Does Generational Character Exist?

The answer is yes, unless you believe that the experiences people have don’t shape them.

At a given time and place, we experience similar things. In the US of the 30s, we experience poverty, desperation, and the hope of FDR. In the 50s, we have prosperity, but also stifling expectations of behaviour and a closing of possibilities for women. In the 60s, we experience the flowering of youth culture, traumatic assassinations, and civil rights victories. In the 70s, we grow up during inflation, terrorism, and the end of “the good times.” In the 90s, we grow up in helicopter households under stifling levels of supervision unknown to previous generations.

Character is formed by genetics and environment in concert. A generation which has one set of experiences is different from a generation which has another set of experiences. The average Boomer personality is different from the GI Generation, the Silents, Xers or the Lost Generation. They grew up in affluence, expected smooth sailing, grew up in a world which worked and in which their youthful experience was a bend toward justice. This is very different than the Xer or Millennial experience of growing up in an economy which was growing worse than that in which their parents had lived, and of the Millennial experience of a world where civil liberties beyond identity rights were actually constricting as they grew up.

To argue that generational differences don’t exist is to argue that nurture doesn’t matter, or to argue that there are no significant differences in the experiences of different generations in the 20th and 21st centuries. I will be frank: Anyone who believes either of those things is wrong.

Likewise, generations make different decisions at different points in their life cycles. The choice the GIs, Silents, and Boomers made in 1980 to abandon the Democratic Party, either because they were racist southerners responding to the southern strategy (and yes, that was a racist strategy, and the people who created it have said so), or whether they voted for Reagan in northern suburbs because they wanted those suburbs to stay white, and fuck the black people, made choices. White flight was a very real phenomenon; it is what those Boomers, GIs, and Silents did.

This does not mean all Boomers/Silents/GI Generation types made those choices, but enough did to make the Reagan revolution possible. Being racist or keeping their suburban housing prices up was more important to them than anything else, and they voted those values. They voted repeatedly for tax cuts–again and again. You could not run except on tax cuts and expect to win. That was what they wanted, that was what they voted for, that was their character.

The massive deregulation of securites which took off in the 80s could not have happened while the Lost Generation were still the majority of decision makers and one of the largest voting blocks. They would not have allowed it, and in the early 70s when an attempt was made to get rid of the uptick rule (that you can only short sell on an uptick of a stock) was quickly abandoned because they came out ferociously against it.

Certainly they had their flaws. But that generation, having lived as adults not just through the Depression, but through the Roaring Twenties, understood that you don’t allow securities markets to get out of control.

There is far too much special pleading today, mostly from Boomers, that America just went to hell when they were the largest voting bloc and later, had the majority of politicians, “because of a few bad people.”

No, that doesn’t happen. They were complicit, they chose to vote racism and fear, they chose to vote, again and again, for tax cuts which hurt the weakest amongst us. They backed three strikes laws, they ate up Reagan’s bullshit about Welfare Queens. If they lost control of their political parties (a questionable claim in 1980), well that too was a choice: a choice not to participate actively in internal party politics.

Generations have character, tendencies in common, and they make decisions based on priorities shaped by their characters and tendencies. That some of them disagree with their peers does not change this, any more than the fact that many people in Democratic elections vote for the losing parties. A decision was still made and that decision reflects their collective values.

This does not mean there are not other causal factors: the failure of liberalism, the oil shocks, the strategies of the rich to fund an ideological apparatus outside the universities, the concentration of capital, the idiotic war in Vietnam, and so on. There are always plenty of factors, but generational character, and generational choice played a part, and until the Boomers have shuffled off the stage, and the Millennials move to the fore, our problems stand no real chance of being fixed. (I leave GenX out, because while, on the balance, our generational character is abysmal, and our most prominent politicians are people like Rand Paul, we are too few in number to really matter: The Millennials will take over from the Boomers, in the same way that the poor Silents were essentially skipped over in favor of the Boomers.)

Character is destiny, for nations, individuals and generations. And character is formed by the experiences we have.

Originally published Jan 7, 2014.

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