What a Long Strange Trip it's Been
Talkin' bout my generation
Though it's ubiquitous to call Boomers a generation, don't throw the term around lightly when talking with Duane Alwin.
Photo by Paul Ruby
Director of Penn State's Center on Population Health and Aging, and McCourtney professor of sociology and human development, Alwin says emphatically, "It's very common for people to talk about the Baby Boom generation but that's a misnomer, at least from a sociologist's perspective."
Instead, what we have, explains Alwin, is a set of cohorts. "There's a separate birth cohort for each year of the Baby Boom. If we date the Boom from 1946 to 1962,"—(like much about the Boomers, there's little consensus about the actual dates involved)— "we're actually talking about a set of 17 birth cohorts."
"Think about it," says Alwin, leaning back in his chair. "Sharing a birth year isn't enough to make you part of the same generation. Generations stem from social movements." Some Boomers might think of themselves, as I do, as being part of the civil rights generation, but certainly not everyone in my birth cohort fought for civil rights—some opposed it."
While Woodstock hippies might be the iconic image of Boomer youth, the sheer size of the group means its members grew up in vastly different times. The older Boomers—or "the leading edge"—were young adults during the Vietnam war but "the youngest of the Baby Boomer cohorts, what we call the trailing edge, were attaining maturity in the early 1980's and the Reagan era." Boomers don't share "a monolithic set of experiences," reminds Alwin, adding "They experienced everything from the predominance of the Democratic Party to the current Republican administration."
So although our first Boomer presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, were born within months of each other in 1946 and thus share the same birth cohort, an argument could be made that they're members of different generations, sociologically speaking.
"The diversity of the Boomers is indisputable," says Alwin. "The question I'm concerned is whether there is anythingdistinctive about these cohorts in terms of their attitudes, beliefs and political behavior."
Step to the right
To answer that question, Alwin conducted a three-year study titled "Stability of Individual Differences" that examined how people change—or don't—over decades. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, the study looks closely at explanations (generational, life-cycle and historical) for shifts in an individual's political ideals and actions.
"What I've found," notes Alwin, "is that there's a growing conservatism among the Baby Boomers."
In his study—using data from the National Election Studies, a large national sample conducted every two years since 1954 at the University of Michigan—Alwin looked at party affiliations from 1968 to 1982.
The Boomer cohorts "all started out relatively independent," Alwin tells me. "In fact, in the period 1968 through 1978, about 50 percent of the Boomers responded ‘independent' to the party preference question." Beginning in 1980, Alwin explains, there was a systematic decline in that identification. "Their independence went down, their identification with the Democratic Party remained about the same, but their allegiance to the Republican Party went up."
"It appears," concludes Alwin, "that the Republican Party is the principal beneficiary of the aging of the Baby Boom."
Doesn't this run counter to expectations of these supposedly liberal cohorts? Alwin smiles and says, "You explain it to me." A few seconds later, he muses, "Is the whole society becoming more conservative as a whole? The answer to that question is yes. Is it a backlash to the Sixties or just a consequence of aging? We don't know."
Next page: "The conservative liberal"