Kevin MUNGER DominateStillBoomersBabytheWhy American Politics and Culture GENERATION GAP
In his 1928 essay “The Problem of Generations,” the German sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote about how Smith’s contemporary David Hume first
INTRODUCTION
T he American dream is that our children will enjoy better lives than we did; the modern world is built on this idea of progress. The metaphor of government-as-parent does not always work, but there are important parallels between progress at the level of the generationas-family-unit and progress at the level of generation-as-contemporaneouscitizens. Governments of all stripes justify their good governance by delivering economic growth and raising standards of living.
But this progress has come with serious costs. We have exploited the resources and labor of other countries and pillaged the environment. Regardless of whether any of that was worth it, it seems the consensus now is that all the nations of the world can achieve Western prosperity if they adopt the correct institutions and the most modern technology.
There is a branch of social science that we might broadly call liberal positivism. Its central aim has been to understand what these institutions are that bring prosperity. When Adam Smith titled his most famous work An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he meantFromit.the outset, however, even a social scientist of Smith’s caliber could not simply impose the ideal institutions on a nation. Many obstacles, not least the biological realities of humanity, get in the way.
THE PROBLEM OF GENERATIONS
The positivist approach is concerned with numbers and patterns. It seeks a science of generational development and displacement. Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, was partly motivated by a desire to model the tempo of human progress using the mathematics of generations. Mannheim argues that generational analysis is an ideal starting place for the positivist: “There is life and death; a definite, measurable span of life; generation follows generation at regular intervals. Here, thinks the Positivist, is the framework of human destiny in comprehensible, even measurable form. All other data are conditioned within the process of life itself.” Despite the neat structure of generational data, contemporary social science has paid little attention to generations. Part of the explanation may be the explosion of other kinds of data with the rise of computation. The discovery of some thorny statistical challenges in the 1970s may have discouraged positivist researchers. Or perhaps the progressive humanism that predominates among social scientists has blinkered them in its insistence on the fundamental equality of all humans. This moral premise has been a powerful remedy to the essentialist tendencies of social scientific positivism. The uncritical reification of what can be easily measured left a shameful legacy of scientific racism.
drew the connection between governments and people: “Only because mankind is how it is—generation following generation in a continuous stream, so that whenever one person dies off another is born to replace him—do we find it necessary to preserve the continuity of our forms of government.” Hume translates the principle of political continuity into the biological continuity of generations.
But the simple fact is that there is no fundamental equality among humans at any given time, even if there is fundamental equality “in expectation,” or averaged across the life cycle. We fully acknowledge this
2 INTRODUCTION
Mannheim’s essay anticipated the central ontological conflict, that of generations, in the contemporary United States. He describes two broad epistemic approaches to understanding generations: the positivist and the historical romanticist.
But some of what I argue cannot be defended on these grounds. I am deeply invested in exploring the limits of positivism imposed by the explosion of complexity and dynamism that results from our location in time—the 2020s—at the center of one of the most important informationtechnological revolutions in human history. This book takes these epistemic limits to heart and makes claims that are beyond the evidence that
The contemporary appeal of generational analysis to the romantic-historical social scientist is more obvious. We share our experience of the world with people who share our experiences. Events crystallize this phenomenon—“Where were you on 9/11?”—but the accumulation of the everyday is more profound. There is a unity that comes with generational identification, a capacity to reject what came before and to dream of what is possible.Mannheim cites the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wrote that “The inescapable fate of living in and with one’s generation completes the full drama of individual human existence.” A beautiful turn of phrase, but consider Heidegger’s context. He was born the same year as Hitler, and he never opposed Nazism. Romantic-historical generational unity enables the construction of the Other in other generations. We are the center of action. Older generations are in our way, and younger generations are pitifully unable to function in the world we created.
inequality when it comes to minors, establishing strict laws and rules designed to protect these humans who clearly need protecting. It is also true that people change continuously throughout their lives, in ways that are relevant to social science. The age composition of a country has huge effects on its economy, politics, and culture. And the age composition of a country rarely changes quickly, making this line of inquiry uninteresting for social scientists aiming for “policy impact.”
INTRODUCTION 3
Like Mannheim, we can synthesize these two approaches. The positivist constrains the excesses of the historical romanticist with data. And when the positivist has no data, the romanticist can offer the experiences of people living in their generation.
Most political science works in the positivist mode. The primary method of this book is to combine a wealth of historical data with novel survey evidence. These surveys attempt to understand the experiences of the surveyed in more qualitative terms, a stepping stone bridging our data and the romantic self-perceptions of people as members of generations.
can be furnished by the past. The internet’s capacity to reshape human society is necessarily beyond our experience.
