Do all of these generational shifts matter?
By David Moats
Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
People talk about generational change, but change on a scale to earn that description is rare. Now that the Democratic presidential nomination has shifted from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris, true generational change is within view.
The last election to usher in a generational shift came in 1992. Those of us then in our middle years had lived exclusively with presidents that had experienced the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. We were the baby boomers, those born after all those soldiers, sailors and Marines came home.
Then in 1992, a baby boomer was elected president for the first time. Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, were young, full of ideas and ambitions. They had displaced President George H.W. Bush, who himself had been a pilot during World War II. Their theme song came from Fleetwood Mac with the lyric “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” I was 45 years old, and it was an exciting time.
And the shift was happening in Vermont, as well, when Vermonters elected Howard Dean as governor. Dean, the former lieutenant governor, had become governor in 1991 upon the death of Gov. Richard Snelling. Like Clinton, Dean was bursting with ideas and ambition, and he, too, was a baby boomer. It seemed as if our generation had found its moment.
Both President Clinton and Gov. Dean were Democrats who had to operate within the conservative parameters defined by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan had famously declared that government was not the solution to our problems; government was the problem.
The notion that government had to be cut back and that the free market should be set free limited what either Clinton or Dean could do. One commentator during the recent Democratic National Convention observed that if anyone this year had put forward several of Clinton’s signature goals — getting tough on crime and reforming welfare — they would get nowhere. Clinton’s failure on health care reform was only redeemed 20 years later by President Obama.
That conservative era seems to have spent itself. Democrats are now the ones declaiming about freedom and opportunity, while Republicans are caught within a fever dream about the horrors of American life.
Another generational change occurred earlier. When John F. Kennedy won election in 1960, he declared that the torch had been passed to a new generation, and he was right. He succeeded President Dwight Eisenhower, commanding general of Allied forces in Europe during World War II. Eisenhower was a genuine and beloved hero of the time, but times were changing.
Kennedy had been a young naval officer during the war and became a hero himself after his PT boat was sunk. By 1960 Eisenhower was seen as an old man (70 years old when he stepped down) who had suffered a heart attack while in office. He would be succeeded by a new generation.
Even with these seemingly inevitable changes, things did not go smoothly. Kennedy was assassinated, and Johnson dragged America into the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon (another World War II veteran) was forced to resign the presidency because of his criminal actions during Watergate. The generation that succeeded Eisenhower was struggling. Meanwhile, their children, the baby boomers, were watching with varying degrees of rage and disillusionment as things fell apart.
Joe Biden was born in 1942, too early to be counted as an actual baby boomer, but he experienced some of the same shocks and disappointments as those born in 1946 and thereafter. These included the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But it was also the time of the civil rights movement, an inspiring crusade on behalf of freedom and equality, followed by other movements for women’s rights, gay rights and the rights of others who had suffered historic discrimination.
These struggles shaped Joe Biden, as they did his contemporary in the U.S. Senate, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. In the 1970s, Biden and Leahy were the two youngest members of the Senate, and they served together for decades. Each became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, achieving notable victories, such as the Violence Against Women Act.
Age caught up with Leahy, and he declined to run for re-election in 2022. He did it on his own — he wasn’t pushed by party elders as Biden was. With Biden, the stakes during the 2024 election were far greater than they were for the Vermont senatorial election in 2022, and given Biden’s evident decline, his insistence on running for re-election had created a crisis.
Now that his vice president has risen to the top of the ticket, Generation X is poised finally to rise to the occasion for good. After all, Donald Trump is a baby boomer. As Bill Clinton wryly noted at the Democratic convention, even Clinton is younger than Trump.
Barack Obama, too, counts as a member of Generation X, as do a rising cadre of politicians in Vermont, including Rep. Becca Balint, Vermont’s Democratic member of Congress, who is three years younger than Kamala Harris.
Do all of these generational shifts matter? They do in the sense that while the experience of older politicians may grant them wisdom, sometimes, they can also lock them into the paradigms of the past. The post-World-War-II generation — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon — absorbed the wrong lesson from their predecessors. Appeasement at Munich, a major blunder on the way toward World War II, so spooked Johnson and others that they erroneously applied the lesson of Munich to Vietnam.
Biden’s politics have not been out of step with the times, but his age had sapped his ability to carry forward his agenda on climate change, Ukraine, and a host of other issues. The succeeding generation — Kamala Harris and Becca Balint, among them — are poised to give new energy to this progressive agenda, even as Republicans sink into the swamp of Trump’s rampant narcissism.
Baby boomers like me are not adept at distinguishing among the generational groups that have followed us. Generations X, Y and Z are all part of something new that we have no choice but to welcome. Meanwhile, our grandchildren are giving us the lowdown on Taylor Swift, and Kamala Harris and Becca Balint have become an advance guard on what may be momentous and historic change.
