Talkin' bout my generation

The happy Candide of the Movin' On Jeans set, Steinhorn sees the boomers as the vanguard in an inexorable march progressing toward the best of all possible boomer worlds. But the '60s, the crucible in which the boomers were tested, were not ultimately about "progress" or even "values." They were a jungle, a chaotic amalgam in which the Romantic exaltation of the individual mingled with an inchoate, post-Beat rejection of authority and occasional infusions of hard-nosed political activism. What emerged from this feverish stew, once the drugs wore off, the Vietnam War ended and most people had to get jobs, was far less orderly, neat and liberal than Steinhorn believes.

In fact, not one but several boomer sensibilities emerged from the '60s. Steinhorn's analysis is not fine-grained enough to distinguish between the various quite different offshoots of the ambiguously individualist boomer ethos. He focuses on the mainstream liberal branch, which accepts the role of government, believes in redistributive justice, and tends to vote Democratic. But an equally important branch is the libertarian, which rejects big government, sees redistribution of wealth as bureaucratic theft, and tends to vote independent. Libertarian boomers reject liberal pieties and do-gooderism, the qualities that make up the heart of Steinhorn's boomer virtue. Yet libertarianism and its cousin, an aggressive meritocracy, are increasingly dominant forces in American life. This is why affirmative action, for all its racial "virtue," is on life support, and more important, why Americans are unconcerned that the gulf between the rich and the poor keeps getting wider.

Steinhorn's vision of a happy, decent and virtuous boomer America is accurate enough as far as it goes, but it leaves out one little thing: money. Steinhorn celebrates the way boomers remade the workplace, making it more individualistic, free, innovative and nonhierarchical. He denies that the boomers sold out: "The media ... prefers the stereotypical storyline about Boomers, that they rejected capitalism in the Sixties and then sold out to become grasping yuppies in the Eighties, so they're not really a generation of reformers but a generation of self-inflated narcissists. Yet the truth is that most Boomers never really rejected capitalism in the Sixties and most never bathed in its excesses in the decades since -- from the Sixties onwards they've simply wanted to make our system more responsive and humane."

As examples of this new, enlightened approach to the system, Steinhorn cites the trend toward open workstations, nonhierarchical org charts, companywide brainstorming, socially responsible investing, etc. All of which is no doubt true. But Steinhorn has nothing to say about the explosion of service-sector McJobs with dreadful health benefits, or downsizing, or indeed the whole phenomenon of essentially unchecked capitalism, in which a company's stock price and the profits its shareholders get are the sole determinants of whether thousands of employees are laid off. When it comes to these issues, far more fundamental than whether the boss allows his subordinates to vent, the boomers' vaunted virtue suddenly disappears. Whenever boomer virtue runs up against the bottom line, the bottom line tends to win. Steinhorn is right in insisting that this does not prove that boomers are hypocritical -- or at least not any more hypocritical than any other generation. Few boomers, as he points out, were Marxists in their youth. But this kind of, ah, accommodation does nudge the Boomer halo just a tad.

Steinhorn is right that the boomers are responsible for a fundamental change in America's manners, and to a lesser degree in its mores. It is no longer acceptable to openly disparage ethnic groups or paternalize women. But manners, and even goodwill, do not run society. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the real impact of the boomer sensibility is on interpersonal relationships and subjective attitudes; it has little tangible impact on American society. Thus, boomers support diversity training (but not national programs to address inner-city poverty), multiculturalism (but they take no interest in foreign news or culture), and environmentalism (as long as they don't have to change their lifestyle at all).

In "Bobos in Paradise," the conservative writer David Brooks mocks the consumerism and "hip" affectations of boomers (echoing, ironically, a virtually identical critique by the left-wing writer Thomas Frank). Steinhorn attacks Brooks' book as part of a "prolonged culture war against Boomer liberalism and society." It's understandable why Steinhorn read it this way: Brooks himself seems confused about whether to regard his subjects as his enemies or his doubles, a confusion reflected in the book's clumsy, uncertain transitions between neutral observation and heavy-handed satire. (There may also be an ex post facto interpretation involved: After writing "Bobos," Brooks was given an Op-Ed column in the New York Times, in which he squandered in record time whatever goodwill he had earned from the left. Those expecting Brooks the open-minded intellectual and sophisticated cultural critic discovered instead a partisan publicist for the right.) But despite its snark, Brooks' book is far more equivocal and even affectionate toward the boomers than Steinhorn acknowledges. In "Bobos" (Brooks' neologism for "bourgeois bohemians"), Brooks acutely sums up Bobos as a group that tries to have it both ways: "Bobos are reconcilers, after all, so maybe it is inevitable they would strive to blur their duties with their pleasures, making the former more enjoyable and the latter more tame." And Brooks concludes his book by praising Bobos for making politics more centrist and civil (this was before George W. Bush), improving capitalism and generally making life more pleasant.

If Brooks sees a downside to the Bobo era, it is a kind of genteel mediocrity. Bobos have a lukewarm spirituality, and it is unclear what they really care about. Brooks does not invoke Nietzsche's flealike "last man," the decadent Mr. Nice Guy of the Apocalypse whose spiritual horizons have disappeared, but you can feel him peering over the Pottery Barn sofa.

Brooks' Bobo is drawn with more sophistication than Steinhorn's boomer. But in the end, the two versions are pretty similar. Boomers are well-meaning, responsible, tolerant, open-minded citizens who are basically content with the status quo. In this light, all this arguing about whether the boomers are heroes or sellouts seems faintly ridiculous. It seems more likely that a hundred years from now, historians will neither exalt nor disparage the boomers. They will remember them as a generation that inherited a world at peace and a country of unprecedented prosperity, who did their best to make it a little better and have some fun while doing it. Yes, there was Vietnam, and the weird maelstrom of the '60s. But taking the long view, the boomers sailed on calm seas. Ironically, after all the acid and rebellion and strangeness, they may simply go down in history as a generation, in the words of the Chinese proverb, that was lucky enough to live in boring times.

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