Boomer Nostalgia

Why we miss the culture we rebelled against

Yuval Levin recently meditated on political and cultural nostalgia.

People will always miss the time when they were young… But that is not what the political power of nostalgia has involved for most of my lifetime. That power has been especially a function of the cultural power of the Baby Boomers… I think our culture as a whole, and not just the older Boomers, has pined for the era when those Boomers were young for a long time, and has understood itself through their eyes. The end of that pining is likely to point toward a far less nostalgic political culture in the years to come, for good and bad.

As I approach my 70th birthday, I find myself increasingly relating current events to two periods of my life. First, there is the time of my youth, both before and during the turbulence of the late 1960s. Second, there is the period from 1994 to 1999, when the advent of the World Wide Web was for me an opportunity to experience an adult adolescence. I often joke that at age 40 I had to decide whether my midlife crisis would consist of starting a business on the Internet or going for a sports car and a bimbo, and I made the right choice.

Nostalgia for postwar culture

Levin writes,

The era the Boomers missed was the era of their youth, but it was also a peculiarly cohesive and unified moment for the country. And a decade ago, American politics overflowed with nostalgia for that unity, expressed by the left as nostalgia for an America with fewer billionaires, by the right as nostalgia for an America with fewer foreigners, and by the center as nostalgia for an America with a much less divisive politics.

I am nostalgic for Boomer families. And I am nostalgic for the weaker social divisions of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I was an only child, because it was medically impossible for my parents to have more children. That made me an oddity (as if I was not enough of an oddity otherwise), although I did not mind. But I could see the large families all around me. And I decided when I was about 18 that I wanted to have a family with multiple children.

I still believe that families with three to six children are great. The result is a thick family tree, with lots of cousins who enjoy one another’s company and have shared memories.

I wish that our culture could have thrown out the bathwater of keeping women stuck in the house without also throwing out the babies. But in the late 1960s, feminism could not embrace having a large family. While magazines talked about women “having it all,” all of the emphasis was on careerism. Since the 1960s, both men and women have become more careerist.

One way that you can see careerism at work is in the way that office dynamics come to resemble marriage dynamics. When your idea for a marketing initiative is not adopted, you feel mistreated and betrayed. Seeing the boss give the other guy the promotion you applied for is like finding your spouse in bed with someone else. Leaving your employer is like getting a divorce.

It used to be that work and family felt like different spheres. Of course, that was also before there were work emails.

Large multigenerational families used to keep adults entertained and busy. They provided a sense of belonging, a focal point, a sense of stability, and a sense of meaning. Many fewer people enjoy that nowadays.

The turn toward careerism was reinforced by college credentialism and assortative mating, which divided the country along educational lines. In the 1950s, people without college education could attain high status in business, marriage, and society. That is no longer the case.

Many of the most achievement-oriented young people take too long to get married, and many of the less promising have difficulty getting and staying married at all. These phenomena serve to widen differences across social classes in income and cultural identity.

For a long time, there existed sexual tension between the “refined” woman and the cruder man. You can find it in fiction, from Lady Chatterly’s Lover to The African Queen. But in contemporary America, it has become the central political and cultural divide. College-educated women and non-college-educated men disagree profoundly with one another. Few are able to see any good in the other side.

In addition, there is worse racial tension today. Although the political system took a long time to respond, the postwar consensus was that overt racial discrimination was what was holding back Blacks. Today, that consensus has disappeared. Instead, we have one side that blames systemic racism, while the other side blames heredity and culture.

The cultural contradictions of Boomerism

Levin writes,

The time the Boomers miss the most was the period in which that liberalization had begun but had not yet weakened America’s cohesion, so the country had the best of both. It was a strong and cohesive society that was having all the fun of liberalizing. This was an inherently ephemeral set of circumstances. It couldn’t possibly last, since the liberalization was bound to (and intended to) break down the cohesion. By the turn of the 21st century, although we did not want to restore the constrictions of 1950s America, we wanted the unity back. And by now we want it back so intensely that we (imagine we) are willing to restore the constrictions, though we disagree about which ones.

As someone born in the mid-1970s, Levin concludes,

Everyone in our politics now seems to think that there is going to be some kind of utterly disruptive calamity between the present and the future — a climate catastrophe, a fiscal crisis, a cultural collapse, the end of democracy, a geostrategic explosion, take your pick. No one seems able to think of the future as continuous with the present and therefore as our responsibility and something we need to be building.

It’s hard to say whether this overwhelming catastrophism is the final chapter of the Boomers’ identification of America’s fate with their own or the first chapter of a post-Boomer politics of despair, or a bit of both. But it does seem to me that the antidote to it would need to look like a politics that understands its purpose as defined by obligations to the old and the young and sees the future as something that will come one day at a time and that we might as well prepare for. In other words, we need a middle-aged politics with high hopes but low expectations, like the politics we had when I was young.

I go back to the loss of large, multigenerational families. I think that before you can get “a politics that understands its purpose as defined by obligations to the old and the young” we need more people who feel a connection to the old and young within their own lives.