

25–29

30–34

35–39

40–44

45–49

Age FIGURE 3.2  Downward shift in voter turnout: Turnout increases with age, but it is also higher among older generations, holding age constant: 30- to 34-year-old Millennials voted at only a slightly higher rate than 18- to 24-year-old Boomers did.

Source: Adapted from Charles Franklin, “Age and Voter Turnout,” Charles Franklin (blog), https:// medium.com/@PollsAndVotes/age-and-voter-turnout-52962b0884ef. Data from the Current Population Survey.

election saw a massive spike in turnout among people under thirty, although the absolute age-turnout gap decreased only slightly.4 The two youngest female members of Congress in history were also elected in 2018. This increase could have lasting implications; one of the most robust findings in the literature on why people vote is simply that they voted in the past. Despite all of the sophisticated theories of voter behavior, the most parsimonious explanation is that voting is a habit.5 That is not to say that we know nothing about the causes of voter turnout. There are several competing explanations for low youth turnout, but the political scientists John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus make the case that the problem is driven by a lack of what they call “noncognitive skills.” Young people who report wanting to vote are much more likely to cast a ballot if they also possess the grit and discipline to follow through on their desire. More concretely, individual changes in state law that increase barriers to voting cause a larger decline in voting among the young than the old.6

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Noncognitive skills explain part of the intergenerational decline in turnout. Another part of the story is the difficulty of the tasks involved in registering to vote and then casting a ballot. At first blush, this seems like a poor explanation for trends over time because the mechanics of voting have not changed for decades. However, this institutional stability is taking place alongside a serious change in the informational reality of the young. The preferred institutions of the Boomers have been locked in place. Boomers do not abide any changes. But for the young, whose experience navigating bureaucracy is increasingly mediated through digital technology, the analog processes of filling out a voter registration form and understanding districts based on the postal service may seem antiquated or foreign. One of the most significant national reforms to these mechanics, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, took for granted that driving a car is central to the lives of Americans. The law allowed them to register to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But even this so-called “Motor Voter Act” has a generational component. Eighty percent of eighteenyear-olds had their driver’s license in 1983 (the earliest year with data) compared to only 60 percent in 2011, a figure that held constant throughout the 2010s.7 In contrast, the rate of holding a driver’s license has held steady for people in their forties and fifties and increased for people in their sixties and seventies. A more generationally relevant update might be a “Website [pronounced web-uh-site] Plebiscite Act.” The institutional reform that most kick-started voter turnout among young adults was making voting legal in the first place. The movement to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen only gained traction in the 1960s, so all the beneficiaries were Boomers. The debates at the time centered around the unfairness of drafting people to fight in Vietnam who were too young to exercise any say in the matter. In 1970, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to include a clause that anyone eighteen years or older could vote in state and federal elections. But the Supreme Court ruled that Congress did not have a say in the voting age of state elections—only a constitutional amendment could mandate a national voting age. Congress passed the 26th Amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age in the United States to eighteen. Its passage was the fastest in history.

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Within almost exactly one hundred days, every state had ratified it, which had three noticeable effects on the development of Boomer electoral power. First, most obviously, it instantly increased their share of the electorate, giving them a plurality of the voting age population overnight and making them a powerful bloc. Second, it allowed a segment of the Boomers to begin the habitforming process of voting earlier than previous generations had. While it does not distinguish Boomers from younger generations, it does cut against whatever other trends are responsible for the generational declines in voter turnout depicted in figure 3.2. Third, the fact that such a momentous and age-specific change to the practice of American democracy took place during the youth consciousness and rebelling of the 1960s plausibly contributed to how the Boomers see themselves as a coherent generational unit. This part of the emergence of Boomer “cohort consciousness” will be discussed in a later chapter.

POL ITICA L DONATI ON S

In 2018, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, less than half of 1 percent of adults were responsible for 71 percent of all individual political contributions.8 For reference, the 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans who motivated the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement controlled “only” about 35 percent of the country’s wealth. Despite our massive wealth inequality, campaign donation inequality is four times as bad. Political donors have more influence over the conduct of campaigns, particularly primary campaigns, than any other group, and their views are far from representative of the citizenry as a whole.9 Shockingly, for example, they tend to be motivated by lowering taxes on the wealthy. Political donors also have a strong preference for candidates who are like them, especially those who are like them in race and gender. In 2020, the political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Alexander Sahn used the distribution of first names among political donors to estimate their race and gender, to see how these variables predicted which candidates they donated to.10 The troubling descriptive result is that racial minorities are underrepresented among political donors compared to their share of the

B O O M ER BALLAST IN AM ERICAN POLI TI CS43

population and even to their share of elected officials. Part of the explanation is there are too few coethnic political candidates: more African Americans make donations when a Black candidate is on the ballot. We can’t run the same analysis to calculate the age of all political donors, but we do know that they tend to be much wealthier than the average American. Given the generational wealth disparity, this likely is another dimension in which Boomers punch above their weight in the political process. The reports put out by the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets give us a peek into the age distribution of the biggest donors. Their most recent report, on the 2014 election, was able to find the age of 491 of the top 500 donors. And it turns out that the Boomers were not, in fact, running the elite campaign finance show: over half of these megadonors were members of the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation. What’s even more shocking is that there were seven times as many megadonors over eighty-five as under thirty-five, but at that time there were close to fifteen times as many voters under thirty-five as over eighty-five. Although not as comprehensive as the 2014 report, I looked up the age of the top twenty-five individual donors in the 2020 election cycle. The average age of these individuals was seventy-two years old. The youngest, at age fifty-two, was Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn. There was a tie for the oldest, eighty-nine, between the liberal billionaire George Soros and the conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s appearance on the list is karmic, as he has played an even larger role in the development of politically relevant institutions with big generational implications. As the mastermind behind Fox News and the News Corp. empire, he has shaped the contemporary Baby Boomer media landscape more than perhaps any other person. But maybe he was pushing on an open door; after all, people get more conservative as they get older, right?

AGIN G A N D IDEOLOGY

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; but if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain,” or so the old

4 4BO O M E R BALLAST IN AM ERICA N POLI TI CS

saying goes. The quote has been falsely attributed to many historical figures, but the earliest known formulation appears in Thomas Jefferson’s memoirs, quoting John Adams: “A boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty.” (The age pyramid at the time was significantly more bottom-heavy.) Regardless of where it came from, the staying power of the saying suggests some baseline plausibility: the young are more optimistic, more idealistic, and more open. However, empirical research has found that the saying is not as accurate as it intuitively seems. The first major application of cohort analysis in political science was in 1969, when Neal Cutler used it to debunk the age/conservativism hypothesis.11 But more recently, advanced statistical techniques have found a nugget of truth in the folk wisdom. A 2014 analysis by British researchers finds support for cohort or “generational” effects causing older Britons to be more likely to vote conservative, but they also find support for a direct effect of aging on voting Conservative.12 The researchers found evidence for an effect of age on potential mechanisms that could determine politically relevant attitudes: “Aging effects can derive from processes inherently related to getting older, such as psychological changes relating to values and preferences.” There is evidence from psychology that aging tends to produce more cognitive inflexibility, close-mindedness, and resistance to change—what we might call “small-c conservatism.” These traits are all psychological attributes or cognitive styles that have been theorized to generate a preference for right-wing policies.13 More recently, a team of American political scientists constructed a decades-long panel data set with standard longitudinal surveys.14 Their results help us understand the puzzle of ideology and aging. First, ideology (measured as a series of social and economic issue positions) is remarkably stable across a person’s lifetime: the conservative tend to stay conservative, and the liberal tend to stay liberal. Party self-identification is also extremely stable: Republicans stay Republicans and Democrats stay Democrats. However, ideological self-placement does seem to move, meaning whether a person consistently describes himself or herself as conservative or liberal over time. And for the people who changed their self-description, they were more than twice as likely to move from liberal to conservative than the other way around.

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One limitation of this style of analysis is that it must compare the politics of different decades on the same left-right scale; this is methodologically challenging, as the meanings afforded to these labels are not themselves stable.15 In a more holistic sense, people in changing societies necessarily become more attached to the past and more distant from the present as they get older. Young people know nothing but the recent past, while older people have watched issues, politicians, and even nations come and go. There is no way to fully capture this experience with a survey question. Broadly, though, ideological demand by aging Boomers is unlikely to be a major factor in electoral politics. They do have specific preferences over policies, as I will discuss later, but these are driven more by their position in the life cycle than by the effect of being old per se.

THE TWO PARTIES

Our electoral institutions are weird. Only four other countries in the world (France, Canada, the UK, and India) use single-member district plurality voting at the federal level, and we are famously unique in the use of the Electoral College, which is perhaps telling. Many democracies were born in the twentieth century, with a clean slate to design their ideal electoral system and the United States as the world’s most prominent democracy. Many adopted our principle of checks and balances, and some opted for our presidential system over the European-style prime minister. But none embraced our electoral system wholesale. Indeed, some American political scientists think that switching to proportional representation would be the single best nonpartisan reform toward a healthier democracy. I agree, and I think that Boomer ballast provides an additional reason why. The primary effect of our single-member district plurality system is to all but ensure the existence of exactly two viable parties. This is called Duverger’s law, and it is one of the most empirically robust results in the political science literature.16 The intuition behind this relationship is that this electoral system advantages incumbent parties by making it very difficult for new parties to either form or grow larger. Usually, new parties require multiple

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election cycles to gain momentum: to build networks of party activists, quality candidates, and donors. And voters tend to want to avoid “wasting their vote” on upstart parties with no actual chance at power.17 Under proportional representation, an upstart party can win a small minority of overall votes cast but still gain a few seats in Parliament, a key part of the positive feedback loop of party development. Under our system, however, an upstart party could theoretically get 30 percent of the aggregate national vote and end up without any representatives in Congress. The exception has to do with the geographic distribution of party support. If an upstart party has a strong geographic base, they stand a chance of winning a few districts by concentrating their efforts. Canada’s Bloc Québécois is a prime example. Although the country has a singlemember district plurality system, the distinctive politics of the FrenchCanadians in the province of Quebec have enabled this “third party” to be a force at the federal level for decades. This geographic exception is almost completely irrelevant to the politics of generational conflict, of course, as younger people are spread throughout the country. Perhaps Millennial parties in cities with pockets of young people could get off the ground, but there is no base large enough to make noise at the federal level. Compounding this structural disadvantage to third parties is the United States’ unusually restrictive ballot access laws. Each state establishes its own requirements for parties to get their candidates on the ballot, and many of them are extremely onerous. In some cases, third parties have to collect 3 or even 5 percent as many signatures as there were votes cast in previous statewide elections to get on the ballot—and they have to do this every election if they fail to receive a sufficient percentage of the vote. In practice, in places like my home state of North Carolina, this works out to a tax of about a quarter million dollars per election cycle on the aspirant Libertarian and Green parties, in terms of the time spent pounding sidewalks with their clipboards. In my experience, the pitch they make is pretty compelling, even if they sometimes lay it on a little thick: “Do you think the people should be able to cast their vote for who they think is the best candidate, or do you think the two state-sponsored parties should be able to force you to choose the lesser of two evils?” All told, this restrictive ballot access exacerbates Duverger’s law and further disrupts the potential growth cycle of third parties.

B OO M ER BALLAST IN AM ERICAN POLI TI CS47

Almost none of the European democracies have the same electoral system, so most of them enjoy a broad constellation of political parties. This means many of them also have seen the emergence of youthful parties that can organize in parallel to established parties, potentially replacing them if the latter become too sclerotic and out of touch. The advent of social media over the past decade has made this process even easier, and the recent prime ministers of several major democracies—including Giuseppe Conte of Italy and Emmanuel Macron of France—are the heads of parties that came into being immediately before taking power. A brief look at the members of the European Parliament reveals that it is far less gerontocratic than our system. The average parliamentarian is a sprightly fifty years old (trending downward, from the previous session’s average of fifty-four), the same age as some of the youngest House of Representatives cohorts in the past century. As shown in the following chapter, both the Democrats and Republicans are dominated by the old to a historically unique degree. Duverger’s law says that third parties are unlikely under present conditions, and while the two parties disagree about plenty of things, they are composed of older people and are more likely to address the needs of their elderly constituents. There is no escape valve for young political ambitions.18 They are stuck between the rock of our electoral institutions and the hard place of Boomer ballast. A plausible consequence of this phenomenon is that the young opt out of electoral politics entirely, and voter turnout rates are lower than for any previous generation. This cannot last forever, but Millennials and Gen Z who expect an incipient “youth wave” are going to be disappointed. All the evidence suggests that Boomer ballast in the two-party system will remain for at least another decade and that the aftereffects will be felt even after that. Younger generations do not identify with either party. Despite a sharp cross-sectional relationship between age and party identification (with people generally most likely to identify as Independent in their twenties), Millennials have become more likely to identify as Independent as they age. Survey data indicate that between 2004 and 2017, the percentage of Millennials identifying as Independent has increased from 34 to 44 percent. Over that same period, Boomers became less likely to identify as Independent and more likely to join one of the two parties.19

4 DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN POLITICS

T

he first member of Congress born in the 1990s was elected in 2020. At twenty-five years old, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from western North Carolina, centered his campaign on his youth, frequently making overtures to his own new generation of conservatives who would not be afraid to clash with established members of the Republican Party. To celebrate his victory—which was not, to be clear, much of an upset, as the seat had been held by a senior Republican and the district was easily carried by Trump—he tweeted, “Cry more, lib.” Overall, however, the 2020 election did not see any significant youth wave in Congress; the total number of Millennials in the House of Representatives went up by only four. This was a significant decrease in the progress from the 2018 midterms, in which the number of Millennials in Congress grew from five to twenty-seven. Although incumbency is always the biggest factor, there were several instances of incumbent members of Congress being unseated by older challengers. This was not the result of a broad-based repudiation of young politicians by the electorate but more a pipeline problem, as relatively few young politicians from major parties ran for office. Much of the blame for this dearth of young candidates belongs to our electoral institutions. Recall that Duverger’s law ensures that a third party is unlikely to be viable under the current electoral rules. Boomer ballast means that both parties are run by members of this powerful generation,

D EM O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN P OLI TI CS49

and our electoral institutions make it impossible for Millennials to start a competing party that is genuinely Millennial—one composed primarily of Millennial politicians that emphasizes Millennial issues and uses a Millennial style of campaign communication. Isn’t this just more Millennial whining, though? Perhaps the reason that we observe this Boomer ballast in the generational makeup of federal politicians is because they are excellent politicians who keep getting reelected. Sure, there are more Millennial voters now, but why not assume that their interests are being heard and represented by the Boomer incumbents? Political science research on descriptive representation suggests that this line of thinking is implausible.

DESCRIPTIVE REPRESEN TAT I ON

One conception of representative government emphasizes representative representatives: it is important to have elected officials from a variety of locales so they can act as a conduit for individuals spread throughout the state to the central government. The Founding Fathers were especially concerned about the disparity in the interests of urban and rural constituencies, and between free and slave states, and they attempted to balance the composition of Congress to reflect this. At the time, those were the cleavages that the elite—all white landowning males—thought were important. They were not particularly interested in representing anyone who didn’t fit that bill, but within this group, they worried about maintaining a power balance between farmers and merchants. Having enough of each in Congress would ensure that both sides had their interests represented in legislation. Today, society has advanced considerably, and we now (claim to) believe that everyone deserves to be represented in government, regardless of their race, gender, or real estate holdings. As Congress has become more professionalized and the nation more economically diverse, we have moved away from the idea that members of Congress should be representative of the workforce. A Michigan Congressperson whose district is in Detroit can represent the interests of automakers and workers without having worked on a factory floor.

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The situation is very different when it comes to race and gender. The moral argument is clear. These categories are central to peoples’ lives, and they should be unrelated to interest and capacity to serve as politicians. “Descriptive representation” has come to mean the presence of politicians who share these outward characteristics with voters. Other than straightforward group pride, there are two reasons why voters of a certain demographic might prefer to be represented by someone from their own group. The first is ideological: the politician and the voter are in the same boat, and so they want the same thing. Choosing between two otherwise similar politicians, a woman might prefer to vote for the female candidate because she thinks that this politician will be more likely to push for paid maternity leave.1 The other is informational. There are certain things about, say, being an African American that no white politician, no matter how well-intentioned, can understand. Evidence of the ideological importance of generational descriptive representation would be that there is some policy dimension that is correlated with age but not fully captured by the existing party cleavage. For example, younger people are much more concerned about climate change than are older people. Democrats emphasize climate change more than Republicans do, but the young-old gap is larger than the Democrat-Republican gap. If Millennial Republicans were to replace Baby Boomer Republicans in the Senate, the median Republican senator would move closer to the desired position of Millennial Republican voters on these issues. Informational reasons are not entirely distinct, but they emphasize the limits of what politicians can know about the wishes of their constituents. For example, in 2018 the political scientists David Broockman and Chris Skovron found that members of Congress consistently overestimate the conservatism of the issue positions of voters in their districts.2 Other forms of descriptive representation operate in a similar way. For instance, increasing the number of women in a legislature means women’s issues are more present in the consideration of new legislation because the legislators have more knowledge about those issues. Descriptive representation is a useful proxy for this kind of firsthand knowledge of related issues and is thus a pathway by which the ideological argument operates.3 Age-based descriptive representation solves an additional kind of informational problem, the internet revolution that intersects with Boomer ballast in so many ways. The complexity and the rate of change of modern

D EM O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN P OLI TI CS51

communication technology require constantly updated expertise—in an area where older people are systematically disadvantaged. Even if they were aware of the importance of the internet and social media, and even if they were perfectly in tune with their constituents’ general preferences, the challenge facing older legislators is figuring out the correct policies to satisfy those preferences. Finally, descriptive representation is part of what scholars call a virtuous cycle. Initial increases in minority representation tend to affect the political process and yield even higher minority representation. The existence of female “role models,” for example, has been shown to encourage more young women to express interest in politics and for more female candidates to run for office.4 One key question is whether the research about descriptive representation in the context of race and gender applies to the issue of generational groups. After all, politicians always seem to be drawn from the same segment of society: established adults who have demonstrated their capacity in some professional field or who have worked their way up the ladder of political institutions. Evidence from other areas of political life suggests that the current situation is unique. Boomer ballast at the top of the political parties has restricted the upward mobility of aspiring members of Congress from younger generations. As I will demonstrate later in the book, generational membership has also become more important to both the identity of a larger group of people and their preferences over policy. There is already evidence that the logic of descriptive representation applies to the elderly. We see it in the age of members of Congress and the age distribution of the districts they represent.5 This research demonstrates that older lawmakers tend to introduce bills on lower-salience “senior” topics even without elderly overrepresentation, while lawmakers in districts with a top-heavy age distribution tend to introduce bills on higher-salience “senior” topics, independent of their own age. That is, all politicians know that seniors are worried about Social Security, and if their district has a lot of seniors, they’re more likely to push for laws related to protecting Social Security. However, only older politicians are responsive to less obvious but still important senior issues like free enrollment at the state university system. The primary conclusion here is that older-age-based descriptive representation mostly acts through the

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informational channel—the reason that age-based descriptive representation matters is that people of different ages have different information about issues relevant to the elderly. The problem of historically low Millennial and Gen Z voter turnout is thus partially a result of the institutions that selects candidates for office. There simply aren’t enough young people running for office, so young voters feel alienated from the entire process. The wave of attention attending the rise to prominence of newly minted Millennial members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cawthorn lends credence to this idea; if there were an AOC running in more districts, there might well be more Millennials running for office in the future. Her status as a Millennial woman of color is not incidental; recall that Millennials are far more diverse than previous generations. Still, generational descriptive representation isn’t everything. The highest-profile political campaign by a Millennial resulted in widespread repudiation by younger voters. In the 2020 Democratic primary, the gay Millennial mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, wooed the votes of Boomers successfully and aggressively—he even proposed a “Gray New Deal”6—but was criticized by Millennial political activists. Instead, the heavy favorite of every demographic crosstab of voters under thirty was the Silent Generation senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. One possible explanation for this challenge to the importance of cogenerational support comes from the literature on candidate entry—the technical term for what type of people decide to run for office. The political scientist Danielle Thomsen examined this question in a number of ways, including both ideology and gender, and proposed two mechanisms for why the first Millennial to have a serious shot at a major-party presidential nomination is also the only person to ever utter the phrase “Gray New Deal.” Thomsen finds that state legislators who are better aligned with the ideology of their national party (who have better “party fit”) are more likely to run for Congress. By this logic, in the case of the Democratic primary, a Millennial who better represented the more left-leaning Millennial Democrats might choose not to run at all.7 The other argument, from her work on gender and politics, begins even earlier in the process of candidate entry. It is well established that the main reason there aren’t many women in Congress is that women are less likely to run; in other words, when women run, they win at the same rate that men do. But the issue is not that there are plenty of women who could plausibly win Congressional

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN POLITICS53

seats if they would only run. Rather, the issue is earlier in the pipeline— there are fewer women advancing up the ranks of local politics into positions from which they could plausibly run and win a Congressional seat.8 This latter pathway is reinforced in the case of Millennials by the way that age operates: for someone to be in a position to credibly run in the Democratic primary by the time they are thirty-eight, they have likely been planning to do so since a very young age. Given Mayor Pete’s transparent ambition, the Millennial pipeline is likely to have produced someone like him as the first member of that generation to run for president. These benefits for age diversity among politicians are far from mutually exclusive; in fact, they’re mutually reinforcing. Boomer ballast is at its most extreme for federal politicians. But just how bad is it? Many popular analyses cite isolated statistics about the age of elected officials, but this book aims to provide a more comprehensive picture of demographic trends in the federal government over the past several decades. How does the current slate of officeholders compare with the rest of modern American history? Longitudinal data is necessary to illustrate the overrepresentation of a specific generation in our national politics. There are only a fixed number of terms served in the House of Representatives—435 every two years, to be exact—and people born between 1940 and 1955 have already served more than their “fair share.” Later generations will thus mechanically be unable to serve as many terms in Congress. The House of Representatives is exactly the institution in which we should expect to see the first generational replacement. It is the most responsive of the federal elected institutions, in the way that political scientists use the term: if the desires of the voters change, responsive institutions are more likely to change. Although a small, energized bloc of young people have been pushing for new blood in the Senate and the presidency, this group has thus far lacked the organization and the numbers to break into these less responsive offices.

HOUSE OF REPRESEN TAT I V ES

In addition to being the most responsive component of the federal government, the House also has the lowest age requirement, twenty-five, so this is the institution that we should expect to include younger politicians.

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Consider figure 4.1, a chart of the birth years of all members of the House, weighted by the number of sessions of Congress they served. Each session lasts two years, so given the lengthy tenure of most members, each of them is counted multiple times. Take Paul Ryan as an example. He took office in January 1999 and served ten terms before retiring in 2019. He was born in 1970, so he contributes ten sessions to the total count of members of the House born in the 1970–1974 year bin. (I only counted full terms here and did not include members who began a term in any month other than January, so this excludes the spouses of deceased members of Congress or special elections.) Figure 4.1 shows that time in the House of Representatives is not evenly distributed across generational cohorts.9 The dotted line is a naive (non-population-adjusted) estimate of the number of terms each fiveyear cohort would serve if terms were distributed equally across cohorts. For most of the time from 1933 to 2019, the actual figures stay close to this line. Other than a bump for people born from 1925–1929, the fifty years

Sessions of Congress served

1500

1000

500

0 1850

1900

1950

2000

Birth year FIGURE 4.1  People

born between 1935 and 1955 have already served more than their historical “fair share” of sessions in the House of Representatives.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates.

D E M O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN P OLI TI CS55

from 1890 to 1939 saw a generationally diverse House (although it was nondiverse in pretty much every other way). The next fifteen years, however, saw a massive jump in membership. The modal five-year bin is 1940–1944, before the Baby Boomer generation technically begins. The 2019 House had twenty-five members born in that age range, fifty-two born between 1946 and 1950, and sixty-nine born between 1951 and 1955. Again, we find evidence that the 1940–1954 cohort had the most success per capita, but the trends suggest that the dominance of the Boomer as nominally defined will continue to grow between 2020 and 2030. Most importantly, the presence of these generational winners implies that there are generational losers. Terms in the House of Representatives are a fixed quantity (there are 435 every two years), so the competition is zero-sum. Younger generations will necessarily serve fewer than their expected number of terms—far fewer, in fact, because of the historically unprecedented control of the House by a narrow generational cohort. Let’s look at the same data in a different way. Figure 4.2 plots the percentage of the House of Representatives controlled by each generation

Greatest Silent Boomer Gen X Millennial

Share of House of Representatives (%)

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0 40

FIGURE 4.2  Generational

60 Median age

80

control of the House.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

100

5 6 D EM O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN POLI TI CS

throughout that generation’s life cycle. This is the same display as the wealth breakdown by generation in chapter 2, but the data go back much farther, allowing for a more explicit comparison of how powerful each generation was when young, middle-aged, and old. The Greatest Generation has the most normal curve, both in the statistical sense of a normal distribution and the curve that best reflects the long-term historical trend. The members started entering the House at around thirty; their share grew steadily until their midfifties, and then it steadily declined. The Silent Generation—and especially the blessed microgeneration born during World War II—got off to a much quicker start, but they peaked at roughly the same age and declined only slightly less quickly. In contrast, the Boomers have been punching above their weight throughout their entire life cycle. They started entering Congress much more quickly than other generations, had the highest and latest peak (when the median Boomer was sixty, the generation controlled 63 percent of the House), and are sticking around much longer than previous generations. As a result, the showing by Gen X and Millennials has been much weaker. The median Gen Xer is forty-nine, and that generation controls 34 percent of the House, compared to 57 percent of the House for Boomers at the same age. And thus far, the story is basically the same for Millennials. How much of this generational disparity is driven simply by demography? Are there so many Boomer politicians just because there are so many Boomers? From the perspective of the impact of Boomers on governance, this doesn’t really matter, but reframing the question this way provides some of the best analytical leverage to disentangle the different structural factors causing Boomer ballast. Figure 4.3 plots the same data as above, normalizing each generation’s share of the House by the number of babies born in that generation. This measure is useful but imperfect; generations are constantly shrinking (from mortality) and growing (from immigration). If anything, though, it likely underestimates older generations and overestimates younger ones. This weighting is further evidence that the Silent Generation is in fact the most successful per capita. The dominance of the Boomers in figure 4.2 is driven primarily by their numerical advantages over previous

D E M O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN P OLI TI CS57

Share of House of Representatives (%)

Silent Boomer GenX Millennial 0.010

0.005

0.000 40

60 Median age

80

100

FIGURE 4.3  Control of the House, weighted by generational size (normalized by number of babies born that generation).

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

generations. However, Millennials and Gen X are still lagging behind Boomers even taking numbers into account, suggesting that the other components of Boomer ballast also play a significant role in contemporary electoral politics. The final way to examine these data is by Congressional session. Figure 4.4 plots several age distribution metrics of House sessions between 1935 and 2021. The vertical line in each panel represents that metric (mean, median, and variance) calculated for the 2021 House. Panel A shows the mean age for each session. The year 2021 is near the top, but note that this actually represents a decrease from 2017, the peak mean age of the House. The contrast with panel B (which shows that 2021 saw the highest median age) reflects the fact that the biggest change in the age distribution from 2017 to 2019 was the inauguration of a wave of young members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

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4000

6000 5000

3000 Frequency

Frequency

7000

4000 3000 2000

2000 1000

1000 0

0 50 (a)

52

54 56 Mean age

58

50 (b)

52 54 Median age

56

58

5000

Frequency

4000 3000 2000 1000 0 (c)

90 100 110 120 130 140 150 Variance in age

FIGURE 4.4  Age distributions of sessions of the House of Representatives over time: The 2018 “Youth Wave” means that the mean age of members of Congress may have peaked, but the median is still the highest ever and the variance has exploded, creating the opportunity for intergenerational conflict in the chamber. The vertical lines represent the 2021 House.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

The extent of this youth wave can best be seen in panel C, which displays the variance in age in each session. Higher variance means that more of the ages of specific members of Congress in each session are farther away from the mean of all the ages in that session. Clearly, 2019 and 2021 are extreme outliers; the variance here is at least twenty higher than any previous session. Before that, the range of the distribution of variances had been only forty.

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN POLITICS59

Ocasio-Cortez has been the poster child for the contemporary importance of cohort in determining electoral and legislative strategy. Her grassroots campaign strategy—emphasizing personal contact in the physical world and through social media—allowed her to pull off the biggest upset of the 2018 midterm election primaries, unseating long-term Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley. She has a knack for social media, famously hosting livestreams on Instagram where she discusses policy and pop culture while cooking dinner in her apartment. This is the kind of discursive style that signifies to Millennial constituents that she speaks their language and will better represent their interests than an out-of-touch, technologically illiterate Baby Boomer.10 Her appeal rapidly spread beyond her home district, and she has become one of the most well-known American politicians on social media. Already in her brief tenure, however, she has clashed with older members of her own party. Along with three other female members of Congress, the Millennial Ilhan Omar and a pair of Gen Xers, Ocasio-Cortez voted against a bill to fund border security in July 2019, in defiance of the House Democratic leadership. Using her social media platform, she was also an outspoken critic of the bill for being too harsh on migrants. This prompted criticism from Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said, “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world.  .  .  . But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”11 Pelosi was not interested in ceding an inch of institutional power to the realm of new media influence. This dispute over political tactics reflects the growing social divide between the Baby Boomers in positions of power and the rising tide of Millennial politicians who disagree about both political ends and means. When Ocasio-Cortez moved to the capitol, she brought the crucial Millennial issue of unmanageable housing prices (especially in urban settings with the most job opportunities) to the media agenda. She tweeted that her salary as a member of Congress would not be paid for three months and that she’d either have to go into debt or sleep in her office, a challenge familiar to much of her audience. Although inextricably tied in with her class-based criticism of contemporary American politics and politicians,12 the message resonated especially well with a Millennial audience facing similar conditions.

