Are Gen X Becoming the Next Boomers?
The word “boomer” now names a posture more than a generation. A look at how Gen X liberals can defend the system that worked for them while still believing they are on the right side.
In recent years, “boomer” has come to describe a posture as much as a generation: the habit of defending a system because it worked for you, then treating your own comfort as evidence of its fairness. I see that posture among some Gen X liberals who regard themselves as the responsible left, vote reliably blue, and recoil at the word socialist.
I belong to that demographic. We watched the generation ahead of us explain structural failures as individual shortcomings, and we assumed our reading, politics, and cultural preferences would keep us from doing the same. The more difficult test comes when the common good makes a claim on something we have acquired for ourselves.
On representation and diversity in leadership, this group is often engaged and articulate. The conversation changes when it turns to wealth taxes, universal healthcare, or breaking up institutions that have accumulated much of the past thirty years’ gains. Once a proposal reaches our retirement accounts or home equity, the people advocating it can suddenly seem naive, excessively online, or unfamiliar with how the world works.
Questions about implementation and whether a policy will improve people’s lives deserve a serious answer. Too often, the response settles into an agreement that things ought to improve, accompanied by relief that improvement can be postponed. I recognize the pattern in the older generation’s approach to civil rights and to the economy it inherited: agreement in principle, delay in practice, and an account of that delay as prudence.
Our confidence in our own decency makes this harder to see. The people we criticized also understood themselves as reasonable adults surrounded by extremes. That self-image can accommodate support for change alongside resistance to each proposal that carries a personal cost.
Recognizing the pattern gives people my age a responsibility to examine it in ourselves. Our music and talking points may have changed; the temptation to protect what we have remains familiar. I would like us to be more honest about the moments when that temptation begins directing our politics.