The late-life radicalization of the Boomers is proving to be an ongoing catastrophe.
I am, of course, referring to liberal Boomers, not conservative ones. As far as I can tell, conservative Baby Boomers might be one of the most stable voting blocs in the country. Conservative Boomers today tend to vote for the same things they have always voted for and basically believe in the same American values they did in 2006 or 1986. Their stability is something we currently take for granted, and it will be missed one day.
The old people I remember from the 1980s and ’90s acted old. I don’t mean that as an insult.
Liberal Baby Boomers have taken a different path: a strange, late-life radicalization.
Gray panthers
Usually when we hear the word “radicalization,” we think of anarchists, Islamic terrorists, and other violent groups. With liberal Boomers, we aren’t dealing so much with a violent insurgency or rogue actors who want to bring society to its knees. We’re dealing with people who, in their old age, have too much time to read the news and get mad in fits of performative self-righteousness and who have decided that a good use of their twilight years is reliving some micro-version of the ’60s and ’70s.
Next time there is a No Kings rally or some other left-wing protest, drive by and take a look at who is there. You may be struck by the amount of gray hair. This isn’t a novel observation. Researchers studying the recent anti-Trump protest movement have noticed that many of the organizers are considerably older than the activists who usually come to mind when we think of political protest.
At first, that doesn’t seem strange at all. Of course retired people are going to show up. They have the free time.
But I’m interested in something beyond simple availability. Why do so many people who are approaching 70 or 80 seem determined to become political activists now? Why the signs, the marches, the constant outrage, the sense that retirement is finally their chance to join the resistance?
AARP anarchists
The obvious retort is that young people today are politically disengaged and somebody has to do it.
There may be some truth to that. But it still doesn’t explain why a certain kind of affluent liberal senior citizen now seems to fancy himself part of the vanguard of political action.
There is something historically upside down about it.
The old stereotype says that age brings caution. You accumulate responsibilities, watch political fashions come and go, and become a little less impressed by people promising to remake the world. Whether or not people literally become more conservative as they age, older generations have traditionally occupied that cultural role: They remind the young that most supposedly revolutionary ideas have been tried before and that smashing things is easier than rebuilding them.
The old are supposed to be the anchor. The young are supposed to be pulling at the chain.
So how did we end up with 70-year-olds trying to recapture the barricades?
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Elder shortage
Maybe it’s because fewer of them have grandchildren than previous generations did. Maybe it’s the nature of technological society, which gives everyone access to a limitless supply of things to be angry about and has, for whatever reason, had a particularly strange effect on liberal Boomers. Maybe it’s because people are living longer and spending more years in retirement with more free time.
Or maybe it’s just something particular to the liberals of that generation. Maybe they want to relive their glory days.
Maybe they simply can’t bear to be old.
I’m not sure exactly what the answer is. It’s probably some combination of those things plus a few others. But what I do know is that it wasn’t like this when I was a kid.
The old people I remember from the 1980s and ’90s acted old. I don’t mean that as an insult. They weren’t desperately trying to keep up, prove they were hip, adopt the latest political vocabulary, or convince the rest of us that they were on the right side of history. They had older-generation attitudes. Sometimes those attitudes were wrong. Sometimes they were annoying. But they were recognizably the attitudes of people who had been around for a while.
What makes the current situation even stranger is that many of these newly radicalized liberal Boomers weren’t extreme leftists when they were younger. Plenty were basically centrists in the ’80s and ’90s. They had kids and jobs and mortgages and wanted their children to have a decent future. Those responsibilities tended to keep them somewhere near the middle, even if they considered themselves liberals.
Now the kids are gone, the mortgage is paid off, and some of them seem to have finally become the campus radicals they never quite managed to be at 22.
Are we going to see the same thing happen as Gen X ages? What about Millennials?
I hope not.
If we want future generations to inherit the same America we lived in, at some point we have to start acting our age.