Americans naturally tend to think of their presidents, like their families, in terms of generations. This may have started with the news that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had both died on July 4, 1826, half a century to the day from the time the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence they jointly drafted.
The Founding Generation (born 1732-1767) held the presidency for nearly half a century, from 1789 to 1837. Five of those presidents were adults during the American Revolution; two had childhood memories of it: John Quincy Adams, who watched gunfire smoke from Bunker Hill at age 7, and Andrew Jackson, who was slashed by a British officer’s sword at age 14.
Less than a month after Jackson left office, a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln gave his Springfield Lyceum speech, venerating the Founders and warning of mob rule. He was part of the Antebellum Generation (birth years 1773-1809), which held office between 1837 and 1869. It grappled with the fissiparous issue of slavery and its expansion. After a bloody civil war, this generation abolished the “peculiar institution.”
The Civil War Generation presidents (birth years 1821-1843) all fought in that war, except Grover Cleveland, who paid $300 not to do so. Regarded by historians as undistinguished, they presided over amazing technological innovation and tumultuous economic growth in the years 1869-1901. They were followed by the post-Civil War Generation presidents (birth years 1856-74), all college graduates, who led America’s emergence as a world power between 1901 and 1933.
Each generation held the presidency for 30-some years, as did the three presidents (birth years 1882-90) who served as subordinates in World War I and commanders in World War II, holding office from 1933 to 1961.
There was more turnover for the seven presidents of the G.I. Generation (birth years 1908-24), each with World War II military experience, who served from 1961 to 1993. One was murdered, one resigned, and two were defeated for reelection. But after floundering in the late 1960s and 1970s, in the 1980s, they presided over revived broad-based economic growth and nearly bloodless victory in the Cold War.
How have their successors, the Baby Boom Generation (birth years 1946-1961), done? They started off when some thought we’d reached “the end of history,” with democratic capitalism not seriously challenged. Its first three presidents each served eight years (the first such trio since the political allies Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe) and followed elite consensus policies on immigration and trade.
But some consensus policies imploded. Subsidies for minority homebuying produced the 2008 financial collapse and lingering slow growth afterward. The non-enforcement of immigration restrictions produced at least marginal downward pressure on low-skill wages and widening economic inequality.
The trade opening to China produced cheap consumer goods but didn’t move China toward rule-based conduct or anything like democracy. And it facilitated the spread of coronaviruses — with minimal disruption earlier this century, but this year with the devastating COVID-19, which has killed thousands and shut down the economies of Europe and North America.
The arguable failures of consensus trade and immigration policies fueled the oddball candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016. So did dynastic politics: Trump used Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton as foils in the primaries and in the general election.
Baby boomer self-righteousness played a role too. Consider Trump’s stubborn refusal to admit error or avoid trivia or Barack Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) apparent attempts to delegitimize Trump, in contrast to earlier presidents’ and candidates' choices not to delegitimizing the close presidential winners in 1960 and in 2000.
Now, after nearly 30 years, the boomers won’t go away. Trump, the third president born in 1946, is running again. Joe Biden, born December 1942, is technically a generational throwback, just a month too early for boomer status (defined by William Strauss and Neal Howe’s prescient 1991 book Generations as starting in birth year 1943). While 37% of 2016 Republican voters backed post-boomer candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, only 4% of Democratic primary and caucus voters backed Gen Xers Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang this year.
That doesn’t mean that younger generations have no influence. The G.I. Generation maintained its hold on the White House after the 1960s and 1970s ghetto riots and campus rebellions. But it ceded control of the culture to boomer rebels, as Ronald Reagan lamented in his 1989 farewell address.
Similarly, as boomers keep hold of the presidency, many politicians and corporate executives seem ready to cede control of the culture to Black Lives Matter and campus radicals. They’re apparently cool with statue smashing, unbothered by the resemblance to the Taliban’s smashing of the Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan — and with trashing American history, as with the New York Times’s 1619 Project.
Happy Fourth of July.
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