The baby boomers move on. Now what?

One untold big story of 2008 was a political power shift, from the baby boomers to generation X.

The baby boomers are, broadly speaking, the cohort born between 1946 and 1961. Having ruled much of the world, they are now on their way out. The boomers are being replaced by “generation X”, the 28 to 45 year olds; though some would say that there’s also a transitional generation, currently in their late 40s.

Look at what’s happened in 2008.

In the United States presidential election, Barack Obama (born 1961) trounced John McCain. McCain was born in 1936 and is not a baby boomer. Earlier in the year, however, Obama saw off Hilary Clinton, born in 1947 and the queen of the boomers, to become the Democratic party’s standard-bearer. Obama’s two immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, were both born in 1946.

In the race for London mayor, Conservative Boris Johnson (born 1964) ousted Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone (born 1945 and a baby boomer, if only just).

In my home country, New Zealand, National’s John Key (born 1961) defeated Labour prime minister Helen Clark (born 1950).

There could be more change to come. In the next UK general election, due in 2010, if not sooner, prime minister Gordon Brown (born 1951) will face Conservative leader David Cameron (born 1966). The Liberal Democrats are also led by a generation X-er, Nick Clegg (born 1967).

Many of the key members of Brown’s cabinet – Ed Balls, James Purnell, David Miliband and Ed Miliband -- were born in the late 1960s, though Purnell was born in 1970.

Other examples of post baby boomers in power or on the way up before 2008 are Sweden's prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, France's justice minister Rachida Dati and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, leader of Denmark’s Social Democrats.

There is a cruel irony in this generational shift. The baby boomers were the mainstay of the “sixties generation”; the self-styled driving force of a revolution that questioned established authority and the existing order, in foreign policy (most notably over Vietnam), education, gender and race. They took on many core values of the World War II generation and its predecessors.

Now these old “change agents” are the old guard and younger voters are moving them on. Barack Obama defeated Hilary Clinton by providing a more convincing narrative of “change” and “hope” and winning more support from under 35 year olds. He offered a liberation from America’s bitter political divisions of the last four decades and the Clintons are a potent symbol of one side of America’s culture wars. Boris Johnson’s core message was that, after eight years of Ken, it was time for a change in London. John Key campaigned as a “fresh” alternative to three term prime minister Helen Clark.

The boomers’ time at the top has been very brief. In the different forms of Clinton and Bush II, they have occupied the White House for just 16 years. The representatives of the GI generation were there for twice as long (1961-1993). The UK boomers’ dominance dates from Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, giving them even less time at the top than their American counterparts have enjoyed. Only in New Zealand, where they first came to power in 1984, have the boomer politicians arguably had a long tenure.

Looking at what the boomers leave behind, and what might be about to change, there’s another rich set of ironies. Baby boomer politics started out as being about war, peace, love, feminism, creativity, human relations and happiness. The driving force is self-fulfilment, self-expression and self-actualisation. At their most annoying and tiresome, the baby boomers have practised the politics of self-indulgence. They grew up in more benign economic times and didn’t have to worry too much about money. The post-war prosperity and then the revolt against the Keynesian economic settlement, happened all around them.

In terms of hard policy, however, the most significant legacies of Bill Clinton, Blair and Brown are in the area of political economy. They reconciled their parties with, adapted and then embraced, the market economics of Reagan and Thatcher (even if those were not exactly the same in the US and Britain). They, and, George W. Bush, have presided over the rise and rise, and now, the collapse, of turbo-capitalism. Brown, its erstwhile champion, now has to lead Britain through the consequences. Bush II and Blair also fought the Iraq war, with all its disastrous consequences for American and British prestige.

So with a new generation taking over, there is the prospect of new ideas and fresh approaches. These are surely needed now. As for what the new way may look like, Newsweek’s Jeremy Kahn offered a few opinions at the beginning of 2008.

"Compared with the baby boomers, they are more technocratic, more global in outlook, more comfortable with technology, more idealistic and yet less ideological and less invested in old debates . . . Instead, the new generation has been influenced by the end of the cold war, September 11 and the Iraq War."

He suggested they could take a distinctive direction of policy travel: support for "the continued spread of democracy and liberalism, particularly to Muslim nations," optimism "about the long-term prospects of reining in Islamic terrorism" and general support for "globalization." Kahn saw the new generation as being much more focused than its predecessors in climate change as well as immigration and its challenges to cultural identity.

