How Boomer Nostalgia Harms America

[Valin]

Washington Free Beacon:

Book Excerpt: Yuval Levin, ‘The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism’

Yuval Levin

May 28, 2016

 

The baby boomers are the children of the World War II generation. They are generally defined as Americans born between 1946 and 1964, so they are now in their fifties and sixties; the oldest among them are entering their seventies.

 

They are a generation that has always stood out, first and foremost, for its sheer size: about 75 million Americans were born in those years, an era when the constraints of depression and then war gave way to an unprecedented economic expansion, and with it a sharp increase in rates of marriage and childbearing. In the twenty years before the baby boom began, the number of births in America hovered around 2.6 million per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During the baby-boom years, this figure climbed to 4 million per year.

 

The baby boomers transformed the age structure of American society. If you were to chart the nation’s population by age at different times over the past seven decades, you would find in each case a large bulge representing the baby boomers at different stages of life—what demographers have often playfully called “the pig in the python.”

 

(Snip)

 

Instead, we should consider how they came to be, how and why America has changed, and what this might mean for what America is becoming. And we should apply the lessons we learn to the essential work of economic, social, and political reform.

 

To begin to escape our overpowering frustration, then, we should try first to better appreciate the real strengths and weaknesses of the midcentury America that still so beckons to us, and to better grasp the nature of the transformation that was then beginning and is still underway.

 

Adapted excerpt from The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism by Yuval Levin. Copyright © 2016. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

[SrWoodchuck]

@Valin! Great post.

 

I suppose...being a "boomer," I shouldn't live in a cherished past & wish that my two boys & their families can experience the same conditions & blessings I had, because the exact conditions will never happen again. Instead, I should listen to those that want to "revise" history to better establish a false present experience that is tailored to make themselves happy, because the past should be whatever they decide it was...to fit their preferred experience.

 

Constitution=old, unwieldy & stifling. Socialism=new, exciting & full of possibilities.

 

Ethics, morals & life lessons learned during our early years, can be just as relevant in future times. Things like common sense, charity, sacrifice, courage, responsibility. If you actually look deeper into those "boomer" past experiences...you see a basic code that can be timeless. You can't live in the past, but you don't have to let others determine your future...and some of what millennial's & post-bloomers think should be the new experience...are mistakes that can be foreseen by those with more life experience. My Dad didn't get smart until I got older. JMO

[Draggingtree]

Piecing America’s ‘Fractured Republic’ Back Together

JUNE 10, 2016 By Mark Hemingway

Yuval Levin’s new book takes a look a ways to keep America from coming apart at the cultural and political seams. Ed Whelan, Rachel Lu, Jonah Goldberg, and R.R. Reno weigh in.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/10/piecing-americas-fractured-republic-back-together/