Don't Get Me Wrong

It's clear that many of us so-called Xers despised the stereotypes foisted upon us by commentators (usually Boomers). But just as there were false assumptions in these tracts, you can find false assumptions about those assumptions.

This comes out of the curiously underresearched article "The Generation Gambit: The Right's Imaginary Rift Between Young and Old" by Hans Riemer and Christopher Cuomo of something called the 2030 Center. Appearing on fair.org, a proudly liberal Web site, the authors accused Strauss and Howe -- you remember them, the cranky Boomer authors of 13th Gen: Abort? Retry? Ignore? Fail? -- of being part of some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy to create generational warfare.

While their criticisms of the famed hatchet job by Strauss and Howe have some merit, Riemer and Cuomo must have read the Cliff's Notes version of 13th Gen or entrusted an inept research department. They said Strauss and Howe presented a "thinly veiled agenda" to create a generational divide, and that "a group of Xers closely affiliated with Strauss and Howe translated this caricature of young people, and its accompanying ideology, into political organizations that would advocate the agenda on behalf of young people."

Strauss and Howe trying to fire up a bunch of people to be young, have fun, drink Pepsi and lead a political movement? Er, no, sorry. Moreover, Riener and Cuomo sniff a conservative conspiracy behind this attempt to instill a generational divide (think privatizing Social Security and other social program cuts that would hurt the poor and elderly). An interesting thesis, but even if it was true, Strauss and Howe had nothing to do with it.

Perhaps, like a harried undergraduate who has developed an idea for a paper and only wants facts that support the thesis, Riener and Cuomo only skimmed the book or took notes that fit their idea. So they missed entirely the part toward the back of the book where Strauss and Howe lay bare their souls as liberals incensed that any young people would vote for Reagan. Howe and Strauss lamented that 13ers (their version of Xers) represented "the first pro-Republican young Americans since the 1920s. In fifteen out of sixteen polls taken between 1981 and 1988, 13ers gave Ronald Reagan a higher approval rating than any other age bracket."

But Strauss and Howe's righteous indignation seems woefully misplaced in terms of the target. They assail "crasher" -- their gimmick of an Internet poster who can spout X-like drivel and serve as a convenient whipping boy -- for being part of a generation that "was almost completely pro-Reagan in the early days. Instead of voting for folks like Carter, who fretted away most national emergencies, you liked the guy who would get things done and not just worry about it." They added that 13ers seemed "attracted to the guilt-free American pride of the Reagan years.

But this strange outburst seemed like a smokescreen; Reagan owed his victories over weak opposition to all generations -- and least to "13ers." By the authors' reckoning, the first Xers were born in 1961, meaning only a small sliver were of voting age in 1980. By 1984, any 13ers born in 1966 or before were eligible to participate in Reagan's landslide for a second term. But given the traditionally low voting rates of younger Americans, how could any self-respecting demographer attribute Reagan's victory to the generation with the least amount of voters, potential and actual, at the time? One can only speculate that Howe and Strauss were trying to displace their disappointment of their own generation's enthusiastic support of Reagan onto some other scapegoat.

History does repeat itself, as Riemer and Cuomo were now using Strauss and Howe as their strawmen to make a political statement. This all leads me to believe that any attempts to drag the talk of Generation X into politics -- from the left or the right -- is nothing more than a shortsighted, cynical and exploitive attempt to score some cheap points. A generation that doesn't want to be categorized or defined as a target market knows when it's being played.

The 2030 Center represented by Riemer and Cuomo -- described by fair.org as an "organization created by concerned young people to promote long-term policies that will invest in the future and move all Americans forward together" -- apparently learned the difficulty of trying to play generational politics while insisting they were not playing generational politics. That or their inefficient research methods and/or questionable conclusions apparently doomed them to the ashbin of history. A check of their the 2030 Center's Web site finds their Recent Media Coverage page carries no entries more recent than June 2001. Much like the Generation X lobbying group Lead ... Or Leave (who chose the latter option), the 2030 Center shows that trying to fire up a whole generation to support the usual partisan efforts is not yet a winning formula.