Is the Biden Presidency The Final Triumph Of The Silent Generation?
Is the Biden Presidency The Final Triumph Of The Silent Generation?, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser
The who? Never heard of them? Or never heard from them? More like the latter. After all they have not been called “Silent” for nothing.
Yes, it seems that we alternate generations between large noisy ones and smaller quieter ones. The Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression and won World War II, and they certainly let everybody hear about all that a whole lot. Two generations has been mine, with me a front end boomer, and we have certainly boomed plenty, much to the annoyance of many other generations. Two generations after that we have the noisily whiney millennials, although I grant that they have had some unpleasant things happen to them so not totally without grounds for some of their whining.
In between the Greatests and boomers came the Silents, with poor ironic Gen X stuck between the boomers and the millennials, although I think the Gen Xers have been noisier than the Silents. And now we have Gen Z coming up, who do not seem all that silent, alhough maybe not quite as self-righteously noisy as the millennials.
So what about those silent Silents? Well indeed Joe Biden is one of them, and I think our first president to be one. Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, and Trump were all boomers, although Trump just barely. Prior to Clinton they were all Greatests after Eisenhower. The Silents never got a chance. And so far Biden is not doing too badly.
Curiously I had a prominent Silent give a seminar virtually at my university this past week, Mr. Social Capital, Robert Putnam, who turned 80 in January. He spoke on his new book, The Upswing: How the Progressives Worked Together and Maybe We Can Too. He shows on a variety of categories, political, economic, social, cultural a pattern that he labels the “I-we-I” pattern, whereby there was an increase in solidarity and “we orientation,” cooperation, social capital, equality, and so on from the 1890s to roughly the 1960s, some variables peaking in the 50s and economic equality peaking in the 70s, but most peaking in the 60s. Since then we have basically gone down hill to an “I” orientation of greater inequality and polarization and unhappiness and low social capital, and on and on and on.
In the discussion he pinpointed cultural shifts as crucial and noted especially shifts in the mid-60s, even noting the contrast in themes of the early folkish Bob Dylan with his civil rights songs to the later electronic Dylan with his more personalistic emphasis, and supposedly a similar shift with the Beatles, especially when they broke up. This peak of “we” and the move towards “I” coincided with the rise of the boomers.
I had heard him once before specifically highlight the virtues of the Silent generation, his generation. So the Greatests had lots of “we” orientation with all their achievements. But they had this dark side of being racists and otherwise highly prejudiced. By the time you get to the boomers and later, the levels of prejudice are much lower, but one gets this alienating emphasis on the “I.”
Which makes the Silents the golden mean, still following the “we” focus of the Greatests, but the first generation to see a substantial reduction in racism and prejudice. So maybe this is why Biden is doing so well, and maybe he is the president to set off the upswing back to more of a less polarized “we” orientation.
Barkley Rosser
My experience of The Greatest Generation was that they were not at all noisy. But they did seem to have come back from the War with a determination to fix racism and injustice and avoid further wars and Depressions. This is not to say that all their politicians were on board with this. I don’t think they were called Greatest until some TV newsperson invented the phrase quite recently. As it was, I think they were the high point of American civilization. They gave us the Hippies, some of whom tried hard before the marijuana got them….and the Reagan recession…and then the wonderful opportumities of Yuppiedom.
I don’t know which genration decided that their grandparents were stealing their future, but that lie was sold to them by very rich liars from an earlier generation so these get hard to keep track of.
Certainly, I see no sign of the current generations (All Living Persons) being smart enough to avoid being led by the nose by either the hard Right, or the hard Left, or the hard Middle.
fwiw. i think by date of birth you would call me a “silent.” but me and my friends were anything but silent. who do you think led the anti-war and pro civil rights activism? not to mention awakening of environmentalism. Yep, we had to fight a lot of other “silents” as well as some “greats” who hadn’t gotten the message. if you want to think of it that way.
The thing about the Silent Generation is that we were too young to be hipsters, and too old to be hippies. It was awkward. When I refer to “hipsters” I don’t mean the affluent yuppies in Soho, I mean the guys like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg. I mean people whose most enthusiastic applause at a concert was a couple snaps of their fingers, and maybe a nod of the head. I mean people who were “cool.” It’s hard to explain because my generation isn’t very eloquent.
Coberly,
Well said.
I might add that a lot of “Silents” suffered the deprivations of the Great Depression and then the rationing for WWII, but were just kids then without fully developed socialization or empathy on a societal scale. Most did not turn out as well as Coberly, but rather harbored some resentment over being forced by the state to share.