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Despite the advancing age of the cohort, however, the 2020 House elections saw fewer new Millennials (fourteen) elected than did the 2018 elections (twenty-one). The election was notably dominated by the two oldest major-party presidential candidates in history, leaving less space for Millennial-centric campaigning. However, this progress in Millennial membership is far from sufficient to make up for the generation’s accumulated deficit of terms served in the House, and it is not exactly evidence for the arrival of the always-inevitable/never-arriving wave of youth power in national politics.

SENATE

The Senate was designed to be less responsive than the House—so much so that senators were initially selected by state legislatures. That changed with the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which meant that senators were directly elected just like House members. Ironically, the combination of this ostensibly democratic reform and the demographic trends of the twentieth century set the stage for a particularly old legislative body. The original system treated senators as agents of the state government. This gave more national influence to groups who were closer to the levers of state electoral power—local political machines, chambers of commerce, wealthy businessmen—and less power to average citizens. The late nineteenth-century Populists criticized this system, saying that senators should be more directly responsive to the wishes of the people. Political scientists have demonstrated both theoretically and empirically that the 17th Amendment had the intended effect of increasing senatorial responsiveness to the voters relative to the prior path through the state legislature.13 However, the Amendment also gave senators more leeway in pursuing their own ends. The politically inexpert and time-constrained voters have a lower capacity for oversight than the professional legislature. For some senators, this leeway can take the form of self-interest through ideological discretion, meaning they pursue their own agendas even if voters would prefer something else. Of course, the central goal of elected officials is generally considered to be reelection, and they used this new rule to pursue it vigorously.

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Empowering the people also meant empowering individual senators, making it more difficult to remove them from office. This tendency is compounded by the importance of the seniority system in the distribution of power among senators. The assignment to Senate committees is done by seniority, for example, so the longest-serving senators are given the choicest positions and thus wield more power, making them harder to unseat. The oldest federal elected official—by far—was the senator Strom Thurmond. He served twelve years as the most powerful member of the Senate, president pro tempore. He was still in office at age one hundred, a living record of the fact that people a century ago used to have names like “Strom.” Although not as old on average as the Supreme Court, demographic trends in figures 4.5 and 4.6 suggest that the Senate will continue to grow older before we see any reversal like the one in the 2019 House. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 replicate the analysis from figures 4.1 and 4.2. Here, as expected, the modal birth year bin in figure 4.5 is even earlier. The most common birth year range for a senator is between 1930 and 1935. Again, this is likely to change. There are four living senators born in that range,

Senate terms served

300

200

100

0 1860

1880

1900

1920 1940 Birth year

FIGURE 4.5  Senate

1960

1980

terms served, by birth year, from 1933 to 2017: People born between 1930 and 1950 have dominated the Senate for decades.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

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Share of Senate (%)

0.6

0.4

0.2

Greatest Silent Boomer Gen X Millennial

0.0 40

60

80

100

Median age FIGURE 4.6  Generational

control of the Senate.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

compared to eighteen born between 1946 and 1950 and twenty-two born between 1951 and 1955. The Senate is much smaller than the House, and the terms are six years instead of two, so it makes sense that there are larger deviations from the horizontal line denoting the expected number of terms. Even still, the twenty-five-year period from 1930 to 1954 is an anomaly. Each five-year bin in this range will end up being dramatically overrepresented, which means subsequent generations will not be able to serve nearly as many terms. The generational analysis in figure 4.6 shows trends that are broadly similar to the House in figure 4.3. The main difference is the massive advantage of the Silent Generation throughout most of their life cycle. At age 56, the median Silent member controlled 69 percent of the Senate. Nice! Later in the life cycle, however, the longevity advantage of the Boomers starts to kick in, and they are again sticking around longer than previous generations.

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The 2021 Senate is distinctive in another way, as figure 4.7 shows. As in figure 4.4, each panel displays the distribution of a metric over the forty-four sessions in the date range, and the vertical line represents that metric calculated for the 2021 Senate. Panels A and B plot the mean and median age, respectively, for each session, and show that the 2021 class’s median age of sixty-five is the oldest in history. Exactly half of the current Senate is at or above the federal retirement age. The variance is not unusually high, although the trend has been steadily increasing since the minimum age variance of the 1989 Senate.

800 1000 600 Frequency

Frequency

800 600 400

400 200

200 0

0 54

56

(a)

58 60 Mean age

62

64

54

56

(b)

58 60 62 Median age

64

1000

Frequency

800 600 400 200 0 80 (c)

90

100 110 120 Variance in age

FIGURE 4.7  Age

130

distributions of sessions of the Senate over time: Unlike the House, the 2020 election saw a steady increase in both the mean and median age of senators, making that session the oldest in history.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

66

6 4D EM O GRAP H IC TRE NDS IN POLI TI CS

SUPREME COURT

It is perhaps less of a surprise that the Supreme Court justices are older. The Court famously has a lifetime tenure, which has cast the politics of aging in a different light as the Court has become more politicized. Many liberals spent the Trump administration deeply invested in the health of the then-oldest justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (born in 1933). Her death a few months shy of the 2020 election had a significant impact on the longterm ideological composition of the Court, as President Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett (born in 1972) as her successor. This, then, is the branch where we might be least likely to find evidence of Boomer ballast. While figure 4.8 demonstrates that the overall distribution of birth years is spiky and idiosyncratic (there have been only 112 justices in the history of the United States), the modal birth year decade

140

Years in Supreme Court

120 100 80 60 40 21 0 1750

1800

1850

1900

1950

Birth year FIGURE 4.8  Years in the Supreme Court, by birth year, from 1789 to 2019: The Supreme Court is small and designed to be run by older people, so even Baby Boomers have served few years to date.

Source: @unitedstatesproject, https://github.com/unitedstates

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is actually the 1810s, with the 1930s a very close second. If Justice Steven Breyer lives four more years, then the 1930s will ascend to the top spot. While not the absolute maximum, the 2019 Court is near the top of the age distribution. The mean age of seventy has only been eclipsed in a handful of other years, and the median age of sixty-nine is also above the ninetieth percentile.

PRESIDENCY

The most visible branch of the federal government is the presidency, which has also seen the most explicit conversations about the age of officeholders. If you are somehow reading this book but are unaware of what happened in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, here’s what happened: the two oldest presidential candidates in history faced off, and the older one won. Even still, the Republicans repeatedly attacked Joe Biden’s age, painting him as out of touch and mentally unfit for office. And it wasn’t just the nominees who were old. Among a massive Democratic primary field that began as the most diverse in history, the final two candidates for the nomination (including Bernie Sanders) were both white men in their late seventies. Both were technically born a few years too early to be Boomers. The overrepresentation of people born in the 1940s among the majorparty nominees for president over the past twenty years is staggering. Consider this list: Joe Biden (1942); John Kerry (1943); Bill Clinton (1946); George W. Bush (1946); Donald Trump (1946); Mitt Romney (1947); Hillary Clinton (1947); and Al Gore (1948). The only exception proves the rule. The 2008 election saw the only significant age gap between presidential candidates: Barack Obama (1961, and thus, yes, a Boomer) versus John McCain (1936). It also saw the largest jump in voter turnout among people under thirty. The majority of those younger votes went to the younger candidate. And if we look only at the candidates who won the presidency—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—we see that the only thing that prevented thirty-two consecutive years of Boomer presidencies was the victory of Silent Joe Biden.

5 DREAMING OF A BOOMER CHRISTMAS

E

“

very year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers’ childhoods.” Web comic artist Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) sounds like he’s joking, but it’s actually an accurate description. Figure 5.1 displays an adaptation of his charming data visualization of the Christmas songs with the most radio airplay in the 2000s. The overwhelming majority of them were released in the 1940s and 1950s, the peak of the Baby Boom. The exception proves the rule, in terms of the changing ethnic demographics of the country: the only song on the list released later than 1970 is “Feliz Navidad.” We don’t have data from radio stations in the 2010s, but I would be willing to wager that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is starting to make inroads as well. Christmas music, while infectious, is not exactly the most dynamic sector of American culture. Unlike in federal politics, generational conflict over media and culture is not constrained by the rigid two-party system. Technological advances allow younger generations to avoid the Boomer-dominated “legacy media” of cable news, talk radio, and elite journalism entirely, creating alternative media ecosystems on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and especially YouTube and TikTok. This chapter examines generational dynamics in the media through the lens of supply and demand. Technological innovations act as a kind of pressure valve that prevents active generational conflict. Instead, legacy

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Baby Boom

The 20 most-played Christmas Songs (2000–2009 Radio Airplay) by Decade of Popular Release

Rocking, Around the Christmas Tree Jingle Bell Rock

Rudolph Blue the Red-Nosed Christmas Reindeer Little Winter Wonderland Drummer Boy Chestnuts I Saw Mommy Roasting Kissing on an Open Fire Santa Claus Let it Snow

Silver Bells

Have Yourself It’s Beginning a Merry Little to Look a Lot Christmas Like Christmas I’ll be Home for Sleigh Holly Jolly Christmas Ride Christmas Frosty It’s the most Santa Claus White Feliz the Wonderful Time Navidad is Coming Christmas Snowman of the Year to Town

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

Today

1980s

1990s

2000s

FIGURE 5.1  Randall

Munroe demonstrates the combined power of nostalgia and Boomer ballast. Munroe’s alt-text punch line to this reads “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice.”

Source: https://xkcd.com/988/.

media are slowly being replaced by parallel media. The cable news era is fading into irrelevance as its elderly audience declines and younger generations opt for different media. To many young people, cable news is already passé (anyone remember how the cable channel founded by Millennial darlings Vice Media crashed and burned?), but demographic trends suggest that it should continue to grow in influence for several years before its sharp and irreversible decline begins. A brief aside: although this book focuses on the impact of Boomer ballast in the realm of politics and culture, these two cases are likely on the extremes of rigidity (politics) and flexibility (culture). Though comprehensive data is more difficult to come by, other domains range somewhere

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in the middle, and they serve as useful examples of how the structural elements of Boomer ballast play out in less extreme contexts. Major professional organizations like the American Bar Association and American Medical Association maintain strict controls on the production of lawyering and doctoring; you can’t be a professor without getting a PhD. Boomer ballast means that there is a glut at the top end of the age distribution in these professions, creating intergenerational conflict within their ranks. It is not, of course, possible for Millennials to create an alternate legal system, so they must endure dramatically higher competition, worse conditions, and hazier paths to career advancement. There is some flexibility within the legal profession, and Millennials appear to be taking advantage of it. One commentary on “The Legal Industry Generation Gap” notes the disproportionately top-heavy nature of the biggest firms: “Data shows that larger firms are still firmly in the hands of the Baby Boomers, while the leadership of their Fortune 500 clients is being turned over to the next generation.” Whereas 20 percent of general counsels (the top lawyer for a company) at Fortune 100 companies and 30 percent of them at Nasdaq companies are members of Gen X, less than 5 percent of the top dogs at the elite “Big Law” firms are younger than 57.1 This blockage has also been a driver of new business models, many of which have been formed by younger lawyers frustrated with the Boomers who have neither the desire nor the capacity to take advantage of legal innovations made possible by advances in information and communication technology. The general principle is that Boomer ballast produces explicit intergenerational conflict—heavily favoring the Boomers—in contexts that are more rigid, but sectors that are more exposed to the Internet revolution tend to enable Millennials to start fresh while Boomers maintain control of institutions that fade into irrelevance. Media and culture are prime examples of the latter.

SHIFTING CULTURAL D EMA N D

Boomer demography is particularly potent in the ballot box because their demographic strength is compounded by much higher voter turnout.

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There is a similar force multiplier in the realm of cultural demand: their advantage in wealth accumulation. But on the media demand dimension, we have not yet seen the apex of Boomer influence. We are only halfway through the discontinuity that comes from that generation’s natural life cycle: when people retire, they tend to consume a lot more media. Every year, the American Time Use Survey asks a sample of Americans to carefully document their daily activities in categories like paid work, volunteering, watching television, and childcare. This is the single best resource for understanding how Americans spend their days, and while it isn’t the most fine-grained data, it’s great for capturing broad trends. The graph in figure 5.2 looks at the category of “watching TV, movies, and streaming” broken down by age bracket.2 Three things jump out. First, Americans watch a lot of (broadly construed) television. Even women in their thirties—the group with the lowest rate of consumption— watch almost two hours a day. Second, younger people watch less than older people on average, and this disparity is increasing, especially among men. Third, although a gradual increase begins for both genders in the latter half of their forties, media consumption skyrockets when people enter their sixties. The primary explanation for this jump is retirement. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average male over sixty-five watches five hours of television every day. As a result, their preferences shape the type of cultural products on offer for everyone else. Have you ever watched a show with broad viewership among the elderly, like Jeopardy! or the presidential debates? The advertisements heavily target their demographic: local politics, arthritis medication, and retirement planning. It’s much harder to observe how the presence of this audience affects the decisions about what kinds of media are created in the first place. We can’t see the movies that were never filmed and screened because they appealed mainly to Millennials, who are more strapped for time and cash than earlier generations. Figure 5.3 presents a novel data analysis that demonstrates the effect of Boomer demand in the realm of movies. I started with a list of the 45,000 films in the full MovieLens Dataset, which included information on the year each movie was released as well as the top five billed actors or actresses for that movie.3 I cross-referenced each of these “movie stars” with biographical information compiled by the Internet Movie Database to find their date of birth then simply subtracted that from the year each

Men 15−19 20−24 25−29 30−34 35−39 40−44 45−49 50−54 55−59 60−64 65+ Age

2013−2017 2003−2007

Women 15−19 20−24 25−29 30−34 35−39 40−44 45−49 50−54 55−59 60−64 65+ 0

5

10

15 20 25 Hours per week

30

35

FIGURE 5.2  Hours of weekly television viewership, by age: Older and especially retired people watch far more television than younger people, a tendency that has only become more pronounced in more recent years.

Source: Gary Kimbrough, American Time

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44

Average age of top 5 listed cast

42

40

38

36

34

32

1920

1940

1960 1980 Year of release

2000

2020

FIGURE 5.3  The rising age of movie starts: Ages of top five listed cast members in 45,000

movies, by year: As Boomers entered late middle age and began to retire, the average age of movie stars increased dramatically, from forty to nearly fifty. Source: Combined data from imdb (https://datasets.imdbws.com/) and the MovieLens dataset (https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/)

movie was released to find their age at the time of screening.4 Figure 5.3 thus tracks the age of leading actors and actresses for movies from 1920 to 2019. Each data point represents the average age of all the top five billed actors or actresses in major motion pictures released in that year. There is a general upward trend throughout the entire twentieth century, although the average age plateaued at about thirty-nine from the mid1980s until 2006. That year, which is indicated by the vertical line, is when the oldest Baby Boomers turned sixty. Ever since, the average age of movie stars has increased at a historically unprecedented rate. In 2017,

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the average age of the top five billed stars in all movies was forty-six. This historical time series lets us see that the Boomer generation is unique in its cultural longevity. This makes intuitive sense if you think about the biggest stars today. With all due respect to Timothée Chalamet, there simply isn’t anyone his age who commands the audience attention of, say, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, or Bruce Willis in their prime. This is partly because actors from this cohort are still taking up many starring roles; we can’t have the next Tom Cruise until we get rid of the one we already have. The world of competitive sports provides an illustrative contrast. As much as Boomer sports fans might have wanted legendary quarterback Joe Montana to keep playing, the physical realities of aging led him to retire at age thirty-nine. In fact, as elite sports grow ever-more competitive, the average player’s age in both the NFL and NBA has been declining for decades.5 The Hollywood model increasingly relies on sequels and franchises, which means retaining the same actors over the course of years or decades. A dramatic example is the Star Wars franchise. The original films, released between 1977 and 1983, were a massive cultural touchstone for the Boomer generation when they were at the age of highest cultural impressionability. The sequels released between 2015 and 2019 brought back many of the same characters, which meant casting the same actors, forty years older. The actor Peter Cushing, who played the villain Grand Moff Tarkin in the original film, died in 1994, so the film company used CGI to imitate his likeness in the 2016 release. Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, died during the sequel rollout but was still heavily featured in the final film. Rather than create new roles for younger actors, recent Hollywood trends prefer to show actors even after their death to maintain continuity in their fictional universes and thus in the lives of the aging moviegoing population. The large number of older people with time and money also means a higher demand for films about the life events that accompany old age. Although some of the generational analysis in this book argues that aging Baby Boomers are disproportionately powerful today, it’s important to remember that the increased representation of older people in media is a sign of social progress. The film industry is famously obsessed with youth; unlike in the Senate, “age diversity” in the movies means more roles for older actors, affording them dignity and respect.

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A nominative coincidence can illustrate this point. There are two films called The Last Laugh. The first came out in 1924 and is widely considered a high point of German Expressionism. It tells the story of a hotel doorman who is demoted and falls into despair after his boss thinks he has become too old and weak for the job. After he is fired, the title card reads, “The forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death.” The second is an American film from 2019 (by all accounts mediocre) that tells the story of an aging Baby Boomer dealing with a different kind of identity crisis as he becomes too old for his job. In contrast to the brutal fate of the German doorman, the actor Chevy Chase, then seventy-nine years old, arranges a farewell national comedy tour full of laughs and revelry. Older people are treated much better today—an unambiguously positive development. So it’s especially important to differentiate age-related trends from those that are specific to the unique historical circumstances of the Baby Boomers. Part of recognizing this historical contingency is noticing the changing nature of media and celebrity. Younger people today simply aren’t as invested in individual movie stars as previous generations. There can only be so many movie stars, and Boomer ballast remains the industry’s center of gravity. In response, younger generations are using new media technologies that go around the old Hollywood celebrity system and allow them more direct contact with their favorite entertainers. The movie star of yesteryear has been succeeded by the YouTuber.

BOOMER BAL L AST IN N EWS MEDI A

The entertainment worlds of the young and the old are now segregated. Marketing reports note that the most popular Gen Z celebrities like Jeffree Star, Shane Dawson, and PewDiePie are completely unfamiliar to anyone over thirty (unless they have kids around). According to a 2019 brand report, the YouTube star PewDiePie has just as much name recognition among Gen Z men as does contemporary basketball legend LeBron James—with “Pewds” garnering an even higher favorability rating.6 Gen Z’s biggest pop star, Billie Eilish, made headlines in the winter of 2019

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when she admitted that she’d never heard of the Boomer rock gods Van Halen. Given the opportunity, young people are opting out of legacy institutions. In these cases, the Boomers currently riding out their place atop these institutions will never be replaced. Instead, they’ll simply be rendered irrelevant by the creation of alternative institutions that are better suited to the contemporary social and technological context. YouTube is the best example. With the political scientist Joe Phillips, I conducted research about the emerging alternative sphere of political media on YouTube. Starting around 2016, an “Alternative Influence Network” of YouTube political commentators began to explode in popularity. The communications scholar Becca Lewis first described this phenomenon, which she describes as “an assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities who use YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism all the way to overt white nationalism.”7 The twentieth-century media derived its credibility from the process of journalism.8 The journalism schools established in the wake of the concern about “yellow journalism” in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War were committed to instilling a sense of professional pride and craftsmanship among journalists, who had previously been seen as either partisan hacks or bottom-feeding sensationalists.9 The cost of producing a piece of media content meant that there was a limit on the scale of production. Our intuitions about the functioning of the news media are largely derived from what is in hindsight the Golden Age of media credibility, the middle half of the twentieth century. The professionalism of journalism had become institutionalized, and the economics of the media technology at that time supported a wide array of local newspapers and three broadcast television networks. These professional and economic forces incentivized sober, moderate political coverage, which satisfied the professional ambitions of journalists and editors. It also appealed to the entire political spectrum—large subscription bases in a single town were ideal from the advertisers’ perspective, allowing papers to charge a higher rate for ads.10 This centrism was also encouraged by government regulation. Beginning in 1947, the Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine required that broadcast networks discuss contentious political issues in a way that they considered “fair—that is, [the broadcaster] must affirmatively endeavor to

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make . . . facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues presented.”11 The conflation of these factors produced widespread credibility. If you saw something on broadcast television, it must be true. (In reality, all that was guaranteed was that the government had approved it.) The advent of cable news was a big step in a different direction. CNN was founded in 1980 and was still constrained by the fairness doctrine and the culture of midcentury journalism. Cable television in general, however, greatly increased the number of distinct choices available in televisual media. (Talk radio played a significant role in changing the culture of media as well, but television was by far the dominant medium in postwar America.) The addition of CNN alongside entertainment-only cable channels meant that people who liked watching television but didn’t especially care for news had a host of other options, while news junkies could get their fix any hour of the day. Researchers found that this self-selection into or away from television news consumption became a main driver of decreased voter turnout: the news junkies could still only vote once while the news avoiders opted out of thinking about politics entirely.12 In 1987, under the Reagan administration, the FCC dropped the fairness doctrine, arguing that “the doctrine likely violated the free speech rights of broadcasters . . . and was no longer required because of the increase in competition among mass media.”13 And with that change, one-sided cable news was born. Fox News and MSNBC each began broadcasting in 1996, and while they were initially more moderate than they are today, their availability still meant that news junkies could choose the channel that best matched their political predispositions. Moving away from the goal of objectivity, these programs derived their credibility through “authenticity”—the idea that the hosts were responding emotionally to important news rather than acting like news-delivering automatons. This meant they could be trusted. These cable channels—along with a few programs on broadcast television—still dominate the news media landscape for Boomers and Gen Xers. According to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of people between the ages of fifty and sixty-four “often” get news from television, which is more than double any other source. For people over sixty-five, that figure is 81 percent. Only 36 percent of people aged thirty to forty-nine often get news from television, and for adults under thirty,

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the number is only 16 percent. These younger groups are still consuming news, but they prefer news websites or social media.14 Trends in the number of young people who even have access to cable or broadcast news make it vanishingly unlikely that these media sources will be relevant in fifty years. But remember, many heavy television news watchers have yet to retire, so the aggregate viewership will continue to grow as the average viewing age creeps upwards. Although the different channels present different viewpoints, there are still very few distinct people in front of the camera. There is fierce competition to get your own show, and individual personalities can remain in place for a very long time. The two most popular broadcast hosts, Sean Hannity and the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh (who, as a radio host, relied on authenticity even more), are both Boomers who commanded huge audiences for twenty-five years or longer. Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly were Boomers with a similarly lengthy tenure at the top of the industry. Matthews was encouraged to retire after allegations of inappropriate sexual comments in the workplace. O’Reilly was fired outright after a series of sexual harassment lawsuits came to light. Rather than work their way through the cable news networks and then wait around for the Boomers to lose their jobs for sexual misconduct, young political commentators have embraced the technology of YouTube. Using that platform, and rejecting traditional notions of objectivity even further, says Lewis, means “establishing an alternative sense of credibility based on relatability, authenticity, and accountability.” These YouTubers cultivate “an alternative social identity using the image of a social underdog and countercultural appeal.” Individual political commentators, broadcasting from their bedrooms, sometimes for hours a day, have become a force to be reckoned with in the media landscape. In the past, scholars have worried about polarization due to selfselection into ideological news—and with good reason. Recent studies have found a significant shift in voter preference after the deployment of Fox News, although this effect is driven by Republican-leaning voters.15 These scholars have also worried about “echo chambers” created by social media algorithms or friend networks. So far, this fear has been overblown. Instead, there has been a premature consensus on the existence of social media chambers resulting from an “echo chamber about echo chambers,” as academics and journalists hyped the concern before empirical evidence

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was brought to bear.16 It turns out that the echo chamber was coming from inside the house: our offline social networks of close ties tend to be even more ideologically self-segregated than any online network. But YouTube politics is a new beast, and empirical results from other contexts don’t necessarily hold. The YouTube credibility system is particularly troubling. Viewers come to trust broadcasters because of their authenticity, relatability, and accountability. The “authenticity” of emotional response is nothing new, following the same pattern set by emotional partisan broadcasters on talk radio or cable news. But “relatability” stems from a new symmetry between the viewer and the creator. People don’t simply watch news from someone they agree with on political issues. They seek out and trust people who view and experience the social and cultural dimensions of the world the way they do. “Accountability” raises the threat of an echo chamber effect even further, as the demands of the viewers can (and in fact are expected to) shift what the creator covers and how he or she talks about it. Cable news anchors were not insensitive to audience desires, but audience feedback in the YouTube context is radically more direct. Slow-moving legacy media is comparatively unswayed by the tides of public opinion, and individual broadcasters at least have guaranteed income even if their audience doesn’t like a certain view they espouse. On YouTube, creators’ livelihoods are directly dependent on the financial support of their audiences, which can be withheld at the very first misstep. These new YouTube pundits aren’t unaware of or indifferent to the legacy news media. They are actively hostile to it. They explicitly position themselves as a new counterculture. Although they hold a broad range of ideological positions on the left-right ideology scale, they are unified in their disdain for the legacy media. People who have come to see the Boomer-dominated postwar media establishment as the permanent state of media affairs (give or take the bursting bubble in web-native news websites) are badly mistaken. After growing only gradually for the past several decades, the number of total hours of political news and current events televisual content has exploded over the past five years, and the audience is growing rapidly. The Boomer and Gen X cable news war between the Big Three seems like the only game in town, and demographic trends suggest that the relevance of Fox News and MSNBC will increase in the short run. We have not yet hit the

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peak for Boomer retirees, which will be the apex of Boomer ballast in political media consumption. Recall how much television consumption spikes when a viewer turns sixty. But even on our way to that peak, the alternative media ecosystem will grow, largely unseen by the legacy media and those who fixate on it. When the Boomers are gone, however, things will change all at once. The legacy media are poorly positioned to attract younger viewers, and the once-central battle between Fox and MSNBC will dwindle into irrelevance, supplanted by a fully armed and operational replacement media. This will be a high-variance development. Without any kind of structural constraints, a large range of political views will have the capacity to attract a widespread following. To date, it has been dominated by the right. The left and center must adapt to the reality of the power of YouTube politics and produce a compelling alternative or this replacement will continue the trend started with cable news and drag our politics farther to the right. Movies and media are both areas where digital communication technology has democratized access. Boomer ballast will continue to sustain the bulk of cultural attention on legacy formats while alternative venues develop and flourish.

R The previous four chapters have established the basic conditions that produced Boomer ballast and traced how it will play out in the realms of electoral politics and culture. This analysis has been structural, centering on demographic, economic, technological, and institutional factors and largely ignoring the role of human identity, personality, or agency in responding to these factors. The rest of the book takes up this line of inquiry.

6 WHERE DOES IDENTITY COME FROM?

P

eople need to make sense of who they are. Our personal identities are constructed from a combination of the identity categories that our society emphasizes as important. In some countries, for example, race is a central identity; in others, religion predominates. These identity cleavages tend to persist across generations because they tend to be passed down from parents to children. That mechanism does not operate in the construction of generational identity. Parents and children tend not to be from the same generation. To understand how this identity operates, let’s turn to Karl Mannheim, the German sociologist who wrote a foundational essay, “The Problem of Generations,” in 1927. Mannheim argued that generational consciousness does not come about just because you share a date of birth. For people to feel really in league with each other, they must discuss their similarities and establish a common basis for identification. In Mannheim’s technosocial context almost a hundred years ago, that meant being in physical proximity. He called this the “shared location” that was necessary to build generational consciousness. But even a shared date of birth and location don’t necessarily guarantee generational consciousness. A princeling and his servant might be the same age and live near one another, but their social statuses are distinct. The conception of a shared location implies a shared social

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location. In Mannheim’s society, and almost all contemporary societies, the young have considerably less power than the old, and the nucleus of a shared identity is the familiar us-versus-them mindset of minority groups. The idea of shared location is still useful for understanding the germ of cohort consciousness, even if those locations today tend to be digital rather than geographic. However, the presence of other social divisions makes it more difficult for cohort identity to coalesce. There weren’t that many princelings in Mannheim’s time, so the mass of nonprincelings might easily form a group based on their low birth. But in a society riven by racial or religious division, this is more difficult, especially if those preexisting divisions prevent the young from experiencing a sense of shared location. The more that different identities overlap with each other—the greater the overall identity alignment—the greater impact that identity has. Even if the young do develop a sense of unity, that cohort consciousness may not last. As they age, whatever shared identity they developed in their youth dissipates as they splinter into new groups through the acquisition of new identities. They become professionals or veterans or union members or parents, and these identities become more important to them than their age group. There will always be divisions that prevent cohort consciousness from emerging and life changes that crowd it out if it does. For durable cohort consciousness to overcome these obstacles, there must be some significant event, ideally one with a generational component. The evidence for such a shared social experience to create generational consciousness is well established. Historians have found that the political circumstances of the Red Guards, and the urban youth who experienced forced rustication, have structured Chinese political movements over the past fifty years, as this intense shared experience produced a feeling of generational solidarity.1 Germans who came of age during the period of Nazi rule have experienced lifelong effects on attitudes toward democracy, significantly lagging their West German compatriots from other cohorts in support for democracy.2 Mannheim’s theory was primarily meant to apply in the context of obvious and massively significant events. The attacks of 9/11 might have served as a unifying shock, but it did not impact the lives of most Millennials directly; it also happened too early in their life cycle. Instead,

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for most Millennials, the primary events of our young adult lives were economic. The Great Recession of 2009 hit the American economy just as many Millennials were entering the workforce or deciding about college.3 Yet outside of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Millennials did not group together in generational solidarity. The economic inequality (and other important cleavages) within the Millennial generation precluded that. Instead, the recession bred a neoliberal ethos of hustling, whereby Millennials worked as hard as they could to attain the same prosperity as their parents. The Baby Boomers, on the other hand, experienced two things that brought them firmly together: the television set and the Vietnam War.

