From
the July 3, 2000 Issue of National Review
X
Marked The Spot
Farewell
to generational nonsense.
By Jonah Goldberg, NRO Editor------------------------------JonahEMail@aol.com
ecently,
Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wrote a brilliantly subtle profile
of the pundit Heather Nauert. "Who the heck is Heather Nauert?" Farhi asked
rhetorically. Before the article, the answer from most people in Washington
— er, most men — was, "Isn't she that hot-as-tar blonde on Fox
News?" Farhi fleshed out the characterization somewhat, but it turns out
that's still the right answer. Nauert, 30, frequently appears on television
as a "GOP strategist," even though she's never worked for the GOP-largely
because she's an adequate talker and quickens the pulse of male couch potatoes.
"From the time I was 16," she says, "I knew I wanted to do something on
TV"; lo and behold, she's managed to become an expert on elections, foreign
affairs, and tax policy (after a brief stint as a country-music VJ).
While one might be expected to take this story as an example of how fierce competition is forcing networks to lower their journalistic standards (and let's not pick on Fox on this score; after all, MSNBC's anchors are increasingly underwear models with if-I-only-had-a-brain glasses), one could also see the Nauert story as a sign of a major positive step for our culture: the death of "Generation X."
Not too long ago, the press was committed to the idea that people born between, roughly, 1961 and 1980 were bona fide members of the identity-politics coalition. This idea was based on a sort of secular astrology, the notion that the experience and perspective of young people was so different, so unique — simply by virtue of their date of birth — that members of other generations could never fully appreciate it.
Now, where would people get an idea like that? More important, who on earth could believe such nonsense?
Well, if you guessed "the baby boomers," you'd be right on both counts. Boomers are the "ugly Americans" of civil society. For more than 30 years, they've tromped through every corner of our culture, rearranging things and demanding that people speak their language. When they were under 30, they insisted that anyone older than 30 couldn't be trusted. Once they passed 30, they whined that everyone younger than that was apathetic and unreliable.
When people say "baby boomer," of course, they don't mean all people born from 1946 to 1964. They mean a certain type of liberal — usually coastal, prosperous, suburban, and white; the kind of people who pay fealty to their youthful ideals by demanding no-smoking signs at the Barnes & Noble.
These same suburban Hillary Clinton voters who "swear" they were at Woodstock also insist that there was once a generational consensus about American politics. But both claims are false revisionism. In the late 1960s, probably the most pro-military demographic group was youth, especially those boomers who had not attended college. When the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, the predicted hordes of progressive young people did not materialize to carry George McGovern to victory in 1972. Half of the 18-to-20 age group stayed home, and the other half split about down the middle (52 percent McGovern, 48 percent Nixon). As David Frum has argued, much of what we call the 1960s is really baby-boomer shorthand for the way they wish they had been.
Fast-forward to the 1990s. The first big wave of post-boomers was entering the work force-specifically, elite newsrooms. The prospering boomers hated them. A headline in the Washington Post blared, "The Boring Twenties: Grow Up, Crybabies." Then there was all that drivel about "slackers" and Generation X. Boomers, according to U.S. News, thought of twentysomethings as "flesh-and-blood Bart Simpsons. . . . With their MTV-rotted minds and sound-bite attention spans, they are a whiny cohort with the moral compass of street-gang Bloods and Crips, a bunch of apathetic slackers who don't vote and couldn't care less."
Then came the backlash. Young writers and pols of widely varying levels of talent and good faith whined that boomers were being unfair. The language they used was awfully similar in tone and content to the hypersensitivity we are accustomed to hearing from more prominent members of the coalition of the oppressed. Douglas Rushkoff, editor of The GenX Reader, complained that Newsweek's assault on Gen Xers smacked of "condescending, humorless insensitivity." Another Gen X writer, Ian Williams, whined that Gen Xers feel a "distinct and undeniable alienation from the culture" and that boomers just don't get it.