It is no accident that Millennials resent the labels and stereotypes thrust on them by their Boomer elders. The material conditions of Boomer power
The thesis of this book is that technological progress has produced an inflection point in both the positivist structure of generations and the romanticist spirit of generations, between objective data and subjective identity. These two methods of inquiry can explain older and younger generations, respectively. The Boomers have been around long enough that we have plenty of statistical data with which to describe their trajectory, but the youngest generations are still becoming themselves, producing an energy signature that is not yet intelligible to the positivist but that we can encounter as a zeitgeist.
4 INTRODUCTION
It is a bit of historical bad luck that this is happening at the same time, in the 2020s. But I argue it means that generational conflict will define the politics and culture of the United States in this decade. We can measure the crisis in our positivist generation, the Baby Boomers. They are the largest and most powerful generation in American history. Because of their prominence in the construction of the dominant postwar institutions that still govern our society, they maintain outsize formal power. In their sheer numbers, unprecedented economic success, and the timing of medical advances, they also maintain outsize electoralComtepower.suggests that to lengthen the life span of the individual would mean slowing up the tempo of progress “because the restrictive, conservative, ‘go-slow’ influence of the older generation would operate for a longer time.” This is precisely what the generational actuarial table shows. Both Houses of Congress are the oldest in history. The Boomers held the presidency for twenty-eight consecutive years before losing it to Joe Biden, who is technically one year too old to be a Boomer. The number of living retirees in the United States will peak around 2026. Boomer ballast is a powerful brake on the tempo of progress.
The crisis in historical-romanticist generations has begun to appear. The emergence of the idea of “Millennials” into the national consciousness started to pick up steam around 2013.1 Trends in Google searches for the term have closely anticipated interest in the great Millennial albatross, the phrase “avocado toast,” ever since.
make resentment inevitable. Even before the name “Millennial” stuck, they were called the “Echo Boomers.” They have always been defined in opposition to the Boomers, their culture and politics restrained by the Boomers’ gravitational pull. We can see this oppositional spirit of younger generations in two places. The first is their increasing diversity along essentially every dimension, which contrasts with the distinctive racial homogeneity of the Baby Boomers. The second is the use of new technology to create spaces for cultural creation and political discussion free from Boomer influence. Gen Z—those born from the midnineties to as late as 2010—is the least white, least straight, and most online generation in American history. They were the first generation to be raised on an unlimited diet of potent nontextual media created by their peers rather than by their elders. Gen Z could therefore make a radical break from the rest of society while that society still exists. The art historian Wilhelm Pinder understood the progressions and revolutions of the art world in exactly these generational terms. He argued that art was driven forward by a shared spirit among a cohort of artists. Different generations live at the same time but do not share the same spirit. This “non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous” means that the experiences of the world on any given calendar date can only be shared among young people in similar stages of life. The internet-native Gen Z stands outside the Boomer-dominated culture and politics of the long twentieth century. And they look on, horrified, at the dysfunctional institutions and ravaged natural environment that are their inheritance.
INTRODUCTION 5
“In this deeply learned, far-ranging, and unapologetic tour of contemporary generational politics, Munger traces the causes and consequences of today’s age-based divisions. Like the Boomer generation, the influence of this already powerful book is sure to grow over time as political events reinforce the fundamental insights it brings to the foreground.”
Dan HOPKINS , author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized
Markus PRIOR , author of Hooked: How Politics Captures People’s Interest
Chris BAIL , author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing “Generation Gap is timely, important, well organized, and approachable. Readers will learn much from Munger’s compelling analysis.”
COVER DESIGN: CHANG JAE LEE
“In this fast-paced book, Kevin Munger sets up a colossal collision between outnumbered but tech-savvy Millennials and the Boomers who vote in droves but lack social media literacy. Can Boomers get away with warming the planet and passing on huge debts to the next generations? It may depend on whether Millennials develop unprecedented cohort consciousness.”
NEW YORKcup.columbia.edu PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. How the Baby Boomers’ outsize influence will shape American politics, media, and culture for years to come
George HAWLEY , author of Making Sense of the Alt-Right Kevin MUNGER is an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University. His work has appeared in Nature, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Communication. He is the founder and coeditor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
“In this pioneering book, Munger provides a fascinating new account of America’s political malaise: gerontocracy. The growing cleavage between the old and young—driven by unprecedented demographic changes that allow Baby Boomers to control the political and cultural landscape—threatens the fabric of our democracy. One of the most original, incisive, and well-written reflections on American politics I’ve read in many years.”