Nearly a year on, much of that description of the post boomers still seems plausible. For instance, Barack Obama has promised Americans a transformation, through rejecting the "old" politics in favour of a “new”, post-ideological version. (“There’s not a black America and a white America . . . a liberal America and a conservative America . . . there’s a United States of America”).

But Kahn’s observations now seem incomplete. Some generation X politicians look a little more grounded in conventional ideologies than they seemed this time last year. Step forward, David Cameron.

Kahn was writing months before the world recession and the threat of deflation really hit. The full nature of Obama’s solutions won’t be known until months after he takes office. There will have to be a lot of improvisation, and the details may look rather different to his campaign promises, some of which included protectionist rhetoric (not quite what Kahn suggests). But improvisation was also the rule with previous presidents, such as FDR and Bill Clinton.

As they innovate and improvise, the post baby boomers will need help. For instance, Obama’s incoming treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, born in 1961, is a post-boomer but other key cabinet appointments are experienced, familiar faces: Robert Gates (defence), Lawrence Summers (head of the National Economic Council) and Hilary Clinton (State). The last two of these are baby boomers. So are many key world leaders, such as Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy. And the politics of the emerging powers, such as China and India, follow very different rhythms.

The post baby boomers are taking over, but they won’t be able to run the world on their own.

Hey 1968, it’s time for a break

Well, that year is back.

You know the one – 1968. We have a new round of newspaper articles rehearsing all the old arguments. The slogans and the demonstrations were youthful posturing and an embarrassment, says Tom Stoppard. No, we really made a difference, replies Magnus Linklater. Every day, BBC Radio 4 tells us what was happening exactly forty years ago. The BFI has a mini season of films about May ’68.

I have read and watched a lot about 1968 over the years. (I “wasn’t there”, to coin a phrase, being six years old at the time and living in New Zealand). I appreciate that a lot happened: the Tet offensive, the student and other upheavals in Paris, the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Soviet tanks rolling over the Prague Spring, the Democrats’ disastrous Chicago convention and Nixon’s election, to name a few.

But I can’t get too excited about this anniversary. First, there were many important events but other years had a big long-term impact, arguably more momentous than that of 1968. 1973 saw the first oil shock and marked the ending of the “west’s” economic dominance. 1979 brought the Iranian revolution and showed the emerging political power of Islam. Margaret Thatcher’s election signalled the end of the Keynesian consensus on economic policy. In 1989, the Berlin Wall went down. In 2001 . . . you get the picture.

As for all the argument about the evenements, I find the combination of the British media's fixation with the past and some baby boomers’ narcissistic efforts to celebrate themselves a little hard to take.

Most importantly, much of the legacy of the 1968 demonstrations has not been very happy for liberals, especially the “social liberal” baby boomers who came of age at that time. E.J. Dionne jr. argues that King’s murder and the ensuing riots that engulfed Washington DC and major American cities signalled the collapse of liberal hopes and the beginning of a conservative dominance of U.S. politics. Robert Reich, former U.S. labor secretary (and a Rhodes Scholar with Bill Clinton in 1968) has made very similar observations.

And “the system” – western capitalism – didn’t just survive. Over the past twenty five years or more, the market has been untamed, becoming much stronger and more powerful than nearly anyone in 1968 would have imagined. That wasn’t what liberals of 1968 or the radicals who took to the streets forty years ago had in mind.

Tariq Ali, who was on the London barricades, recently reflected that the hopes of revolutionaries, liberals and social democrats have all been cruelly dashed by the triumph of the “Washington consensus”, combining economic deregulation and the entry of private capital into the areas of public provision. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s revolution is now the conventional wisdom, shared by the main parties and the establishment and consolidated by her successors. As her brilliant (Liberal Democrat) biographer John Campbell concluded a few years ago, Britain today is Thatcher’s theme park.

So is there any reason to revere 1968? Tariq Ali points to sexual liberation as a major legacy of the sixties generation. I agree that feminism is one of the most important things we have from that time. Feminist historians might tell us, however, that the women’s liberation movement was born at least in part from a reaction to the sexist attitudes and approaches of many New Left leaders. This is relevant to the states, where it took off rather more quickly than in Britain or elsewhere. I am quite sure there weren’t too many feminist slogans in the 1968 demonstrations.

