There has been an explosion of generational discourse in the last decade or so, most of it contrasting Millennials and Boomers. Recently, however, my generation, the Jan Brady generation, has been getting some attention. Commentators have noticed the seeming growing conservatism of middle-aged white people. While a majority of Gen Xers voted for Biden, white people in their 40s and 50s are the absolute core of the MAGA contingent.
As my generation ages, I have noticed a divide that explains this, at least as far as white middle-class Gen Xers are concerned. (One should be careful with generational generalizations.) Some are backward-looking, and some are forward-looking. It's built into the DNA of Gen X.
As children, we experienced the great political-economic transition that began in the mid-1970s. The thirty years of postwar expansion ended, helping to provide the basis for neoliberalism, which promised to bring a return to prosperity. The result, of course, was narrowed opportunities and increasing inequality. We were the first generation to reach adulthood with student loan debt, Wall Street gambling instead of pensions, casualized labor, and inflated home prices. Things have only worsened since then for suceeding generations, we were the canaries in the coal mine.
While all this was happening, Reaganism pervaded politics and culture. Greed was good. The biggest villain in Ghostbusters was the EPA. The new neoliberal order made all kinds of promises that weren't kept. However, many people brought up with those promises have refused to abandon them. Following generations have been far more willing to question capitalism. Many Xers also saw how their Boomer parents were able to more easily get the American Dream and so cling to the idea that they can have it too, that the system works. Many of them were able to get into the door of home-ownership and job security right before it slammed shut for the people after them. This has skewed their political understanding, but also made them incredibly anxious about losing their position, and thus opposed to any change in the current system. Whenever I talk about affordable housing in my New Jersey suburb my fellow Gen Xers start frothing at the mouth, even the "liberal" ones. They scream and rend their garments and blubber about "property values" and "overcrowding" just like the Boomers they wish they were.
At some point, I can't blame them because I too was raised on Boomer aspirations. Our generation was so small, their’s was so big. The classic rock format on the radio, coinciding with the absolute nadir of rock music in the 80s, made it so we loved their music, often more than music made by people our age. I consumed their nostalgia constantly. I fantasized about going to Woodstock, and wished I lived in more exciting times. I bought the bullshit narrative that the Boomers represented a progressive change from their elders rather than seeing their embrace of Reaganomics all around me.
It's a common online meme that Gen Xers are the forgotten generation, and I feel that the deeper issue is that we do not have the numbers of the ones before and after us, or their strong self-identification. I still remember a job interview when a candidate started a sentence by saying "As a Millennial..." and as a Gen Xer I was wondering why the hell they would think anyone should care. This increases the tendency to split into a forward or backward-looking contingent. We Xers are inevitably drawn to the poles of the generations on either side of us.
One thing we do have is an unhealthy nostalgia for the pop culture of our childhood, a toxic relationship to the movies and TV of our youth perhaps even stronger than that of the Boomers. All of our childhood favorites have been remade or sequelized in recent years, from Star Trek to Ghostbusters to Star Wars and now (yet again) Indiana Jones. They've even created CGI versions of dead and aged actors rather than recast the roles so as not to offend our nostalgia fetish. Whenever my Gen Z students discuss their love of Star Wars or Stranger Things I feel as if we have repeated the sins of the Boomers.
Beyond inflicting their tastes and nostalgia on the youth, Xers have wrapped themselves up in the culture of their childhoods so thoroughly that they default to looking backward. This has the effect of making them defensive when younger people come along to question certain cultural values. Dave Chapelle’s anti-trans “comedy” is a pretty stark manifestation of this. He was once an edgy comedian on the cutting edge of social commentary, and now that he isn’t anymore he’s decided to attack a group of people instead of alter his worldview.
The backward-looking orientation manifests itself in conservative politics more broadly. Take this disastrous session of the Supreme Court, for example. Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch are the Trump-appointed justices, each one a backward-looking Gen Xer. Decisions from destroying Roe to protecting football coaches praying to striking down gun control have all been justified with appeals to “history” and “tradition.” What else to expect from the spawn of a movement promising to Make America Great Again” when the horizon of “greatness” appears to be 1965?
For both political and personal reasons, I have dedicated myself to being a forward-looking Gen Xer. Some of this is just down to daily cultural practices. For example, when I am in the car I put on the Top 40 station for my kids and I have learned to unironically enjoy many of the same songs as them. My kids express disdain for the music of my youth when I try to play it for them, and I am perfectly fine with that. I am not going to be some old fogey upbraiding them for failing to like “real” music.
When it comes to politics, I want a better future, not to revive some idealized past that never happened or to maintain our current broken system. This will mean radically altering the status quo, and I am not only okay with it, I desperately want it! If we forgive student loan debt for people younger than me I am not going to bitch about how they didn’t have to endure what I did. If younger parents get access to subsidized child care my family didn’t benefit from, great!
Middle age can be a swamp of bitterness and resentment, and that stuff is a soul-killer. I’ve been imbibing a lot of philosophy to avoid those dark thoughts, and it works pretty well. Right now I am reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and he emphasizes over and over again that change is an inevitable part of life. It will come whether you like it or not, and you must train yourself to go with the flow or get sucked down into the undertow. In his words, “Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us.”
My advice to my fellow Gen Xers is to see younger generations as your allies, not your rivals. This week watch, read, or listen to something new made by someone younger than you. Put away comfortable things and embrace the excitement of the new. You won’t just be happier, the world will be a better place, too.