Last week’s D-Day commemorations were a poignant reminder that the ‘Greatest Generation’ (b.1901-1927) will soon no longer be with us.
While it’s pretty neat to be dubbed ‘Greatest’, they were given this ego-boosting sobriquet in recognition of their challenging early years marked by the twin calamities of the Great Depression (1929-1941) and World War II.
So esteemed were they the Greatest Generation that from 1961 to 1993, every US president was from this cohort.
When their time in power ended, they passed the torch to their children (quite literally for George H.W. Bush). The presidency skipped over the Silent Generation (1928-1944) and was dominated by Baby Boomers (1945-1964) from 1993 until 2021.1
This generational transition had a profound effect on US polarization.
The Greatest Generation in Power
Understanding the decisions of presidents (and indeed, voters) often involves examining the key events that shaped their youth.2
Take, for example, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969). Born in 1908 and belonging to the ‘Greatest Generation’, Johnson was 21 when the Great Depression began and 31 when World War II erupted.
His presidency showed his age.
Johnson has two defining legacies:
Attempting to create a ‘Great Society’ through civil rights legislation for racial minorities and massive spending on social programmes.
Escalating the Vietnam War.
Take the Great Society first.
LBJ came of political age in awe of his hero President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945). FDR’s response to the Great Depression was to break significantly with the American tradition of small government and a minimal social safety net by launching massive government jobs programmes and creating a basic welfare state (pensions, unemployment insurance) that had heretofore never existed.
During these years, Johnson directed FDR’s youth programme in Texas, and was one of the only southerners in such a position to provide opportunities to black Americans in the South.
Thus, when it came LBJ’s time to preside over the US, he sought to follow (or even outdo) his political hero, presiding over a huge expansion of government spending and civil rights.
Johnson’s experience as a young adult was even clearer in his approach to the Vietnam War.
In the course of researching Vietnam, there is one word that is mentioned repeatedly by those who advocated American intervention: appeasement.
For LBJ, and many of his advisors, the lesson they took from their youth in the 1930s was that appeasing an aggressive ideological foe is the way to catastrophe.
Nobody wanted to be Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (below), declaring ‘peace for our time’ in 1938 after cutting a worthless deal with Adolf Hitler.
In 1960s Washington, the prevalent belief that the ‘free world’ (i.e. the non-communist world) was only as safe as its weakest link.
Many Baby Boomers, who were entering American colleges in the mid-to-late 1960s, viewed Johnson as imperialist warmonger intent on cruelly denying Vietnamese independence. LBJ, however, believed he was preventing a domino effect that would see communism spread far beyond Vietnam.
Without the experience of the late 1930s, when Hitler marched into Eastern Europe - Munich agreement be damned - it’s unlikely American leaders would have exuded such paranoia about a small rural country in Southeast Asia.
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The final thing to note is that despite the eruption of discord precipitated by the Vietnam War, which emerged during Johnson’s presidency, few of his contemporaries ever accused Johnson of not being a patriotic, well-meaning American.
The Greatest Generation, by and large, retained an acute belief throughout their lives that there was more that bound Americans together than that which separated them.
Ultimately, they leaned into consensus.
The Baby Boomers Take the Wheel
The Baby Boom generation (b.1946-1964), which has dominated American politics since the 1990s (its most polarized era), was shaped by the Vietnam War, racial and gender protests, the Watergate scandal, and the economic malaise of the 1970s.
These formative years were marked by division.
During Vietnam, anti-war protestors and pro-war hawks often questioned each other's patriotism. In the wake of civil rights protests, Americans started identifying themselves with hyphenated identities like African-American or Polish-American. Faith in American institutions withered after Vietnam, Watergate, and the failure to solve inflation and unemployment.
Instead of emphasising their shared values, and putting their contentious youth in the rear view mirror, Baby Boomers remained bitterly divided over their generation shaping struggles.
The Boomers did not inherit the respectful and consensual climate of Greatest Generation politics. By the 1990s, as Boomers took the initiative, politics had turned into a blood sport, with questioning how ‘American’ your opponent was becoming a common insult.
The Boomers brought the culture wars into politics. No longer was politics about how much the government should tax and spend, it was also about religion, LGBT rights, abortion, and guns.
Due to the overwhelming size of this generation, and the fact they are living longer lives than previous generations, US politics has been in thrall to their bitter divides for going on 35 years.
This isn’t to bash Baby Boomers. After all, the lessons the Greatest Generation learnt from their youth led to the much derided Vietnam War and excluded people not part of the consensus (e.g. LGBT Americans). Nonetheless, the Boomers have presided over America’s most polarized era.
And it leads me to the tantalising question: what comes next?
The Next Generation - A Millennial Correction?3
Millennials (born 1981-1996) have recently become the largest voting bloc, and they are poised to assume key positions of power by 2030.
Tired of divisive politics, Millennials might lead a course correction, reducing polarization in the US. Shaped by events like 9/11, the 'War on Terror,' the Great Recession, and the election of the first black president, Millennials may focus on reducing inequality, embracing diversity, and being skeptical of military interventions abroad.
If their parents and grandparents are any guide, then whatever course Millennials choose, their brand of politics will likely dominate American politics well into the 2040s.
The Silents finally had their moment when Joe Biden took office in 2021!
Of course, there are limitations to this approach. How similar is someone born in 1946 to someone born in 1964 (the start and end of ‘Baby Boomers’)?
Gen X is actually the next generation, but it is much smaller in size.
Dwight Eisenhower lived through 1938 too and he wasn’t dumb enough to get into Vietnam.
Nobody even knows what the hell was going on in 1938 or why people did what they did (it was not because chamberlain was a naive goober that trusted Hitler for no reason). But the ghost of 1938 justifies literally every dumb war people want to get into.