MY GEN ERATION

People try to put us down Just because we get around

When The Who sang those lines in 1965, the last of the Baby Boomers had just been born. Postwar America was a dynamic place. The economic conditions of the world into which they were born were historically unique, but the Boomers at that point had only experienced this flourishing economy through their parents. It was the only economy they had ever known, so it was impossible for them to know how good it was.4 The early Boomer years saw several events that would give rise to their sense of being a cohort. The highest profile of these was the Vietnam War. Vietnam was a deeply divisive war, but historical accounts tend to elide the fact that it was more popular among the young than the old. This is not an historical anomaly. The young were also more supportive of the Korean War,5 the Gulf War, and the Iraq War.6 The memorable antiwar protesters were in fact a small but vocal minority. Nixon’s “silent majority” was real, but the hippie college students went on to write the history books. The roots of much of today’s political conflict lie in the Boomer generation.7 The polarization between the antiwar left and the prowar right, institutionalized through organizations like Students for a Democratic

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Society and Young Americans for Freedom, respectively, still structures our politics today. This conflict is essentially an intra-Boomer one, and its continued relevance proves the power of Boomers over our political culture. Just consider how much time the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential election spent relitigating the Vietnam service records of the candidates forty years prior. In 2007, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president, arguing that only Obama could move American politics beyond this generational divide.8 Although Obama’s eight-year tenure had the potential to serve as a bridge beyond the centrality of Boomer politics to younger generations, the 2016 presidential primaries did not shake out that way. Though Republican strategists urged the party to reposition itself and appeal to the nation’s growing and youthful Hispanic population, the two viable Gen X Hispanic candidates, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, could not consolidate support. (And neither could Boomer Jeb Bush, who leaned heavily on his Hispanic connections, including his Mexican wife and mixed-race children). As these various haters and losers continued to split the vote in primary after primary, Donald Trump quickly developed a base of support among fans of his outrageousness, whose votes provided him with a sufficient plurality to lock down the nomination two and a half months before the Republican National Convention. Even in 2021, we live in the long shadow of the Vietnam War. Trump earned a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft when he was diagnosed with bone spurs, though these have not seemed to cause him much difficulty elsewhere in his life. Of course, Joe Biden also received five draft deferments while he was pursuing a bachelor’s degree (during which he played football for the University of Delaware’s Blue Hens) before he was declared ineligible for service due to a history of asthma as a teenager.9 The conservative polemicist Bruce Cannon Gibney, a staunch antiBoomer advocate, is compelling on this point: the Vietnam draft seems to have been cynically gamed by Boomers with the means to do so, which created resentments that continue to rankle the rest. The centrality of the college campus to today’s culture wars, for example, has a clear historical legacy from its role during the Vietnam War. Youth cultural rebellion is another way to increase the likelihood of generational consciousness. Remember, one of the barriers to its emergence

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is the existence of inherited divisions within a society—even smaller divisions like family attachments. The most intense examples of intergroup polarization can only be sustained in the absence of benign intergroup contact. In other words, it’s harder to be aggressively homophobic if you see your gay relative every day. Hence the concern about partisan echo chambers driving partisan polarization today: if half of your church or PTA is Democrat, it is a lot harder to hate Democrats than if you only ever encounter them on TV. The existence of families necessitates intergenerational contact. The youth rebellion of the 1960s was driven by the dissolving American family, as contact with one’s family and the centrality of family to life fell away. Generational consciousness emerged on the college campus and the battlefield of Vietnam precisely because these locations were shared exclusively by cohort members, far from the context of their families.10 Although otherwise dissimilar from the Vietnam War, television also enabled Boomers to share experiences regardless of their geographic origins. As a Millennial, I am extremely attuned to the importance of the Internet revolution to my generation, but the Boomers experienced their own media technology revolution in the form of the humble boob tube. The demands of the wartime economy had hamstrung the rollout of television, but once the war ended, it was everywhere. Between 1946 and 1960, the percentage of households with a television set went from close to zero to nearly 90 percent. Children now had access to a wealth of information that was not filtered through their parents. Although later generations would express concern about both the content of television and the deleterious effects of screen time in general, these concerns were largely absent for the Boomers consuming television as children.11 The emergence of rock and roll music, transmitted over radio and television and through vinyl, introduced a new shared set of cultural values. Everyone had their own parents, but the Boomers all had The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. The invention of mass youth culture in this era represented a significant shock to the sense of young people as a distinctive generational unit. Because of the nature of both the technology and the ideas on offer to the young Boomers, however, their generational identity was individualistic. Yes, television universalized access to youth culture, but it did so in an “individualizing” fashion, to use the framework proposed by

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the political scientist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Rather than participating in culture in physical spaces that encouraged the construction of social ties, people could participate in culture from their living rooms. Putnam famously documents the decline in social capital in the United States beginning in the 1970s, estimating that 25 percent of the trend is caused by television and 50 percent by “generational replacement”—that is, the emergence of the Boomers. Parallel trends like the feminist movement and the decline of geographically constrained community and religious organizations—coupled with generally excellent economic prospects—gave Boomers the freedom to be less reliant on others. They were more able to construct their identities the way they saw fit, and this very individualism and rebellion against the social conformity of their parents became central to the Boomer identity. A few other Boomer milestones bear mentioning. In his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Gibney puts forth other hypotheses for trends distinctive to the Boomer generation that could explain the strength and durability of their generational consciousness. These relationships are difficult to establish empirically, but they seem to resonate with conservative Millennials; Helen Andrews, in her book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, makes broadly similar critiques. To start with, Boomer marriages tended to be much less durable than either earlier or later generations’ marriages. The ten-year marriage “survival” rate was 83 percent for marriages begun in both the 1960–1964 range and the 1995–1999 range. Between these dates, this rate declined, hitting its minimum of 73 percent for marriages in 1975–1979—the prime time for Boomers to get married. The weakness of marital identity posed less of a threat to generational identity.12 Or maybe it was the drugs. Psychedelic drug use can reorient the user’s perception of the world. The invention and popularization of LSD in the 1960s was more than a hedonistic exercise; users thought of themselves as pioneers of new forms of living, in opposition to the “squares” in mainstream society. Marijuana and alcohol use among high schoolers grew throughout the 1970s, when those were all Boomers, and then fell in the 1980s.13

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T H E S HA RED LOCATIONS OF T EC HN OLOGY

The events that produce younger generations’ identity are, of course, different. But history often rhymes, and the Internet revolution plays an analogous role to that of the Boomers’ television sets. In Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch investigates the emergence of different cohorts of internet users and groups them by the language they use online. The key definition of these cohorts is not their birth year but the year they started using the internet. Here is another instance in which the accepted generational breakdown doesn’t quite fit. Among older generations, there is a strong correlation between actual age and “internet cohort,” but it is far from deterministic. For instance, older people in information industries were likely to start using the internet (and to do so more intensively) than were younger people in bluecollar industries. Gen Z is something of an exception here. A very high proportion of current adults in this generation (aged nineteen to twenty-five in 2021) have been using the internet for many years. There is still a socioeconomic gradient in terms of access, but it’s less steep than for previous generations. Many people in Gen Z have no memory of a time before the internet. This access to technology is compounded by an upbringing that has decreased the potential for real-world interaction. Parenting has become more restrictive, leaving teens with more free time indoors.14 The declining accessibility of middle-class stability for adults is driving relatively affluent teens to spend more of their time worrying about their career prospects and working on homework or extracurricular activities. This phenomenon is so prominent that makers of teen movies have taken note. The newest addition to the Breakfast Club–era teen archetypes is the “type-A overachiever,” not exactly a nerd but someone who has their entire future mapped out. In the 2019 movie Booksmart, Amy, the protagonist, mapped out her life from high school all the way to the Supreme Court. This archetype is motivated by raw ambition to advance through the mainstream institutional hierarchy rather than by some esoteric intellectual interest but is still desperately uncool. Prestige serves as a security blanket for people who don’t fit in.

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This combination of access to information technology and the time to use it has been nothing short of a revolution in the media consumed by young people. Social media allows them to communicate, but the current wave of social media also involves uploaded televisual media. YouTube is the most popular social network among Gen Z, and TikTok is currently exploding in popularity. The latter in particular has brought about the true democratization of the creation of video media, encouraging everyone to participate. As young people have more outlets through which they can create their own media, the previously central “mainstream culture” that defined the twentieth century is less and less relevant to their lives. The previous model was one in which the producers of youth-targeted media did not demographically match the consumers of youth-targeted media. Adults made media for kids. The current cohort of adults making that media are of course the Boomers. The producers of youth-targeted media kept getting older, but their audience stayed the same age. Something had to give. Teens still love superhero movies, and Hollywood has been doubling down on their comparative advantage. We have not seen a democratization of the production of films about the Avengers, for instance. New media outlets like Instagram and TikTok do not determine the kind of media that is produced, but they do shift the locus of this determination from film studio executives to Gen Z creators. And those Gen Z creators can make exactly the media that most appeals to their audience. Media about a specific friend group or a shared milestone—college acceptances are a very popular genre on TikTok—or simply memes, ephemeral shibboleths that signify nothing except that you get the joke. The consequences of this development are not entirely positive. During the broadcast era, more of American social and cultural life centered on the consumption of broadcast media. When everyone was watching the same shows, they shared a national identity and were far less polarized. This was, at the time, seen primarily as a loss, especially of social capital, as passive consumption replaced time shared with families.15 The peer-to-peer media of today’s young internet users is a temporal step back toward the pre-broadcast world.16 This is the notion of

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secondary orality that the media theorist Walter J. Ong predicted would emerge from the culture made possible by electric media: more Gen Zers are actively engaged in storytelling, singing, dancing, or debating with their peers. More of the media they consume has been produced by someone like themselves. This reality could reverse long-term declines in social capital. This sociality is internet mediated, and the style of internet use is conditioned by internet cohort, which today is coincident with birth cohort. This means there is serious age segregation. Having already done away with nonmediated pathways for intergenerational communication and the transmission of culture and values, peer-to-peer youth media also decrease the influence of older generations through media. One of the defining features of McCulloch’s most recent internet cohort—which includes Gen Z—is that their internet is first and foremost mobile, accessed by smartphones from anywhere. The linguistic signifiers are undeniable. Consider this. I’m an older Millennial, and when I express overwhelmed exasperation through a “keyboard smash,” it looks like this: “akdjf;aljf.” That’s because I’m mashing the keys where my fingers usually rest on the home row of a computer keyboard. But Gen Z’s keyboard smash is based on where the thumbs rest over a smartphone keyboard, and so it reads “ghbnbhgnbh.” Older readers who are unfamiliar with this example might compare it to a cartoon character with a speech bubble filled with “*#&@!.” The ubiquity of smartphones has broadened and deepened the penetration of the internet into the lives of the youngest generations. Their fluency in technology and the social norms of its use are crucial social currency. This is a generational identity in opposition to the Boomers, who continue to use technology poorly, embarrassingly, or not at all. This evolution of communication technology means we must update Mannheim’s conception of shared location. It isn’t enough for two people to be born in the same year; they must also share a sense of their place in the world. Social media has created exactly that, a shared location accessible to internet users in each generation, restricted by mutually constructed social norms and not at all by geography. As American politics becomes more and more nationalized, the importance of physical proximity for generational identification has diminished.17

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Shared online locations have been possible to some extent from the dawn of the internet, and the 1990s saw a flourishing of online communities using only text-based communication. However, this medium lacks the features that are essential to the power of physical shared locations. The latency of communication is too high—there are necessarily long delays in composing, reading, and responding to text messages. Text cannot communicate as much information as physical communication: facial expressions, body language, and inflection, the standard tools of the sociality that produces a shared identity. Social media is a step beyond the web forums of the 1990s, but only when social videos arrived did social information density make significant inroads. The rise of YouTube communities centered around charismatic “creators” made for an explosion of parasociality, with static comment sections allowing for a degree of community interaction. Latency was still an obstacle to the experience of shared location, however. I borrow the word latency from the context in which I first encountered it: online video games. Low latency means a strong internet connection and an immersive experience of killing aliens with your friends, accompanied by a voice chat that reinforces the shared goal and serves as a proxy for physical proximity; high latency, on the other hand, is equivalent to the dreaded lag, where the game responds sluggishly and the immersion is destroyed. Although currently understudied, especially by political scientists, this form of digital media is better suited for creating shared locations than any other. The popularity of video games is heavily contingent on generation. In a 2017 Pew survey, 60 percent of adults under thirty used video games at least “sometimes,” compared to just 24 percent of seniors.18 There is some truth to the gender-based stereotype of the male gamer, but that same survey found that a total of 49 percent of adult women under thirty play video games, as well as 48 percent of women between thirty and forty-nine. More than any other technology, they create a “place” to hang out. Some of the first video games to develop this potential were the massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, where groups of users teamed up to create “clans” that, for some players, became their main source of sociality. Today, nearly all video games have a social component. For those that are based on small teams, competitive esports are an alternative to the

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traditional sports that still dominate the attention of older generations. The 2020 League of Legends World Championship achieved a simultaneous viewership of 3.8 million19—more than 40 percent of the average viewership of Major League Baseball’s 2020 World Series.20 It’s impossible to talk about these games without discussing the Gen Z celebrities who accompany them. Some of them—called “streamers”— are famous simply for livestreaming themselves playing video games, usually with a public chat that allows their viewers to discuss the game or talk to them. PewDiePie, who invented the “Let’s Play” subgenre of video game streaming, is by some metrics the most popular person in the world. If there isn’t an active chat during a livestream, there are often voice chat servers like Discord that allow fans to discuss the events they’re collectively watching. This is their generation’s version of watching sports at a bar. The three video games that are most distinctively Gen Z, however, are so sociality-forward that they confound older definitions of what a video game is. Minecraft is a lot like digital Lego, an extension of sandbox games like The Sims but with far more of the environment up for grabs and a vibrant community that emphasizes creativity. The most famous Gen Z game is Fortnite. While the game can be played like a traditional competitive war game, the novelty comes from the world-building capacity. The technology writer Owen Williams argues that “Fortnite isn’t a game, it’s a place,” and one that’s difficult to explore without a friend showing you the ropes. There’s far more downtime and creativity than in the traditional hyperrealistic shooting games, making it a pleasant place for people to just hang out. In early 2019, Fortnite hosted its first concert. It was a watershed event in video-games-as-shared-place. Hosted by the electronic music artist Marshmello, the concert was attended by millions of players concurrently, each of them dancing and listening, many of them in friend groups just like at a traditional music festival. This event cannot be fruitfully understood through the lens of video gaming, but it is the very definition of a shared location. Roblox is a culmination of these two trends. The platform itself is a sandbox designed to allow users to create their own games, of which there are now millions. Some of these games have large enough followings

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to allow their creators to make a full-time job selling digital costumes within the games. Over half of Americans under sixteen played Roblox in 2020—and one of the most popular features was the ability to host virtual “birthday parties” on the platform. Again, the definition of a “video game” that I grew up with is a poor match for this reality, but it is clear that Gen Z is using today’s communication technology to create new forms of sociality.21 This small digression into the increased generational consciousness of Gen Z was not initially part of this book, but as I discuss in the next chapter, it jumps out of the data. The creation of Boomer generational consciousness happened a long time ago. It arose from a convergence of historical factors, and it is noteworthy both for how long it has persisted and how distinctive it is from generational consciousness among Gen X or Millennials. But it seems that Gen Z and their contemporary communication technology will yield generational consciousness on the level of the Boomers, and this will become the new normal for future generations.

IDEN TITY A L IGN MEN T

One of the defining features of the last few decades is the increase in what political scientists call partisan affective polarization. This term refers to the increased antagonism and decreased trust between Republicans and Democrats. The political scientist Lilliana Mason argues that one of the major causes of this upward trend is an increase in “social sorting.”22 With her colleagues, she developed a scale to measure the social identity component of partisanship (which I adapted in the next chapter to describe cohort consciousness).23 To measure social sorting, she conducts a survey that measures Black, evangelical, secular, and Tea Party social identities alongside liberal and conservative social identities in relation to Democratic and Republican identities. Mason found that the kind of emotions that drive affective polarization—anger at the out-party and enthusiasm for the in-party—are significantly less common among partisan identifiers who also identify with multiple “nonsorted” identities. For example, a person who identifies as a

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Republican but who also identifies as secular and Black is far less likely to be angry at any perceived threat to Republicans than is a white Republican who also identifies as evangelical. Thanks to the census, we have access to decades of a variety of objective (though self-reported) group identifications. These identities are not necessarily the ones I think are most important or relevant to the topic of generational conflict, but when it comes to data that go back one hundred and seventy years, you take what you can get. Figure 6.1 displays these long-term trends, restricting the sample to people over eighteen. The y-axis is the correlation between age and group membership at each year the census was conducted. Each of the lines corresponds to membership in a category that represents an important portion of a person’s experience of the world; as the lines go up, the more the old and young differ in terms of that category. For example, the line with the highest peak in the figure describes whether someone is out of the labor force. For many people, their job is how they spend most of their time, the place where they socialize, and

Correlation between age and demographics

Alignment of age and other politically relevant characteristics

0.4 0.3

Variable White (non-Hispanic) Inverse family size Veteran One generation in household Out of labor force

0.2 0.1 0.0

1850

1900

1950

FIGURE 6.1  Social

2000

sorting and age over time: Across a variety of politically important forms of identity, there has never been as large a divergence between the young and old as there is today. The y-axis measures correlation between age and other demographic identities, like whether someone is in the labor force, is a veteran, is white, and so on.

Source: IPUMS Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, “the Census”

92W H E RE D O ES ID ENTITY COME FR OM?

the source of their identity. The experience of those who are formally employed differs significantly from those who are not. In the past, the correlation between labor force participation and age was minimal. There were strict laws and norms barring women from formal employment and a much shorter average retirement period between when people stopped working and when they died. Since 1950, however, this correlation has skyrocketed to around 0.4, indicating that older people are much less likely to be in the workforce. The overall trend is an increasing correlation between age and each of these measures over time. Our society is becoming more “age-aligned.” Older people have a distinct cluster of group memberships, and younger people have a separate cluster. Older people today are more likely to be veterans, to have a smaller family, to be out of the labor force, and to be white. The most significant of these identities is race, which here is measured as a binary variable for whether the respondent is white non-Hispanic or not. This correlation had been constant and low for nearly a century, demonstrating just how unusual it is that old Boomers are overwhelmingly white at the same time as younger generations are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. Race is our nation’s most historically significant identity. The changing racial composition of America is a significant contribution to the lack of mutual understanding between Boomers and younger generations. The dark gray line in figure 6.1 represents the correlation between age and the likelihood that there is only one generation in the respondent’s household. Here, “generation” is used in the family-tree sense: Are parents and their children living in the same household? This isn’t a measure of age and social sorting but rather a measure of age and social segregation. Older people today are much more likely than younger people to not have any intergenerational contact. Sadly, much of this is because older people today are more likely to live alone. This line of thinking suggests the degree of the impact that a given identity has on political beliefs or behaviors. If we hold constant the number of distinct identities a given person has, increased alignment should increase their impact. But there are some important ways that old age (irrespective of generation) influences an individual’s identity.

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Older people experience specific changes (which some might call losses) that have been theorized to be politically relevant. The political scientist Neal Cutler’s 1977 work, which introduced the concept of “political gerontology,” argues that “age brings significant losses in personal status; while new statuses may be obtained, they cannot really replace those which had been the basis of a lifetime of social gratification.” For many people, their careers, organizational affiliations, hobbies, and especially family relationships comprise a significant portion of their identities. The losses in physical capacity that accompany old age can deprive people of active participation in these enterprises; the maturation of children or the death of adult relatives can irrevocably change one’s identity as a child, parent, or spouse. Cutler uses the word status where we might today prefer identity. These things that are being lost are sources of pride for many people, and they may feel that their general sense of self is threatened. And here is a specific theoretical connection to the contemporary politics of the elderly. “Status threat” among rural whites has been shown to be a significant predictor of support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.24 Cutler anticipates that something similar will happen again: “Older persons, like persons of all ages, may respond to threatening situations through the application of their own personally validated stereotypes.” These losses affect the relative salience of an individual’s social identities. Being deprived of one’s identity as a member of a community, as a professional, or as a spouse— and simultaneously deprived of the actual social connections upon which those identities were based—produces a “feedback vacuum [which] creates a vulnerability to and dependence on external sources of self-labeling, many of which communicate a stereotyped negative message of the elderly as useless and obsolete.”25 The external sources of self-labeling vary from context to context; in contemporary American politics, the rise of a conservative media ecosystem that explicitly targets elderly viewers has successfully raised the salience of their partisan and ideological identities. The success of Fox News on cable television and conservative talk radio is based on the obvious but important truth seen in the last chapter’s data: retired people have way more time to consume news. On this dimension, the Boomers and Gen Z in the 2020s have something in common: a high percentage of their waking hours are spent

94W H E RE D O ES ID ENTITY COME FR OM?

consuming media. This media is increasingly personalized to their tastes, and in the face of physical social fragmentation (which was accelerated dramatically by COVID-19), it plays a crucial role in how they construct their identities. The young media consumer has not yet acquired midlife-cycle identities that define the lives of working-age adults; the older media consumer has started to lose access to those identities. Both are thus uniquely reliant on mediated identities. However, in stark contrast to the broadcast era, there is close to zero overlap in the media that these two groups consume. Boomers still prefer television, especially cable news, while younger generations increasingly exist in virtual spaces like social media and video games. Even within social media users, the experiences are starkly different for the young and the old. This structural break in the overlap of identities between Boomers and Gen Z paves the way for the salience of these generational terms as identities unto themselves—for explicit intergenerational conflict. And I have evidence that this is already starting to happen.

7 THE EMERGENCE OF COHORT CONSCIOUSNESS

O

“

K, Boomer.” The term was first identified by the New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, who interviewed the teens involved in coining the term and found that they both do and do not have generational conflict in mind. They offered several competing explanations for the term. •

•

•

“Boomer” here isn’t defined by birth date but is rather a state of mind, a resistance to change that manifests in lack of concern over global warming and the contemporary economic situation facing the young, as well as a rejection of internet technology. The Boomers started it, lobbing blanket accusations against the young and using the term “Millennial” as a slur: lazy and entitled “snowflakes” who wouldn’t know a book if it hit them in the face and who instead obsess over their damn phones. It doesn’t really mean anything more than a casual rejection of the overbearing demands of the world, the eternal youthful cry for self-determination.

But “OK, Boomer” cut to the quick. The Baby Boomers were the first cohort in American history to enthusiastically identify with their generation en masse, so the repurposing of what had been a point of pride rebellious to declaim them as old and out of touch really stung.

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This chapter demonstrates that the theoretical antecedents to generational consciousness have in fact caused some Americans to identify with their generation. While this consciousness is interesting for a variety of political and cultural reasons, it can directly impact electoral politics when it leads to generational conflict in that arena, when two generations have divergent preferences on how to allocate scarce resources. Some political scientists think that democratic politics is best studied in these terms, in the competition between people or groups who disagree about their preferred policies. This is certainly the case with the Boomers and Millennials, who have very different ideas about how government spending should be allocated between student loan debt forgiveness, climate change amelioration, and social spending on the elderly. This conflict, if it is salient enough, could be taken up by the political actors and institutions that structure electoral politics. Generational consciousness is the motivating force by which younger generations can act as pressure groups that force their policy positions onto the political table. Another process by which identities are reinforced is through contrast with other identity groups, such as when Boomers like and trust other Boomers and dislike and distrust Millennials (and vice versa). Contemporary political science has devoted significant attention to the process of “affective polarization” between partisans and found that it has risen steeply over the past two decades. The group-based theories of political behavior suggest that “group consciousness” in the form of warm feelings toward members of the in-group are only half the battle—colder feelings toward members of the out-group help enforce group boundaries. Indeed, the majority of the increase in partisan affective polarization in the United States over the past decades has come from decreased warmth toward outpartisans.1 As I show later in this chapter, this could already translate into electoral consequences. Although both Boomers and Millennials are willing to support a hypothetical politician who prioritizes the issues relevant to their respective generation, only Millennials with a high degree of “generational linked fate” are willing to punish a politician prioritizing elderly issues. Another surprising result from the survey evidence is that Gen Z is precocious in terms of generational thinking. Although still young, they

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readily adopt the “Gen Z” identity and are convinced that their individual life outcomes are inextricably linked with the fate of their generation. Although there is not yet conclusive evidence about why this is the case, further investigation into a century-old theory of generational consciousness combined with the novelty of an entire life spent online is a good place to start.

T E ST IN G FOR COHORT CON SC I OUSN ESS

There is no consensus checklist of the criteria required for a generational consciousness. But research on other political actors and political cleavages suggests four key criteria. 1. Self-identification: How many members in an ascriptive group identify as members of the group? This criterion has been central to work on class politics2 and racial and ethnic politics.3 2. Linked fate: How many members of the ascriptive group see their own fortunes linked to the experiences of others in their group? The concept of linked fate has been articulated most clearly in the study of African American politics4 but has been extended more widely.5 3. Issue alignment: To what extent do members of the ascriptive group view their group as facing unique social and political challenges compared to those of other groups? This is important because even when groups reflect high levels of solidarity due to shared identity and shared linked fate, they may not transform into political groups. To make this transformation, group members must broadly agree about their priorities and their most serious challenges. And, critically, these challenges must be viewed as systemic challenges that are not due to individual failings. Unemployment and low wages may plague members of the working class, for example. Yet, if most see these issues as individual failings of not working hard enough, this viewpoint will prevent individuals from taking actions consistent with group interests6 and hinder the group’s transition to a collective political actor. Indeed, much of the early work on class politics in the United States focused on the puzzle of false consciousness and self-blame,7 a concept extended to the study of other groups.8

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4. Willingness to act in pursuit of group interests: Finally, are members of the group willing to take actions that advance their agenda? The form of this action will necessarily vary. Electoral strategies make sense only when there is partisan alignment.9 When parties do not align—as in the 1950s when neither U.S. party endorsed civil rights reforms, or in the early 1970s when both parties endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment), groups typically take advantage of other opportunities open to them in the political opportunity structure.10 For example, the NAACP focused most of its resources on the courts until they built alliances in the Democratic Party that would enable a legislative strategy in the 1960s. In January 2020, I partnered with Penn State’s McCourtney Institute of Democracy’s Mood of the Nation (MOTN) Poll to ask a series of questions on just this topic.11 Other public polls have asked questions about generational preferences and media use that serve to illustrate broad trends described in this book. But this survey is unique in its explicit attention to the emergence of cohort consciousness and its consequences for electoral politics across the generational spectrum. Respondents were asked to select the generational label that described them best. Then, they were asked about the salience and linked fate they felt with respect to that generation. Likewise, each person was asked about the most important problem facing their generation. My research paper coauthored with my Penn State colleague Eric Plutzer provides more technical detail.12 The wording for the initial question comes from a survey conducted by Pew Research in 2015. At that point, researchers found that 40 percent of Millennials, 58 percent of Gen Xers, and 79 percent of Baby Boomers “consider themselves to be part” of the generation corresponding with their birth year.13 We suspected that these numbers would have gone up in the intervening years, and we were right. Figure 7.1 plots this percentage in the Pew poll conducted in 2015 with the results from the January 2020 MOTN poll. Generational identification has increased for each of the five generations in our study.14 Two of these are something of an artifact of how the surveys were asked. Pew didn’t include Gen Z (the oldest of whom were seventeen at the time), and they included a category for the Greatest Generation. Many of the Silent Generation in the 2015 survey understandably opted for that label (as, amusingly, did 8 percent of Millennial respondents).

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS99

Percent born in range identifying as that generation

80

60

Sample Pew YouGov YouGov core

40

20

0 Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

FIGURE 7.1  Generational identification is on the rise: Every generation reports higher lev-

els of generational identification than they did in a Pew survey from 2015, with the largest growth among younger generations. Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll; Pew Data from https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/09/03/most-millennials-resist-the-millennial-label/.

