Note: All the material on this page was published by Strauss and Howe in 1997, before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal became public, before Clinton's impeachment and acquittal, before the contested election of 2000 and the ascendency of President George W. Bush [43] and his neoconservative administration, before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, before the military operations in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003)--and before the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web. The text that follows, the authors' description of Boomer elderhood, entitled "Boomers Entering Elderhood: Gray Champions," is predictive, and--as it has so far (June 2003) turned out--surprisingly perceptive. I have retained the authors' future tense (even when referring to a future now in the past) and reserved for footnotes occasional references to Clinton's disgrace, Bush [43]'s neoconservative agenda, or other events of the unfolding Twenty-first Century. Here are some explanations to some of the authors' terminology:
Picture veterans at a holiday parade in the late 2010s marking the Vietnam War's various fiftieth-year observances. Almost forgotten will be the Awakening era's crisp formations of Shriners in bright-colored scooters. Gone too will be the Unraveling era's personable Korean War vets with their modest We Fought Too buttons. In their place will be bearded old Aquarians in tattered camouflage, their step defiantly out of sync, their eyes piercing the crowd with moral rectitude.102
"You and I are on our way to an unexpected harvest festival," says Craig Karpel to his fellow Boomers. In The Retirement Myth, he likens his generation's coming elderhood to a journey to "Owl Mountain," a "primordial sanctuary . . . preserved since the most ancient times," sustaining wisdom passed down from "villages in the middle of nowhere speaking to us across the millennia."103
The bulk of today's gerentologists and demographers do not yet grasp what's coming. Ken Dychtwald's Age Wage and Cheryl Russell's Master Trend create the impression that Boomers will be much like today's busy senior citizens--except better-educated, more selfish, and (an easy prediction) much more numerous. This kind of forecast leads to the conclusion that early in the Twenty-first Century, younger generations will be overwhelmed by extravagantly doctored, expansively lobbying, age-denying old people. To support their consumptive Sharper Image lifestyles through old age, Boomers would have to impose confiscatory taxes on younger people. This would be an enormous dead weight, if it ever happens. It won't.104
Clues of what old Boomers will be like can be glimpsed in the "conscious aging" movement. Cutting-edge books like From Age-ing to Sage-ing speak of new "spiritual eldering institutes" teaching people to engage in "vision quests." These new "elders of the tribe" see themselves as "wisdom keepers" who must apply "their dormant powers of intuition . . . [to] become seers who feed wisdom back into society and who guide the long-term reclamation project of healing our beleaguered planet." Boomer gerentologist Harry Moody sees a Twenty-first Century shift to a "contemplative old age" that eliminates today's focus on activity and instead "transcends doing, in favor of being." Elders will be defined as spiritually gifted over their juniors who "are too busy to cultivate the quietness and inwardness from which mystical experience is possible." Pain and bodily decline will be accepted, even honored as necessary burning off of worldly dross for the purpose of acquiring higher insights. In sharp contrast to the youth-emulating "uninhibited octogenarians" of Gail Sheehy's Silent Generation, these new earth sages will want to be authentically old people, critical links in human civilization, without whose guidance the young might sink into Philistinism--but with whom the young can craft what gerontologist David Gutmann terms "the new myths on which reculturation can be based."105
A New Age gerontology is similarly rediscovering the spiritualism of female aging. In Goddesses of Everywoman, Jean Bolen describes gatherings where postmenopausal women enter underground ritual caves. Sitting in a sacred circle in the "nourishing dark," they light candles to enable each participant to claim the traditional "wise woman" as her new self. There is talk of stripping negative connotations away from words like crone or witch, as though a withered female body (like Grandmother Willow's in Pocahontas) were a sign of magical knowledge.106
Boomer evangelicals will join the search for a spiritual old age. Elder conservative Christians will sharpen their sermonizings about good and evil, implant God and prayer in public life, and demand more divine order in civic ritual. They will view as sacrilegious many of the Unraveling era's new pro-choice lifecycle laws, from genetically engineered births to nontraditional marriages to assisted suicides. They will desecularize birth, marriage, and death to reauthenticate the core transitions of human life.
Boomer-led niche cultures will cease much of their Unraveling-era quarreling and find new communitarian ground. Ethnocentrics will reveal new civic virtue in racial essences. The Fatherhood movement will become patriarchal (and feminism matriarchal), demanding and enforcing family and community standards. Active members of these cadres will comprise just a small minority of old Boomers, but like the hippies and yuppies of the Second and Third Turnings, they will command the attention and set the tone for the Fourth. Those who dislike them--and there will be many--will be unable to avoid seeing and hearing their message.
