Boomers Eclipsed

C ast your mind back to November 2017. Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio were pushing for a slight amendment to the forthcoming Donald Trump tax cuts. Instead of reducing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, their amendment would reduce it to 22 percent and seriously expand the child tax credit. Twenty Republicans and nine Democrats in the Senate voted for it. But Trump wanted his number and got it.

And yet, the desire to do something to make family formation a little easier is everywhere. In recent months, Republican Mitt Romney proposed a federal child allowance that would be the first major expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s. Lee and Rubio have proposed more dramatic expansions of the child tax credit. Senator Josh Hawley has proposed a “Parent Tax Benefit” that would give aid to single mothers but also provide a serious marriage bonus to cohabiting couples that got hitched. The intellectual Right is full of proposals for expanded support for parents and their young children. The Biden administration wants to provide direct monthly checks to families.

Why this sudden explosion of interest? You could attribute it to panic about falling fertility rates (they’ve been falling since the 1970s). But something quite momentous happened between 2017 and these past few months. Sometime in the middle of 2019, the Millennial generation eclipsed the Baby Boomers as the largest living generation of people.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how much the Baby Boomers have distorted American society and government. The story of the second half of 20th-century American government has basically been a story about the Boomers. The expansion of highways and suburbs allowed them to have a childhood unlike anyone before them. By the early 1960s, almost the whole of popular culture and the bulk of advertising dollars were dedicated exclusively to them, and this continued into their tawdry middle age (The Big Chill), and into their oncoming sexual dysfunction (Viagra and Cialis commercials). At nearly every step since their birth, government bent to subsidize their lives more. When Boomers depended on the financial markets, the response to a financial crisis was to save Wall Street long before saving the entry-level jobs that Millennials needed. Zoning and building policies inflate the value of Boomer-owned homes. Even policies that are putatively for Boomers’ children, expanded Pell grants and preferential treatment of student loans, were ways of surreptitiously lifting the financial burden on Boomers.

And so, buoyed by government and society, Boomers now control almost half of the household wealth in the nation. Millennials control roughly 3 percent. Nearly three in five childless Millennials say they don’t have kids because it is too expensive to raise them. This sudden push to use the government to smooth income for young people is a generational watershed.

The change is not just governmental. In recent years, social media and other technology companies have essentially destroyed the mass-broadcast popular culture that was the formative institution and primary identity marker for Boomers. Generation X is willing to indulge in a tiny nostalgia for Nirvana and Soundgarden, but they have none of the appetite for catechizing people into the Stones and the Eagles the way Boomers did.

Many policies and social movements that were unthinkable as long as the Boomer imagination was the controlling one in American politics are suddenly possible. And not all of them will be hostile to conservatives. The breakup of mass pop culture, and the centripetal forces separating social classes and identity groups, will be a major challenge to public schools and to all sorts of schemes for social management and integration.

Helen Andrews’s book, Boomers, foregrounds Steve Jobs and his company’s oddly demanding slogan: Think Different. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance to do just that. We have a chance to rebalance the democratic scales in society.

In 1964, a member of the Silent Generation sang, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” And perhaps for the first time since the mid 1960s, they really are.