The largest legitimate increase is among the Millennials, where identification increased by more than half. Boomers were still far and away the most likely to identify with their generation, so while the increase from 79 percent to 81 percent is small in absolute terms, there isn’t that much more identification possible. Furthermore, this isn’t simply a story of older people being more likely to identify with their generation; the Boomers have far higher levels of identification than the generations on either side of them. Gen X saw modest increases, from 58 percent to 64 percent. These comparisons are between the black and dark gray lines in figure 7.1. For comparison, class identification data from the General Social Survey lets us see the percentage of blue-collar workers who self-identified as “working class.” Even when blue collar is defined narrowly to only include

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skilled manual laborers and nonagricultural semiskilled laborers, only 60 percent adopt the working-class label for themselves. The big story here is among the younger generations. Whereas generational identity years ago was weak among the young (look at Millennials in 2015), today it is quite strong. The 56 percent identification among Gen Z is particularly striking; although this only includes people aged 18 to 23, Gen Z is already far more advanced in their generational identification than the much older Millennials were in 2015. The light gray lines in figure 7.1 restrict each generation to what we call its “core”: we exclude people born on the cusp (within one year) of each generational cutoff point. These distinctions are, admittedly, arbitrary. Decreased generational identification among, say, Millennials born in 1981, could stem from either confusion about the precise cutoff or from a genuine lack of shared experience or goals with other Millennials. Eliminating cusp respondents increases generational identification for all five generations, with the largest effects for Gen X and especially Gen Z, but only small effects for Millennials, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. Drilling down on the respondents who are on the “cusp of the cusp” (their age is one beyond the two-year window around each generational cutoff), there is a striking pattern in acceptance of these generational labels. Table 7.1 displays these identification percentages for each of the four generational cutoffs. On balance, there is strong evidence that people are aware of their generational positions with respect to these relatively fine-grained birth-year distinctions. The one exception is at the Millennial/Gen X border: 40 percent of 38-year-olds (technically Millennials, according to the Pew classification) identify as Gen X, compared to 60 percent of 41-year-olds (technically Gen X). The other major pattern is that people just above the cutoff are much less likely to identify with the younger generation than vice versa. Just 5 percent of 25-year-old Millennials identified as Gen Z, and just 7 percent of 41-year-old Gen X as Millennials. The major exception to this trend, and the most robust evidence for the uniqueness of the Boomers, is that 70 percent of 76-year-old Silents adopt the Boomer label. There is some historical ambiguity about the Boomer cutoff, with some accounts including everyone (like these 76-year-olds) born during World War II, but it is consistent with the evidence about the strength of the Boomer

THE EMERGENCE OF COHORT CONSCIOUSNESS101

TA B LE 7.1   Generational

Identity for Those on the Cusp of Pew’s Generational Definitions

Younger Generation (%)

Older Generation (%)

Gen Z / Millennial: Age 22

54

29

Gen Z / Millennial: Age 25

5

67

Millennial / Gen X: Age 38

40

40

Millennial / Gen X: Age 41

7

60

Gen X / Boomer: Age 54

55

20

Gen X / Boomer: Age 57

15

62

Boomer / Silent: Age 73

94

0

Boomer / Silent: Age 76

70

15

generational identity among “core” Boomers that this is a uniquely coherent generational group. Generational identification is common. Overall, 66 percent of the respondents identified with the “correct” generation as operationalized by Pew. If we exclude those right on the cusp of a Pew boundary, we find that more than 60 percent of every generation other than the Silents did so. Widespread generational identification creates at least the potential for collective action.

SUBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PRO B L EMS FACIN G EACH GEN ERAT I ON

A key feature of the MOTN poll is the open-ended responses. For exploratory research like this, where we want to see how cohort consciousness operates, it is essential to understand the generations on the same terms as our subjects. The central question we asked each respondent was “What would you say is the most important problem facing Americans in the [respondent’s

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self-reported generation] today?” The “most important problem” question is standard in public opinion surveys, and it reliably shows that different types of people (Democrats and Republicans, say) have different perceptions of the challenges they or the country face. Figure 7.2 shows that these perceptions vary a lot across generations. The position of the words in each plot represents the relative frequency of each word in the open-ended response by members of each generation. Words positioned farther to the right are more common across all responses; those higher are more commonly used by that generation. The words in the top right corner, displayed in a larger font, are the most common words that are also distinctive to that generation. The Baby Boomers have several worries that we might expect for any older population: Social Security, Medicare, prescriptions, and age discrimination. Gen X has some of the analogous life-cycle concerns (retirement, parents, and Social Security), but right among them is evidence of generational conflict: Gen Xers name both “Boomers” and “Millennials” when asked about what they think are the most important problems. (No one thinks that Gen X is the most important, problem or otherwise.) For Millennials, some of the biggest worries are standard concerns for young people in the United States (stagnant wages and finding a job). And again we see evidence of generational resentment, with both “Boomers” and “Baby Boomers” popping up. But the biggest issues are unique to their cohort and its specific historical context. “Student” and “debt” are the two highest-ranked terms, with “loan” not far behind. And a close third is “climate change,” in concordance with previous research about the importance of this issue to Millennials.15 The contrast to the life-cycle worries that dominate the concerns of the previous generations is striking. These results are in keeping with research on Millennial beliefs and preferences by the political scientists Stella Rouse and Ashley Ross, who go into much greater detail in their 2018 book, The Politics of Millennials.16 Gen Z has by far the most distinctive response, which makes sense because many of them are still in education. The words on the upper left of the plot (abuse, acceptance, bullying) reflect these concerns. Again, the historically specific terms “climate change” and “student debt” dominate the upper right, this time joined by “gun” and “violence.” But the single most distinctive term for this generation is “mental,” referring to mental health or well-being. Depression and anxiety are very common topics of

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll. Data visualization by Burt Monroe.

FIGURE 7.2  Most important issues facing each generation: Each generation has terms it uses to describe the issues facing it. Words to the right are more common in the whole sample; words higher up are especially common for that generation.

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discussion among Gen Z, including as themes in popular music. I’m not an expert on mental illness, so I won’t speculate on the exact causes of this phenomenon except to say that it doesn’t strike me as a positive development that young people feel this way.

SALI ENCE OF GENERATIONA L I DEN T I T Y

It is one thing to identify as a member of a group in response to a survey question. Some of us prefer Coke, others Pepsi, and while this “group membership” can be made temporarily salient in the context of a survey, it plays a decidedly minor role in our day-to-day lives. The next step on the scale of generational identification, then, is precisely the salience of that identification: How much of the time is the respondent aware of their generational identity over the course of their life? We asked each respondent the following question: You said you think of yourself as member of the [Generation]. Some people think about their generation all the time, during many activities. Others only think of themselves as a member of the [Generation] in specific situations where they are reminded of it. How about you? Would you say you think about yourself as a member of the [Generation] • • • •

Almost all the time A lot of the time Just now and then Hardly ever

Figure 7.3 provides a breakdown of generational salience by self-identified generation. A clear majority of those in Gen Z say that they think of themselves in generational terms a lot of the time or more, followed closely by the next youngest generation, the Millennials. Gen X members exhibit the lowest level of generational identity salience and Boomers and the Silent Generation lie in between. The Boomers lagging younger generations is something of a surprise, although this is potentially a result of their higher baseline levels of generational identification.

T H E E M ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 05

Generation Z

Millennial Generation

Generational salience Hardly ever Just now and then A lot of the time Almost all the time

Generation X

Baby−Boom Generation

Silent Generation

0.00

FIGURE 7.3  Generational

0.25

0.50 Proportion

0.75

1.00

salience by self-identified generation.

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

L IN K ED FATE

Some Americans might identify as being unemployed, dog owners, or as Irish—and they might even consider those identities highly salient— but still lack any elements of group consciousness or political solidarity. Another way of thinking about group identification is the extent to which a given individual thinks of their own fate as inextricably linked to the fortunes of a given group as a whole. This line of thinking was developed by the political scientist Michael Dawson, who coined the term “linked fate” to explain why African American group identification has been such

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a consistent and sticky predictor of support for the Democratic Party.17 Although wealthy members of other racial minority groups have tended to shift to the Republican Party out of financial self-interest, African Americans have not. The theory is that, due to their history of oppression in the United States, African Americans are more likely to believe that they cannot advance individually if their race continues to be oppressed. Racist redlining laws are a recent example as to why: even well-off African Americans were unable to secure loans or rent apartments in white neighborhoods because of the pervasive racism in society. There is no way to advance individually without overturning the system. To operationalize this concept, Dawson developed the survey questions that are still the standard in the literature. Later, other researchers demonstrated that the concept of linked fate applies to Americans of other racial groups and that it can apply to other forms of group identity as well.18 Fate linkage with class identity is of a similar magnitude to racial linked fate, with gender and religion weaker but still significant. We extend the concept to measure to what extent what happens to others of their self-named generation has something to do with respondents’ own lives. How much do you think what happens to Americans in the [Generation] will have something to do with what happens in your life? • • • •

Not at all Just a little Some A lot

Overall, the levels of perceived linked fate approach those typically seen for racial and ethnic groups. According to a 2019 Pew survey, 61 percent of whites and Hispanics answered “some” or “a lot,” along with 66 percent of Asians and 73 percent of Blacks. In our survey, 56 percent overall did the same, for generational rather than racial linked fate. But the overall percentage hides important differences across generational groups, which paint a rather different picture than we saw for group identification. Figure 7.4 displays these summary statistics. Gen X is an outlier in their low levels of linked fate (only 7 percent say “a lot,” and the majority say “just a little” or “not at all”); Silents are

T H E E M ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 07

Generation Z

Millennial Generation

Generational linked fate Not at all Just a little Some A lot

Generation X

Baby−Boom Generation

Silent Generation

0.00

FIGURE 7.4  Generational

0.25

0.50 Proportion

0.75

1.00

linked fate by self-identified generation.

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

only slightly higher in each category. Boomers are higher in linked fate than either of these adjacent generations, with over a quarter reporting the highest level. But the youngest generations report the highest average linked fate. Millennials are evenly distributed among the top three categories, with only 8 percent reporting the lowest level. Gen Z’s responses are remarkable; the modal respondent has “a lot” of generational linked fate, and none of the 30 respondents reported “Not at all.” To place this in context, self-identified members of Gen Z are more likely to report generational

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linked fate than Asians, whites, and Hispanics are to report racial linked fate, and only slightly less likely than Blacks.

GE NERATION-BASED ISSUE A LI G N MEN T

A persistent folk theory of political beliefs is that different people subscribe to different “ideologies”—coherent bundles of policy preferences derived from firm moral principles. One problem with this theory is that the bundles of policy preferences are different across countries, and they even change over time within a given country. Even worse, decades of public opinion research has consistently found that very few people have a coherent ideology at all; most people have idiosyncratic preferences on some issues and no real opinion on others. The people who do have coherent ideologies tend to be strong partisans, which makes sense, but it also complicates the idea of ideologies as policy preferences derived from first principles. Instead, these strong partisans tend to learn what positions they should hold by listening to party elites and partisan media. These policy preferences still matter, of course, because they are central to the capacity of groups to apply coordinated pressure to electoral politics. The different agendas revealed in answers to the open-ended mostimportant-problem (MIP) question are striking. But is there evidence of issue alignment among different generations? And is it politically consequential if an individual’s perceived problems are aligned with others in the same generation? That is, if a Boomer ranks climate change and mental health as the most important problems facing her own generation, does that imply anything about that voter’s likelihood of voting based on generational interests? To investigate this systematically, I created an issue alignment score for each respondent based on the whether their named problems were those most often mentioned by members of their own generation. I generated the score by first estimating a multinomial logit model in which the dependent variable is the categorical Pew generations classification and the independent variables are a series of dummy variables coded 1 if the MIP answer was tagged for a particular category and zero otherwise. The models show that the answers highlighted above are

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 09

highly predictive of group membership. For example, for those mentioning the health care system the odds of being a Boomer are more than ten times larger than the odds of being a Millennial, and for those mentioning mental health, the relative chance of being in Gen Z is over four and a half times greater than being a Millennial. Based on these models, I generated predicted probabilities in each group. To illustrate, one Boomer stated that the MIP facing his generation were “democrats,” which was tagged to be in the political threats category. Another mentioned “Losing social security” and “health.” The first was only given 0.21 probability of being a Boomer while the second was estimated to be 0.61. In this way, the predicted probabilities of membership—when predicted solely on the basis of answers to the MIP question—serve as a measure of issue alignment relative to others in the same generation.

WI LL INGN ESS TO ACT POLI T I C A LLY

From the perspective of electoral politics, of course, the most important indicator of generational identity is whether it affects voting decisions. Other politically relevant identities are correlated with preferences for politicians who prioritize issues that are important to members of a certain group. We asked respondents if their vote choice would be affected by a politician saying they would be a “strong advocate for” either younger or older generations; each respondent saw both options in a random order. Suppose a candidate running for office said that the needs of today’s [younger/older] generations were not being met and that candidate would be a strong advocate for the interests of today’s [younger/older] generations. Would that make you More likely to support that candidate Less likely to support that candidate It would not make any difference one way or the other

Figure 7.5a displays the results for a politician who would advocate for older generations. The Boomers are again striking positive outliers.

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Generation Z

Millennial Generation

Support More likely Less likely No difference

Generation X

Baby−Boom Generation

Silent Generation

0.00

(a)

0.25

0.50 Proportion

0.75

1.00

FIGURE 7.5  (a) Support or opposition to candidate advocating for the interests of older generations. (b) Support or opposition to candidate advocating for the interests of younger generations.

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

More of them are more likely to support (and fewer of them are less likely to support) this politician than Gen X and even the Silents, who might naively be expected to be more invested in the interests of older generations. This comports with the results of figure 7.4, where Boomers reported higher levels of linked fate than Silents. Among younger generations, Gen Z are the only ones more likely to punish the elderly-advocating politician than reward them, although Millennials are the least likely to be more supportive of them.

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 1 1

Generation Z

Millennial Generation

Support More likely Less likely No difference

Generation X

Baby−Boom Generation

Silent Generation

0.00 (b)

0.25

0.50 Proportion

0.75

1.00

FIGURE 7.5  (continued)

Figure 7.5b replicates this analysis for a politician who would advocate for the interests of younger generations. Here, both Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to support this politician, although note that the percentage who support this politician is lower than the percentage of Boomers who supported the elderly focused politician. All the other generations are somewhat more likely to support this politician, with the notable exception of the Boomers, the only generation to be more likely to punish the politician advocating for the interests of younger generations.

1 1 2  T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

We have thus far established that generational identity exists. It is salient for many self-identified Millennials and Gen Z, and it is a source of perceived linked fate for many Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. As well, members of each generation perceive different social and political problems as being the most important to their own generation. This contrast raises two key questions. The first is whether these facets of collective potential form a coherent belief system or whether they are largely idiosyncratic. The second is whether these facets of collective identity promote group interest voting. We turn to these next.

H OW DO THESE FACETS OF I DEN T I T Y REL ATE TO ONE A N OT HER ?

Identity salience, linked fate, and issue alignment are all constituent components of politically relevant generational identity. But do they tend to go together? Is a Boomer who thinks of themselves as a Boomer all the time also more likely to hold generationally aligned beliefs about which issues are most important to their generation? To test this, I calculated (polychoric) correlations between these identity facets for each generation, which are reported in table 7.2. These show that salience is positively correlated with linked fate for all. This is the most likely correlation because both measures were derived from similar survey questions having something to do with one’s relationship to their generation. But this correlation implies that if generational identity rises in the coming years, a sense of linked fate will as well. This linkage is strongest for the three youngest generations. The issue alignment measure is derived from a different type of survey question, and we see much lower correlations across the board. Still, there is an intriguing pattern in the correlations between linked fate and issue alignment. Members of Gen Z show a moderate correlation, and Millennials and Silents are somewhat lower still. This may be a function of the nature of the MIP question, which measures issue salience rather than a suite of policy preferences. But it could also reflect the ability of

TA B LE 7. 2  Correlations

Among Facets of Generational Identity by Self-identified Generation

Salience (0–3)

Linked fate (0–3)

Silent (N=59) Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3)

.15

Issue alignment (0–1)

.08

.17

Boomers (N=215) Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3)

.23

Issue alignment (0–1)

.04

.09

Gen X (N=188) Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3)

.41

Issue alignment (0–1)

.27

.08

Millennials (N=227) Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3)

.43

Issue alignment (0–1)

.04

.18

Gen Z (N=51) Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3) Issue alignment (0–1)

.55 −.10

.27

Overall Salience (0–3) Linked fate (0–3)

.35

Issue alignment (0–1)

.04

.16

1 1 4  TH E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

citizens to identify similar issues of concern in the absence of subjective solidarity. However, it makes sense that we observe some correlation for the youngest and oldest generations. Middle-aged people have a much broader range of life experiences and pressing concerns than the very young or very old. Millennials and Silents are plausibly divided on the MIP by their class: poor people who identify either student loan debt or social security as the MIP are also likely to see their fate tied to that of their generation as a whole. This logic explains the Gen Z result as well, given the nature of their issue emphasis: climate change is a universal threat.

WH AT DETERMINES WHETHER GEN ERAT I ON IN FLUENCES VOTE CHOI C E?

While I have established the correlation of these tendencies at the aggregate level, I have not yet demonstrated the individual-level evidence for my theoretical model of how generational identity drives vote choice. To that end, I test whether linked fate, generational salience, or issue alignment are moderators of vote choice. Figure 7.6 plots the estimated levels of vote choice, moderated by generational salience. The underlying regression takes as a dependent variable the same choices as in figure 7.5 (here transformed into a cardinal numeric variable ranging from 1 to 3, where 2 means “No Difference”) and interacts with a categorical variable representing self-identified generation with generational salience (the same four-point scale as in figure 7.5, here transformed into a cardinal numeric variable). The gray dots represent the estimated values for each generation among respondents with the maximum level of generational salience, and the black dots represent the values among those with the minimum level. Over one-third of the sample provides one of these two extreme values. The bars represent 95 percent confidence intervals for the estimates at each extreme level, but note that this number does not easily translate to the significance of each interaction term. The figure includes the associated p-value for each of these interactions.

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 1 5

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

2.4

Generational salience 1 4

2.0

1.6

0.97

0.051

0.183

0.358

0.387

Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

FIGURE 7.6A  Does

generational salience moderate electoral preference for youth-

focused politicians? Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

Figure 7.6a plots the results for a politician prioritizing younger generations; 7.6b the older generations. One macro trend from 7.6a is that members of any of the four oldest generations are more likely to support the youth-focused politician the more salient their generation is. This effect is easily most pronounced and only significant among Millennials, who go from an average of 2.05 to an average of 2.45 across the full range of generational salience. Gen Z is generally supportive of this politician, but this support is not moderated by generational salience.

1 1 6  TH E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

2.8

2.4

Generational salience 1 4 2.0

1.6

0.8

0.529

0.686

0.067

0.428

Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

FIGURE 7.6B  Does generational salience moderate electoral preference for elderly focused politicians?

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

The story in 7.6b is quite different. Boomers are the only generation for whom high-salience respondents are more likely to support the elderly focused politician. None of the other generations have their vote choice moderated by salience. Figure 7.7 replicates figure 7.6 except that the moderator is generational linked fate. The results here are more dramatic. Linked fate has huge effects on the vote choice of the two youngest generations toward a youth-focused politician (see figure 7.7a). For Millennials, moving

T H E EM E RGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 1 7

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

2.5

Generational linked fate 2.0

1 4

1.5

0.135 Gen Z

0

0.431

0.433

0.362

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

FIGURE 7.7A  Does generational linked fate moderate electoral preference for youth-focused politicians?

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

from the lowest to the highest level of linked fate means a shift of 1.02— over half of the entire range of the dependent variable. The trend for Gen Z is large but imprecisely estimated due to the limited sample size; the support of older generations is not moderated by their generational linked fate. Figure 7.7b reveals the consistently self-interested effect of generational linked fate on support for the elderly-focused politician. Boomers and

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

1 1 8  T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

2.5

Generational linked fate 1 4 2.0

1.5 0.519

0.006

0.249

0.081

0.099

Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

FIGURE 7.7B  Does generational linked fate moderate electoral preference for elderly focused politicians?

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

Silents high in linked fate are significantly more likely to support this politician; here is the only case where the Silents are more extreme than Boomers on any analysis we conduct, and the difference is only slight. More striking is the decrease in support for this politician among Millennials high in generational linked fate. Finally, I examine the effect of issue alignment as a moderator of vote choice. Figure 7.8a demonstrates that there are no significant interaction effects for support for the youth-focused politician. Although the graph

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 1 9

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

2.5

Issue alignment 1 4

2.0

0.135

0

0.431

0.433

0.362

Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

1.5

FIGURE 7.8A  Does

issue alignment moderate electoral preference for youth-focused

politicians? Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

shows that going from zero alignment to maximum alignment makes the estimate for younger generations move substantially and in the expected direction, the distribution of the issue alignment variable means that very few respondents are at the extremes and the interaction term is not significant. Figure 7.8b is broadly similar except that Boomers see a more pronounced effect of issue alignment. The p-value of the interaction term is 0.11, and among Boomers with the highest level of generational alignment, the point estimate is 2.8, which is close to the maximum of the scale.

Support (1= Less likely, 3 = More likely)

1 2 0  TH E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

2.5

Issue alignment 1 4 2.0

0.519

0.006

0.249

0.081

0.099

Gen Z

Millennial

Gen X

Boomer

Silent

1.5 Other

FIGURE 7.8B  Does

issue alignment moderate electoral preference for elderly- focused

politicians? Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll.

I S GENERATIONAL CONSC I OUSN ESS AN A L L-WHITE PHENO MEN ON ?

Every individual holds a multitude of identities and the salience of each is contingent on many factors.19 Nonwhite Americans hold identities that are deeply politicized and it is thus likely that additional identities, such as those based on generation, may be less salient and less potent. As a broad test of this possibility, I replicated all of the previous analyses for whites and nonwhites separately. Overall, the trends are similar in whites and nonwhites alike, but the effects are overall larger among whites.

Percent born in range identifying as that generation

Percent born in range identifying as that generation

T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 21

75

50

25

0

Pew

Year YouGov

FIGURE 7.9  Generational

YouGov Core

60

40

20

0 Gen Z Millennial Gen X Boomer Silent

Gen Z Millennial Gen X Boomer Silent

(a)

80

(b)

Pew

Year YouGov

YouGov Core

identification of whites (left) and nonwhites (right).

Source: Penn State McCourtney Institute for Democracy Mood of the Nation Poll; Pew Data from https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/09/03/most-millennials-resist-the-millennial-label/.

In fact, the only serious differences are in the baseline level of generational identification, which are significantly higher among whites than nonwhites.20 Figure 7.9 replicates figure 7.3 with the sample divided this way. The black line, with data from the Pew survey in 2015, is not divided by race and merely serves as a reference. Far and away the largest racial gap in generational identification is among Gen Z. A full 83 percent of “core” white Gen Z identify as such— among whites, second only to core Boomers at 88 percent. In contrast, only 45 percent of core nonwhite Gen Z selected that term as their generation. The Boomers have the second-largest racial gap in generational identification, with the rate dropping to 65 percent among nonwhite Boomers. These generations are large positive outliers; for Millennials and Gen X, the racial gap is in the low single digits. Although it is too early in the Gen Z life cycle to make strong predictions, the evidence we gathered as part of this project points to the emergence

1 2 2  T H E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

of (especially white) Gen Z as a coherent generational entity unlike any except the powerful Boomers. The much-hyped conflict between Boomers and Millennials does not make much more than a ripple in the data, but there may be other important intersectional racial-generational identities that the current data do not capture; there is some evidence of “Millennial/Gen Z Latinos” as a distinct group with respect to attitudes toward climate change, for example.21 Regardless, the coming decade is likely to draw these two largest generations into conflict more explicitly, as their divergent economic issues will make demands of the U.S. government that are in direct opposition. The big question is when generational conflict will break into the political mainstream. The Republicans and Democrats are both still run by Boomers, and the most salient intra-Boomer conflicts still define the central political arena. Rising generational consciousness among younger generations, combined with their growing demographic, economic, and political power, will at some point allow them to gain control of one of the parties and reorient partisan conflict toward the issues that matter most to them: student loan debt, housing, and climate change. In turn, this will cause the other party to double down on Boomer issues like Social Security, pensions, and Medicare.

8 THE ISSUES Zero-Sum Competition

Y

ounger generations are coming into the numerical, economic, and political power to challenge Boomer supremacy. Generational conflict over the past few decades has tended to take the form of “culture war” battles: social issues like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and the role of women in society. While these are all important issues, they did not necessarily entail a generational conflict (except for the Vietnam War and the draft back in the 1970s), and none of them relates to the core functioning of the Boomers’ postwar society, which is increasingly inflected by capitalism thanks to the Boomers’ neoliberal “third way” economic model. The journalist E. J. Dionne makes the case that American politics under President Clinton (the first Boomer president) veered away from serious policy questions toward the symbolic “culture war” conflicts that energize partisans today. In Why Americans Hate Politics, Dionne explains how the logic of advertising and PR took over the presidential election of 1992 and the Republican-led takeover of the House in 1994 under media-savvy member of Congress Newt Gingrich. These institutions were all run by Boomers, and the relevant symbolic cleavage points were intra-Boomer conflicts; indeed, they simply reified the battle lines drawn as a result of differential experiences of the Vietnam War. The Republicans and Democrats both came to appreciate the importance of these symbolic issues,

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and they have increasingly aligned with and thus amplified preexisting sociocultural cleavages. This political climate persists today, although younger generations are trying to shift the narrative battlegrounds. As discussed in chapter 4, the dominance of the two-party system means that most of this conflict has been within those parties, both of which are still dominated by Boomers. The Trump era saw a massive increase in media and political attention to Millennial “culture war” issues around race and gender, but it is striking how little action around these topics is actually possible through federal legislation or even (outside of narrow immigration issues) executive action. I believe that American politics will move beyond these symbolic issues and that the conflicts of the 2020s will explicitly be about the functioning of capitalism. Environmental issues, and especially human-caused climate change, are among the top issues that Millennials and Gen  Z report facing their generation. This is intrinsically at odds with an ideal that prioritizes economic growth over all else. The scope of the problem necessitates a significant national reorientation, one that will upend some long-standing structures of American life. The generational consequences of climate change policy are obvious: regardless of how serious the effects of climate change turn out to be, Boomers will not be around to feel the full brunt of them. Even as temperatures continue to rise, major weather events become more common, and the American West has come to terms with summers of unbroken smoky haze, younger generations understand that the worst is yet to come. In contrast to the “unprecedented affluence and the welfare state” of the Inheritors, Millennials and Gen Z face a glaringly unequal labor market, impoverished social support, and structural exclusion from the housing market, the traditional American path to wealth accumulation. Consider the epidemic of student loan debt, which Millennials currently rank as the second-biggest problem facing their generation. Or the campaign of Millennial-favorite presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All the central plank of his platform. Here, too, there are glaringly obvious generational cleavages. The aggregate student loan debt held by Millennials is many times larger than what Boomers owed, and “Medicare for All” literally means extending to younger

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generations the government benefits Boomers can already expect to enjoy for the rest of their lives. What are the Boomers’ positions on these issues? Looking at their policy priorities and public messaging, it seems to amount to “When I was your age, I worked my way through college and bought my own house; why don’t you just work harder?” Or, in the words of the oldest president in U.S. history, “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break! [Audience laughs and applauds.] No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break.”1 This view may seem contradictory for an older generation that is about to become the primary beneficiary of government spending, but it is entirely consistent with the political and especially cultural revitalization of conservatism after 2008: the Tea Party movement. Subverting the traditional conservative stance against all government spending, Tea Partiers put an explicit emphasis on ensuring that government spending only goes to people who deserved it due to their hard work.2 Although the Tea Party was a right-wing movement, the underlying ethos is at the root of the generational conflict that started with the rise of mocking trend pieces about Millennials in the early 2010s: kids these days are spoiled and don’t work hard enough; people who don’t work hard are not legitimate targets of government support. The resulting disparity in perceived issue importance and preferred policy makes a generational cleavage in politics all but inevitable. The zero-sum distributional consequences for younger and older generations mean that this cleavage is structural. The fiscal status of Social Security— the most explicit age-based policy imaginable—means that the “third rail” of American politics can no longer be ignored. By 2033, absent some reform, the accounts will be insolvent and benefit cuts automatic. The idea that young and old people have different policy priorities is not exactly a revelation. What makes today’s issues (climate change, student loans, housing policy, pensions, Social Security) so potent is that the age cleavage is explicitly part of the policies. It is impossible to evaluate their effects except through the lens of generational differences. The arrow of time points ever forward, and the young can rationally support Social Security today with the expectation that they will one day benefit from the program. But the old know that they will never benefit directly from student loan forgiveness.3

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This logic means that none of the funding for these economic policies can come from retired Boomers through income taxes, the primary revenue source for the federal government. There is one exception here, which is either cutting senior citizen benefits or “means-testing” them to include only people below a certain income level; this is the single reform that this powerful bloc is most united against. Basically, the Boomers believe that if income taxes are used to finance student loan debt forgiveness or climate change amelioration, the same generations who most benefit from those policies should also have to pay for them. In an attempt to flip the generational tables, a new form of taxation is rapidly gaining traction among the young: wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are an antidote to the intergenerational inequality in economic opportunity and wealth accumulation. Unlike taxes based on income, wealth taxes make possible a redistribution of money from wealthy retirees to the working poor. They are thus an explicit form of intergenerational conflict, and I expect that they will become much more salient over the coming decade. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Senator Elizabeth Warren became the most prominent politician to propose such a wealth tax. Her “Ultra-Millionaire” tax would affect households with a net worth over $50 million; while the policy proposal did not specify the generational implications, there are considerably more Boomers than Millennials in that category. The policy decisions of the postwar era have had predictable generational consequences—although they were rarely couched in those terms. These policies have largely been wealth transfers to the Boomers at every stage in their life cycle. The power and coherence of the Boomer bloc has produced a fiscal crisis. The numbers have been clear for decades. While Boomers were still in the workforce, they could have increased taxes/ contributions or means-tested or otherwise reformed benefits; instead, as the ratio of workers to retirees dwindles precipitously, the federal government will be forced to bail out pensions and Social Security (which means higher taxes on the younger generations currently working) or make abrupt benefit cuts. At the same time, younger generations will continue to advocate for generationally targeted subsidies of their own: climate policy, student loan forgiveness, and access to homeownership. The latter two issues are generationally narrow, as they affected relatively few people who entered

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the workforce before the 2008 financial crisis. But within this group, these issues are extremely important for their capacity to achieve any measure of financial stability. The 2020s will be a decade of zero-sum economic conflict about how to assign a fixed amount of federal money across these generations. Indeed, during the writing of this book, the generational consequences of fiscal policy have become more explicit: Biden’s first major policy item as president was the “American Rescue Plan” (informally, “the COVID bill”), with line items addressing two of the five issues to be discussed next— neither of which had much to do with the pandemic. In some ways, if my predictions are correct, the details of this chapter may be out of date by the time you read it.

