COMMENTS: The False Promise of Generational Politics
Siegel, Fred
The history of the last half-millennium can be written as the story of rising classes, each pronouncing itself a universal class that embodies the general good. More narrowly, just as Virginia...
...393...
...More narrowly, just as Virginia gentlemen stressed the virtues of breeding and farmers extolled the virtues of the rural life, the young, highly educated professionals—a few years ago derided by the neoconservatives as the "New Class" but now renamed the "Yuppies"—insist that their meritocratically confirmed "intelligence" is the primary requisite for governing...
...In the shadow of that economic downturn, the radicalism of many '60s college students was derailed by the harsh demographic realities of the 1970s...
...Arguing evidently from their own experience, they speak of the baby boomers as a unified group...
...In fact the baby boomers are sharply divided between those born before and after 1954...
...One of these years, you're going to either have an idea, or an issue or a candidate come along that will create a majority coalition that would last...
...but many others, even those who voted for McGovern and Carter, were put off by the snobbery and pretensions of "hip" America...
...Brown's failure to stop Carter in '76 did little to staunch the speculation in 1980 about how the baby-boom voters would finally make their numbers felt...
...One of McGovern's advisers, Fred Dutton, who later became a PR man for the Saudis, has written a widely praised book, The Emerging Democratic 391 Majority, explaining how youth, newly enfranchised when the voting age dropped to 18, would sweep McGovern to victory...
...Reagan leads Hart among people between 30 and 49, and the president's strongest approval rating57 percent—comes from 18- to 29-year-olds...
...Similarly, "new generation" politicians had come to the fore in Hart's home state of Colorado, on the Democratic National Committee, and in the House...
...In 1973 and 1974 careening inflation and OPEC oil shortages dimmed the afterglow of the '60s...
...As later with Hart, blacks were not part of Brown's coalition...
...The era of youth was replaced by the era of limits...
...In Tennessee there are four congressmen and one senator under 50, but not one supported Hart in the state's primary...
...The younger group, and most of them did not take part in the "great refusal," is distinctly more conservative...
...A 1982 study of 13 major corporations found that "a third of the top jobs were held by people under 40 and 74 percent by people under 50...
...A Hart presidency, reasoned pollster Pat Caddell, would be emblematic of their personal achievement...
...Brown talked about creating a new cross-cutting coalition that would defy all the old categories...
...But the baby boomers are leveling off as a percentage of the voting-age population...
...And buried in the general election statistics was the then surprising shift of middle-income, younger middle-aged voters to the Reagan camp...
...In 1972 the '60s generation was only 23 percent of the voting-age population and 14 percent of the actual voters...
...The number of college students did grow rapidly in the 1960s, but even those of the '60s "political generation" were outnumbered by those young people who couldn't get a student deferment, who went to war, and came home to work in factories, farms, and restaurants...
...Their counterparts are heavily in evidence on Charles Manatt's Democratic National Committee, which has been furiously trying to attract young entrepreneurial tyros into the party...
...And they demanded too much from government, they were too expensive...
...Youth failed McGovern...
...One explanation for Hart's limitations will surely be that he was sociologically ahead of his time...
...But the biggest surprise came in the brief postelection shift to Republican party identification, when the group showing the most marked change was that of the older middleclass baby boomers who had struggled with stiff job competition and rising home-mortgage interest rates under Carter...
...FINALLY, THERE'S THE LACK OF UNITY among the people who should be Hart's core supporters...
...Hart alone," said a writer for the New Republic, Sidney Blumenthal, "is positioned to become the leader of the generation...
...In the House, the Democratic Caucus, which recently issued its "Yellow Brick Road Report" for a high-tech Democratic future, is dominated by such young neoliberals as Wirth of Colorado and Gephart of Missouri...
...Eventually, said Broder, quoting Republican pollster Robert Teeter, the "massive unmobilized 'baby-boom' generation of voters will be mobilized by someone or something...
...Blacks," he told an aide, "are the wrong symbol in the '70s...