Magnus Linklater argues that the exact aims of the demonstrations were hard to pin down. He may be nearer the mark than his contemporaries when he identifies a challenge to authoritarianism and totalitarianism as the unifying, lasting theme from those times. The interesting point is, from whom and at what this has been channelled over the last forty years?

The American liberal writer Paul Berman has shown how some ‘68ers later became important political figures. Adam Michnik was arrested in a demonstration in Warsaw in February of 1968 and went on to become the leading theorist of the Solidarity protest movement of the 1980s. Václav Havel was in New York in the spring of 1968, took part in the student strike at Columbia and joined Alexander Dubcek in the short-lived liberal uprising in Prague that summer.

It didn’t stop there. After 1989, Michnik became a supporter of Poland’s first non-communist government, editor-in-chief of the leading daily newspaper and has been dubbed “the Sisyphus of democracy.” Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic. He is a hero of many liberals, including Nick Clegg.

Still, it is very hard to draw a straight line from the 1968 demonstrations to the post-communist politics of the former eastern bloc and Paul Berman has not tried to do so.

Berman has written of another stand against authoritarianism: by the prominent German 1968 barricadier Joschka Fischer, who became a Green Party politician and foreign minister and became a leader of Europe’s fight against Serbian ultra-nationalism. Conservative and social democrat presidents and prime ministers from older generations didn’t want to know. But this came some time after Fischer had an epiphany. Some of his so-called revolutionary comrades from 1968 and after turned out to hold anti-semitic views. When it came to the crunch, the comrades seemed to be imitating the Nazis whom they were meant to revile. Fischer concluded that it was fascism in all it forms, including the fascism of the “New Left”, that had to be stopped.

There are, however, other anti-authoritarians from 1968: France’s nouveaux philosophes. One is Andre Glucksmann, who led the Sorbonne demonstrations and later arguedthat the old Soviet bloc represented the worst sort of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Glucksmann’s anti-totalitarianism has led him to back Chechnyan independence -- and the Iraq war (like Berman, but unlike Fischer). He supported Nicolas Sarkozy, a scourge of the 68 generation, in last year’s presidential elections.

Another is Bernard Henri Levy, who became a strong critic of socialist and communist responses to 1968, as well as of the Soviet Union. He called for intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s and now campaigns against Islamic totalitarianism.

The nouveaux philosophes may not be neo-conservatives in the American mould because they have not embraced capitalist ideologies in the same way. Some UK liberals may agree with them on some issues but not on others. My point is that their views underline how strained are the connections between the evenements of 1968 and the politics of today.

I can’t accept the conservative sneer that 1968 was about little more than youthful indulgence. But that one year wasn’t the start of a revolution either. While it may not be worth all the fuss, that year unleashed some baby boomers as important political forces. It’s just that the forces ended up looking and acting very differently from where they were in 1968. And, lest we forget, like characters in a play by Chekhov, the boomers’ time is passing.

Is it too late for Nick Clegg to offer a "fresh" face?

We all know that people are pissed off with the way things are going. Voters in the US, the UK and elsewhere keep telling pollsters that their countries are on the wrong track. But they don’t necessarily want big policy changes. The voters are finding their own solution (as they inevitably do): get in some new faces at the top, without risking policy shocks. They are also more and more interested in leaders from a new generation who are untainted by old arguments and who carry less political baggage than what’s already on offer. Senator Barack Obama, with his offer of a fresh break from the baby boomers' culture wars, is the latest example.

My home country New Zealand has a general election later this year. After three terms, the incumbent Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark (57) faces an uphill struggle (but she will fight like hell) against the centre-right National Party’s John Key (46), an MP since 2002 who became his party’s leader in late 2006. The veteran NZ political pundit Colin James says:

. . . "fresh" is John Key's critical advantage.

Clark has been more than 14 years and two months Labour leader, now longest serving by some accounts. She was an MP 27 years ago, a minister 21 years ago and Deputy Prime Minister 19 years ago. She is long in the political tooth.

Key is still new. He has not accumulated enemies as Clark has. He promises a "fresh start". The potency of that slogan is in its plausibility.

Key is not promising a change of direction. He has signed up to most of Labour'smajor policy positions. His "fresh start" for young people predisposed to crime two weeks back consisted mainly of more vigorous action on programmes already in place.

