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The end of the baby boomers’ 40-year reign is almost at hand. The scepter will presently fall to a young generation that is staggeringly unprepared to receive it.
Since the foreshocks of succession first began to rattle American politics in the early-to-mid-2010s, candidates and their parties began to pander to the youngest generation of American voters — the heirs apparent. “Pokémon Go to the polls” gave way to promises of H-1B elimination, rent control, graduate grants, student loan forgiveness, and the like.
Baby boomers have promised — disingenuously — to pass the torch in every election since 2008. All the while, they remained the largest age demographic by voting in every presidential election since 1988, and made up the largest age demographic in every United States Congress since 1991. The stalwarts of prior decades remain in authority to this day.
The result is that young voters play a central role in campaigns and elections while their actual policy preferences are never adopted — red states fail to deliver on school choice, blue states fall hilariously short on promises to vastly expand subsidized housing and public transportation. Young voters are left feeling betrayed and infantilized, hence today’s disillusionment and oozing generational resentment.
But this time, the foretold dethronement is real. The Baby Boomer generation began in 1946 — 80 years ago. The current life expectancy in the United States is 79 years. Like all those before them and all those to follow, the influence of baby boomers will dissolve as the people themselves begin to die. The political reality is equally inescapable: As the boomers wane, discontented young voters will witness an aggressive political realignment. A tidal wave of collective dissatisfaction with the American republic that is already breaking will soon crash upon parties, states, and institutions nationwide.
Those feeling unrepresented in current American politics will be represented in full — and fast. Though the young will certainly mourn the dead, they’ll at last direct the living.
And that is where young Americans will face a far greater matter. Their impending political preeminence is undeniable: For better or worse, the influence of baby boomers in American politics will recede to irrelevance in the next decade. The question now is whether young Americans can rule well.
Baby boomers have, for better or worse, wielded power in a remarkably dispassionate manner. They are the predominant equalizing force in contemporary politics: 34% Republican, 33% Independent, and 32% Democrat, according to Gallup. And with 62 boomers in the Senate, they are certainly the greatest moderating force. What’s more, they retain a level of civility in government that young people do not. These same young people once called that civility “the swamp,” but now simply call it complacency and corruption.
No one fully knows the character that national politics will assume once it’s stripped of those niceties — not just the Senate filibuster, but the ever-receding rules of decorum. Young voters seem all too pleased with those who conduct business via classless social media and podcast spats. If this is what young voters truly want — or what they’re willing to tolerate to get what they want — they’ll get a lightning-fast, extremely confrontational, and staggeringly unprofessional government. That’s like a fast food restaurant with compulsory power.
Equally frightening is what will happen once this new government gives young voters what they want, whether or not it amounts to something more substantive than “do something.” Mass indignation, no matter how righteous, never actually subsides — especially when it receives what it nominally desires. History would be far less tragic if the masses were ever able to stop crying “more” the third or fourth time around. But after all, we’re hungry. What’s one more cycle in the McGovernment drive-thru?
We who will inherit the country should use this peculiar moment to consider whether we’re prepared to get what we want. Otherwise, those disgruntled at the long-protracted passing of the crown will soon come to reminisce about when they got to blame everything on the boomers. Americans captured this attitude with the words, “This is what you asked for, heavy is the crown.”
But then again, that was Linkin Park, and it hasn’t been cool since 2013.
Lewis Thune is a senior studying politics.