...The moderate Republican columnist David Broder rewrote Dutton in Changing of the Guard, which proclaimed the inevitable arrival of a generation of problem-solving moderates...
...They are wrong on both counts...
...George Bush picked up on Broder's theme and for a while the "preppie" candidate of the young upwardly mobile Ivy League WASPs, sounding much like the future Gary Hart on economic issues, managed to give Ronald Reagan a run for the Republican nomination...
...But by 1980 they were no longer perceived as having a radical potential...
...Moreover, it seemed in '60s language that they "had finally gotten their act together...
...The claim that their interests represent the general interest is particularly strong among New Class baby boomers because at each stage of their lives whatever they needed, from child rearing to school construction to draft avoidance, has forced itself on the national agenda...
...The "authentic" individual, preening himself or herself on an asserted independence, has a difficult time joining a coalition...
...The ideal of selffulfillment, which links the '60s to the "me generation" of the '70s and the Yuppies of the '80s, leaves little room for the give-and-take essential to institution building...
...they will soon begin to decline...
...WHATEVER THE PREVIOUS DISAPPOINTMENTS of generational politics, the "sleeping giant" promised to awaken in 1984, if only because the numbers had improved...
...At each stage politicians and ad men have seen those needs as vehicles for their own careers...
...In the 15 years between 1965 and 1980, 29 million new people entered the labor market, a population greater than the entire labor force of West Germany...
...In state after state Hart, the Senate loner, has failed to win the backing of other "new generation" politicians...
...Still, no doubt, the illusion of generational salvation will be with us for many an election to come...
...Corporate America had gone by then through a "greening" of sorts...
...Even before Hart's presidential campaign, their strivings were parodied by C. E. Crimmins's The Official Young Aspiring Professionals' Fast-Track Handbook, which explained the social dangers of eating the wrong kind of cheese...
...they conjure up images of violence...
...Caddell and Blumenthal argue that Hart is both the courageous new leader fighting an uphill battle against entrenched interests and the irresistible wave of the future...
...Now, as many of the "best" have gone on to make their "separate peace" through a law partnership or a job title, these earlier divisions are reflected in the polls between Reagan and Hart...
...Remember," he told young Californians facing economic adversity for the first time in their lives, "the deficits we're paying off now are the ones Lyndon Johnson ran up to finance the war in Vietnam...
...Brown shrewdly combined antiwar themes with fiscal conservatism...
...but he succeeded in attracting Silk Stocking Republicans, who helped remold the Democrats into a more professional and upper-middle-class party...
...that shaped and was shaped" by Vietnam and civil rights and that "because of its vast numbers, will eventually command politics well into the twenty-first century...
...The economic success of the two-income professional families who were gentrifying the cities could hardly be doubted...
...The stiff competition for jobs between baby-boomer whites, upwardly mobile blacks, and increasingly job-oriented women produced a renewed concern for personal mobility, reflected in the career of the next "generational politician," California Governor Jerry Brown...
...Instead, many of the "new generation" politicians operate as policy entrepreneurs outside the bounds of party loyalties...
...In Colorado a coterie of New Politics Democrats—led by Governor Richard Lamm, who rode into office on environmental concerns, and by Patsy Schroeder, the antiwar congresswoman—are the Democratic party...
...In every election since 1972 pundits have announced that not only would the '60s generation shape the agenda as it had in '68, but that it was going to come to power through its representatives...
...The cry will be, "Wait Until '88...
...But by the 1984 election they would be 43 percent of the eligible population and a predicted one-third of all voters...
...Some, as the young UAWers who were briefly militants for George Wallace, moved to the right...
...When Richard Celeste, a young politician who has spoken of generational themes, was asked why he had not supported Hart, he responded, "After all, we're very competitive...
...While Ronald Reagan wasn't all that unattractive to many of these "networking" young tyros, they looked to Hart's campaign as an oppor392 tunity to have their own success reflected on the national stage...
...According to pollster Daniel Yankelovich's 1982 book New Rules, the "baby-boom trend setters" had finally come into their own as self-confident, mature individuals ready to bear the burdens of social responsibility...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
