Baby Boomers

Shortly after Christmas, the oldest baby boomer will turn 80. The 75 million people born between 1946 and 1964 who have dominated the American political imagination since the Eisenhower administration are starting to fade from the scene. Anyone who has felt oppressed by the baby boom – and this includes virtually every non-senior citizen in the country – will complain that it’s about frickin’ time. If the boomers are only now losing their influence, they long ago lost their marbles. What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But maybe it was the indignant boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell over the Covid “misinformation” to which Joe Rogan allegedly gave vent in 2022.

Lee Greenwood may be “Proud to be an American,” but the same can't be said for a growing number of his countrymen and women. Those who identify as “extremely” or “very” proud to be American has dropped from 87 percent in 2001 to 58 percent in 2025.  In 2001, Republicans, Independents and Democrats were all within six points of each other in their reported national pride. But now there's a 56-point divide between Republicans (92 percent) and Democrats (36 percent). Republicans stay patriotic regardless of the presidency, while Democrats have dropped 24 percent since Trump's inauguration this year. Beyond political affiliation, it seems the younger a generation is, the less American pride its members have.

The war between the generations is on, and the battle lines have been drawn. The baby boomers don't like the millennials because they can't understand why the millennials won't just buy a house already. The millennials don't like the boomers because, as they've explained, a house no longer costs $75 with a couple coupons like it did back in 1972. And lately the millennials and Generation Z have been mixing it up as well, over such important issues as hair partings and emojis. So a fractured conflict, this one, a bit like Lebanon's civil war except with more awful Facebook posts. Yet if you're looking to really understand the social media-fueled rifts between the generations, then you have to start with the main combatants, the boomers and the millennials.

Having been saddled by everyone involved with the largest portion of blame for Tuesday's election disappointment, Donald Trump's descent into the pit of despair takes exactly the form you could expect: a series of Mean Girls rants about everyone more popular than he is in the Republican Party. There has been much talk over the years about how there's a Good Trump and a Bad Trump, but the truth about our 45th president is that, just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of the Hulk, he's always angry — he just controls it better when times are good. Now that times are bad — or as bad as they can be when you have millions more Republicans voting than Democrats and you just dislodged Nancy Pelosi from power — he is reverting to his true form. It ain't pretty.

Republican fortunes are again on the upswing as the 2022 midterm elections loom. A series of Biden administration legislative wins over the summer, along with the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, appeared to be mitigating projected Democratic losses in November. But persistent inflation, a recessing economy, a worsening national crime wave, a slew of foreign policy embarrassments, and other gaffes have combined to put the Republicans back in a decisive lead. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Monday gave the GOP a four-point advantage over the Democrats among likely voters. In most categories, the breakdown by age demographic is about what one might expect.

Long before her Senate confirmation hearings, we knew Judge Amy Coney Barrett was smart. A Supreme Court clerkship and prolific career in the legal academy added up to someone uncommonly capable of hard work. That she is Catholic with seven kids — the ‘dogma lives loudly in her’, to borrow Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s immortal slur — is well known. What we didn’t expect was the hearing’s greatest surprise: Judge Barrett is normal.That is no minor relief in an America that increasingly seems a little unhinged. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse came to the Senate floor bearing an incomprehensible series of partially hand-scrawled charts, like a conspiracy theorist storming a town hall.