CL IMATE CHANG E

Despite the record-breaking heat wave in the summer of 2021, climate change is not a central issue in American politics. In 2018, the citizens of most European nations rated climate change as the number-one threat facing their country.4 The number of seats held by the Greens in the European Parliament increased by nearly 50 percent in the 2019 election, making them the fourth-largest party in a fragmented political system. One poll of German domestic politics in 2019 had the Greens just ahead of Angela Merkel’s governing Christian Democratic Union party.5 Across the Atlantic, Americans ranked both ISIS and “cyberattacks from other countries” as more serious threats than climate change.6 In the United States, partisanship has the strongest effect on beliefs that climate change is caused by human actions. Republicans are far more likely to defy the scientific consensus and deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, according to a 2020 Pew survey. Even still, there is significant variation in these beliefs by cohort, even among Republican partisans. That same survey found that 73 percent of Democrats think that human activity contributes “a great deal” to climate change, as do 34 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans. Only 14 percent of Republicans over sixty-five agree.7

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A Gallup poll in 2018 found a similar generational gap, but this time it was in the percentage of each generation who think that “global warming will pose a serious threat in [their] lifetime”: 51 percent of adults under thirty-four but only 29 percent of adults over fifty-five.8 Conditional on the belief that global warming will pose a serious threat at all, this is almost mechanically true, but it bears emphasizing as a potential point of cleavage on this issue. The size of the elderly population also influences another form of generational spending: school budgets. Long-term elderly residents are more likely to support local school expenditures, while elderly migrants are less likely.9 Generally, older people are more likely to oppose these local school expenditures, although the elderly are more favorable toward local school spending than statewide school spending.10 This suggests a potential avenue by which local spending might be self-interested: school quality increases property values. There is no similar local payoff for older people supporting climate change amelioration, an intrinsically global phenomenon. The politics of climate change is not solely concerned with the future. More and more, younger Americans see the wealth accumulated by the older generations as the spoils of environmental exploitation. The massive increase in carbon emissions over the past half century—from five billion tons in 1960 to 35 billion tons in 201511—represents to them the plundering of Earth’s ecosystem and an intergenerational transfer of wealth from all future generations to the small slice of humanity who enjoyed the energy glut of easily accessible fossil fuels. This resentment became the foundation for the proposed funding scheme for the Green New Deal, the most prominent and ambitious attempt to bring climate change to the forefront of American politics. The Green New Deal proposes to overhaul the American economy on the scale of its namesake, spending trillions to expand the use of renewable energy, with the goal of making the country carbon neutral by 2030. Although the initial bill was soundly defeated in early 2019, bill sponsors argued that only a wealth tax could fund it.12 The proposal was endorsed by many of the candidates for the Democratic presidential election primary, including centrists like the eventual nominee Joe Biden. Given the narrowness of Biden’s victory in 2020, it remains to be seen whether the Green New Deal will be enacted into law. Discretionary spending of this magnitude would certainly need to be

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offset by new revenue, or it would foreclose the other Millennial/Gen Z fiscal goal: forgiving student loan debt.

STUDEN T LOAN DEBT

In 2003, there was about $200 billion in outstanding student loans. Since then, this figure has increased by around $80 billion a year. Figure 8.1 uses data from the Federal Reserve to tell the sobering story. By 2018, student loan debt stood at $1.4 trillion. For reference, over the same time, the total amount of credit card debt in the United States has held steady at about $700 billion. Car loans increased from $600 billion to just over $1 trillion. Student loan debt is an issue with explicit distributional implications based on how old you are.

1600

Auto loan Credit card Student debt

1400

Dollars (billions)

1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 2003

2006

2009

2012 Year

2015

2018

FIGURE 8.1  Changing

patterns of debt: Over the past fifteen years, total student loan debt increased by over 500 percent.

Source: Peter G Peterson Foundation https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/05/10-key-facts-about-student -debt-in-the-united-states. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, 2020:Q4.

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The scale of student debt is a new phenomenon. Governmentguaranteed student loans have existed since the 1960s, but they have long been a safe bet: the increased revenue college graduates could expect to earn meant that they could pay them off in a few years, and the absolute amount of debt used to be far lower. The 2008 financial crisis was a shock to this system, as a cohort of graduates entered a decimated economy with their debt and interest payments unchanged. There are three central causes of the student loan debt crisis. The first is the most obvious: college is dramatically more expensive than in the past. As Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted in 2019, “The Boomer generation needed just 306 hours of minimum wage work to pay for four years of public college. Millennials need 4,459.” This nearly 1,500 percent increase renders the Boomer ideal of “working your way through college” laughable; instead, Millennials are working through college and for many years after it to account for the student loan debt they incur. There are many competing explanations for this skyrocketing tuition. Colleges provide a wider range of services than they used to (my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does indeed have a first-rate climbing wall), but that cannot fully explain why many college degrees cost more than most houses. Another part of the story is declining state funding: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that per-student state support for public higher education declined by over 30 percent between 2000 and 2014, with the 2008 financial crisis the main driver.13 Younger generations may be justifiably frustrated that they are being asked to shoulder costs that had previously been financed through taxation. The second reason is that college degrees are more necessary for economic success. Colleges had to be cheap to attract students when they had other opportunities for steady, livable incomes. Being a “company man” who planned to stay with a single firm for his entire career may sound dull, but it was an incentive for those firms to invest in providing on-thejob training. In contrast, as the Millennial author Malcolm Harris argues in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, today’s corporate world is less invested in its workforce and has offloaded the costs of that human capital development to workers themselves. Given the skills demanded by the modern economy, this means going into debt to pay for college.

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The final cause of increased student loan debt (and a likely contributor to the increase in tuition) is the favorable conditions for extending those loans. This is pernicious: expanding access to higher education sounds like a laudable goal for the government, but subsidized student loans were not the way to do it. The post-2008 reforms reduced some of the worst excesses of student loan debt while ensuring the fundamental pathology remained.14 For some reason, the 2010 Affordable Care Act gave the federal government a monopoly on student loans. As late as 2008, nearly two-thirds of these loans came from private banks. This gave the government leeway to expand the “income-based repayment” model, where individuals who took out student loans would have their monthly payments capped at 10 percent of their net income. After twenty years (or ten, for teachers and other government employees), the remaining debt would be forgiven, that is, paid for by other people’s income taxes, and thus no burden on retired Boomers. There are explicit generational consequences of this policy, especially when coupled with the increasing strictness and now near-impossibility of discharging student loan debt through bankruptcy. Clearly, the system wouldn’t work if people could get their degrees, immediately declare bankruptcy, and then move on. But today student loan debt is second only to original sin in indelibility. Bankruptcy and deferred student loan forgiveness both ultimately entail the government taking a loss on student loans, but the timing means that different generations will have to foot the bill. In the aggregate, all of the policy over the past twenty-five years has spared Boomer-run corporations from investing in human capital and Boomer taxpayers from taking on any risk. Individual Millennial borrowers and ultimately Millennial taxpayers, on the other hand, have had to finance their own human capital development through student-debt-financed higher education. Biden’s 2021 “American Rescue Plan” included $1.9 trillion in spending, but none of that went to student loan debt forgiveness. The bill did, however, change the tax status of some kinds of student loan debt, expanding the conditions under which debt forgiveness is tax exempt rather than treated as income (and thus eliminating a potentially hefty tax bill). This change could pave the way for Biden to fulfill his campaign promise to cancel some student debt, but if that happens, it is sure to be far more

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controversial than the obscure tax policy that makes it valuable to individual debt holders.

HOUSIN G POL ICY

Student loan debt is upstream of the Millennial homeownership crisis. The presence of the former as the major financial investment in the early part of the adult life cycle crowds out all other forms of investment, including the down payment on a house. Instead of entering the adult world, with the long time horizon and stability that comes with a thirtyyear mortgage, many Millennials spend their twenties and thirties in a state of arrested development, trying to claw their way out of student loan debt while their rent payments go toward someone else’s mortgage—and that someone else is likely a Boomer. The Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph C. Sternberg’s 2019 book The Theft of a Decade (subtitled How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future) argues that housing policy is central to any analysis of intergenerational wealth. The recent explosion of rents in desirable cities has brought the topic to broader public attention, but the underlying policy choices have been shifting for decades in ways that are difficult to track or straightforwardly assign cause and effect. The first half of any comprehensive analysis of housing policy is understanding how home ownership expanded in the twentieth century. For decades until about 1930, the homeownership rate had been constant at about 47 percent. But the Great Depression brought with it widespread risk of defaults, so the federal government intervened and created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The HOLC inaugurated the now-standard twentyyear amortized, fixed-rate mortgage, and the FHA insured mortgages and encouraged banks to make loans with better terms and lower down payments. The homeownership rate began to rise, and by 1970 it was 63 percent. The GI Bill was a particular boon to the middle-class fortunes of white veterans of World War II, providing financial benefits, including tuition remission for higher education or vocational school, unemployment

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benefits for up to a year, and mortgages with no down payments. The exclusion of Black veterans—either explicitly in the form of Jim Crow or more subtly through redlining—from these programs widened the Black/ white wealth gap that still exists today. The advantages of homeownership are compounded through one of the largest government expenditures currently on the books: the mortgage interest tax deduction, which reduces federal income tax paid by people who make interest payments on a mortgage. When the policy was introduced, it was just one instance of the universal tax exemption on interest—and not a very important one. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913, enabling the federal income tax bill passed later that year, which contained the mortgage interest tax deduction. At the time, however, the goal could not have been to promote middle-class home ownership. For one, only the top 2 percent of households paid any income tax at all. Instead, the motivation was the difficulty for the federal government to measure what kind of interest was “commercial” or “residential” for large family farms or industrial concerns. However, since the Tax Reform Act of 1986 elected to keep this deduction (while simultaneously restricting its breadth to only the top third of households), this massive subsidy to upper-middle-class homeowners has become seen as both essential and even downright patriotic.15 For context, according to a 2006 article in the Duke Law & Technology Review, the tax expenditure of the mortgage interest tax deduction (the taxes that the government doesn’t collect from homeowners) was the second-largest tax expenditure in the country in the 2000s. In absolute terms, this number is projected to be $600 billion from 2018 to 2028. That figure was lowered significantly by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which capped the amount of mortgage principal (for both first and second homes!) at $750,000. This clause expires in 2025, at which point the cap increases back to $1 million. The Treasury estimates that the mortgage interest tax deduction will cost $129 billion in 2028 alone.16 In other words, two decades of the home mortgage interest deduction would approximately cover the cost of forgiving all current student loan debt. The Boomers and their parents enjoyed the largest expansion of homeownership in American history. Simply working salaried jobs allowed them to accumulate wealth. And their advantages in the

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housing market didn’t end there. Sternberg makes a concrete case for the power of Boomer ballast in structuring the federal governments’ response to the 2008 financial crisis. Economic stimulus took the form of the gently named policy of “quantitative easing,” which basically means printing a ton of new money. The Fed could have injected this money into many different parts of the economy (including through a universal cash transfer, as implemented in 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or through small business grants designed to increase employment, which would in practice have helped out the Millennials just starting out in the job market). Instead, per Sternberg, they decided to “revive the housing market by keeping as many Boomers and Gen Xers as possible in homes they could barely afford, while propping up prices so that Millennials would never be able to afford a house.”17 This seems sensible—mass evictions would be terrible for the country, and these homeowners were not solely responsible for the mess of regulatory and private-sector failures that made bad loans possible. But the decision to direct the cash to homeowners had obvious generational consequences. The artificially low interest rates made possible by quantitative easing meant that they were locked in to these houses for decades, unable to afford to move elsewhere because the mortgage lending market had become much more discerning. According to Sternberg’s data, “more than twenty million homeowners refinanced their mortgages between 2009 and 2012, when interest rates were at historic lows.”18 As the labor market became increasingly concentrated in certain desirable cities, this inflexibility was a serious impediment for Millennials entering the workforce to afford houses near where the best jobs were. The newly conservative mortgage industry also made it harder for people to afford homes anywhere, especially if they made their income in the expanding gig economy that was light on the kind of traditional documentation that credit lenders demand. Generational trends in homeownership reflect the aggregate impact of these policies. Figure 8.2 uses data from the U.S. Census to display the differential likelihood of owning a home (either alone or jointly with a spouse) by generation, at each stage of the life cycle. In keeping with their status as adults during the postwar economic boom, the Silents had by far the highest rate of homeownership when they were forty and younger, although the Boomers mostly caught up later in life.

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100

Homeownership rate (%)

80

Silent Baby Boomers Gen X Millennials

60

40

20

0 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49 50–54 55–59 60–64 65–69 70–74 Age FIGURE 8.2  Declining

>75

rates of homeownership.

Credit: Rob Warnock, “Homeownership Rates by Generation: How Do Millennials Stack Up?,” apartmentlist.com, March 17, 2020, https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership -by-generation. U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Surveys, 1976–2019.

In contrast, Millennials have been at a significant disadvantage in homeownership compared to both Boomers and Gen X. By the age of thirty-two, more than half of each of these older generations owned their home, a mark that Millennials did not reach until they turned thirty-seven. Nowhere are the generational consequences of housing policy more pronounced than California. The cause of (or perhaps blame for) what I describe in this chapter can generally be chalked up to the shifting shape of the age pyramid and broad shifts in the American economy. The charitable interpretation would be that Boomers just got lucky. The size of their generation meant that any issues facing them became issues the country could not ignore. Californian housing policy in the postwar era, in contrast, is a brazen wealth grab by Boomers that has hamstrung one of the most productive regions in the history of the world. This is an emotional issue for me: coastal California is a paradise, blessed by stunning natural beauty and a perfect climate. It has been the center of the cultural and technological world for over a decade.

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For all the progressive posturing by California’s politicians, the state’s 1978 Proposition 13 is one of the most regressive housing policies imaginable. It is an explicit and massive transfer of wealth to the people who already owned houses in the state when it was passed—and their direct descendants (or whoever inherits the house when they die). Take the example of actor Jeff Bridges. According to a 2018 article in the Los Angeles Times, he and his siblings inherited a stunning beach house in Malibu in 2009. (Bridges’s father was Lloyd Bridges, the actor who famously chose the wrong week to quit drinking/smoking/sniffing glue in the classic Boomer film Airplane!) Because the property was never sold but rather acquired in the old-fashioned (like, medieval, primogeniture vibes) way, the only mechanism for increasing its assessed property tax is the 2 percent year-on-year cap. The house was last assessed in 1975, so by 2017, Bridges and his relatives were paying $48,000 a year in property taxes. That sounds like a lot, but compared to estimates of the house’s value, they would in fact be paying over $300,000 a year in property taxes in the absence of Prop 13.19 Bridges claimed that he was “shocked” to find this out; in this respect, he is not alone.20 California’s self-serving Boomers will probably depart this mortal coil unpunished for their housing crimes. But it is possible that they will live to see the collapse of another generational pyramid scheme, underdiscussed in national policy debates but a crucial component of Boomer wealth: pensions. At present, despite the particularly weak state of California’s pension finances, there are approximately 80,000 Californians receiving over $100,000 a year in pensions.21

PRIVATE PEN SIO N S

When I began my career as an assistant professor at Penn State, I could opt into one of two employer-supported retirement plans. One of them took the form familiar to many Millennials with full-time jobs: a tax-deferred 401(k) into which I could deposit a portion of my paycheck, partly matched by an employer contribution. The other plan, however, took my breath away. Upon retirement, I would be guaranteed a lifetime defined-benefit pension. The formula for

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the annual benefit was 2.5 percent of my highest annual salary multiplied by the number of years I worked in the university system (this also serves as an enticement to stay in one job for my whole career). So, hypothetically, if I became a wildly successful and popular fixture at Penn State, eventually promoted to a full professor making as much as the highestpaid member of my department, then my pension after my retirement at seventy would pay out $120,000 a year until I die. The conditional life expectancy of a seventy-year-old man (and this is assuming zero medical advances over the next forty years) is around fifteen more years. That pension would be worth $1.8 million. I went with the nonstandard 401(k) option, rejecting the kind of retirement plan available to a sizable minority of Boomer professionals who spent most of their careers at a single institution. Upon retirement (in terms of the present value of their pensions) they become millionaires. But my reaction to the defined-benefit plan, which I suspect many of my Millennial compatriots share, was that I literally don’t believe you. That is, despite the explicit terms in the contract, ostensibly guaranteed by the state of Pennsylvania, I expect the plan to go bankrupt before I retire. These plans were only possible under economic and demographic conditions that no longer exist. Although most private-sector retirement plans have shifted to the defined-contribution 401(k) model, many public-sector employees like me are still operating on defined-benefit plans. This sounds like a great deal for them, but the math does not add up at all. Many state and local governments will face a serious reckoning—most of them after Boomers have gotten their generous retirement benefits, but not all. Sternberg cites estimates of the proportion of state government pensions that are “funded” at between 34 and 66 percent.22 That means that they have currently stockpiled between a third and two-thirds of the funds they need to meet the pensions they have promised. The rest of the money must come from current employees paying more into the system or their investments performing better than expected. The problem is that the assumed annual rate of return for the latter was 7.6 percent—an unrealistically optimistic number.23 That same report suggested that the economic downturn in the wake of COVID-19 had already added an estimated half a trillion dollars to the aggregate funding gap. The shift to privately held defined-contribution plans also means that a generation of private-sector workers (mostly Boomers) are currently

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atop something that looks a lot like a pyramid scheme that has stopped growing. A report by the Social Security Administration says that about half of Boomers will receive some amount of defined-benefit revenue in their retirement, although only 20 percent of workers were participating in pensions in 2008.24 The Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund is the first large private pension fund that is expected to fail—and that will happen sometime in the mid-2020s. A combination of overoptimistic assumptions about investment returns and (more importantly) a diminished ratio of workers paying into the fund to retirees drawing benefits means that the fund is already running at a $2 billion deficit, with a $40 billion total fiscal gap.25 Simple accounting shows that the fund will run out completely in 2025. The federal entity designed to serve as a guarantor to private pension plans—Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)—is so meager that this first large pension “bankruptcy” will drive the guarantor into deficit spending. Thomas Nyhan, the executive director of the Central States pension plan, didn’t mince words: “We’ll take the PBGC down for sure, there’s no doubt about it.”26 That will mean an immediate and sizable benefit cut for everyone covered by Central States. Worse still, when the PBGC’s trust runs out, the only source of pension payments will be the meager annual dues from active Central States Teamsters—meaning benefit cuts of 90 percent or more for the hundreds of thousands of retirees who hold no private retirement funds outside of this plan. Government relief will (understandably) become an overridingly important issue for these people and their families. Bruce Cannon Gibney argues that it is “improbable that the government will let pensions wholly collapse, any more than it was willing to let major banks fail in 2008. . . . It will be through the Host of the PBGC that liabilities are transubstantiated into intergenerational welfare.”27 Although plan administrators have been in denial about the extent of this problem, the unavoidable truth is that the shift away from private pensions makes the plans as designed unsustainable. The math just does not work. The transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans will produce a crunch, but this is the least of our worries. The structural problem is the ratio of retirees to workers. In 1950, that ratio was 16.5: put another way, six retirees for every hundred workers. By 2017, the ratio

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was 2.8, and it is projected to reach 2.1 by 2035. That’s nearly fifty retirees for every hundred workers.28 Gibney’s analysis was resoundingly vindicated with the 2021 Biden bill, which included an eye-watering $86 billion of no-strings-attached cash to bail out these large, multi-employer pension funds. This move ensures that the Boomers holding these pensions will get the full value while doing nothing to address the underlying conditions that caused the problem in the first place. I confess that I’m tempted to switch retirement plans myself.

SOCIA L SECURITY

The most famous age-based policy has been a wild success. Elderly poverty has dropped precipitously due to the program, which continues to enjoy broad support. According to the policy feedback theory developed by the political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell, these two facts are tightly linked. The passage and expansion of Social Security played a significant historical role in the conception of senior citizens as a coherent political force.29 In contrast to most issues, low-income seniors are even more likely to advocate for Social Security than are wealthy seniors—and there’s a lot more of the former than the latter.30 Another potential rationale for this success is what some political scientists call “compassionate politics.”31 Even the young, who do not immediately benefit from Social Security, report strong support for the program based on their sense that the elderly are in need. This view is in contrast to traditional psychological justifications for government transfer programs, which tend to be grounded in a sense of “deservingness.”32 This “deservingness” is not always explicitly acknowledged and is sometimes filtered through racial resentment, as in the tendency for some white voters to oppose government transfers to racial and ethnic minorities, demonstrating the limitations of nonuniversalist logic for government spending.33 But there’s a normative paradox in compassionate politics: “Program support thus depends centrally on continuing stereotypes of older people as helpless and needy, a view that may be increasingly challenged by demographic statistics that highlight the elderly’s growing affluence and power.”

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This final clause is something of an understatement. Although they still support Social Security, younger generations are increasingly convinced that there won’t be anything in it for them. A 2015 Gallup poll suggests a stark age divide. When asked, “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” 64 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine and thirty to fortynine answered “No.” Only 30 percent of Americans aged fifty to sixty-four said the same. Only 6 percent of Americans over sixty-five and not yet retired agreed.34 The next decade will see a crisis. Without reform, in 2033, the retired elderly will immediately lose 23 percent of their income from the program. This is not a surprise. The politics of Social Security are contentious and resist reform. The last attempt was George W. Bush’s post-2004 effort to privatize individual retirement accounts, which became one of the defining domestic policy failures of his presidency. Despite a unified Republican government and an unambiguous commitment to the reform (“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it”),35 the one serious attempt to fix Social Security over the past forty years was a spectacular failure. The political scientist R. Douglas Arnold has written extensively on Social Security and the hardball generational politics and game-theoretic logic that have prevented any kind of reform. In 2015, he wrote an article on “why Congress has avoided fixing Social Security when the solutions were relatively affordable and when the baby-boom generation could have helped pay its share of the costs.” The problem began with the enthusiastic expansion of the program between 1935 and 1973. Many laws were passed, all increasing the benefits given to retirees. In the process, however, the underlying budget for the system switched from an advance-funded system—“I pay directly into the reserve that I will one day use”—to a system in which current workers finance current retirees. This outcome was politically desirable: politicians produced visible benefits and made the costs disperse and difficult to observe. But the system reached a crisis in 1977 and again in 1983 due to the simple arithmetic of payments in and benefits out. Each time, Congress had to pass legislation increasing the revenue for the system by raising tax rates and expanding the tax base, for example, by raising

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the retirement age from sixty-five to sixty-seven. These reforms were only possible, Arnold argues, because crises in Social Security funding would have led to automatic benefit cuts in the absence of any action. We are inevitably approaching another of these crises as the “peak retiree” years loom. The problem could have been addressed equitably and at tolerable cost. Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, which is currently 12.4 percent of wages, evenly split between employer and employee. The actuaries at the Social Security Administration estimate that the entire problem could have been solved in 2015 by increasing the payroll tax by 3.1 percentage points, to 15.5 percent. In 1992, a similarly effective reform would have required an increase of only 1.6 percentage points, to 14.0 percent. Every year that passes makes this style of reform more painful because of a failure of the “baby boomers to contribute to repairing Social Security, pushing all costs on successor generations.”36 Instead, when the crisis arrives, Arnold’s analysis suggests that there is only one feasible option: increasing the tax base. In 2020, only the first $137,700 in a worker’s annual wages are subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This amount is indexed to wage inflation.37 Eliminating this cap (and not similarly eliminating the cap on benefits received by high earners after they retire) would instantly address 82 percent of the issue. This would entail a massive tax increase on top earners. In Arnold’s example, a banker making a million dollars a year currently pays $7,347 in Social Security taxes (matched by their employer). If the cap were eliminated, they would pay $62,000. If we reach 2033 with no reform, Arnold thinks we will soak the rich. The millionaire banker is not a sympathetic figure, but even still, this solution lets Boomer millionaire bankers (and Boomer lawyers, doctors, and members of Congress) off scot-free. A graphical representation of these numbers might help them stick. Figure 8.3 uses data from the Social Security Administration’s 2019 report to illustrate how we got here. The scheduled benefits line plots the benefits paid out to seniors, and the dedicated revenues line the amount of revenue the SSA takes in; both are measured as the percentage of the aggregate payrolls for that year. From the mid-1980s to 2010, the system ran a surplus; ever since then, the benefits have outpaced revenues, with the difference paid out of the accumulated trust fund.

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20

Scheduled benefits 16 Payroll (%)

4.1% Payable benefits Dedicated revenues

12

Trust fund exhaustion: 2035

8 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 FIGURE 8.3  The

coming crisis in social security.

Source: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Analysis of the 2020 Social Security Trustees’ Report,” April 22, 2020, https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2020-social-security -trustees-report. Data from Social Security Administration.

The revenue line has remained flat at 13 percent since 1990, which makes sense in the absence of any policy changes. There have also been few policy changes in benefits, but the benefits line has skyrocketed from around 10 percent in 2000 to a projected 16 percent by 2035, the year the trust fund will be exhausted. One of those two lines will have to change in the next fifteen years. Either the benefits line will go down, meaning seniors get less money than they expect, or the revenue line will go up, meaning younger generations will have to pay more in payroll taxes than any generation previously. This explicit generational conflict could have been avoided if the revenue line had been moved up at any point in the past thirty years. Instead, Boomers and the politicians they voted for kicked the reform can down the road. On this topic in particular, the situation has been so obvious for so long that it is difficult not to acknowledge the legitimacy of youthful grievance. If my analysis is correct, these five issues will become more central to electoral politics in the coming decade. The more that Millennials can act as a coherent group to apply pressure to politicians, the sooner this will

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take place, but on this topic the long-term demographic trends are inevitable. Immediate success is likely to hinge on their effective use of modern communication technology to organize outside of the legacy institutions still controlled by Boomers. Thus far, I have primarily cited changing communication technology as a contributing factor to the emergence of generational identity among the young, first with the television of the Boomers and now with the social media of Millennials and Gen Z. But the current information technology revolution has reshaped the lives of everyone, and given the reality of Boomer ballast, its impact on this aging generation has been significant— and, as I will argue, disastrous.

9 TECHNOLOGY AND ALIENATION

O

n April 10, 2018, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before Congress as part of an investigation into the company’s privacy practices. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal data of users was harvested so political ads could be targeted at them, Congress hoped that Zuckerberg’s testimony would clarify what had happened and what steps Facebook might take to prevent it from happening again. Unfortunately, that was not the headline from the hearing. Instead, it became a question asked by the Utah senator Orrin Hatch, a question that revealed how poorly the eighty-four-year-old understood Facebook. While media and technology experts were concerned about Facebook’s potentially monopolistic power, Hatch seemed concerned about Facebook’s future: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Zuckerberg could not contain his smirk when he responded, “Senator, we run ads.” Not to be outdone, a few months later Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, participated in a congressional hearing on technology. Although there were a number of tough questions about Google’s role as the arbiter of information and potential political bias, the toughest question he faced was from sixty-nine-year-old Steve King, a member of Congress from Iowa. King grilled Pichai about an incident in which a profane political ad

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appeared on his seven-year-old granddaughter’s iPhone. Pichai patiently explained to King that the iPhone was not a Google product. The elderly, even those with the resources of members of Congress, have more difficulty adapting to new information and communication technology. This is a huge problem for how American institutions in which Boomer Ballast is especially pronounced, like the federal government, govern the use of these technologies. And the problem applies to society at large, not as regulators but as users. The seriousness of this problem has only become clear in the last few years, as use of the internet and social media has become the norm among the elderly. As more Boomers retire and more of social and political life is lived online, the need to ensure that they can healthily participate in online spaces will only become more acute. Political scientists have only recently come to appreciate the fact that the experience of elderly social media users is distinct. After the 2016 presidential election, researchers paid extensive attention to the problem of “fake news” shared on social media. Several separate research teams, all using different methods and collecting their own samples from multiple social media platforms, came to the same conclusion: older people viewed and shared more fake news than younger people did. A lot more. There are several plausible reasons why, but the one with the most empirical support is that older people have much less of what scholars call “digital literacy.” That is, they are less able to navigate the internet and find, verify, and share the information they would like to. Today the fastest-growing population of Facebook users in the United States is adults over the age of sixty-five.1 It is important not to overstate the case. The view of younger generations as “digital natives” who intuitively and effortlessly use new technology is naive and incorrect: younger people are indeed attuned to the social dynamics of how their peers use this technology, but that does not mean that Gen Z optimizes their digital media use for perfect awareness of political trends.2 And the same body of research that consistently finds that older people both view and share more fake news also finds that they are less likely to report holding false beliefs, both about politics and about COVID-19.3 This chapter discusses how older people use social media and the internet for politics and why it matters. In the modern social media era, from

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around 2010 and until at least 2030, two trends have converged upon the Boomer generation and will continue to affect them. The first is that they are nearing the end of their lives, making them ill-positioned to adapt to changing technology and norms. The second is that the world is experiencing an epochal shift in communication technology, actively upending all of the seemingly permanent informational institutions and practices established for the era of mass media. Even I—a relatively young academic who studies digital media professionally—feel overwhelmed by the deluge of technological changes. The situation for older people is dramatically worse. People accumulate knowledge of how the world works throughout their lives. But the world changes faster and faster, and much of the knowledge that Boomers gained throughout their lives is now knowledge of how the world used to work. So, yes, “fake news” is a predictable consequence of the confluence of Boomer ballast and the internet revolution. (Overall, I prefer to frame the problem as one of informational fraud, as scammers and grifters take advantage of this vulnerable population for economic and political ends.) But the exaggerated attention paid to misinformation is in some sense naively optimistic: the “misinformation” label implies that our societal problems are merely technical and can be solved with better content moderation. The reality is much bleaker. Social media allows the people our society has left behind an opportunity for revenge, a place to inflict their misery on the happy people who would have otherwise continued ignoring them. And while there are miserable people in every generation, Boomer ballast means that more of them are older and are starting to grapple with the inevitable decline occasioned by aging. Until recently, American society had successfully banished older people from public life, enlisting an army of caretakers to manage their senescence. Our youth-obsessed culture would prefer that old people just go away. Social media entails the genuine democratization of communication; the twentieth-century strategy of physically removing nonnormative people from society (Foucault describes the prison and the asylum, but the nursing home is the contemporary addition) will no longer work. This is a good thing! It means that we will be forced to take better care of each other; our information ecosystem can only be fixed by repairing the social decay of the past decades.