Instead of a new direction, Key's "fresh start" promises fresh energy in the current direction: some amendments and over time discernible leans but nothing dramatic or unsettling.

Key is able to do that plausibly because, unlike his predecessor and his opponent, he is not defined by the debates of the past . . .

James explains what those were and then says:

Key can plausibly present himself as offering "fresh" politics. He can imply he has answers to the "crisis" he says besets us without proposing radical policy change, simply because he is of a new political cohort. He can even take large political risks. . . He can walk where Clark cannot.

In case UK readers haven’t worked it out yet:

There are loose parallels in United States presidential candidate Barack Obama, British Tory leader David Cameron and Kevin Rudd in Australia.

At the age of 41, inexperienced in office and all but unknown before 2005, Cameron, in his own way and in this political environment, seems to tick a lot of same boxes as Key and Obama.

Nick Clegg is also 41 and still a new face at Westminster. But he came to his party’s leadership two years after Cameron. The new generation of voters already had someone new to identify with. So a “fresh face” won’t quite be enough.

Has he arrived too late? Not necessarily. The last time voters were getting very weary of a government, in 1997, the Lib Dems invited them to make a real difference and it worked. I think that could work next time. But offering a genuinely fresh start means taking large but calculated political risks and walking where Brown and Cameron cannot.

1970s redux

In the latest Sunday Times Magazine, Bryan Appleyard has re-assessed the seventies and decided that they weren’t just a ten year long bad hair day. He concludes:

The full reassessment of the 1970s must . . . take into account two great truths. First, it was the age of transition from then to now. Battles were fought and won that made us who we are today. Some victories were benign – few now would argue against the liberation of gays and women, and environmentalism. Others were distinctly ambiguous – hyper-individualism has gone, everybody agrees, too far, though nobody knows how to restrain its excesses. Second, it was a period that produced a disproportionate share of the greatest art of the postwar period. Sam Tyler [in tv’s Life on Mars] was right to leap off that building back into the era of Gene Hunt and Mark III Cortinas. It felt more alive. The 1970s had the Allegro, but they weren’t “shit-brown”. They were golden.

After years of denigrating and trying to forget them, I agree that the 1970s should be looked at afresh. In economic terms, they were years of unhappy decline. Western countries experienced deep anxiety and feelings of national malaise. To the right, the seventies marked the catastrophic collapse of the Keynesian (or, in the US, liberal) economic policy consensus in the west. The presidents and prime minister of the time are usually derided as doomed stewards of decline who failed miserably to make the old, statist policies work. The “left” and liberals often depict the 1970s as lost, unhappy years, devoid of social progress.

The economic history of the time is, however, more complicated than is often painted. James Callaghan’s government tamed inflation for a time and avoided mass unemployment. Nor were the leaders of the time always stuck in a statist, corporatist time warp. James Callaghan’s government experimented with “monetarist” policies and cut public spending in real terms to the sorts of levels we have seen in recent years. It was, after all, Callaghan who told the 1976 Labour conference that "spending your way out of a recession" was no longer an option. In the US, Jimmy Carter was defeated partly because of the high interest rate policies pursued by Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve. All sides of politics now accept and follow these sorts of policies. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did not invent them all on their own.

A big re-think of liberal and centre-left politics can be traced back to the 1970s. For all this faults, Carter recognised the big tensions between the cultural conservatism and economic resentments of many “middle ground” American voters and the policies pursued by liberalism’s champions. That was one of the main reasons he was elected president in 1976. Bill Clinton won twice in the 1990s largely because he was able to bridge these sorts of chasms.

For all the economic and political failures, the seventies were not a dead decade. Edward Heath’s government made an appalling mess of the economy but he took Britain into Europe, a major achievement. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 -- both, it must be said, by Labour governments. A new law on domestic violence was also passed. In the US, Richard Nixon disgraced his office. But he left behind the world’s first environmental protection agency and ground-breaking legislation on protecting endangered species.

No, I do not see the seventies as a golden decade. I grew up in New Zealand and witnessed the ending of a number of golden weathers during those years. They still make me shudder sometimes. The great inflation and the oil shock hit New Zealand very hard. In 1975, a well-meaning but inept Labour government was swept out of office, thrashed by the unspeakable Robert Muldoon. Then inflation stayed in double digits, the economy stagnated, unemployment started going up and for a while the mood got ugly. But the decade also saw the rise of the women’s movement, which had more impact, more quickly than in many English-speaking countries. New Zealand was home to a strong environmental movement with substantial public support, as well as the world’s first green party. A cultural renaissance started and a more outward-looking, cosmopolitan society started to emerge. That part of Bryan Appleyard’s article strikes a chord with me.

