Emphasis Added : Strauss & Howe

The Post-Millennial Generation

Rob — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:24:00 GMT

If one reckons the basic boundaries of the Millennial generation to be 1981-2000, then we are now nearly 8 years into the birth years of the post-Millennial generation. How might this new cohort be different from their well-publicized older peers?

Strauss and Howe's methodology offers one possibility. According to their theory of the procession of generations, a Civic cohort like the Millennials is usually followed by a generation they call "Adaptive." Adaptives are late-bloomers, growing up in the shadow of their assertive and accomplished elders. Their historical role is to institutionalize the material innovations of Civics and correct some of the excesses and rigidity of the Civics' approach to social order. Adaptives in their youth have historically been leaders in the crusades for social justice (earlier iterations of this generational type were the abolitionists, the Progressives, and the civil rights activists of the 1950s and 60s); in later life, they tend to prefer compromise over confrontation as a leadership style, and are usually swept aside by the crusading, spiritually-aware Idealists (like the Baby Boomers) coming up behind them.

Earlier this month, when I spoke at an insurance conference in Phoenix, I heard a lot of concern from the (mostly Boomer) crowd about the gaps in learning they've seen, even among well-educated Millennials. My standard retort is that this is probably something that will swing back in coming years. Adaptives historically take learning and literature more seriously than Civics, frequently taking a more overtly intellectual and satirical approach. Harvey Kurtzman, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Thomas Pynchon and John Updike were all members of the most recent Adaptive generation, the Silents, born 1925-1945. It is not too early to start looking for clues about these kinds of tendencies in the cohort now in early childhood.

The factor that gives Adaptives their defining qualities and their generational coherence is their historical experience in youth. Typically born to Reactive parents (Lost Generation, GenX) who provide them with plenty of attention in compensation for the more "hands-off" style of their own upbringing, they grow up amid economic turbulence (the Depression of 1873, the Great Depression), where they internalize habits of thrift and caution. They observe the flamboyant, assertive manner of their next-elders and initially tend toward conformity. Their frustrations and discontents only bubble to the surface relatively late, in their early to mid-20s, and linger into adulthood.

The other critical defining quality of Adaptives? Their earliest experiences of American government occurred under the leadership of bold, transformational figures. In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson took the young country in a new direction, the oldest of the new Adaptives was in their early teen years. In 1865, the future Progressive generation had just been born. In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office in the depths of the Great Depression, the oldest Silents were just 7, just as today's New Adapatives will be in the first hours of the new Obama administration.

Post-Compromise Politics

Rob — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:35:00 GMT

While the AARP is open to anyone over 50 - a cohort which now includes increasing numbers of Baby Boomers - the organization's demographics now fall solidly across the pre-Boom Silent Generation (b.1925-1945), and it shows. Silents, in Strass and Howe's taxonomy, are considered an "adaptive" generation, motivated by a desire to infuse the collective spirit of their next-elders (in this case, the Civic "Veteran" Generation) with a sense of fairness, social justice, and self-awareness that is painfully absent from the culture during their formative years.

In their youth, in the 50s and 60s, Silents were the impetus behind the civil rights movement and the early dawnings of feminism. They were also the humorists and literary gadflies, including Harvey Kurtzman, the genius behind Mad Magazine, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and the irreplaceable George Carlin. Unlike Boomers, Silents are not as deliberately disruptive in their social protest (Carlin notwithstanding), because their orientation is toward achieving actual change rather than self-actualization. The difference between Silent Generation and Boomer political activism is the difference between William F. Buckley and Newt Gingrich, for example.

Strauss and Howe, among others, have observed that this quiet determination to drive social change, combined with the disaproval with which many aging Adaptives view the noisesome protests of their younger Idealist siblings, can develop into a leadership philosophy that prizes compromise, not just as a method, but as an end unto itself. This has plusses and minuses. While younger Adaptives can provide much-needed agility in static systems (as the young President Theodore Roosevelt did in breaking a political logjam in the early 20th century, and as the generation of organizational leaders of the 1980s and 90s did when creating a more inclusive workplace), elder Adaptives from previous American generations proved to be some of the most disasterously ineffective executives in the country's history because they will do practically anything to avoid pitched conflict.