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But any solutions are far off, and we’re not even making progress yet. The combination of the aging and alienated but still powerful Boomers with the internet revolution is the defining social crisis of the coming decade.

WHO IS THE IN TERN ET ?

In the twentieth century, it was obvious who made our broadcast media. The technology needed to produce television and radio was expensive, which limited the supply of media. Only very large corporations could compete in television broadcasting, and the companies and personalities behind television were household names and faces; it was a rare citizen indeed who could name the president and his party without also being able to identify Walter Cronkite at CBS Evening News. Identifying who consumed this media was only slightly more difficult. Radio technology rapidly penetrated the fabric of American life, going from 10 percent of households to 90 percent in twenty-three years that included both the Great Depression and World War II, as shown in figure 9.1. Television was adopted even faster. Black and white television made the analogous 10–90 percent penetration jump in only thirteen years, from 1951 to 1964: the heart of the Boomer birth range. This was also the time when market research like the Nielsen ratings system allowed for a rough but generally accurate picture of how many and what kinds of people were watching certain shows.4 This meant that it was tractable to trace and understand the dynamics of the production and consumption of these linear broadcast technologies. There were a reasonably small number of different media products a given consumer could select from at any given time. The top-down, largescale production of these media products also made them legible to the researcher, and their impact on society was rapid and widespread. The internet is different in every respect. It took many years to develop, and during this time, its only consumers tended to also be its producers. Only people with specialized skills could even access online media, which began as written text. This early online media was thus produced

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and consumed by a small number of professionals in academia and tech companies, gradually expanding to geeky hobbyists with enough free time and disposable income to purchase and use the complicated hardware required to access it. Although early online media had fewer consumers than broadcast media, it had dramatically more producers. Further, online media is not temporally constrained, so any consumer at any time can choose between anything that has ever been produced. In this respect, online media is like print media, except that the former is naturally searchable and more accessible than even a well-staffed library. And newspapers, news magazines, and radio are also constrained by geography—although there are many producers in aggregate, a given consumer has access to only a handful of them. Here, again, online media is unconstrained. From the very beginning, online media was intrinsically more varied than any other media format, in terms of both the sheer number of competing media products and the range of styles, topics and opinions they covered. Throughout the internet’s history, various entities (originally “portals” and now “platforms”) have come to dominate web traffic. A huge percentage of sessions have begun at, say, Yahoo!, Facebook, or Google, but this concentration disguises the fact that everyone’s experience at each of these sites is unique. I can never step in the same newsfeed twice, let alone the same newsfeed as my friend. This claim about media heterogeneity (the variance in media consumers’ experiences made possible by the massive selection) begs the question: What do we mean by “media”? Again, our intuitions about a clean distinction between media and not-media are an artifact of the top-down broadcast technology of the twentieth century. The internet—and especially the social web that has dominated since the late 2000s—is an intrinsically horizontal platform. Instead of a small number of capital-M Media firms handing down Media products for mass consumption, people are using communication technology to talk directly to one another. Instead of the “unmediated” experience of talking face-to-face, however, they’re communicating through various digital media objects like Instagram photos, Facebook posts, YouTube comments, and TikTok videos. For the past fifty years, television has been the dominant medium for political communication. The total supply of television content is constrained by the cost of production and distribution; for years, this meant

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exactly three channels per household. So, with a small number of notable exceptions, the dominant theories of media effects were focused on homogeneity: watching television had the same effect on everyone.5 The internet inverts this. Individual experiences are so distinct that heterogeneity should be the baseline expectation: consuming digital media has different effects on everyone. This represents a special kind of challenge for journalists, scholars, and anyone else interested in understanding digital media. The analyst’s broadcast television diet was necessarily quite like the broadcast television diet of the average consumer; the opposite is true for digital media. In her book Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America, the political scientist Jaime Settle makes a compelling case for developing new theories based on premises that reflect this new reality. In particular, she demonstrates the limitations of researcher-imposed definitions of “political” or “media.” People who spend more time scrolling their Facebook newsfeeds have a larger conception of whether which posts are “political.” Over time, the online experiences of people who use the internet often and those who don’t become increasingly distinct. Scrolling Facebook affords an unprecedented density of information about weak social ties. In the past, you might have been friendly with your kids’ soccer coach, and a glimpse of the bumper stickers on her car might tell you her broad political leanings. If you become Facebook friends, however, you can be fed a stream of her favorite quotes from the Dalai Lama, pictures of her meeting the Democratic primary candidate Marianne Williamson, and her salutory views on Taylor Swift’s recent turn away from hedonistic pop toward hipster folk. You might learn that your long-lost high-school acquaintance runs a small landscaping business started with profits from an early investment in cryptocurrency, has an unorthodox position on Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship president, and is a proud member of the #YangGang. Although these “weak ties” are more likely to be culturally and politically similar to you than a random sample of the population would be, they’re significantly more diverse than the people about whom you could observe this kind of personal information in the world before social media. Repeated exposure to the expressed political beliefs of the subset of friends who broadcast these beliefs (naturally, a group that’s more politically engaged and extreme than average) as well as their nonpolitical

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Facebook posts allows people to draw a network of connections between cultural and political tastes and preferences. Even if you don’t know anything about Democratic primary candidate Andrew Yang, some of your learned associations with Bitcoin and mixed martial arts spill over as you see them correlated in your friends’ feeds. Sociologists mining decades of the General Social Survey have found robust evidence for what they call “lifestyle politics,” the association between partisanship or ideology and preferences for consumer goods and leisure activities.6 Think of “latte liberals” or “hunting conservatives.” But Settle argues that the number of such politically laden preferences is much larger among habitual Facebook users. The technological affordances of online media allow for more varied content, expanding the scope of “politics” beyond the evening news or a cable talk show. This variety has only increased over time, as more types of people and organizations produce that content. But this is only one source of increased heterogeneity of media effects. Unlike a radio or television broadcast, where the range of the experiences among adults exposed to a given piece of content is limited, the range of the experiences among adults exposed to online media is extremely wide, at least for the internet audience of the late 2010s. These experiences are created at the intersection of a media consumer and a piece of online media. One classic model of political sophistication—how much people know about the political events of the day—conceives of the acquisition of political information as a process with three inputs: access to that information, the motivation to acquire it, and the ability to process it.7 Information access has clearly increased with the web, and there is evidence that rising education levels has increased the ability to process it.8 The key complication is that the difficulty of acquiring political information on social media is much higher than in other modalities—and that ability is currently highly heterogeneous and strongly correlated with age. But again, we should not oversimplify: older people are on average better informed than young people, at least in terms of standard measures of “political knowledge” like awareness of which party controls which chamber of Congress or how many Supreme Court justices there are. Social media are far less revolutionary in terms of “political knowledge” than

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they are in terms of social knowledge—which is more important for how politics actually works. The type of people who are best positioned to analyze developments in the internet or online media are those who have been on the internet all along: they are educated, tech-savvy, and knowledgeable. Due to the cliquey nature of online networks, they have mostly interacted with each other. To them, the most interesting developments in online media have been changes that affected their experiences: new platforms, new publishers, new hardware, new algorithms, and new terms of service.9 This fundamentally top-down theoretical framework misunderstands the relationship between production and consumption on the social web. The intuitions of these commentators were developed by the dominant media technology of the past several decades: mature broadcast television. In this context, with high audience penetration, a medium that can be consumed easily and passively, and regulatory and technological barriers to entry, it makes sense to focus on media production.10 None of this is true on the social web, and as Settle argues, the transfer of traditional media scholarship that focused on top-down information flows was an impediment to the development of theories that better model the social web: “The conceptualization of social media as a tool of the elites and the media may be facilitated by methodological path dependency . . . favoring a top-down model of political information dissemination on social media” (61). Settle argues that we should retheorize Facebook, taking as a premise the way that people actually use it. They scroll their newsfeed to learn about developments in their social circle, in the process developing a denser and broader network of social and political cues. So what does the experience of the billions of people scrolling through online political media look like if we put it through that same sort of reorientation, emphasizing the staggering heterogeneity in both the producers and consumers of online media? This heterogeneity is both historically novel and here to stay. Although there are many dimensions to it, the primary explanatory dimension here is age. The 2016 U.S. presidential election made it clear that it was not Millennials whose engagement with online media needed to be better understood—rather, it was the Baby Boomers’.

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OL D AGE AND DEC LI N E

Much of the received wisdom about how aging itself affects politically relevant processes is overblown. People are indeed slightly more likely to become more conservative—not more liberal—as they age, but mostly political beliefs do not change much over the course of one’s life. However, we all know that aging is real. It is a universal human experience, with predictable physical effects that are familiar to everyone. Our eyesight gets worse. Our fine motor skills decay. The hair on our bodies shifts. And the first two of those affect our relationship with media. The bestcase scenario might be a large-screen television, very bright, with adjustable volume and a simple remote for navigating channels. Radio is the same. Newspapers are also fairly easy to manipulate, since they can be held as close to your face as you need. But how do fading fine motor and sensory skills change how we interact with the contemporary digital media environment? The hardware and software that govern online political communication are designed for the young and by the young, with sharp eyes and nimble fingers. This is one reason that the issue of accessibility is receiving increased attention in both academic and industry circles. But new tech is always striving to appeal to the early adopters who chase after the hottest new developments, and those people tend to be younger. It is a physical challenge for older people to use digital media technology, and the problem is not going to go away without serious effort to improve both the hardware and software that structure digital media. There is also evidence that the internet is rewiring some of the cognitive processes that are central to our practice of democratic politics, but only among younger generations. For example, research shows that political knowledge is a strong predictor of issue-position stability, but recent work suggests that this relationship is now reversed for people who belong to the “internet generation.”11 People for whom searching for information online is second nature do not need as much political information stored in their brain because they can access that information in their digital memories. Accordingly, people are better at remembering where to find information than the information itself. This makes them think they are more knowledgeable than they actually are.12

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This cognitive shift has not taken place among older generations. Boomers cannot take full advantage of the contemporary media-technological environment. And they will never adapt to it because cognitive patterns are much more flexible among the young. According to one paper in the early days of broad internet adoption, these effects are driven by an aspect of old age which had fallen below the radar of most political scientists, that age “may be associated with declining cognitive abilities.”13 This is obviously a sensitive topic, but it’s one on which there is an absolute scientific consensus. Although the timing and rate of cognitive decline varies dramatically, it is inevitable for everyone who lives long enough. The authors of the 2008 study conclude that their findings are likely to affect political cognition during elections—as the population ages over the twenty-first century, correct voting (meaning voting for the candidate whose policy positions best match the voter’s own stated policy preferences) in primaries is predicted to decrease by 4 percentage points due to the aggregate effects of cognitive decline among the electorate.

THE EL DERLY AND FAKE N EWS

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 came as a shock. Although polls before the election suggested that the result would be close, consumers of mainstream news media did not seem to think Trump had a chance. Within a week of the election, as scholars and pundits scrambled to explain what happened, one theory rose to the top. Many Trump voters were not consuming news from the mainstream media (the theory goes) but were instead being fooled by “fake news” stories posted on low-quality or deceptive websites and shared on Facebook.14 Theories about why people shared fake news abounded. The most incorrect was that the Russians were the primary actors and that their disinformation campaign was an unprecedented act of war that had corrupted our otherwise pristine political media ecosystem. Reactionary efforts to discredit the results of an election are a hallmark of democratic backsliding. The most common explanation for the rise of fake news had to do with confirmation bias, the tendency for people to be less skeptical of news

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that fits their worldview. This has some baseline plausibility, but universal human psychological explanations like these have some trouble explaining dramatic change. Before theorization about the mechanisms underlying fake news could improve, we needed better descriptive information about the scope of the problem. In 2016, the political scientist Andy Guess had already been developing just the tools to produce this kind of knowledge. Data from any individual platform—say, from the popular Twitter Application Programming Interface that provides so much of the data underlying academic research on social media—are necessarily selective and incomplete. Guess instead invited survey respondents to install a plugin to their web browser to allow him to collect the entirety of their browsing history.15 Guess and his coauthors reached two main results from the data.16 First, the overall prevalence of fake news on Facebook is less than you might think. Although some people did see and share multiple fake news stories, these people were very rare, and they were likely to share fake news among themselves, limiting the overall reach. Second, and more important for us, they found that users over sixty-five shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group. In the world of media effects studies, this degree of heterogeneity is basically unheard of, and it demands an explanation. Some of this disparity can be explained by the composition of the newsfeeds of people of different ages. People are more likely to be friends with someone the same age as them, so if older people are sharing more fake news, they are also seeing more fake news appear in their news feed. But this can only amplify the effect, not explain its origin. Another possibility is that this is uniquely a problem of Guess’s method, or of the sample he studied, or perhaps it is limited to Facebook. This seems unlikely, however, because equally careful research by two additional research groups—this time studying Twitter—found similar results. The computational social scientist Pablo Barberá has, for many years, conducted what he calls a “Twitter panel.” Much of the research using Twitter data is hampered by the fact that finding a sample of people by searching for hashtags or tracing follower networks can produce a nonrepresentative picture of what’s actually happening on the platform. Barberá had the simple but brilliant idea to use the numerical “user ID” assigned to each Twitter account to create a truly random sample of Twitter users.

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Using machine learning and a dataset of Twitter users with demographic information, he was able to estimate the age, race, gender, and partisanship of everyone in the random panel. He had the panel in place well before 2016, so it was relatively straightforward to go back and see which people shared fake news. In a study he published in 2018, Barberá reported that people over sixtyfive shared roughly four and a half times as many false news stories on Twitter as people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. A third research team from Northeastern University began with a list of registered voters and matched them up with Twitter accounts. Though this was laborious, it had the distinct advantage of analyzing only people who might actually vote, which is the cohort generally of the most interest to political scientists studying elections. This also eliminates the risk that bot accounts are included in the analysis. Their sample represented approximately 3.7 percent of all voters with Twitter accounts, and they too found robust statistical evidence that older people are more likely to have shared false news. Three research teams were not intending to study older people. Age was simply one of the variables they had access to in their data, and the relationship with sharing fake news just jumped off of the regression table. A reasonable question, given the consistency and magnitude of these findings, is why scholars didn’t notice the trend of the age-based heterogeneity of online media effects until after 2016. I have three answers. First, they did notice, or at least they reported similar findings. We need look no further than the single most famous paper based on an online political experiment.17 A team of academic researchers and Facebook data scientists (who were so excited about the magnitude of their study that they put the sample size in the title) conducted a “61-millionperson experiment” in which they randomly displayed a message to some of their users urging them to turn out to vote in the 2010 Congressional election. They had two versions of the treatment: one with a standard civic responsibility argument for voting, the other with the same message paired with information about which of that user’s Facebook friends had already voted. The researchers measured two outcomes of the treatment: first, whether the subject elected to click the button that would provide information related to voting; and second, by matching subjects against the government voter record, whether they went and voted.

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Overall, the second treatment was much more effective on both outcomes. The first publication reported only the main effects of the experiment but made a huge impact. It was published in the prestigious journal Nature in 2012 and has since been cited over two thousand times. In contrast, the crucial heterogeneous effects of the treatment were not published until 2017 and have been cited only thirty-five times. The long-standing orientation of media effects research toward the homogeneity of the broadcast era caused the following fact (from an experiment conducted in 2010) to fly under the radar: “The [Facebook GOTV experiment] effect size for those fifty years of age and older versus that of those ages eighteen to twenty-four is nearly four times as large for self-reported voting and nearly eight times as large for information seeking.” Again: massive heterogeneities. But how should scholars think about these results? We need a theoretical framework that synthesizes these findings and takes the massive heterogeneity of both the content of online media and the way that people respond to that media as a premise, not a finding. This theory could not have originated in political science; the details of the experience of receiving online communication is far removed from the core questions of the field, which has tended to focus more on the elite senders of this communication. Instead, we can find this framework in a productive intersection of sociology, communication, and a subfield of computer science called human-computer interaction. For the past two decades, the research of the interdisciplinary sociologist Eszter Hargittai has foregrounded the heterogeneity in the way that people with internet access experience using the internet. She coined the term “second-level digital divide” to emphasize that “digital literacy” is unevenly distributed among internet users. Using the revolutionary (to quantitative political scientists) methodology of watching the subject navigate online information retrieval tasks—paired with detailed recordings of subject speed and accuracy—Hargittai documents this fact, which seems obvious in hindsight. Even in this groundbreaking study from almost twenty years ago, the negative correlation between age and internet skill is unmistakable. Hargittai has spent much of her career developing both the theoretical role of internet skills and survey questions that measure this concept, validated against behavioral outcomes.18 In recent years, her work has focused on internet use among the elderly, demonstrating significant

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heterogeneity based on age, education, and income among this group.19 Even here, however, it seems that cohort explains the most. There is overwhelming support for the idea that people who have more experience using the internet have higher levels of digital literacy, and this seems like common sense. Based on the adoption patterns graphed in figure 9.1, we know that many older people have been using the internet for less time than many younger people. But the context of that use has implications for the rate of learning. The primary difference has to do with digital skills that are necessary in school or the workplace. Consider two people in their sixties, one retired and the other still working, who are each introduced to email at the same time. The employed emailer has much more invested in using email correctly (not, for instance, accidentally hitting Reply All to a company-wide email) but also many more resources. When they make a mistake, someone in their network with higher digital literacy can help them. This is not the case for the retired emailer, who may be more likely to contact family or friends. The final answer, of course, is that there simply weren’t that many old people using the internet and social media until recently. Consider the range in the size of the age categories reported in the massive Facebook experiment. The lowest age category is “eighteen to twenty-four” and the highest is “fifty and older”; these categories were based on the age distribution of Facebook users at the time, and it is telling that there wasn’t much need to draw distinctions between people over fifty years old. The gradual adoption of these platforms by the elderly snuck up on the techsavvy observers who tend to emphasize changes in their own experience of the web. It’s hard to observe these tidal shifts, but the changes have been accumulating, and it is now obvious that Facebook in 2021 is a very different beast from Facebook in 2010.

FACEBOOK IS OTHER P EOP LE

Advanced age isn’t only significant because it makes it harder to use a smartphone. Aging forecloses futures, closes doors, gives the lie to the motivating myth of perpetual progress upon which the liberal democractic

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capitalist world relies. After decades of fitting together the pieces of a life, you can only watch them fall away. And it hurts, a minute-by-minute suffering that can curdle the disposition of even the best-adjusted person. I invite you to take a moment to seriously consider what your life will be like at eighty. On average, you can expect to live that long. How many relatives do you expect to have? How much do you think you will get to spend with people you care about? What will you do, day-to-day? Think about how much youth culture has changed since you really got it, and how much worse that’s going to feel. Obviously, I’m projecting, but I don’t think my experience is atypical, certainly not among people reading this book. Some cultures venerate the elderly, and most emphasize the importance of extended, intergenerational family as a source of community, mutual care, and knowledge transmission. Instead, ours insists on the fundamental equality of all humans—a necessary corrective to centuries of racial oppression, but a serious blind spot when it comes to the realities of aging—and gives poor Boomers the opportunity to live out their old age in camper vans, traveling to Amazon warehouses and seasonal jobs across the country until they die. So, yes, Boomer ballast is real, and this one generation has accumulated an unprecedented amount of economic, cultural, and political power. But they are also gazing into the abyss of mortality in a society that has no use for the unproductive and places no great emphasis on the afterlife. Before social media, they might yell at the television newscaster, tut-tut the punk kids walking down the street, or pop the football that the neighbor children accidentally kicked into their yard: basically, inhabit our society’s stereotypes of what old people are like. But social media gives them an outlet, allows them to be heard. If social media were a healthier form of communication, this might mean that their accumulated wisdom and humanity were able to spread; alas, we have Facebook and its insipid Boomer meme pages. In August 2021, to pantomime addressing persistent criticism about a lack of transparency, Facebook published a report on the most-viewed links on the platform. Their point seemed to be that the far-right extremist content that muckraking journalists identify is not all that prominent; they ruled out the possibility that The Daily Stormer was one of the top twenty websites, but the disclosure said nothing about the long tail of content.

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But the simple list of the top twenty most-viewed posts from April, May, and June 2021 was illustrative of what Facebook is actually like. It was all inane (number five: “Please Settle This Debate: Does Sugar Go in Spaghetti”), but the through line is cheap nostalgia, baiting lonely Boomers with time to kill into sharing the link and posting a comment in the hope that someone will respond. Here are three of the top twenty posts on the country’s most popular social network. • • •

“Post an older TV show that today’s kids have probably never heard of.” “Show us your age by telling us a restaurant you loved going to but is no longer around!” “Date yourself by naming one concert you have attended.”

This nostalgic pabulum is a consequence of lonely old people feeling left behind, left out of contemporary culture. The natural discomforts of aging, the breakdown of care networks for the elderly, and the increased visibility of cultural change afforded by social media combine to create a situation where chain emails and now Facebook are their only channels of contact. Again, given the social and political realities, this leaves them less lonely than the alternative. But these digital technologies that we have not given the elderly the tools to learn how to use or even understand have also left them vulnerable to all manner of economic and political fraudsters. The elderly have long been targets of financial fraud; one of the most prominent services provided by the AARP is its “Fraud Watch” hotline. They frequently update their members on new trends in telemarketing or mail fraud, and they have rapidly expanded into the realm of digital fraud as well. Boomer ballast, combined with the increased politicization of society, has dramatically expanded the opportunity for political fraud in terms of both campaign donation scams and deceptive partisan media. Fake news should, I believe, be interpreted as part of this larger phenomenon. The very existence of a piece of (predigital) media implied that some cost was expended to create it. This is part of the “message” of medium that relied on physical infrastructure to store and transmit it: a someone expended some effort to create this, so it can’t be complete

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nonsense; even if it is literally untrue, there’s some reason that this untruth was created rather than another. Digital media drives the cost of producing and distributing media down to close to zero. Although the conversation has evolved considerably in the past five years, some of the initial reporting on the infamous Macedonian teenagers running fake American politics websites during the 2016 presidential campaign remains illustrative. Inspired by the success of a local lawyer with knowledge of U.S. politics and media, several teenagers started their own websites designed to go viral on Facebook.20 Most cared little about the partisan leanings of what they published, and they reportedly tried making content across the political spectrum.21 They quickly learned that pro-Trump content and anti-Clinton content performed the best, and they started straightforwardly ripping off Trump-aligned content from across the web. Unlike a real news organization, they didn’t have to care about the reputation of their Facebook page or worry about publishing accurate information: they were free to spam as many articles as they could in the hope that one would go viral. This is the crucial informational parameter that tech-savvy people have developed healthier intuitions about: devoid of some reputational or monetary cost, the existence of a piece of digital media provides zero information about anything at all. And this is perhaps the hardest kind of adjustment for Boomers to make: because an informational parameter like this is about learning how to learn, humans have to stop updating it early in their life cycle. I expect informational fraud to grow in importance alongside the time that retiring Boomers spend on social media. Strict regulations surrounding campaign finance allow us to observe how related informational fraud played out during the 2020 election. In particular, the Trump campaign used exploitative digital tactics like false promises of matching donations and automatically signing donors up for recurring donations. Although people of all ages were defrauded, the donor pool is dramatically older than the population, and older people are easier to defraud. A New York Times report quotes a Democratic strategist: “Everybody knows what they’re doing: They’re scamming seniors to line their own pockets and to raise money for campaigns.”22 And while the Trump campaign was forced to refund more than $120 million in fraudulent online donations during 2020, the Biden campaign

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was far from innocent, refunding over $20 million as well. Both campaigns sent spam emails with the subject lines about Social Security in an explicit attempt to target seniors. Overall, four times as much money was refunded to donors over seventy than under fifty, a pattern that held for both campaigns. Federal campaign regulations are evolving, and the prechecked recurring donations boxes driving the worst of this fraud may soon be outlawed. But the internet moves much faster than government regulation, and the amount of money in vulnerable hands will only grow.

R Personally, I am “long” on the internet—the economic, political, and media upheavals of the past decades notwithstanding, I believe that we are far from reaching any kind of new equilibrium for an informational ecosystem of ubiquitous, near-instantaneous, global communication. This implies that our capacity to understand this world will also be diminished relative to the twentieth century that persists in our theoretical knowledge of society, in the structure of our knowledge-making institutions, and of course in the knowledge still stored in the brains of people living today. This is the fundamental irony of the Boomer experience of the 2010s and 2020s. As I have argued in this book, they are a historically unique generation currently at the height of their economic, political, and cultural power. The American demographic center of gravity is peaking at the same time that a global revolution in information technology rewrites all of the rules, rewarding people with the flexibility to adapt to quickly changing circumstances. Although the tableau of an older person baffled by communication technology can be darkly funny (when that person is a U.S. senator charged with regulating the technology in question), it is also brutally sad and potentially dangerous for the practice of a democratic system that requires a healthy information environment.

CONCLUSION

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he global pandemic that occurred while I was writing this book offered an unusually explicit operationalization of the politics of age. The powerful Boomers were far from the most seriously harmed by the virus, either physically or economically. More likely than anyone else to own their home and have investments in the stock market, and less likely to have an employment situation that forced them to continue risking infection, they were in fact the most insulated generation; older generations were more epidemiologically vulnerable, and over half of U.S. COVID-19 deaths were among people older than Boomers.1 However, the virus accelerated the developments in media and technology described in the previous chapter, which created a serious challenge. As these trends show no sign of reversing, the stage is set for generational political conflict, with the underlying economic competition amplified through the powerful and mutually reinforcing forces of media and cohort consciousness. The virus is dramatically more lethal among the elderly. Although apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult, the case fatality rate (the number of people confirmed to have died from the disease divided by the number confirmed to have had it) across several countries was below 1 percent for people under fifty years old, in the low-to-mid single digits for people in their sixties or seventies, and well over 10 percent for people eighty and older.

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However, COVID-19 had serious effects even on the elderly who did not contract the disease. Nursing homes instituted strict lockdown policies to stem the spread among their vulnerable populations (and even this was not enough—many nursing homes saw many deadly, uncontrolled outbreaks), resulting in even more social isolation, loneliness, and alienation. People were unable to visit their parents and grandparents, who had fewer ways to spend their time than ever before. Although the statistics tell us plenty about the premature deaths, the human cost of this inhuman experience may never be fully accounted for. The countless deathbed Zoom conversations between parents and children are an enduring tragedy. Everyone had to deal with serious, novel challenges, and the direst consequences were concentrated among society’s most vulnerable. People without the luxury of savings or the possibility of working from home were dramatically more exposed to the virus. Beyond nursing homes, people were forced to spend almost all their time in their own homes. The public health authorities enforced a variety of quarantines while existing trends toward remote work and online learning kicked into hyperdrive. By the logic of the previous chapter, the shift to either online work or retirement, along with a disrupted social life and increased media consumption, was an accelerant for the consolidation of Boomer identity refined through social media and especially cable news. Fox News experienced its largest annual gain in viewership ever, 43 percent growth; MSNBC grew as well, but CNN saw the biggest gain of 83 percent growth compared to 2019.2 After decades of declining intergenerational contact, especially among white Americans, the pandemic was the first event in living memory to disrupt the fall and winter holidays that still stubbornly stitched extended families together. During the Trump era, these events had become increasingly fraught, at least in the eyes of the media: the trope of the Trump-loving uncle in a shouting match with the socialist niece over the Thanksgiving turkey entered the national consciousness. Intergenerational conflict—sublimated through hyperpartisan politics—had already threatened to weaken these traditions. When public health concerns over the virus rendered them unsafe, there were more than a few sighs of relief.

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The politics of pandemic restrictions took some stranger turns. The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, told Fox News that he was representative of American grandparents in that he would prefer for governments not to implement virus-related precautions that might damage the economy. Would he sacrifice his own life for Uncle Sam? Yeah, he would. Older conservatives were not the only ones who were less than fully committed to minimizing the death of the elderly. For a brief period in March 2020, a TikTok meme referring to COVID-19 as “The Boomer Remover” made a bit of a stir before the severity of the situation became apparent and the joke became too dark. But the underlying generational tensions were unmistakable. Millennials, Gen Z, and Boomers all spent more time in their respective generational “shared locations” on social media. Gen Z flocked to TikTok, which exploded into mainstream popularity with schools closed and students looking for a place to hang out with each other from home. The platform represents a qualitative advance in social media technology, the first to be designed entirely around mobile videos. The high barriers to entry in making videos that are not laughably bad kept older generations (including this author) from joining in, reinforcing Gen Z as a coherent and self-conscious Millennial cohort. Millennials’ social media use was more fragmented, reflecting the divergent social and professional interests that come with adulthood. Instagram remained the most central, but it was also the least immersive or conducive to community experiences. Other platforms continued to structure the time of Millennials with specific interests; however, because these locations were more salient for those specific interests than for generational identity, this did not encourage future cohort consciousness or cohesion. Video gamers used Twitch and Discord; sports fans and news junkies used Twitter; fans of YouTube deepened their relationships with YouTube creators; careerists built their LinkedIn networks. Boomers, however, continued to expand their social media use—but only to Facebook. The New York Times reporter Kevin Roose put out daily reports on the posts with the most public engagement on the platform in 2020. Other than occasional cute animals or C-tier memes, these posts were consistently dominated by hyperpartisan, low-quality news, about twice as much of which was far right than far left. Despite this growth in Facebook use, Boomer political media continued to center on cable news

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and especially Fox News. Conservative broadcast media continued to be a major source of identity, amplified rather than replaced by online media. Fox News and the personalities it employs remained the center of the conservative Facebook ecosystem. The story of COVID-19 is far from over, and you can get more up-todate information on the web. It is safe to say, however, that this oncein-a-century event played out in starkly generational terms. Both in the experiences of individuals identifying with their generations and zerosum government policy about risks and benefits to the young and old, we should expect other such shocks to reveal and exacerbate the generational fault lines over the coming decade.