At the onset of old age, Boomers will do what they have done with every earlier step of the aging process: They will resist it for a while, then dabble in it, and ultimately glorify it. Like old Transcendental men (who sprouted long beards as badges of wisdom), Boomers will establish elegant new insignia of advanced age--flaunting, not avoiding, the natural imprints of time. Rather than trying to impress the young with Greatest-style energy or Silent-style cool, old Boomers will do so with a Zen-like serenity, a heightened consciousness of time. Slow talking, walking, and driving will become badges of contemplation, not decline. The ideal of an advanced age will not be the active and leisured Greatest or the emphatic and expert Silent, but rather the inner elder who thinks deeply, recalling Emerson's view that "As we grow old, . . . the beauty steals inward."107
The very word retirement will acquire a new negative meaning, connoting selfish consumption and cultural irrelevance. The elder goal will not be to retire, but to replenish or reflect of pray. The very concept of any retirement will fade, as elders pursue new late-life careers, often in high-prestige but low- (or non-) paying emeritus positions. In academe, Boomers will become part professor and part spiritual guide in a reinvention of the university. In church, elders will deliver the fierce homilies while younger adults collect the money, the reverse of what is common today. Talk radio will be the bastion of elder reflection.
Aging Boomers will be drawn to the classic. Their late-life cultural questing will not evoke juvenescence, as it did in the Awakening era, but rather a preservation of values that will increasingly seem antiquated to others. Boomers will rail against pop culture detritus left over from the Unraveling: violent films, shopping malls, convenience stores, packaged throwaways. Under their stewardship, Hollywood will establish standards of taste while making definitive films of great literature, biography, and history. Old travelers will seek self-discovery and wisdom, preferring monastic retreats over cheery cruises, Tai Chi over shuffleboard. Elder enclaves will resemble Sedona more than Sun City, rural hamlets more than condo minicities. The gray elite will cluster in areas long associated with this generation: Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, New England.
Boomer elders will still make heavy demands of the young, but the nature of these demands will differ greatly from those imposed by today's elders. Where the Awakening-era Greatest burdened the young fiscally, Crisis-era Boomers will burden the young culturally. They will reverse the coin of elderhood from what they remember of the Awakening: Where Greatest elders once obtained secular reward in return for ceding moral authority, Boomers will seek the reverse. Accordingly, grandchildren will not look to them for financial advice (as per Greatest seniors) or emotional support (as per Silent seniors), but rather for guidance in the realm of ideals and values. To young eyes, old Boomers will appear highly eccentric. What Boomers feel as inner warmth will feel cold to others, and what they see as ethical perfectionism will sometimes strike others as hypocrisy.
In the Fourth Turning, Boomers are likely to occupy the vortex of a downward economic spiral. This will happen partly because of their numbers but mainly because of their location in history and collective persona. As financial expert David Barker observes, "the generation born in a K-Wave [economic] advance and inevitably spoiled by the wealth created by their parents' generation is sure to drive the system over the edge, without the experience of past decline to provide financial and economic sobriety." Having been born during the High's new cornucopia, having come of age with the Awakening's fiscal levers at full throttle, Boomers in their old age will encounter a national economy that will provide them with a very different end game. This elder generation will get a comeuppance for a lifelong habit of preaching virtues its members have not themselves displayed--of talking more than doing. There will be payback for the Boomers' tendency to graze on a problem until they finally decide to focus fully, at which point their sudden discovery becomes as much the issue as the original problem. Sooner or later, the truth will dawn on old Boomers that the money supply won't be there to support their accustomed consumption habits in old age. Neither they nor their nation will have saved enough.108
From this sudden realization could issue the end game of Boomer lifecycle consumption and savings habits: the Great Devaluation. At long last, aging Boomers will focus on the hard fact that a newly endangered America truly cannot (and younger generations will not) make their old-age subsidies a top public priority. This realization will render Boomers jittery about preserving their remaining assets. Some unforeseeable happenstance could spark a precipitous market selloff, as old investors will want to liquidate their equities to a shrinking universe of buyers. The main domestic buyers would be Generation X, who will have lower incomes and far fewer assets than Boomers and who will be of no mind to take risks with wobbling markets. Foreigners will be hesitant to acquire more U.S. assets in a time of pending fiscal crisis, especially since so many of their own societies will be facing similar demographic problems. A brief but precipitous panic could ensue. Years of savings could vanish in a matter of days--or hours.