This brings us to the AARP, whose latest advertsing campaign, "Divided We Fail," saturates cable news political coverage. Its pointedly non-partisan message is that politicians need to "stop bickering" and solve problems like healthcare, social security, and the economy. It recalls the cranky centrism of Ross Perot in 1992, but unlike that campaign, it offers no solutions and presents no single figure around whom the compromising problem-solvers of America can rally. And while Perot came at the high-water mark of Silent political and cultural influence, today the "let's sit down and reason together" message seems utterly old and tired.

The fact is, both parties have ideas on how to address the problems that concern the AARP and others, and their approaches are, by and large, fundamentally incompatible. We don't need to "stop bickering," as if our principled differences were just childish misunderstandings: we need to air the differences as loudly and clearly as possible. We don't need to compromise. We need to choose.

Another One for the Bookshelf

Rob — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:25:00 GMT

I just saw this review of a new book called Millennial Makeover: YouTube, MySpace and the Remaking of American Politics by Morely Winogrand and Michael Hais. The reviewer, Mike Connery, is himself the author of a book on Millennials in politics called Future Majority. The political implications of generational theory interest me at least as much as the technology and workplace implications, which is part of the reason that I am moonlighting as a messaging strategist for a local Congressional campaign.

In my consultations with the professional campaign staff, it appears that convention thinking about the "youth vote" still refelects the disengaged voting patterns of GenX and the young Boomers in the 1970s (the ones who did not elect George McGovern president, for example, despite the urgings of Hunter S. Thompson and others). Barack Obama's success in getting young voters excited is unsurprising to them, but the fact that the under-26 crowd is actually showing up at the polls really seems to have thrown them for a loop.

Clay Shirky made an interesting point about Howard Dean's abortive run in 2004, noting that his use of technology such as meetups and web-rings did more to prove the community-building value of social networking tools than it said for their efficacy in actually delivering the results politicians care about, e.g., votes. Obama seems to have solved that problem. His supporters not only get excited and give money, they actually turn up - not merely to vote, but also to endure often lengthy and confusing caucuses with hardcore party regulars their parents' age or older.

Part of the credit belongs to Obama's campaign. He is a political organizer by trade, after all. Most of the real change, however, comes down to a newly-engaged and sophisticated electorate. Millennials are different from GenX and Boomers in many noticeable ways, and it should be no suprirse that their approach to citizenship is different as well. Strauss and Howe would suggest (and I suspect Winogrand and Hais would agree) that it would be so regardless of the existence of social networking technology, because the collaborative values of Millennials is part of their generational identity as civic builders. That's a tough counterfactual to prove, however, because social networks are here and they are obviously playing an important, if not decisive, role in the mobilization of young people.

In any case, I am looking forward to adding these books to my reading list.

Another Cinematic Window into Generational Relationships

Rob — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:23:00 GMT

In the words of one of my favorite aphorisms, "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." My hammer at the moment is generational theory, Strauss and Howe's view of the procession and relations between different cohorts in American history. Once you put on those goggles, everything from politics to pop culture snaps into a particular alignment.

Last night, I watched Citizen Kane, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece that was one of the great early artistic achievements of the Veteran generation (Welles was born in 1915, a first-wave Veteran). The film traces the career of fictional newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane - notoriously modelled on real-life mogul William Randolph Hearst - from his childhood in Colorado in the 1860s through his idealistic youth to his final pathetic days as a lonely, frustrated recluse. Kane is an iconic representation of the Missionary generation, the idealistic children of the post-Civil War era whose youthful exhuberance defined the "Gay 90s" and whose reforming instincts put teeth in the programs of the Progressive era. Their Presidents ranged from the feckless Warren Harding (a charming hack undone by loose personal and professional morals), Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (arrogant, stiff-necked moralists whose stubborn pursuit of failed policies doomed the country to Depression), and Franklin Roosevelt, the inspirational "big-picture" man who, in 1941, was already well-established as the national father-figure.