WHAT IS TO BE DON E?

. . . is how books about politics often end. Unfortunately for the narrative arc of this one, there are no quick fixes for problems that are many decades in the making. The generational demography at the base of the incipient conflict is slow-moving but inexorable. My goal in this book is to describe what I think will happen over the next decade. Most fundamentally, my goal is to elevate the status of generational thinking and analysis, to put “Boomer ballast” onto the agenda. The incentives of academics, journalists and pundits are all to emphasize the short-run effects of short-run causes, and as a result, we tend to underappreciate the effect of slow-moving processes like demography. As Paul Pierson writes in Politics in Time, social scientists “may fail to even identify some important questions about politics because the relevant outcomes happen too slowly and are therefore simply off their radar screens.” I am a firm believer in the necessity of prediction to discipline the production of social scientific knowledge. The ultimate defense of what I’ve written here is if it helps me understand the world in ways that other frameworks and evidence bases do not, the only way to know that is to make a series of specific predictions. The first milestone will be the year of peak retirees: the year that more people leave the workforce than ever before or ever again. It is possible, however, that this has already happened; Pew reports that COVID-19 caused a total of 3.2 million Boomers to retire between September 2019

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and 2020, an almost 50 percent increase over the expected trend. Regardless, in simple age terms, 2024 will be the year that the modal American turns 65. Four years later, in 2028, the final Boomers will reach that age. The implications of this development will filter through every element of mass society, economics, and politics. In terms of the viewership of legacy media and especially television, the fully retired and alive Boomers will spend more time than ever. These younger Boomers are also more likely than older ones to have started using social media like Facebook, a habit that will likely persist. Given the stagnant rate of Boomer adoption of other social media platforms, Facebook is likely to become even more of a Boomer haven than it already is. Economically, the big question is whether the spaces formerly occupied by Boomers will open up to younger generations. Will the middlemanagement positions in stable industries continue to exist after the Boomers who have held them for thirty years retire, or will the economy continue to eliminate those positions in favor of more informal labor? Even taking the arguments of gig economy employers at face value, the flexibility these jobs afford will become less attractive to Millennials as we continue to try to ascend the ladder of adulthood. The broad middle-class success of (white) Boomers is being replaced by stark inequality within the Millennial generation; among the latter, people with professional jobs in tech or a handful of other growth industries have achieved an unprecedented degree of stability and consumer freedom, while others despair of ever paying off their student loan debt or even having health care. Housing is an analogous case. The market for homeownership in 2021 was, as the realtors say, “red hot”: demand far outstripped supply. Part of the reason is that Boomer homeowners in desirable locations didn’t want to move out due to historically low interest rates that locked them in place. The situation in California remains far worse due to the insane property tax law. The question of which Millennials eventually reap the real estate bounty from Boomer retirement again reveals stark inequality. This inheritance-driven housing policy will reinforce the staggering racial disparity in household wealth between white and nonwhite Americans. Already, the issues I’ve identified as key points of zero-sum generational economic competition have begun to gain salience in mass electoral politics. The Biden administration’s first major policy move included nearly one hundred billion dollars to bail out private pensions, and student loan debt forgiveness remains a hot topic. In contrast, despite the

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obvious fiscal disaster looming in the 2030s, it is unlikely that any kind of Social Security reform will be undertaken; that particular can will again be kicked down the road. In terms of how this retirement boom might affect nonelectoral elites, it is useful to think about the kind of power and influence wielded by people at the end of their careers compared to people who are retired but wealthy. The former direct major institutions, from university presidents to newspaper editors, union bosses to CEOs; they have power over many areas of American life. Still, people in these kinds of positions tend not to retire right when they turn 65, so institutional Boomer ballast should persist into the 2030s. Note that this analysis does not emphasize Boomer-ness in either attitudes or self-description. Boomers here are only distinctive in their sheer numbers. These years will see more slots open up in the upper ranks of major institutions than the years before or after. The general competition, then, will be between the chronologically next-in-line Gen Xers and the numerically dominant Millennials. These might not be the highestsalience developments, and the consequences may not be the most directly visible, but these are in fact the commanding heights of American society. In contrast, elite electoral politics will see a clear and extremely high-profile generational turning point in 2024. President Joe Biden began his term as the oldest president in history; in 2024, he will be eighty-two years old. He at one point indicated that he intends to serve as a “transition” president, and that he might be the first president to decline to seek reelection in decades. If he does run, his advanced age will be a central issue throughout the campaign. If he does not, there will be an unprecedented opportunity for the incumbent party to run an open primary. A generational angle is extremely likely, given the two previous Democratic primary campaigns where age was the defining cleavage in support and younger generations felt beat down by the defeat of Bernie Sanders. Regardless of Biden’s decision, the 2024 Democratic primary will proceed along profoundly generational lines. If Millennial cohort consciousness aligns with policy preferences—if someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez consolidates support on both left-leaning issues and youthful esthetics—this will be the defining cleavage of the 2024 Democratic primary and the beginning of the era of open generational conflict. The Republicans have a far larger elephant in the room: former president Trump, an arch-Boomer who thus far seems to have retained his

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hold on the Republican Party electorate. His influence among ascendant Millennial Republican politicians has already been felt. The book The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by the journalist Charlotte Alter described a cohort of three such politicians elected to the House in the 2010s, hoping to reorient the Republican Party and embrace issues that matter more to Millennials across the spectrum. In 2021, however, Alter wrote a postmortem describing how these three (and other young, heterodox Republican politicians) had been driven away from their Millennial agenda by Trumpism. One retired from politics, and another lost his reelection campaign. The exception proves the rule: Representative Elise Stefanik leaned fully into Trumpism during the 2020 election campaign and is now the most powerful Millennial Republican in Congress. Trump’s future standing will likely ride on some combination of Biden’s popularity and his own capacity to remain relevant without the spotlight of the presidential office or access to social media. If he can credibly run in the primary, the same generational cleavage that existed in the 2016 Republican primary is likely to be relevant: older Republican primary voters disproportionately supported Trump over his youthful Hispanic challengers in the early primaries. But the distinct advantage in digital communication style that Trump held in 2015 and 2016 will have been fully internalized by his competition. His stunning success has encouraged imitators, many of whom retain significant connection to the Republican Party establishment that is still ambivalent about Trump. Since he will be seventy-eight years old in 2024, without the possibility of reelection in 2028, the Republicans will likely prefer for him to sit out in 2024 and endorse a younger candidate. If Biden decides to run in 2024 and faces a youthful Republican challenger with Trump’s support, the Republicans might well be able to wrest back some generational support from the Democrats. Beyond the presidency, the congressional leadership of both parties will finally see significant turnover in the 2020s. Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House since 2003; Mitch McConnell has led the Senate Republicans since 2007. Although both are in the Biden, slightly-too-oldto-be-Boomers subgeneration that has dominated Congress like no other, they are clearly the old guard and will serve as the targets of younger generations of politicians seeking change within their party.

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Given the recent pattern of opposition party resurgence in the offcycle elections and the favorable electoral map, 2022 could well see a “Red Wave” in the House and Senate. Again, this offers the Republicans an opportunity to drum up youth support in the electorate and install younger members of Congress who could institutionalize that support. The Supreme Court will probably continue to avoid explicit generational conflict. Even here, however, demography may take over: liberal disappointment with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg during a Republican administration despite clear health risks was considerable, and there will be significant discussion of whether Justice Breyer (another super-Boomer) should retire under Biden if he isn’t yet dead. Of course, under the current law, there is no formal mechanism to influence this decision. The larger question about the Supreme Court, then, is whether it will see significant reform. The “reign” of unelected leaders has drawn criticism from both parties, exacerbated by the increased generational nonrepresentativeness of the Court due to longevity gains. But the greatest uncertainty comes from the future status of communication technology itself. The major tech companies that own the fiber optic cables, cloud storage, and social media platforms on which the internet depends have themselves accumulated unprecedented economic, cultural, and political power. The response of the federal government—the only remaining entity with sufficient power to challenge the tech companies— over the next decade will define the future of the internet. Already, beginning with the Trump era and accelerating sharply during the pandemic, the foundational American and Silicon Valley principle of free speech has given way to public health and safety concerns stemming from misinformation, hate speech, and incitements to violence. These moves by Big Tech have thus far been sufficient to delay genuine scrutiny and regulation by the government, but it remains to be seen how long this uneasy peace will last.

THE BIG PICTUR E

Karl Mannheim’s century-old “The Problem of Generations,” in my estimation, holds up. I have not identified any novel framework for predicting when generational identity (and ensuing generational conflict) will

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flourish, but I have applied his framework to the contemporary technosocial context; time will tell how accurate these predictions turn out to be. Another approach to social science is less interested in making predictions than in generating understanding, a subjective way of making sense of what is going on. But first I want to point out that no is one talking about this. Certainly, there is a surfeit of unserious chatter about generations (“OK, Boomer”; the infamous Saturday Night Live sketch “Gen Z hospital”), and I’m not the first person to notice that communication technology has become somewhat more important of late. But the implications of the inherent tension between contemporary demography, Boomer power, and a rapidly changing information technological context have attracted little attention. Part of the hesitancy may stem from a general unease with discussing politics through the lens of demography, an understandable reaction to the horrific deeds justified by “scientific” evidence about demography in the twentieth century. The specter of eugenics is a sobering one, and I make the following observations in full light of this fact. There is a degree of hypocrisy in the inversion of the position of the two major political camps in the United States. Liberal progressives, who generally believe in empowering the state to promote healthier attitudes and behaviors among the citizenry, have carved out reproduction as an inviolably sovereign realm of human endeavor. Conservatives, who at least claim to want to limit the scope of government interference and are particularly displeased with recent efforts to promote progressive racial or feminist ideals, have come around to profertility policies to complement their long-standing opposition to abortion. In my view, the most plausible explanation for the avoidance of demography-as-policy is the sheer terror of aging and death that lurks beneath the surface of our society. We experience the world in linear time, emphasizing progress and development: the American dream of each generation wealthier than the last is one of permanent growth. In contrast, reproduction exists in cyclical time. Each human experiences every stage of the life cycle, which from the perspective of economic productivity means inevitable decline and decay. The dominance of the linear, progress-obsessed worldview produces cognitive dissonance at the societal scale, preventing us from fully engaging with the reality of cyclical time and the transformation from progress to decline within our own life cycle.

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Auguste Comte, the inventor of positivism, took as a premise that the fundamental “rate of change” of society—the human life span—was basically fixed. The limitation of this analysis is that generational replacement is no longer necessary for change. The breakdown of the traditional extended family structure allowed younger generations to produce new societal forms and experiment at the local scale. This created the possibility for small-scale acceleration of progress, but in the twentieth century of mass culture and industrial production, the commanding heights were necessarily controlled by the older generations, restraining this rate of change. The democratization of the production and distribution of media—and the proliferation of opportunities to consume media— represents a decisive break in societal continuity and thus the triumph of linear time over cyclical time. History furnishes cases that serve as a useful contrast. Neil Postman, a communication theorist and technology skeptic, makes the following observation about the lack of technological innovation that proceeded after the initial development of the Gutenberg press: “Until the midnineteenth century, no significant technologies were introduced that altered the form, volume, or speed of information. As a consequence, Western culture had more than two hundred years to accustom itself to the new information conditions created by the press. It developed new institutions, such as the school and representative government. It developed new conceptions of knowledge and intelligence, and a heightened respect for reason and privacy” (66). What we need, then, to adapt to the technological shock of the internet is simply more time. The existence of Boomer ballast makes the current technological progress socially, economically, and politically wrenching. The rate of change of information technology shows no sign of slowing, and the full implications of the internet will take decades to be realized. We might at least take solace in this ballast being a fundamentally time-limited phenomenon. However, if we are now at a persistently high rate of technological change, or at least in a decades-long such period, we will always face some degree of “information-technological inequality.” Just like contemporary digital inequality, the gradient of this inequality will follow traditional socioeconomic and educational fault lines—but the role of generational differences will only expand. Our youth-obsessed society

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already discounts the wisdom of its elders compared to many other societies. Rapid change reinforces this prejudice: wisdom is in fact less useful the more the world differs from the world in which those elders gained that knowledge. Human-speed processes like civil society building, institution building, child-rearing, and intergenerational knowledge transmission run the risk of irrelevance in the face of accelerating information technological progress. I’m not arguing that there’s going to be an internet 2.0 that will replace the current internet but rather that the internet will continue to permeate more and more of human life. The automobile was invented in 1886; the following century saw human transportation revolutionized not by cars 2.0 but rather by more and more of American economic and social life adapted to the automobile. I share Postman’s concern that this encroaching technocracy enervates human capacity: each new realm of activity empowered by technology means another store of knowledge that dissipates in the newer generation. We are unable to build durable institutions or accumulate knowledge about how to live if we are constantly reeling from technological progress. The demographic conditions of Boomer ballast have in fact slowed down the impact of the internet and its consequences, for better and for worse; the world they leave behind will be shockingly distant from the world in which they started.

R I conclude by reemphasizing the fundamental disconnectedness of the two prime causes explored in this book. First, the Baby Boomer generation has been a uniquely powerful generation. The development of the United States into a military and cultural hegemon in the aftermath of World War II was done on their watch; the “long present” that defines the national (and, through media, global) conception of normal is a fundamentally Boomer normal. The conclusion of their life cycle will produce a yawning absence in our cultural, economic, and political institutions. The 2020s will see conflict between generations as the young aim to accelerate this senescence and establish themselves as the Boomers’ successors. “Boomer ballast” has meant an unusual degree of stability over the previous decades; the gravity produced by this

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generation has slowed subsequent generations, but like a spaceship slingshot around a black hole, these generations will speed forward once past the Boomer event horizon. Second, advances in communication technology have permanently shifted the process of the intergenerational transmission of culture and knowledge. The democratization of the ability to produce and transmit media accelerates cultural dynamism and reduces the importance of the elderly as a locus of knowledge accumulation. For the first and (barring catastrophe) only time in history, the biological rate of growth— generational change, constrained by the human life span—has been intersected by the technological rate of growth. These two trends will have multiplicative effects, particularly in the realms of culture and politics. Recall the framework from Karl Deutsch, which argues that societies with more “uncommitted resources” are best suited to adapt to major changes. The realities of the human life cycle mean that individual Boomers cannot be the unit of adaptation; instead, society will be reorganized through generational replacement. Boomer culture will thus never be “defeated”; it will simply slide into irrelevance. The seemingly permanent canon of American cultural signifiers will evaporate rapidly, like puddles after a flood. And into its place will spring a robust, dynamic media culture that has been built under the radar of legacy media and cultural institutions. Some of the most famous Americans are YouTube influencers and esports celebrities who no one over forty has ever heard of; this baffling contradiction will be resolved in the waning days of Boomer cultural power. Politically, the situation is even more up for grabs. Boomer ballast, filtered through the U.S.’s two-party system, has prevented the development of younger political candidates and organizations. Political engagement of these generations has thus also, like so much of our lives, been mediated through communication technology. The youth political “movements” (the term is question-begging; few people are actually moving) that have made a splash have taken the form of what Paolo Gerbaudo calls “hyperpolitics”: direct engagement between the masses and charismatic politicians has taken the place of party organizations; social media meme wars, punctuated by brief paroxysms of street protest, have taken the place of nonparty organization. Gerbaudo, Zeynep Tufekci in Twitter and Tear Gas, and Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New

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Millennium—a variety of theorists, working in different traditions, have identified this pathological hollowness of digital politics, the way that symbolic action has supplanted organization and structure. Although powerful, digital movements are both fragile and temperamental; they can be more easily co-opted or simply stalled into irrelevance. The political scientist Eitan Hersh coined the term “political hobbyism” to describe the tendency of some of the most vocal partisans to experience politics as just another online fandom. It is undeniably the case that teenagers on “Politigram” (political Instagram) who describe their evolution from conservative to anti-woke to alt-right to anarcho-capitalist to egoist (Randian) to Dengist to egoist (Stirnerian) to anarcho-primitivist to Maoist third-worldist to Trotskyist to post-Marxist to Deleuzian to high school graduate are political hobbyists. But Hersh, more damningly, describes the Twitter- and Facebook-active adults who might otherwise have constituted Gerbaudo’s party functionaries as political hobbyists. Precisely because parties (or more accurately, candidates) are able to replicate hollow versions of standard political functions without the dirty business of actually organizing their supporters, their enthusiasm is dissipated in hobbyism. Recent concerns over the health of U.S. democracy are justified, but the focus has been too much on electoral institutions (particularly in regards to the presidency). Democracy is more than just the act of casting a ballot; indeed, the combination of biannual national elections with never-ending digitally mediatized hyperpolitics is not a recipe for a healthy democracy, whether the votes are cast fairly and the institutions majoritarian or not. Younger generations may consider Boomer ballast as only a drag, retrograde, and I have argued that Boomers are, inevitably, stuck in the past. But the Boomers also retain a disproportionate amount of the organizational or civil society capacity in our society. Yes, this was easier for them because of their advantageous economic position and historical luck at growing up alongside our major postwar institutions. But the largely invisible societal glue they and their networks provide are constitutive of postwar American democracy, and this function will not be replaced unless we actively and intentionally work to replace it. Younger generations need to learn how to use our powerful new communication technology—rather than be used by it. The fascination with influencers and the dream of social media fame are the hollow social analogues of hyperpolitics. New social and political institutional forms are possible but only if we build them.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1.

Google trends search, November 26, 2021, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date =all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0cpgf,%2Fm%2F0134kj.

1. THE PROBLEM OF GENERATIONS 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

I hope that the slight ugliness of this phrase is outweighed by its self-evident meaning and conceptual stickiness. Paige Leskin, “American Kids Want to Be Famous on YouTube, and Kids in China Want to Go to Space: Survey,” Business Insider, July 17, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com /american-kids-youtube-star-astronauts-survey-2019-7. Inglehart 2018; Alwin and McCammon 2003; Grasso 2016; Grasso et al. 2019; Miller and Shanks 1996; van der Brug and Franklin 2017. Mann 1973; Weakliem 1993. Matthews and Prothro 1966; Dawson 1994. Wilcox 1992; Bean 2016. Curry and Haydon 2018; Webster and Pierce 2019; Eshima and Smith 2020. Lipset and Rokkan 1967. Schattschneider 1975. Thompson 1968; Katznelson 1986. E.g., Bledsoe, Welch, Sigelman, and Combs 1995. Ware 2020.

178 2. TH E BIRTH O F TH E B OOM

2. THE BIRTH OF THE BOOM 1. 2. 3. 4.

Subject to data availability in other countries. This graph and the next were inspired by tweets from the labor economist David Kimbrough, a persistent “Millennial myth debunker.” Turner and Bound 2003. Taylor et al. 2013.

3. BOOMER BALLAST IN AMERICAN POLITICS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Fry 2018. Arnold 2015; Binstock 2000. Converse and Niemi 1971, quoted in Pomante and Schraufnagel 2015. Wattenberg 2019. Gerber, Green, and Shachar 2003. Juelich and Coll 2020. Data from the Federal Highway Administration show a significant change in the percentage of people at different ages with a driver’s license, over time. See Sivak and Schoettle 2016. “Donor Demographics,” OpenSecrets, https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/donorde -mographics.php?cycle=2018&filter=A. Broockman and Malhotra 2020; Broockman, Ferenstein, and Malhotra 2019. Grumbach and Sahn 2020. Cutler 1969. Tilley and Evans 2014. Following Tilley 2003, they use panel data to create bounds on aging effects and then introduce cross-sectional data to separately estimate period and cohort effects. Cornelis et al. 2009. Peterson et al. 2020. Ellis and Stimson 2009. Duverger 1954; Cox 1997. Goff and Lee 2019. Aldrich and Lee 2016. Pew Research Center, March 20, 2018, https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends -in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/.

4. DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN POLITICS 1. 2. 3. 4.

Fowler and Kam 2007. Broockman and Skovron 2018. Bratton and Ray 2002. Campbell and Wolbrecht 2006; Ladam, Harden, and Windett 2018.

5. D RE AM ING O F A BO O M E R C H RI STMAS1 79

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Curry and Haydon 2018. Sydney Ember, “O.K., Mayor: Why 37-Year-Old Pete Buttigieg Is Attracting Boomers,” New York Times, November 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/us/politics/pete -buttigieg-iowa-2020.html. Thomsen 2014. Thomsen and King 2020. See also Broockman 2014 for evidence that this process cannot occur quickly. All calculations in these figures done with data made publicly available by the @ UnitedStates project, a collaborative, open-source database currently hosted at https:// theunitedstates.io/. Fenno 1978. Graham 2019. Carnes 2018. Gailmard and Jenkins 2009.

5. DREAMING OF A BOOMER CHRISTMAS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/content/dam/ewp-m/documents/legal/en/pdf/reports /s039305_0915.pdf. This analysis was inspired by a graph created by the labor economist Gary Kimbrough. The Movies Dataset, https://www.kaggle.com/rounakbanik/the-movies-dataset#credits .csv. https://datasets.imdbws.com/. Michael Salfino, “The NFL Is No League for Old Men,” FiveThirtyEight, August 30, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfl-is-no-league-for-old-men/; Cork Gaines, “Chart of the Day: The Average Age in the NBA Has Stopped Dropping,” Business Insider, May 10, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-average-age-in-nba-2011-5. “YouTubers Are Among the Most Popular Celebrities for Gen Z. How Much Should Brands Prize Their Endorsements?” Morning Consult, November 5, 2019, https://morn -ingconsult.com/form/youtubers-are-among-the-most-influential-celebrities-for-gen-z/. Lewis 2018. Munger 2019. Ladd 2011. Hindman 2018. Ruane 2009. Prior 2007. Ruane 2009. Pew Research Center, “Social Media Outpaces Print Newspapers in the U.S. as a New Source,” December10,2018,https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/10/social-media-outpaces -print-newspapers-in-the-u-s-as-a-news-source/. DellaVigna and Kaplan 2006; Hopkins and Ladd 2014. Guess, Lyons, Nyhan and Reifler 2018.

1 80 6 . W H E RE D O ES ID ENTITY COME FR OM?

6. WHERE DOES IDENTITY COME FROM? 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

Yang 2016. Weil 1987. Ross and Rouse 2015; Ross, Rouse, and Mobley 2019. The echo of this for Millennials was the “end of history” that defined our youth. The time “from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers” was another consistent era of economic growth, and as someone whose first eighteen years of life were precisely these, it seemed like a permanent state of affairs. The only threats were like Osama bin Laden: evil, delusional men set on toppling a beneficent and prosperous world order. Page and Shapiro 1993, figure 7.4. “Generations Divide Over Military Action in Iraq,” Pew Research Center, October 17, 2002, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2002/10/17/generations-divide-over-military -action-in-iraq/. Klatch 1999. Andrew Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters,” The Atlantic, December 2007, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/12/goodbye-to-all-that-why-obama -matters/306445/. Bernie Sanders, in contrast, applied for conscientious objector status but was too old for it to matter. Card and Lemieux 2001. Gibney 2017, 24. Gibney 2017, 62. Boyd 2014. Putnam 2001. Older social media—sites on which user-created video is not the focus—also enable horizontal sociality. The limitations of text and images prevented them from ever actually supplanting video media. Social media helps people stay in touch, and for a sizable minority of people who enjoy reading and writing, it enabled the creation of entire social worlds. Although the person writing this and, by construction, the people reading this tend to enjoy writing and reading, it’s impossible to overstate how much the majority of people hate reading, consuming an average of zero books a year. Even for those text lovers, though, the text modality is simply not information-dense enough to supplant real-world sociality. Hopkins 2018. Andrew Perrin, “5 Facts About Americans and Video Games,” Pew Research Center, September 17, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/17/5-facts-about-americans -and-video-games/. Adam Fitch, “The Most Watched Esports Events of 2019,” Esports Insider, January 13, 2020, https://esportsinsider.com/2020/01/esports-viewership-2019/. Stephen Battaglio, “Dodgers Win But the 2020 World Series TV Audience Hits Record Low,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts

7. T H E E M ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CO NSCI OUSN ESS1 81

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

/business/story/2020-10-28/dodgers-win-but-the-2020-world-series-is-the-least-watched -ever. Ana Diaz, “Why Is Everyone Talking About Roblox: Everyone Should Have Been Talking About It Sooner,” polygon.com, March 11, 2021, https://www.polygon.com/22326123/what -is-roblox-explainer-public-offering. Mason 2018. Huddy, Mason, and AarØe 2015. Mutz 2018. Kuypers and Bengtson 1973.

7. THE EMERGENCE OF COHORT CONSCIOUSNESS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Abramowitz and Webster 2016; Mason 2018. E.g., Cantril 1943; Jackman 1979; Jackman and Jackman 1983; Zipp and Plutzer 1996; Walsh, Jennings, and Stoker 2004. White and Burke 1987; Dawson 1994; Tate 1993. Dawson 1994. Lien, Conway, and Wong 2008; Masuoka and Sanchez 2010; Sanchez and Vargas 2016. For a critical appraisal, see Gay, Hochschild, and White 2016; McClain et al. 2009 provide a helpful overview. Brody and Sniderman 1977. Feldman 1983; Iyengar 1990. E.g., McClain et al. 2009. Brooks and Manza 1997. McCarthy and Zald 1977; Banaszak 1996; Ryan 2013. This entails a nationally representative survey in partnership with YouGov, with 1,500 interviews completed January 14–21, 2020. YouGov samples, matched to Current Population Survey benchmarks and population estimates from other surveys, are demographically representative of the eligible American voting population. All analyses employ the survey weights provided by YouGov. Doherty, Kiley, and Jameson 2015. If anything, slight differences in how the questions were structured means that these increases might be underestimates. Pew allowed each respondent to identify as a member of multiple generations, and the orange bars simply reflect whether the respondent selected their “birth date” generation as one of potentially multiple choices. Our survey allowed each respondent only one choice. Ross, Rouse, and Mobley 2019. Rouse and Ross 2018. Dawson 1995. Gay, Hochschild, and White 2016. Serpe, Stryker, and Powell 2020.

1 8 2  7. TH E EM ERGE NC E O F CO H O RT CON SCI OUSN ESS

20.

21.

The one exception to this trend is among nonwhite Silents, who identify as such at higher rates than do white Silents. There are very few people in this bucket, however, so this may well be a fluke of the data. Ross and Rouse 2020.

8. THE ISSUES: ZERO-SUM COMPETITION 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Summer Meza, “Biden Doesn't Want to Hear Millennials Complain: ‘Give Me a Break,’ ” January 12, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-says-millennials-dont-have -it-tough-780348. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin 2011. Haselswerdt 2020. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in 2018. Jochen Bittner, “The Greens Are Germany’s Leading Political Party. Wait, What?” New York Times, June 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/greens-party -germany.html. Jacob Poushter and Christine Huang, “Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern,” Pew Research Center, February 10, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/10/climate-change-still-seen-as-the-top -global-threat-but-cyberattacks-a-rising-concern/. Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy, “How Americans See Climate Change and the Environment in 7 Charts,” Pew Research Center, April 21, 2020, https://www .pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/21/how-americans-see-climate-change-and-the -environment-in-7-charts/. R. J. Reinhart, “Global Warming Age Gap: Younger Americans Most Worried,” Gallup, May 11, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/234314/global-warming-age-gap-younger -americans-worried.aspx. Berkman and Plutzer 2004. Brunner and Balsdon 2004. United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data,” accessed December 6, 2021, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse -gas-emissions-data. Vanessa Williamson, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 Percent Tax on the Rich Isn’t About Revenue, It’s About Decreasing Inequality,” Think, January 26, 2019, https://www .nbcnews.com/think/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-s-70-percent-tax-rich-isn-t -ncna963146. “Section 2: The Decline in State Funding,” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, accessed November 26, 2021, https://www.amacad.org/publication/public-research -universities-changes-state-funding/section/3. Sternberg 2019, 120.

8 . TH E ISS U ES : ZERO - S U M CO M PETI TI ON 1 83

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Dennis J. Ventry Jr., “The Accidental Deduction: A History and Critique of the Tax Subsidy for Mortgage Interest,” Duke Law, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent .cgi?article=1561&context=lcp. U.S. Department of the Treasury, October 19, 2018, https://home.treasury.gov/system /files/131/Tax-Expenditures-FY2020.pdf. Sternberg 2019, 131. Sternberg 2019, 136. Liam Dillon and Ben Poston, “Must Reads: California Homeowners Get to Pass On Low Property Taxes to Their Kids,” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2018, https://www.latimes .com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-property-taxes-elites-201808-htmlstory.html. Mini Raker, “Actor Jeff Bridges Says He Was ‘Kinda Shocked’ After Reading Times Article on His Property Tax Break,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2018, http://www.latimes.com /politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-may-2018-actor-jeff-bridges-says-he-was -kinda-1535059177-htmlstory.html. Robert Fellner, “Nearly 80,000 California Retirees Are Receiving $100,000 or More in Pension Pay, New Data Show,” Transparent California, November 5, 2019, https://blog .transparentcalifornia.com/2019/11/05/nearly-80000-california-retirees-are-receiving -100000-or-more-in-pension-pay-new-data-show/. Sternberg 2019, 159. The Pew Charitable Trusts, “The State Pension Funding Gap: 2018,” June 11, 2020, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2020/06/the-state -pension-funding-gap-2018. Gibney 2017, 220. Doug Sword, “Retirees Worst Nightmare,” Roll Call, February 28, 2020, https://www .rollcall.com/2020/02/28/retirees-worst-nightmare-federal-backing-of-pension-funds-at -risk/. Sword, “Retirees Worst Nightmare.” Sternberg 2019, 222. Sternberg 2019, 160. Campbell 2011. Campbell 2002. Huddy, Jones, and Chard 2001. Huddy and Sears 1995; Skitka and Tetlock 1993. Kinder and Kam 2010. Frank Newport, “Many Americans Doubt They Will Get Social Security Benefits,” Gallup, August 13, 2015, https://news.gallup.com/poll/184580/americans-doubt-social-security -benefits.aspx. Galston 2007. Arnold 2015, 10. Social Security Administration, “Contribution and Benefit Base,” https://www.ssa.gov /OACT/COLA/cbb.html.

