Politics & Culture: X Marked the Spot - Farewell to generational nonsense

National Review, July 3, 2000 by Jonah Goldberg

Recently, Paul Farhi of the Wash ington Post wrote a brilliantly subtle profile of the pundit Heather Nauert. "Who the heck is Heather Nauert?" Farhi asked rhetorically. Before the article, the answer from most people in Washington-er, most men-was, "Isn't she that hot-as-tar blonde on Fox News?" Farhi fleshed out the characterization somewhat, but it turns out that's still the right answer. Nauert, 30, frequently appears on television as a "GOP strategist," even though she's never worked for the GOP-largely because she's an adequate talker and quickens the pulse of male couch potatoes. "From the time I was 16," she says, "I knew I wanted to do something on TV"; lo and behold, she's managed to become an expert on elections, foreign affairs, and tax policy (after a brief stint as a country-music VJ).

While one might be expected to take this story as an example of how fierce competition is forcing networks to lower their journalistic standards (and let's not pick on Fox on this score; after all, MSNBC's anchors are increasingly underwear models with if-I-only-had-a-brain glasses), one could also see the Nauert story as a sign of a major positive step for our culture: the death of "Generation X."

Not too long ago, the press was committed to the idea that people born between, roughly, 1961 and 1980 were bona fide members of the identity politics coalition. This idea was based on a sort of secular astrology, the notion that the experience and perspective of young people was so different, so unique-simply by virtue of their date of birth-that members of other generations could never fully appreciate it.

Now, where would people get an idea like that? More important, who on earth could believe such nonsense?

Well, if you guessed "the baby boomers," you'd be right on both counts. Boomers are the "ugly Ameri cans" of civil society. For more than 30 years, they've tromped through every corner of our culture, rearranging things and demanding that people speak their language. When they were under 30, they insisted that anyone older than 30 couldn't be trusted. Once they passed 30, they whined that everyone younger than that was apathetic and unreliable.

When people say "baby boomer," of course, they don't mean all people born from 1946 to 1964. They mean a certain type of liberal-usually coastal, prosperous, suburban, and white; the kind of people who pay fealty to their youthful ideals by demanding no-smoking signs at the Barnes &Noble.

These same suburban Hillary Clinton voters who "swear" they were at Woodstock also insist that there was once a generational consensus about American politics. But both claims are false revisionism. In the late 1960s, probably the most pro-military demographic group was youth, especially those boomers who had not attended college. When the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, the predicted hordes of progressive young people did not materialize to carry George McGovern to victory in 1972. Half of the 18-to-20 age group stayed home, and the other half split about down the middle (52 percent McGovern, 48 percent Nixon). As David Frum has argued, much of what we call the 1960s is really baby- boomer shorthand for the way they wish they had been.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. The first big wave of post-boomers was entering the work force-specifically, elite newsrooms. The prospering boomers hated them. A headline in the Washington Post blared, "The Boring Twenties: Grow Up, Crybabies." Then there was all that drivel about "slackers" and Generation X. Boomers, according to U.S. News, thought of twentysomethings as "flesh-and-blood Bart Simpsons. . . . With their MTV-rotted minds and sound-bite attention spans, they are a whiny cohort with the moral compass of street-gang Bloods and Crips, a bunch of apathetic slackers who don't vote and couldn't care less."

Then came the backlash. Young writers and pols of widely varying levels of talent and good faith whined that boomers were being unfair. The language they used was awfully similar in tone and content to the hypersensitivity we are accustomed to hearing from more prominent members of the coalition of the oppressed. Douglas Rushkoff, editor of The GenX Reader, complained that Newsweek's assault on Gen Xers smacked of "condescending, humorless insensitivity." Another Gen X writer, Ian Williams, whined that Gen Xers feel a "distinct and undeniable alienation from the culture" and that boomers just don't get it.

Op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and magazine articles poured forth from Gen Xers, most of them terribly written and even more poorly conceived. But that mattered little. Gen Xers figured out how to push every button in the baby-boomer psyche. They claimed to be a demographic group with a distinctive identity; they invoked the legacy of the 1960s, reminding boomers of the vast chasm that supposedly divided people on either side of 30. Most claimed that liberal goals were the goals of the "youth movement." Indeed, they built an argument on the foundational assumptions of modern liberalism, and wrapped it with a nostalgic appeal to boomer vanity.