Now, I am not sure if I completely buy into Strauss-Howe thinking. There are reasons for that: I’m a New Zealander, our Baby boom ran later (I was born in 1960, which was the peak of the boom here) and my generation caused an echo boom when life got fairly good in the late 1980s. But we left high school during the late 70s and early 80s when NZ was in decline: we had fuel rationing when I was in university and by the time I graduated the country was virtually bankrupt.
I’ve disliked Keynesian economics ever since.
But the peak boomer/Gen X moment was McCain vs Obama. McCain is one of the better of the Boomers (and as someone who grew up in a Boomer / Gen X mixed family, that is not a compliment). Obama, like Key and Cameron, is of the next generation and tried to keep the socail democratic structure — which was built post war and refined by the boomers — going.
And it is now broken. The progressive project has failed. Strauss and Howe date the beginning of this crisis to Obama’s election (well they are American).
And, then most recently, I think our society has entered a Fourth Turning. And these are, again, these are twenty-year periods. You are not just into it and out of it immediately. I think the lesson of history is that Third Turnings always ultimately culminate in a Fourth Turning. It is a season you have to move through before you are born again, so to speak, as a society, and regain institutional confidence. You have to go through a crucible to get there.
I think the Fourth Turning started in, probably, if I were to date it now, it would be 2008, possibly a realigning election in that year of Obama, Barack Obama against John McCain. And obviously, simultaneously with that, as we all recall, an epic, historic crash of the global economy from which we still have not recovered. We are sort of hobbling long in kind of a low-earth orbit, with continued high unemployment and excess capacity, not just in the United States, but around the world. And of course, all the rules of economic policy seem to have been – are – broken and lie in fragments on the floor. People are wondering what the heck do we do in this new era?
And I think that this is a period when, in each of these turnings, each generation is moving in their new phase of life. Boomers are beginning to retire, they are beginning to redefine senior, the senior phase of life. X’s are beginning to assume mid-life roles as the dominant parent generation and leaders. These are people born in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And Millennials are fully beginning to come of age and redefine young adulthood. And meanwhile, a very small generation is just beginning to come on stream, which remembers nothing before 2008. And these are the kids who are now just entering the first couple of years of elementary school.
We can already see these generational divisions forming, and it is interesting how each generation is, to some extent, defined by the thing they just have barely no memory of. Boomers are defined by the World War II that even the oldest of them cannot remember. Gen X’ers are defined by the American “I,” which I would say was anything up to and until the assassination of John Kennedy, whenever they began to change so much rapidly after than in 1963. That is an event that even the oldest X’er has no memory of. And Millennials have no memory of the consciousness revolution and all the family and social experimentation of the ‘60s, ‘70s, early ‘80s. It is all over by the time they came and were first looking around. So for a millennial in school today, you know ,Woodstock is an SOL question. [Laughs] It is as far removed from them as the New Deal is for a Boomer like myself.
That is how generations move, and of course, each generation needs to correct and compensate for the excesses of the generations that came before, often the mid-life generation, when they are coming of age in youth.
Well, what has happened since 2008?
- I have stopped watching the six o’clock news and reading the paper. I get my news online.
- Most people are struggling, but the rich are much richer < ;li>
- Society has become more divided, and the left now plays virtue poker by identifying with more and more disabled and dysfunctional groups
- The average high school graduate has not read a book published before I graduated university. Because the Boomers thing relevance makes art, not that something that is high art is still read and discussed after the issues of the day disappear
And, despite propaganda, my children are far more conservative than my generation.
It’s hard to force women to want to be in tech.”
The younger the cohort, the less interested they are. It’s the sex-role dimorphism cycle identified by Strauss and Howe in 1992. The rising generation is actually at the maximum level of sex role differentiation. The Boomers in charge are doing everything they can to suppress it, with the help of their sycophants in those rising generations, but the great mass is uninterested.
I proctored a Calc I exam at a local major university and counted around 25 women among the 500 test-takers. The upper-middle class, nearly all-white, high school where I teach offers several programming classes, and there isn’t a girl in any.
I expect that the next turn will rediscover the virtues of tradtion, of tribalism, and shun diversity and tolerance. For diversity will be seen as a cost and tolerance a luxury society cannot afford. We were rich. The transfer system (which is what a social welfare system or socail democracy is) cannot survive a depression.
The rich can afford to be stupid, for the food will be there. The poor will not have that luxury. When times are tough, having a sexual divergent or complimentary strategy works. The Husband can bring home food and work hard knowing that his wife is keeping the budget, will have food available, and will educate the children, keeping them well away from the crazy elders who ruined their own upbringing.
By making things simpler, they will be less fragile. The instutitions of the right will not survive this unless they adapt and stop trying to manage a big state (which we cannot afford). And the left will have to redefine themselves around support for the local poor, and protecting the working man from exploitation by the stranger.
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