My point is that this much-maligned decade deserves to be re-assessed. Many of the most important accepted wisdoms of today’s politics can be traced back to the seventies. So can some very important social progress. But I certainly don’t mourn them, the way some people do the sixties. Nor am I about to rush out and buy any progressive rock albums.

The politics of generations: baby boomers and after

I have just come across an article in Newsweek (21 January 2008) called Leaders for a New Age that contends we are now seeing the rise to political power of the post-baby boomers:

"men and women too young to have been shaped by either of the two major ideological contests of the 20th century—the battle against fascism and the long twilight struggle against communism."

The examples discussed include British foreign secretary David Miliband, Conservative Party leader David Cameron, Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, France's Justice Minister Rachida Dati, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, leader of Denmark's Social Democrats and, of course, U.S. Senator Barack Obama, who has a chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

"Compared with the baby boomers, they are more technocratic, more global in outlook, more comfortable with technology, more idealistic and yet less ideological and less invested in old debates . . . Instead, the new generation has been influenced by the end of the cold war, September 11 and the Iraq War."

In terms of policies, the authors suggest a direction of travel: support for "the continued spread of democracy and liberalism, particularly to Muslim nations," optimism "about the long-term prospects of reining in Islamic terrorism" and general support for "globalization." According to the article, the new generation is much more focused than its predecessors on climate change as well as immigration and its challenges to cultural identity.

The article may speak too soon. A boomer has only just become president of France. Last year, Ms Thorne-Schmidt was defeated at the polls by another. Senator Hilary Clinton, queen of the boomers, may well see off Senator Obama. In other ways, it is too simplistic, glossing too easily over old arguments. On Europe, for instance, there is still a gulf between David Miliband and David Cameron. Britain's political argument over the future of work and pensions policy is unlikely to be reduced to:

"widespread support for a state-provided social safety net, coupled with a realization . . . that current benefits and the tax systems that support them have become overly burdensome and must be reformed."

Also, some boomer politicians, such as Tony Blair, hold many of the views described in the article.

Still, the generational divide in politics is overlooked far too often. Having been born in 1962, I am technically a boomer. But having been active in "progressive" parties in two countries, I have often noticed that the boomers involved have a different mindset from myself and many contemporaries. This has been most noticeable on matters economic. The liberal and left political boomers have tended to be less concerned about arguments over public debt and inflation, more interested in foreign policy and (in New Zealand at least) gender and human rights. Historically, they have also been more likely to prefer statist policies - taxes, spending, regulation - over market-based policies. There was usually common ground, however, over human rights, feminism and gay rights.

Personally, I put this down to the oil shocks and the great inflation of the 1970s, which produced different expectations in my age group and profoundly changed the intellectual climate in western countries. Liberals and social democrats who became interested in politics around this time arrived at a perplexing, uneasy turning point between the politics of values and money, equity and efficiency, ends and means.

In my experience, inside and outside of the political world, the twentysomethings, the true children of the market, are something else again: much less interested in party politics, less likely to see politics as providing solutions to problems like climate change, more concerned with packaged campaigns and causes (see Make Poverty History), more likely to perceive themselves as "consumers" with entitlements in all spheres -and therefore more demanding of personalised public services. They may also be more ambivalent about civil liberties and personal freedoms.

Yes, this is all subjective. So it would be fascinating though to see some detailed studies of the differing political attitudes of the differing age groups - say, the boomers, the Abba-Star Wars generation and the children of the market. I am sure they would present some big threats and opportunities for Liberal Democrats. Voters with a more positive, more outward-looking, more tolerant, more idealistic outlook may be more receptive to a liberal story, told by a new, post-boomer leader. On the other hand, what if (and this only a suggestion) most voters aged under 40 -- the groups where we have done well in recent general elections -- don't relate at all well to our version of social liberalism and essentially see schools and hospitals as goods that they purchase with their tax money? It would be useful to look and plan ahead, rather than seeing what happens and then reacting, as has happened all too often in the past.