Boomers were mostly spoiled rotten unless they grew up in lower income households such as I did. As a lot then Boomers turned out successful enough to spoil their brats worse than they were spoiled themselves. I practiced some restraint with my Gen-X brats, but they did less well with their Millennial brats.
Well, if the Greatest Generation came back from the war with a goal of ending racism they failed miserably.
Without a doubt, racism is the largest problem our country has faced and is responsible for where our country is right now in economic and moral terms.
EMichael
I think you think they failed miserably, but either you didn’t know any of the people who came back from the war, or the people you knew were the hard cases. I was not one of the “greatest” but I was there on the front lines fighting for civil rights, and our leaders were people who had come back from the war. LBJ came back from the war… and he was the big reason that the Civil Rights movement succeeded.
If its success has not gone far enough, or not lasted as well as it could have, the onus is not on the “greatest” but on us.
I belive that overreaching has been a big part of the counter-movement, but I will agree with you that there seems to be a huge reserve of racism in this country that I did not suspect until Mr Trump and his Republican allies found out they could win elections by stoking hatred.
At that, i think “racism” is endemic in all human populations, and will emerge in pernicious form when stoked and led by evil people. Racism itself is not “the” problem. It is a consequence of… well, first, our genes.. but also the evil and stupidity that are the real problem. Not exactly genetic, but a genetic response to perceived threat … which is what we get with evil politiicians on one side, and at least stupid politicians on the other side.
Ron
just to be sure: doing well, better perhaps than some, was not my fault. i had good examples, and I must add.. to their credit the entire school system that I experienced…in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Florida (even!) taught that racism was bad.
I would add, that being decent is also a genetic propensity among humans. it can be lost to hate under circumstances of either “natural” need or political exploitation of natural self-defense and group-defense.
the current “thought-leaders” on our side are doing everything they can to turn “racism” into group hate. so instead of creating conditions where decency can function we just add fuel to the fire.
Cob,
Trump wasn’t a cause, he was an effect. Every GOP President since Nixon has run on racism. Every single one.
EMichael
I think we are both right. actually i am not sure if there are any effects that are not causes.Nixon may have played to the southern strategy but he did not whip it to a frenzy and give it permission to take over the country by force.
I submit that whether Trump or Nixon are/were racists, they both knew how to use inherent (genetic tendency) racism for their political purposes. when we first started this argument (years ago now) i was a bit naive about how easy it was to arouse the pernicious form of racism from its sleep among the masses.
and i don’t think you recognize “racist” thinking among your own friends… a very strong tendency to blame a whole group of people for something you don’t like. can’t be helped. it’s the way brains work. takes a little development to learn to distinguish your fingers from one another.
for example, you don’t appear to notice the racism inherent in the attacks against ‘racists.” i am not trying to be cute here. far less do i want to be accused of saying the same things that someone like Tucker Carlson would say. mostly because Tucker is fomenting racism, and I am trying to persuade people to avoid falling into the racism/escalating-hate trap. Martin Luther King understood this. Malcom X did not. Neither did the people who approved court-ordered busing. or the war against statues and flags.
but just so you know, i don’t like “racists” any better than i like gun nuts or the species of “christians” who preach hate…against everything that Jesus tried to teach.
i was thinking the other day about people who like the sport of dogfighting. we had a writer on AB a few years back who thought cruelty of this kind was a Scotch-Irish [who are neither Scotch nor Irish] invention. As far as i know Mike Vick [in the news at about the same time] had no scotch-irish ancestors or background [though you never know]. neither do the cockfighters. cruelty and stupidity and racism are not American inventions…although recently we had a writer on AB who seemed to think that the world was a loving place until “europeans” invented the slave trade in America.
Coberly,
Sure. Keep up the good work.
Ron,
just to be clear: i distinguish between “people who own guns” and “gun nuts”.
my family own guns. they do not patrol their property line (farm country) with a gun looking for trouble, or shoot the neighbors dogs. or target practice with their heavy caliber automatic (rapid fire) just over a ridge or behind a row of trees from their neighbors property, or even pratice with their small caliber, single shots in a residential neighborhood.
regarding that “ridge”:
my uncle (marines/korea) told a story about being on a range with a B.A.R. a previously untrained marine asked if he could try it. they asked, “can you hold it down?” the guy said, “sure.”
so they let him. the gun rose about 45 degrees dropping bullets about a mile away in a schoolyard. he said they all ran.