Op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and magazine articles poured forth from Gen Xers, most of them terribly written and even more poorly conceived. But that mattered little. Gen Xers figured out how to push every button in the baby-boomer psyche. They claimed to be a demographic group with a distinctive identity; they invoked the legacy of the 1960s, reminding boomers of the vast chasm that supposedly divided people on either side of 30. Most claimed that liberal goals were the goals of the "youth movement." Indeed, they built an argument on the foundational assumptions of modern liberalism, and wrapped it with a nostalgic appeal to boomer vanity.
And it worked. Madison Avenue loved the concept of Gen X, because it gave them a hook to go after younger consumers. Hollywood didn't need to be persuaded to leap on the twentysomething craze, considering their insatiable desire to appear profound while casting young and attractive people. Lazy journalists, marketers, and pollsters all used "Gen X" as shorthand.
But a vast amount of the theorizing was still hooey. The late social scientist Everett Carll Ladd, writing about Generation X, observed that social commentary "has many shortcomings, but few of its chapters are as persistently wrong-headed as those on the generations and generational change. This literature abounds with hyperbole and unsubstantiated leaps from available data."
Regardless, the boomer media elite was sold on the idea, largely because many Vichyite twentysomethings were eager to tell the baby-boomer regime what it wanted to hear. Groups like "Lead or Leave" and "Third Millennium," and TV shows like MTV's ludicrous "Choose or Lose," suddenly appeared, dedicated to the proposition that young people in America speak with one voice — and that these paper tigers were that voice. Some groups tackled serious issues; Third Millennium, for example, dealt responsibly with Social Security. But the idea that these groups had broad support from their "constituency" is a fantasy.
Indeed, many of these activist "youth" groups are simply the youth auxiliary for monster interest groups. Look, for example, at the "coalition" — People For the American Way, Friends of the Earth — supporting the generally benign voter-turnout group, Youth Vote 2000, and you quickly see that youth politics is generally a synonym for conventional liberal activism.
The rise of multiple cable-news channels only exacerbated the Gen X fad. All of a sudden, the weak thinking behind generational analysis married the lowest-common-denominator values of news producers trying to fill thousands of hours of nothingness with attractive young people eager to be on TV at any cost. The result was a flood of "Gen X" correspondents, and programs aimed at an audience that wasn't watching, and for good reason. "The visual trope of my hair certifies me as an outsider," one Gen X pundit, Omar Wasow, told the New York Times.
Worse, conservatives — who should be above the temptations of identity politics — started to play the game too. Frank Luntz and a coterie, mostly female, of twenty- (and, shhhhh, thirty-) somethings bragged of their knowledge of Smashing Pumpkins songs and preened over their ability to use the word "progressive" without snickering. After the 1994 election, all over Washington young conservative hipsters of both sexes reveled in their ability to smoke cigars and do the macarena. It bears repeating that conservatism is supposed to respect ancient wisdom, and eternal, universal truths. As political scientist Diana Schaub has written, the Gen X formulation, "Guess you had to be there," denies our "common humanity and the possibility of reasoned discourse."
Many of the professional Gen Xers were legitimately talented, and they have outlasted the fad. For example, Jonathan Karl of CNN was originally a "Gen X correspondent," but he transcended that silliness because he's a good political reporter. (His eagerness to move away from the Gen X beat is revealing.) Some, like Meredith Bagby, CNNfn's Gen X correspondent, still cling to the fiction of Gen X distinctiveness. And others have disappeared because they didn't have anything to offer but their professional youngness. For example, Debbie Matenopoulos was the Gen X representative on ABC's The View. She was dropped when it became clear that she didn't have the intellectual candlepower to toast bread, never mind hold her own with her colleagues on that daytime brain trust.
Which brings us back to poor Heather Nauert (who says her ideal job would involve "something combining politics and smart stuff"). In the Washington Post profile, she quite bluntly tried to play her generational ace: "It's more interesting to see a young person talking about issues than a big old fat white guy." This is undoubtedly true if you've hit the mute button; but Nauert is, by most accounts, pretty bright, so she knows that that's not true when the sound is on. She has announced that she's going to the Columbia School of Journalism this fall, because she needs a "stronger foundation to stay in the business and build a career out of it."
Now that's the voice, not of a "generation," but of reason.
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