Philip Bump - The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

There arent many people left in the United States who experienced a time in which the baby boom had never existed. For most Americans, including members of the baby boom itself, it was just therethe world they entered into, one in which there was this large group of people in the same general age range who were regularly carved out in the public conversation as something to be dealt with, credited, or blamed.

For some small portion of the current population, maybe 2 percent, theres memory of a time before Americans started having more babies than at any point prior. A time when a person could watch the entire country scramble to try to accommodate this sudden massive shift in the population.

For everyone else, the America shaped by the baby boom is simply America, in the same way that a child born today just lives in a world with the internet and with airplanes. It takes a conscious awareness of the baby booms existence and uniqueness to understand the grip that it held and still holds on our national conversation. And that takes putting it in contextif not overhauling our understanding of the boom more dramatically.

In 1945, the year before the boom began, the population of the United States was about 140 million. and you get close to the mark.

Quickly, things would start to break. The government projected that there would be about 3.8 million kids in public kindergartens in 2022, with that figure expected to increase slightly by 2026. If wed had 9.5 million babies born in 2021, though, where would we put them? Who would pay for it? The problems would show well before that, of course, with strains on daycare programs and fierce competition for baby products of all kinds. There would be huge shifts in a number of industries as this massive market blossomed. The country would suddenly become focused on those kids, on meeting their needs year after year as they got old enough for elementary school, high school, driving, jobs, college.

This is exactly what happened with the baby boom. They opened their eyes and everyone around them was working to meet their exceptional needs.

They are a generational tyranny, Landon Jones wrote in one of the first serious examinations of the baby boom. This wasnt meant accusatoriallyat least not entirely. The boom was demanding in the way that an unshoveled driveway is demanding: its not the snows fault. Eventually, baby boomers came to recognize their own power, the power the generation was granted by marketers and by dint of sheer volumevolume in numbers, volume at times in decibels. Joness book is called Great Expectations, which he frames as a descriptor of the hopeful investment that the country made in the members of the baby boom. But it has an inverse interpretation, too: the boomers themselves expected a lot.

A woman born in 1946 once remarked to me that for most of her youth she thought that all new generations were afforded such attention, Jones writes. Only much later did she realize, This wasnt the way it always was; we were the ones who were different.

Over time, the baby boomers became the norm. Rather than reshaping the country in specific ways, they instead redefined it entirely. Those tropes about midcentury Americana are largely boomer tropes, the rock and roll and the blue jeans and the ads for Barbies and Chevys on TV. These are the Cold War kids who grew up to take over government and business and entertainment. They went from invaders to administrators. And, of course, they had their own kids.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, the baby boom wasnt the dominant force it had been, demographically or culturally. The number of living people born in America during the boom years, 1946 to 1964, was declining. But the number of boomers had been increasing, thanks to immigrationimmigration that was rapidly diversifying the population. Meanwhile, many of the boomers kids were members of a new, huge generation that was seizing attention and resources: the millennials.

Suddenly, members of the baby boom generation see something theyve never seen before, a group of people competing with them for power and cultural heft. Not only was the center of gravity shifting, it was shifting to a group that didnt look much like the baby boom, often literally. These young Americans are more diverse, more likely to come from an immigrant family, better educated, less religious, more liberal. America was visibly changing, as it had visibly changed when the boomers were kids. But this time, the changes were away from the boom, not toward it.

About 15 years ago, there began a cascade of events that sharpened this tension. The recession destabilized economic security, shifting upward the age when older Americans expected to be able to retirejust before the first boomers started turning 65. Barack Obamas election sparked both optimism and a furious backlash centered heavily among older Americans. White Christians, for the first time, constituted less than half of the countrys population. And then the Census Bureau announced that the same demographic fate awaited Whites overall, sooner rather than later.

All of this fed into an energy that first broke into national politics with the selection of Sarah Palinthat real American, that stalwart conservativeto join John McCains 2008 Republican ticket for the presidency. It was a dynamic (and a selection) powered by an interlocking conservative media ecosystem that spanned from radio to the web to television. In the first months of the Obama administration, it coalesced into the right-wing Tea Party movement, participants in which were mostly older, mostly White, and worried about things like government spending on noncitizens and the fact that their kids and grandkids had been duped by this Democratic president of dubious origins.