Are Gen X Becoming the Next Boomers?

Somewhere in the last few years, the label “boomer” stopped meaning a generation and started meaning a posture. It means clinging to a system because it worked for you, and mistaking your own comfort inside that system for evidence that the system is fine. By that definition, a lot of the people who consider themselves the responsible left, the Gen X liberals who vote blue but recoil at the word socialist, have earned the label just as much as the generation ahead of them.

I say this as someone who fits the demographic. We grew up watching the boomers get mocked for their instinct to explain away every crack in the foundation as a personal failing. We believed our habits, from the books we read to the way we voted, shielded us from repeating those same mistakes. However, integrity requires choosing the collective good over self interest in every difficult moment, a standard many of us have failed to meet.

Ask this group about representation, about diversity in leadership, and they’re fully present. Ask them about taxing wealth at the rate it would take to fund universal healthcare, about breaking up the institutions that consolidated most of the gains from the last thirty years, about anything that would touch their own 401(k) or their own home equity, and the tone shifts. All of the sudden the people pushing harder are naive, or too online, or unaware of how the world actually works.

None of this makes the critique of democratic socialism illegitimate. There are real arguments to have about implementation and about what actually improves people’s lives versus what just feels good to say out loud. What gets offered instead is a kind of managed disappointment, an agreement that things should be better paired with a relief that they don’t have to be the ones to make it happen. Boomers did this with civil rights and later with the economy they inherited and then hoarded. They agreed in principle and slowed the process and called the slowing prudence.

What makes this generation’s version harder to see is that it genuinely believes it’s on the right side. The boomers didn’t think of themselves as the problem either but rather as reasonable people surrounded by extremes on both sides. That self-image lets you support change in theory while opposing every version of it that would actually cost you something, and still walk away feeling like one of the good ones.

I don’t think there’s a clean way out of this for people my age. Recognizing the pattern doesn’t automatically put you outside it. But recognizing it is at least a start, and it beats the alternative, which is becoming exactly what we spent our twenties rolling our eyes at, just with better taste in music and a different set of talking points.