Talkin' bout my generation

Steinhorn dismisses the fact that conservatives have run America for most of the boomer era, that they currently control all three branches of government, and that George W. Bush, a radically conservative president, was reelected despite a disastrous war, a staggering economy and a domestic record that can charitably be described as sodden. For Steinhorn, the apparent ascendancy of conservatism is misleading. The red states are not really coming -- they're going. Objects in the mirror are smaller than they appear. Sept. 11 simply delayed the inevitable: Bush was reelected not because most Americans shared his "moral values" but because they believed he was a better leader in the fight against terrorism. Steinhorn feels that no long-term conclusions should be drawn from his reelection. Indeed, he argues that conservative politicians have prevailed only because they disingenuously adopt boomer positions and rhetoric: "conservatives are able to gain whatever traction and followers they have not because of what they believe but because of their anti-establishment way of expressing it."

Steinhorn concedes that the conservative assault on the boomers has "succeeded in discrediting Boomers personally -- surveys show majorities of Americans view Boomers as arrogant, ambitious, self-centered, selfish, materialistic, and less patriotic than others ... But that's a Pyrrhic victory at best because conservatives haven't succeeded in their larger goal of discrediting Boomer norms and values." Right-wingers may pack the courts with Federalist Society reactionaries like Samuel Alito and win some elections, but in the long run they're doomed: "however much political power these social conservatives may accumulate, theirs is a worldview that is becoming increasingly obsolete."

At a time when facile potshots at boomers are in vogue, Steinhart's unapologetic celebration of the boomer legacy is refreshing, and much of his argument is convincing. Polls and in-depth studies such as Alan Wolfe's "One America, After All" show that most Americans do indeed subscribe to the core boomer values of tolerance, equality and individual choice. America is never going to return to the '50s, when conformity, strict morality and hierarchy -- not to mention racism, sexism and homophobia -- played a far greater role than they do now. (Homophobia alone still lives on, according to Wolfe -- an analysis borne out by the gay marriage wedge issue.) Political analysts who overreacted to Bush's reelection -- and the Democratic establishment, which refuses to challenge Bush on his inexplicably perceived strength as a "strong leader against terror" -- could use some of Steinhorn's optimism about Americans' fundamental liberalism to stiffen their spines. There is good reason to believe, as Steinhorn and other analysts, including John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, have argued, that long-term demographic trends in the U.S. are working against conservatism: Not only are the Greatest Generation conservatives dying out, the "cosmopolitan" boomer outlook is dominant and will only become more so.

However, "The Greater Generation" is too superficial and boosterish to really shed much light on the confused and contradictory state of American society, culture and politics today. Steinhorn's Panglossian view of Boomers as paragons of enlightenment and open-mindedness may be gratifying for liberal boomers weary of the criticisms heaped on them by Rush Limbaugh and his braying ilk, but in the end it seems overblown, sentimental and windy, like an updated Elks Club oration in praise of diversity training. Even the most self-satisfied boomer must be taken aback by from-the-pulpit pronouncements like "We live in the Baby Boom era of American history, and despite our flaws and blemishes as a nation, we are a more benign and virtuous nation than at any time in our history." Throughout "The Greater Generation," it is axiomatic that "baby boomer" is a synonym for everything good, tolerant and wise -- so that when lauding a boomer factory owner, Steinhorn can write, "Jeff quite candidly admits the gut temptation to exercise power and lash out when workers doubt him, but the Baby Boom part of him keeps that very human temptation in check." Such passages border on the ludicrous.

Certainly there are things to celebrate in the baby boom legacy, many of them so deeply ingrained in our culture that we simply take them for granted, and Steinhorn deserves credit for reminding us of them. But he overdoes it. He exaggerates the boomer-era legacy and glosses over the ways boomers have failed to live up to it. In the end, he fails to acknowledge that boomers are not really as different from their parents, or for that matter from every generation, as they would like to believe.

One of the problems with "The Greater Generation" is revealed by its title. Comparing the virtues of succeeding generations is a dubious exercise, especially when their members lived through periods as radically different as World War II and the '60s. The issue is agency. Leaving aside the obvious definitional and chronological difficulties -- many of the boomers' achievements were set in motion by men and women from the Greatest Generation -- is it really fair to say that a group consisting of millions of people "did" anything? Steinhorn is right that the boomers ended up sharing similar values, but that begs the question of how they arrived at those values. Did the boomers end racism, open up opportunities for women, humanize the workplace? Of course, all those things happened on their watch. But weren't boomers -- at least to a large degree -- just along for the historical ride?

I pose the question because in reading Steinhorn's book, I became aware of a considerable disparity between the exalted claims he made for my generation's achievements and my sense that in my own life, I had done little or nothing to change the world -- at least certainly not in the ways that Steinhorn discusses. Yet my résumé is about as representative of the middle-class boho version of boomer-dom as you can get. I was born in 1953 -- which left me a little too young to have been atop the barricades in 1967, but nonetheless put me chronologically in the center of the boom. I grew up in Berkeley, Calif., the Green Zone of the Left Coast counterculture. I marched to protest the Vietnam War and UC-Berkeley's People's Park debacle and the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. My best friend in high school was a black guy who was into Husserl. I had hair halfway down my back and listened to Hendrix and read Nietzsche and dropped acid at 18. I dropped out of Yale after one semester and went to work at a shipyard in southern Virginia -- beating Vietnam when I read the number "285" in a paper outside a Greyhound bus station. I worked at a motley collection of jobs for seven years before I decided that Mario Savio might have been wrong about the odious operation of the machine and enrolled at Berkeley. I got my M.A. in English lit, drove a taxi and freelanced before getting my first real job in journalism. Now I am a fully accredited member of the boboisie, shlepping my daughter off to her soccer games and rejoicing in at least a few appliances worthy of being ridiculed by David Brooks.

If this formulaic, flashback-riddled résumé doesn't qualify me as a boomer par excellence, what would? And that's the problem. I'm reasonably happy with my unoriginal little life story and have no desire to disavow it, but there's nothing in it that lives up to the "heroism of daily life" that Steinhorn proclaims is my generation's achievement. A few protest marches aside, I didn't actually do anything except bounce through life like a pinball whacked by the transcendental flippers of the '60s. To be sure, many boomers did far more -- some got involved in politics, others went underground, others risked family and societal disapproval to break the color line (as my own Greatest Generation parents did, at a time when it wasn't easy for a white woman to marry a Japanese-American man), others risked ridicule or rejection by applying for jobs that women weren't supposed to apply for. And of course there were those who really were heroic, who marched through the Deep South for civil rights or fought for gay rights in the '60s. (Although most of those activists were pre-boomers: The "when born" definition of the boomers, 1946-1964, doesn't track perfectly with the "big years" of 1964-1968.) But most did not. Like me, they found themselves swimming in a current that was already there.

Next page: A domesticated, Ben & Jerry version of a wild and ambiguous era