I’m not usually a fan of trite generational analysis, where demographers coin cute terms to describe this or that cultural development of each micro-generation. But there is one point on which generational analysis holds true: the party you support in your young adulthood tends to be the party you support for the rest of your life. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but voting patterns hold up quite significantly.
Another important element to generational analysis is the extent to which stereotypes become embraced by the generations themselves. So the 1950s becomes “conservative” and “traditional,” the 1960s “radical” and “anti-authoritarian”, GenXers are “cynical” and Millennials and GenY are “community-oriented” and “socially liberal.” It isn’t so much that these stereotypes are patently false. It’s just that we tend to remember the last 60 years as if part of a teleological Forrest Gump montage.
Add to this the fact that despite the radical developments of the 1950s – rock and roll, the Beats, the Civil Rights movement, for example – the 1960s really were a LOT more culturally radical than the 1950s. And those who came of age during those decades are quite aware of how much about American life fundamentally changed. Everything from sex and sexuality to race to war and peace to the economy changed markedly between the early 1950s – the era of the Silent Generation – and the 1970s. It’s hard to find a 20-year period in modern American history where culture changed more drastically.
Much of our politics since the early 1970s has been dominated by the cultural battles between the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers (or at least the left half of the Boomers). Talk radio conservatives like Michael Savage openly pine for the good old days of the Cleavers and Ozzie and Harriett. It doesn’t matter that the 1950s never looked like it is romanticized to be by cultural conservatives. What matters is that there still are large sections of America who came of political age in the early 1950s, romanticize their own youth as a conservative era, and are as conservative today as they were when they voted for Ike in the 1950s and Nixon in 1960. With the so-called Greatest Generation now, more or less, passing from this earth, the Silenters now comprise the bulk of older voters today.
Seen this way it makes perfect sense that these folks are still the most conservative voters, make up the bulk of the Tea Party movement, and oppose Obama the most (on ideological – not racial – grounds). A gray-haired man born in 1935 – too young for WWII or Korea and too old for Vietnam – will be the poster child for the 2010 midterm elections if the GOP does as well as most people think. The people who fought for FDR’s New Deal and remember it fondly have already passed on. The Boomers are most powerful, but they are only just now hitting retirement. The Silent Generation is dominating the anti-Obama backlash.
But the Silent Generation will be passing from us soon enough too. And then there will be nobody who honestly remembers life before the sexual revolution, or before the riots of the late 1960s, or the hippies. The 1950s will be as much a part of the foggy past as the 1910s.
It is this reason why the short-term anti-Obama backlash is not likely to sink in very much. It is being driven in terms of language and ideology that younger voters find utterly perplexing. There are conservative younger micro-generations too, of course. The late Boomer/early GenXers were quite conservative, coming of age in the late Carter and Reagan years. Ironically enough, Barack Obama is from that generation. But the later GenXers (including me) and certainly those who came after me are far less conservative – especially culturally.
It will be tempting to over-analyze this midterm election, when economics explains much of it. But the generational turnover is clearly a part of the story too. Unless we really do dip into another deep recession I’d expect the Tea Party and the other machinations of the Silent Generation to fall the way of the Mugwumps.