18 49. TECH NO LO GY AND ALI EN ATI ON

9. TECHNOLOGY AND ALIENATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Smith and Anderson 2018. Hargittai 2010. Brashier and Shachter 2021; Reisdorf et al. 2021. Napoli 2011. In addition to the widespread theory that media effects are heterogeneous in partisanship, Prior (2007) and Arceneaux and Johnson (2013) establish the importance of audience preferences for entertainment limiting the total reach of political media. Mutz (2015) makes a similar case for studying the heterogeneity in audiences’ conflict avoidance in understanding the reach of uncivil cable talk shows. DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015. Luskin 1990. Sood and Lelkes 2018. Ironically, this niche group that has had an outsized influence in how we understand the internet appears to be the only one affected by many of the pathologies they’ve diagnosed. As I’ve written elsewhere, “The reason that so much effort has been expended in investigating [online echo chambers] is that academics and journalists find it plausible because we ourselves are precisely the type of news consumers who are most likely to self-segregate into likeminded groups” (Munger 2019). Even here, though, there are issues with the difficult-to-overcome bias that scholars of political communication tend to overestimate how much everyone else cares about politics on television. Arceneaux and Johnson (2013) compellingly demonstrate that studies where people are asked to select a given television program tend to overstate partisan preferences when not allowed to opt out and watch an entertainment program if they don’t really care about politics. More recently, the explosion of niche content that appeals to scholars of political communication has made us less likely to watch any of the programs that are actually the most popular. Kim (2018) takes this problem seriously and experimentally demonstrates that exposure to massively popular rags-to-riches programs like Shark Tank tend to increase tolerance for economic inequality. Kleinberg and Lau 2019. Fisher, Goddu, and Keil 2015. Lau and Redlawsk 2008. There is a debate in the scholarly community about the use of the term “fake news.” In some sense, it is a victim of its own success, and has been successfully reappropriated by President Trump to denigrate established media sources (Brummette et al. 2018). Some prefer the term “false news” to avoid this association (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). On the other hand, I’ve argued that this debate is a distraction and that partisan emotional clickbait news that falls well short of being purely fabricated is a much bigger issue (Munger et al. 2019). Regardless, in this book I use “fake news” to refer to the very specific phenomenon of verifiably false information hosted on zero-credibility websites. Although lies and misinformation are as old as politics itself, this definition allows us to talk about the “fake news” that made the news in 2016 as a distinct phenomenon.

CO NCLU S IO N18 5

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

The approach has some limitations. People have to give their consent, and there is some concern about the representativeness of the resulting samples. However, Guess demonstrates that the sample is not far off from national demographics and that there is no difference between this sample and a nationally representative one on the dimension most likely to cause biased estimates—their attitude toward online privacy. Furthermore, there is only data for desktop and laptop computers, not for mobile devices. This imperfection is inherent in all past research, so while Guess’s web tracking is not bulletproof, it represents the state of the art in media measurement during the 2016 election. Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019. Bond et al. 2012. Hargittai 2005; Hargittai and Hsieh 2012. Hargittai, Piper, and Morris 2018. Craig Silverman, “Macedonia’s Pro-Trump Fake News Industry Had American Links, and Is Under Investigation for Possible Russia Ties,” BuzzFeed News, July 18, 2018, https:// www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/american-conservatives-fake-news -macedonia-paris-wade-libert. Craig Silverman, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article /craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo. Shane Goldmacher, “How Deceptive Campaign Fund-Raising Ensnares Older People,” New York Times, June 26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring -donations-seniors.html.

CONCLUSION 1.

2.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Weekly Update by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics,” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index .htm. Michael Schneider, “Year in Review: Most-Watched Television Networks—Ranking 2020’s Winners and Losers,” Variety, December 28, 2020, https://variety.com/2020/tv /news/network-ratings-2020-top-channels-fox-news-cnn-msnbc-cbs-1234866801/.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics represent figures or tables. AARP. See American Association of Retired Persons actors, age of, 69, 71, 71, 72 Affordable Care Act, 131 African Americans, linked fate of, 105–106 age: of actors, 69, 71, 71, 72; of Biden, 4, 13, 36, 65, 168; of Black Boomers, 33; cognitive patterns by, 152–153; descriptive representation correlation with, 50–52; group membership correlation with, 91, 91, 92; household generations correlation with, 91, 92; identity correlation with, 92–94; news media consumption by, 75–76; race correlation with, 35, 91, 92; television patterns by, 69, 70; voter turnout correlation with, 38–39, 39, 40, 47; voting legislation on, 41–42. See also specific topics age distribution, 3; in Congress, 57–58, 58; in House of Representatives, 53–54, 54, 55, 55, 56–57, 57, 58; in Senate, 63, 63; U.S. top-heavy, 11 age pyramid, 9; fertility and mortality rates shaping, 26; of U.S., 23, 23–25 aging, 157–158; ideology and, 43–45; online media relationship with, 152–153. See also elderly

alienation, 11–12, 164 Alter, Charlotte, 168–169 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 130 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 13, 159 American Bar Association, 68 American Medical Association, 68 “American Rescue Plan,” 127, 131–132 American Time Use Survey, 69 Andrews, Helen, 84 APC problem, 17 Arnold, R. Douglas, 140–141 ascriptive groups: collective political actors regarding, 15–17; generational consciousness criteria for, 97–98 auto loans, 129, 129 ballast, 7–9 ballot access laws, 46 bankruptcy, 131, 138 Barberá, Pablo, 154–155 Barrett, Amy Coney, 64 Because Internet (McCulloch), 85 Biden, Joe, 125, 128, 169; age of, 4, 13, 36, 65, 168; “American Rescue Plan” from, 127,

202IND EX

Biden, Joe (continued ) 131–132; campaign information fraud, 160–161; on pensions, 139; Vietnam War deferment, 82 biological continuity, 1–2 birth year representation: in Senate, 61, 61, 62; in Supreme Court, 64, 64, 65 Black Boomers: population and age of, 33; systemic racism impacting, 34–35 Black veterans, 133 Bloc Québécois, 46 Booksmart (film), 86 Boomer ballast, 7–8, 21–22, 78, 158, 173–174, 177n1; in Christmas music, 66, 67; in civil society organization, 175; in House of Representatives, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 57; information technology revolution regarding, 172; in legal industry, 68; in movie industry, 73; in politics, 67–68; in Senate, 61, 62; ship of state impacted by, 9–10 Boomers, 22, 95; absolute income mobility for, 27–28; activeness of, 12; alienation of, 11–12, 164; as alive, 11; COVID-19 pandemic impacting, 163; as elders, 11, 172–173; electoral politics of, 10, 14, 36–38, 41–42; on Facebook, 165–166, 167; fertility rate creating, 26; financial crisis from, 126; GDP, 28, 29, 30; generational consciousness of, 81–83, 84; generational identification of, 98, 99, 99, 100–101, 104, 105, 113, 121, 122; Gen Z conflict with, 5, 94; homeownership, 134–135, 135; linked fate for, 107, 107; marriages, 84; media consumption patterns of, 12–13; Millennials regarding, 4–5, 31–32, 96, 125; MIP of, 102, 103; national wealth share of, 30, 31, 31; news media personalities, 76; political continuity of, 6–7; politician, elderly-focused, preference, 109–110, 110, 116, 117–118, 119, 120; politician, youth-focused, preference, 111, 111, 115, 117, 119; power of, 4, 7, 35, 167–168; Presidency overrepresentation of, 65; by race, 32–33, 33, 34; Time Person of the Year Award to, 20, 21; Vietnam War divide of, 81–82, 123–124; white phenomenon of, 21, 32, 33; youth cultural rebellion, 82–83. See also elderly; retirement age

Boomers (Andrews), 84 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 83–84 Breakfast Club (film), 85 Bridges, Jeff, 136 Bush, George W., 140 Buttigieg, Pete, 52, 53 cable news, 12, 66–67, 75, 77–78 California, 135–136 Cambridge Analytica scandal, 144 Campbell, Andrea Louise, 139 capitalism, 124 Cawthorn, Madison, 48 CBS Evening News, 147 census, 91, 91, 134 Census Bureau Current Population Survey, 39, 40 Center for Responsive Politics, 42 Chetty, Raj, 26–27, 27 Christmas music, 66, 67 civil rights movement, 21 class, 99–100; conflict, 16; politics, 97 climate change, 124, 127–128 Clinton, Hillary, 36, 160 CNN News, 75, 164 cognitive patterns, 152–153 cohort, 9, 22, 178n12; collective political actors distinct from, 17; House of Representatives uneven, 54, 54, 55, 55, 56–57, 57; identity of, 80–81; internet, 85, 87 cohort consciousness. See generational consciousness collective political actors: ascriptive groups regarding, 15–17; cohorts distinct from, 17 college tuition, 130 communication technology, 90, 143, 171, 174; elderly impacted by, 145–146, 161; future of, 170; innovation in, 14, 19, 66–67; latency in, 88; younger generations future with, 175 Comte, Auguste, 2, 4, 171–172 Congress: age distribution in, 57–58, 58; descriptive representation in, 49–52; Google hearing in, 144–145; leadership turnover in, 169–170; Millennials in, 48, 59; OcasioCortez impact on, 59; voting rights legislation by, 41–42; Zuckerberg testimony in, 144. See also House of Representatives; Senate

IND E X 203

conservatism, 44 content: on Facebook, 158–159; far-right extremism, 158; online media heterogeneity of, 148, 149, 150, 151 Converse, Phillip, 38 COVID-19 pandemic: elderly impacted by, 163–164, 165; generational conflict regarding, 163, 164; social media shared locations during, 165–166 credit card debt, 129, 129 Cronkite, Walter, 147 culture war, 123, 124 Cutler, Neal, 44, 93 Daily Stormer, The, 158 Dawson, Michael, 105–106 democracy, 161; in Europe, 47, 127; group conflict centrality to, 16; health of, 175 Democrat party, 50, 52, 53, 65, 126, 128, 168 demography, 9, 171–172 descriptive representation: age correlation with, 50–52; in Congress, 49–52; gender regarding, 50, 51; ideology correlation with, 50; race regarding, 50; virtuous cycle regarding, 51 Deutsch, Karl, 174; on governments, 18; on institutions, 19 digital literacy, elderly, 145–146, 156–157 digital natives, 145, 152 Dionne, E. J., 123 diversity, younger generations, 5 drugs, psychedelic, 84 Duke Law & Technology Review, 133 Duverger’s law, 45–46 Echo Boomers, 5, 14 echo chamber, political, 76–77, 184n9 economy, 31–32, 130, 180n4; gig, 167; stimulus, 134 elderly, 51–52; campaign information fraud impacting, 160–161; cognitive patterns of, 152–153; communication technology impacting, 145–146, 161; COVID-19 pandemic impacting, 163–164, 165; digital literacy, 145–146, 156–157; fake news regarding, 154, 155, 159–160; identity of, 93–94; school expenditure support from,

128; social media impacting, 144, 145–146, 158; U.S. experience of, 158, 159. See also aging elders, 11, 172–173 elections, 123; campaign information fraud during, 160–161; cognitive patterns impacting, 153; Democratic presidential primary, 52, 53, 65, 126, 128, 168; fake news impacting, 153–154; midterm, 38, 39; Millennials in, 60; for presidency, 7, 38, 39, 151; Senate, 63. See also vote choice; voter turnout; voting Electoral College, 45 electoral politics, 98, 109; of Boomers, 10, 14, 36–38, 41–42; generational conflict in, 46, 47, 48–49, 168; Millennials regarding, 49, 142–143, 168–169; single-member district plurality voting impacting, 37, 45–46. See also vote choice equality, 2 Equality of Opportunity Project, 26–27, 27 eugenics, 171 European Parliament, 47, 127 Facebook, 13, 144, 145; Boomers on, 165–166, 167; content on, 158–159; fake news on, 153, 154, 160; newsfeed, 149; theoretical framework for, 151; voting experiment on, 155–156, 157; weak ties prevalence on, 149–150 fairness doctrine, 74–75 fake news, 145, 146, 184n14; elderly regarding, 154, 155, 159–160; on Facebook, 153, 154, 160; on social media, 154–155 federal budget, 10, 12, 18, 96, 122, 167. See also taxes Federal Communication Commission, 74 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 132 “Feliz Navidad,” 66 fertility: rates, 26; reproduction, 171 FHA. See Federal Housing Administration financial crisis: from Boomers, 126; Social Security, 140–142, 142; of 2008, 130 Fortnite, 89 Fortune 500, 68 Founding Fathers, 49 Fox News, 43, 75, 164, 165

20 4IND E X

fraud, informational, 146, 160–161 fraud, political, 159, 160–161 Fraud Watch hotline, 159 Frenemies (Settle), 149 Gallup poll, 128, 140 GDP. See Gross Domestic Product gender: descriptive representation regarding, 50, 51; politician entry regarding, 52–53 General Social Survey, 99–100, 150 generational categories, 22, 28 generational conflict, 17; between Boomers and Gen Z, 5, 94; COVID-19 pandemic regarding, 163, 164; over culture war, 123, 124; in electoral politics, 46, 47, 48–49, 168; over federal budget, 10, 12, 18, 96, 122, 167; in legal industry, 68; over Social Security, 142; under two-party system, 46, 47, 124 generational consciousness, 10, 15–16, 96; ascriptive group criteria for, 97–98; of Boomers, 81–83, 84; criteria for, 97–98; of Gen Z, 90, 165; Mannheim on, 79–80; of Millennials, 80–81, 165 generational identification, 98; core of, 99, 100; correlations between, 112, 113, 114; cusp of, 100–101, 101; increase in, 99, 99, 100; by race, 120–121, 121, 122; salience of, 104, 105, 114–115, 116. See also identity generational unity, 3 Generation of Sociopaths, A (Gibson), 84 generations. See specific topics Generation X, 168; GDP, 28, 29, 29; generational identification of, 98, 99, 99, 100, 104, 105, 113, 121; homeownership, 135, 135; in House of Representatives, 56, 57; linked fate for, 106–107, 107; MIP of, 102, 103; national wealth share of, 30–31, 31; politician, elderly-focused, preference, 110, 110, 116, 118, 120; politician, youth-focused, preference, 111, 115, 117, 119; Republican Hispanic politician candidates, 82 Gen Z: Boomers conflict with, 5, 94; celebrities, 73–74, 89; as digital natives, 145, 152; generational consciousness of, 90, 165; generational identification of, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 112, 113, 114, 121, 121, 122; identity of, 93–94; internet use, 85; linked fate of,

96–97, 107, 107, 108; MIP of, 102, 103, 104; politician, elderly-focused, preference, 110, 110, 116, 118, 120; politician, youth-focused, preference, 111, 111, 115, 116–117, 119; social media creators, 86, 87. See also younger generations Gerbaudo, Paolo, 174 gerontocracies, 13 GI Bill, 132–133 Gibney, Bruce Cannon, 82, 84, 85, 138, 139 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 64, 170 Google, 144–145 governments, 1–2, 139; Deutsch on, 18; gerontocracy, 13; leadership of, 8–9; pensions from, 137; tech company regulation of, 170. See also democracy; Social Security; taxes Great Depression, 26, 132 Greatest Generation, 43, 56 Great Recession, 26, 81 Green New Deal, 128–129 Greens party, European, 127 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 28, 29, 30 group consciousness, 96 Guess, Andy, 154, 185n15 Gurri, Martin, 174–175 Gutenberg press, 172 Hargittai, Eszter, 156–157 Harris, Malcolm, 30, 130 Hatch, Orrin, 144 Heidegger, Martin, 3 Hersh, Eitan, 175 Hillygus, D. Sunshine, 40 historical romanticism, 2, 3 Hoffman, Reid, 43 Holbein, John B., 40 HOLC. See Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Hollywood, 72, 86 homeownership crisis, 132, 134, 135, 135, 167 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), 132 House of Representatives, 36, 48; age distribution in, 53–54, 54, 55, 55, 56–57, 57, 58; Boomer ballast in, 53, 54, 55, 56–57; elections for, 60; Ocasio-Cortez in, 59 housing policy: of economic stimulus, 134; homeownership crisis from, 132, 134, 135,

IND EX 20 5

135, 167; of mortgage interest tax deduction, 133; Proposition 13, 136 human capital, 131 Hume, David, 1–2 hyperpolitics, 174–175 identity, 79, 84, 87; age correlation with, 92–94; ascriptive group, 97; of cohorts, 80–81; of elderly, 93–94; partisanship measurement, 90–91. See also generational identification ideologies, 108; aging and, 43–45; descriptive representation correlation with, 50; politician entry influenced by, 52; selfplacement, 44 immigration, 34, 34; attitudes toward, 32; policies against, 32–33 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 33–34 income mobility, absolute, 26–27, 27, 28 incumbency, political, 48 Independent party, 47 inequality, 2–3; in information technology revolution, 172; within Millennials, 167; wealth, 42–43 information technology revolution, 3–4, 161, 172–173 Inheritors, 21 Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An (Smith), 1 Instagram, political, 175 internet, 88; cohort, 85, 87; development of, 147–148; digital literacy, 145, 156–157; digital natives, 145, 152; platforms, 148; revolution, 83, 85; theoretical framework for, 151. See also media, online; social media Internet Movie Database, 69, 71 issue alignment: ascriptive group, 97; measure of, 108–109; vote choice moderated by, 118–119, 119, 120 journalism, 74 keyboard smash, 87 Kids These Days (Harris), 29, 130 Kimbrough, David, 178n2 Kimbrough, Gary, 179n2 King, Steve, 144–145

labor force participation, 91, 91, 92 Last Laugh, The (film), 73 latency, shared location regarding, 88 League of Legends, 89 legacy media, 66–67, 77–78 “Legal Industry Generation Gap, The,” 68 Lewis, Becca, 74, 76 liberal positivism, 1 life expectancy, 35 linked fate, 96–97, 107, 107, 108; for African Americans, 105–106; vote choice moderated by, 116–117, 117, 118, 118 Lorenz, Taylor, 95 Los Angeles Times, 136 Madison, James, 16 Mannheim, Karl, 1–2, 79–80, 170 Marshmello, 89 Mason, Lilliana, 90–91 McCain, John, 65 McCourtney Institute of Democracy’s Mood of the Nation Poll (MOTN), 98, 101 McCulloch, Gretchen, 85, 87 media, 12, 164, 184n5; broadcast, 147; demand, 69; democratization of, 13, 174; elderly targeted, 93–94; legacy, 66–67, 77–78; online, 152–153. See also internet; online media heterogeneity; social media Medicare for All, 124–125 Millennials, 20, 21; Boomers regarding, 4–5, 31–32, 96, 125; in Congress, 48, 59; Echo Boomers term for, 5, 14; in elections, 60; electoral politics regarding, 49, 142–143, 168–169; fertility rates of, 26; GDP, 28, 29; generational consciousness of, 80–81, 165; generational identification of, 98–99, 99, 100, 104, 105, 112, 113, 114, 121, 121, 122; homeownership crisis, 132, 134, 135, 135, 167; in House of Representatives, 56, 57; inequality within, 167; linked fate for, 107, 107; MIP of, 102, 103; national wealth share of, 30–31, 31; Ocasio-Cortez representing, 59; politician, elderly-focused, preference, 110, 110, 116, 118, 120; politician, youthfocused, preference, 111, 111, 115, 116–117, 119. See also younger generations Minecraft, 89

20 6 IND E X

MIP. See most important problem misinformation, 146 mortality rates, 26 most important problem (MIP), 101–102, 103, 104, 108 MOTN. See McCourtney Institute of Democracy’s Mood of the Nation Poll MovieLens Dataset, 69 movies: actors age in, 69, 71, 71, 72; Boomer ballast in, 73 MSNBC News, 75 Munroe, Randall, 66, 67 Murdoch, Rupert, 43 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 98 National Voter Registration Act of 1993, 41 nation-state, 8 Nature, 156 Nazism, 3, 80 Nerves of Government, The (Deutsch), 18 News Corp, 43 news media, 73; fairness doctrine influencing, 74–75; as legacy media, 66–67, 77–78; YouTube political commentators influencing, 74, 76, 77, 78 New York Times, 95, 160, 165 Nielsen ratings system, 147 noncognitive skills, 40 Northeastern University, 155 nursing homes, 146, 164 Nyhan, Thomas, 138 Obama, Barack, 65, 82 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 14–15, 59, 168 Occupy Wall Street, 42, 81 Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, The (Alter), 168–169 Ong, Walter J., 87 online media, 152–153 online media heterogeneity: of content, 148, 149, 150, 151; of elderly, 155, 156–157 OpenSecrets, 43 O’Reilly, Bill, 76 partisan affective polarization, 90, 96 partisanship, 90–91, 108

Patrick, Dan, 165 PBGC. See Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Pelosi, Nancy, 59, 169 Penn State, 98, 136–137 Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), 138 pensions: defined-benefit, 136–137; definedcontribution, 136, 137–138; unsustainability of, 138–139 PewDiePie, 73, 89 Pew Research Center, 75–76, 88; on COVID-19 retirement, 166; generational identification survey by, 98–99, 99, 100–101, 101 Pichai, Sundar, 144–145 Pinder, Wilhelm, 5 plugin, web browser, 154, 185n15 Plutzer, Eric, 98 polarization, 12, 90, 96 political continuity: biological continuity relationship to, 1–2; in U.S., 6–7 political donations, 42–43 political gerontology, 93 political hobbyism, 175 political parties, 37, 90–91, 108, 122, 171. See also Democrat party; Republican party; two-party system political sophistication, 150–151 politician, elderly-focused, 109–110, 110, 116, 117–118, 119, 120 politician, youth-focused, 111, 111, 115, 116–117, 119 politicians, 52–53, 82, 109–110, 110, 111 politics: Boomer ballast in, 67–68; class, 97; cognitive shift regarding, 152–153; echo chamber of, 76–77, 184n9; Facebook impacting, 149–150; fraud, 159, 160–161; generational conflict in, 17–18; hyperpolitics as, 174–175; lifestyle, 150; Why Americans Hate Politics on, 123; YouTube commentators on, 74, 76, 77, 78 politics, compassionate, 139 Politics of Millennials, The (Rouse and Ross), 102 positivism, 1, 2, 3 Postman, Neil, 172, 173 presidency: Boomer overrepresentation in, 65; Democratic primary elections for, 52, 53, 65, 126, 128, 168; elections for, 7, 38, 39, 151

IND EX 207

“Problem of Generations, The” (Mannheim), 1–2, 79–80, 170 proportional representation voting, 45, 46 Proposition 13 (1978), 136 Putnam, Robert, 83–84 quantitative easing, 134 race: age correlation with, 35, 91, 92; Boomers by, 32–33, 33, 34; descriptive representation regarding, 50; generational identification by, 120–121, 121, 122; government transfer support regarding, 139; linked fate for, 105–106; political donors preference for, 42–43. See also white phenomenon racism, 106 racism, systemic, 34–35 radio, 147 Red Guards, 80 Republican party, 48, 50; climate change beliefs of, 127; Hispanic Generation X candidates, 82; Trump influence on, 168–169 retirement age, 146–147; peak of, 166–167; power during, 35, 167–168; television patterns of, 69, 70 Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, The (Gurri), 174–175 Roblox, 89–90 Ross, Ashley, 102 Rouse, Stella, 102 Ryan, Paul, 54 Sanders, Bernie, 52, 65, 124–125, 130, 180n9 school expenditures, 128 self-identification, ascriptive group, 97 Senate, 36; age distribution in, 63, 63; birth year representation in, 61, 61, 62; Boomer ballast in, 61, 62; elections, 63; seniority system impacting, 61; 17th Amendment impacting, 60; Silent Generation in, 61, 62 Settle, Jaime, 149, 150, 151 17th Amendment, 60 sexual misconduct, 76 shared location, 79–80, 87; latency regarding, 88; on social media, 165–166 Ship of Theseus, 8–9

Silent Generation, 17, 43, 182n20; generational identification of, 98, 99, 100–101, 104, 105, 112, 113, 114, 121; homeownership, 134, 135; in House of Representatives, 56, 57; linked fate for, 107, 107; MIP for, 103; politician, elderly-focused, preference, 110, 110, 116, 118, 120; politician, youth-focused, preference, 111, 115, 117, 119; in Senate, 61, 62 single-member district plurality voting, 37, 45–46 16th Amendment, 133 Smith, Adam, 1 social location, 79–80 social media, 13, 59, 66, 148, 180n16; elderly impacted by, 144, 145–146, 158; fake news on, 154–155; Gen Z creators on, 86, 87; Instagram, political, as, 175; political sophistication impacted by, 150–151; shared location on, 165–166; theoretical framework for, 151; TikTok as, 86, 165; Trump regarding, 14, 160; Twitter panel, 154–155. See also Facebook; YouTube Social Security, 13, 125, 126, 138; financial crisis, 140–142, 142; reform of, 140–141; revenue, 141–142, 142; support for, 139–140. See also pensions social sorting, 90–91, 91 Soros, George, 43 Star Wars, 72 state, ship of, 8–10 states, U.S., 46, 60 status threat, 93 Stefanik, Elise, 169 Sternberg, Joseph C.: on housing policy, 134; on pensions, 137; The Theft of a Decade by, 132 student loan debt, 124; causes for, 130–131; forgiveness of, 131; increase in, 129, 129 Students for a Democratic Society, 81–82 Supreme Court, 36; birth year representation in, 64, 64, 65; future of, 170 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 133 taxes: mortgage interest deduction for, 133; payroll, 141; property, 136; wealth, 126, 141 Tax Reform Act (1986), 133 Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, 138 Tea Party movement, 125

20 8 IND E X

television, 147, 151, 184n10; age patterns of, 69, 70; Boomer generational consciousness through, 83, 84; diversification of, 75; homogeneity of, 148–149 Theft of a Decade, The (Sternberg), 132 theoretical framework: for online media heterogeneity, 156; for social media, 151 third parties, 45–47 Thomsen, Danielle, 52–53 Thurmond, Strom, 61 TikTok, 86, 165 Time Person of the Year Award, 20–21 Trump, Donald, 13, 36, 64, 65, 93; election of, 153, 160–161; Republican party influence of, 168–169; social media regarding, 14, 160; Vietnam War medical deferment, 82 Tufecki, Zeynep, 174–175 26th Amendment, 41–42 Twitter and Tear Gas (Tufecki), 174–175 Twitter Application Programming Interface, 154 Twitter panel, 154–155 two-party system, 10, 174; Duverger’s law impacting, 45–46; generational conflict under, 46, 47, 124 United States (U.S.), 124–125; absolute income mobility in, 26–27, 27, 28; age distribution in, 11; age pyramids of, 23, 23–25; ballot access laws in, 46; broadcast media penetration in, 147; climate change beliefs in, 127–128; elderly experience in, 158, 159; electoral politics in, 10; foreign-born Americans in, 32–34, 34; immigration in, 32–34, 34; information technology permeation in, 173; partisan affective polarization in, 90, 96; political continuity in, 6–7; political donation inequality in, 42–43; single-member district plurality voting in, 37, 45–46; states in, 46, 60; wealth share in, 30–31, 31. See also specific topics video games, multiplayer online, 88–90 Vietnam War, 81–82, 123–124

vote choice: generational salience moderation of, 114–115, 115, 116; issue alignment moderation of, 118–119, 119, 120; linked fate moderation of, 116–117, 117, 118, 118 voter registration, 41 voter turnout, 37; age correlation with, 38–39, 39, 40, 47; as habit, 40, 42; voting age legislation impacting, 41–42; younger generations regarding, 52 voting: age legislation on, 41–42; Facebook experiment on, 155–156, 157; proportional representation, 45, 46; single-member district plurality, 37, 45–46. See also elections Voting Rights Act of 1965, 41 Warren, Elizabeth, 126 weak ties, 149–150 wealth, 1; inequality, 42–43; national share in, 30–31, 31; taxes, 126, 141 white phenomenon: Boomers as, 21, 32, 33; generational identification as, 120–121, 121, 122. See also race Who, The, 81 Why Americans Hate Politics (Dionne), 123 Williams, Owen, 89 World of Warcraft, 88 Young Americans for Freedom, 81–82 younger generations (Millennials and Gen Z): on Boomer term, 95; on climate change, 128; communication technology future of, 175; diversity of, 5; generational cleavages of, 124–125, 126–127; generational consciousness of, 10; online media designed for, 152; voter turnout regarding, 52 youth cultural rebellion, Boomers, 82–83 YouTube, 73, 86; communities, 88; credibility system, 77; political commentators on, 74, 76, 77, 78 Zuckerberg, Mark, 144