The Missionaries were an earlier iteration of the "idealist" generational type, today represented by the Baby Boomers. Citizen Kane is fascinating because it provides an elegy for that generation's life-trajectory, successes and failures from the point of view of their children, the rising "civic" generation - the Veterans in the 1940s, today analagous to the Millennials. Idealists in the eyes of Civics are larger-than-life characters full of a moral certitude that grows rare in society as Civics reach maturity. Civics see their youthful rebellion against the stodgy, materialistic Reactives (Kane's banker foster-parent in the film, an iconic "Gilded Age" character) as liberating but short-lived. As they age, their values become warped into self-righteousness. Eventually, they seek to control youth and make young people conform to their ideals without regard to their real wishes, as Kane seeks to turn his second wife Susan (a disollute member of the GenX-like "Lost Generaiton" of the 20s) into a great opera star to gratify his own vanity.

Idealists end up, in the eyes of their children, as extinct volcanoes, having seen their great crusading spirit ferment into tone-deaf certitude that is almost pathetically out of step with the more pragmatic tone of the times. They die alone amid the vast store of material posessions they aquired to fill the void in their hungry souls, wistful nostalgia for simpler times on their dying lips, an intriguing but ultimately unsolvable enigma to their posterity.

Today, the Millennial Orson Welles is probably still finishing film school at NYU, and the Boomer Citizen Kanes are still embroiled in the third act of their great generational drama. In about ten years, however, I expect we will see the next great American epic on the model of Citizen Kane, taking the life of some great and aged Boomer icon with a complex legacy of public achievement and personal failure (Bill Clinton, perhaps?) as a metaphor for the American experience of the latter 20th century. Idealists may have their ups and downs as leaders, but they make great theatre.

A Passage of Generations

admin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:51:00 GMT

Sad that the first post on the new blog concerns the passage of one of the most influential thinkers on the subject of generations and sociology: William Strauss, co-author of the monumental work Generations: The History of America's Future 1584-2069, as well as 13th Gen, Millennials Rising, and several other works. Strass, along with his collaborator Neil Howe, identified four principle generational "personalities" that recurred in sequence through American history. They observed that predominance of policies and attitudes such as secularism, spirituality, aggression, willingness to compromise, entrepreneurial drive or social justice, corresponded to the alignment of generational types with particular life stages. This methodology enabled them to make extremely precient forecasts about the cultural and political milieu of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as this remarkable passage which appeared in Generations (published in 1991), anticipating the reaction of a Boomer administration to an international crisis the authors expected in the 2000-2010 timeframe:

The major question- indeed, the one whose answer may decide whether Boom leadership will end in triumph or tragedy - will hinge on this generation's capacity to restrain (or let others restrain) its latent ruthlessness. Elder Idealists seek total victory by whatever means available. Historically, aging idealists have been attracted to words like "exterminate" and "eradicate," words of apocalyptic finality. If the purpose of [the crisis the authors predict - a terrorist attack] is inner principle, the degree of outer-world destruction needed for those ideals to triumph will be of secondary consideration. Make no mistake: Faced with crisis, this generation of one-time draft resisters will not hesitate, as elder warrior-priests, to conscript young soldiers to fight and die for righteous purpose. This stop-at-nothing zeal is already apparent in the first Boomer cohorts to reach their mid-forties, from Elliott Abrams and Oliver North at one ideological edge to Mitch Snyder and Denis Hayes at the other. Picture these individuals as national elders, uncalmed by anyone older - and then realize that they represent their generations' moderate first wave... Subtract the active presence of any adult Adaptives - and the that is the leadership awaiting America in the 21st century. It is easy to picture aging Boomers as noble, self-sacrificing patriarchs, but just as easy to see these righteous Old Aquarians as the worst nightmare that could ever happen to the world. [emphasis added]

Strauss died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 60. In addition to his writing, he was apparently also best known as the founder of the political musical satire troupe, the Capitol Steps.