The Great Devaluation is likely to hit Boomers just as their first cohorts are reaching the official ages of retirement, long before Social Security is now projected to go into official bankruptcy. Indeed, the panic could be triggered in part by the crystallizing financial anxieties of leading-edge Boomers. The flash point may well occur when the new elder mindset (of the 1943 "victory baby" cohort) combines with the new demographic realities (of the large 1946 "baby boom" cohort) to reach a critical mass. This could occur a few years before or after 2005--perhaps between 2002 (when the 1943 cohort reaches the IRA distribution age of fifty-nine and a half) and 2008 (when the 1946 cohort reaches the initial Social Security eligibility age of sixty-two, the age at which over two-thirds of Americans now start receiving benefits).109
Unlike their predecessors, Boomers will consider their old-age finances to be more a private than public concern. For the Greatest, Social Security was a generational bond running through government, its monthly checks a standard-issue badge of senior-citizen equality. For the Silent, Social Security will have been a play-by-the-rules annuity, offering a mixture of delight (for sneaking through just in time) and guilt (for burdening their kids). For Boomers, Social Security will be the object of fatalism and sarcasm. Some will get it, and some won't. The typical Boomer will live on bits and pieces of SEP-IRAs, Keoghs, 401(k)s, federal benefits, and assorted corporate pension scraps that will vary enormously from person to person. For many, this will add up to a lot; for many others, nearly nothing.
When the market hits bottom, millions of Boomers will find themselves at the brink of old age with far smaller nest eggs than they ever expected. They will immediately have to make do with steeply diminished material consumption. Many will have no choice but to live communally or with their adult children, while groping for ways to preserve a meaningful life on very little money. Some without kin will form "intentional families," while others who shunned neighbors all their lives will form "intentional communities."
Following the Great Devaluation, Boomers will find new ethical purpose in low consumption because, with America in Crisis, they will have no other choice. If the Crisis has not catalyzed before, it will now. With other urgent problems facing the nation, public spending on elder benefits will necessarily decline. all the old Unraveling-era promises about Social Security will now be known to be false, just as most Boomers had always presumed. This will create a moral rubric for breaking those promises. A debate will begin about which (if any) of the old promises should still be honored, and what new ones made, in a Next New Deal among the generations. Where Unraveling-era Congresses debated over one or two percentage point differences in rates of increase, Crisis-era Congresses will debate massive cuts. To maintain Greatest-style elder dependence on the young, Boomers would have to wage political war on their coming-of-age Millennial children. It is a war they will not wage--and would not win if they did.
Instead of political battles with other generations, Boomers will engage in moral battles among themselves. Those who retain assets will accuse those who don't of irresponsibility and lack of thrift. Those who don't have assets will accuse those who do of having battened off the corrupt old order. Younger generations will agree with both accusations. In the end, the Next New Deal will find all Boomers, rich and poor, paying a price. Many who spent a lifetime paying steep Social Security and Medicare taxes will be substantially excluded from benefits by an affluence test. Those who still qualify for public aid will receive a much worse deal than their Greatest parents did. The debate will rip apart whatever remains of the old senior citizen lobby built by the Greatest back in the Awakening. The AARP will survive only by reinventing itself as a council of elders committed to advancing the needs of posterity. Modern Maturity Magazine will shift its style from Silent hip to Boomer classic and change its title to refer to aging in more traditional and less euphemistic terms.
The Next New Deal will render the Boomers' old-age health-care subsidies a tightly regulated social decision. Crafting necessity into virtue, Boomers will deep the postponement of death as not a public entitlement. Many elders will eschew high-tech hospital care for homeopathy, minimalist self care, and the mind-body techniques Deepak Chopra calls "quantum healing." The Greatest era of extended care facilities (with bodies kept busy but minds at rest) will be replaced by less expensive elder sanctuaries (with bodies at rest but minds kept busy). Despite the Boomers' larger numbers and longer lifespans--and the costly end-of-life technologies that medicine might then offer--the share of Fourth Turning national income that will be spent on federally subsidized elder health care could fall below what it was in the Unraveling.
Old Boomers will construct a new social ethic of decline and death, much like they did in youth with sex and procreation. Where their youthful ethos hinged on self-indulgence, their elder ethos will hinge on self-denial. As they experience their own bodies coping naturally with decline and death, they will expect government to do the same. Old age will be seen as a time of transition and preparation for dying. With the same psychic energy with which they once probed eros, Boomers will now explore thanatos, the end-time, what the book Aging As a Spiritual Journey heralds as "the final night-sea journey" that lends an elder "the courage and insight to be profoundly wise for others." Their last Big Chills will not so much mourn journeyed friends as celebrate the after-death teaching their departed souls can still offer the young. Funeral homes will help predecedents prepare posthumous books and CD-ROMs to communicate with heirs in perpetuity.110
As they fill the upper age brackets, Boomers will believe themselves to be elders who, in the words of anthropologist Joan Halifax, "function like old cobblers and dressmakers, sewing us back into the fabric of creation." They will feel a new transformative dimension of time, enabling them to craft myths and models that can resacralize the national community, heal its dysfunctions, and grant moral authority for the next Golden Age. The very other-worldliness that Boomers will regard so highly in themselves will strike younger generations as evidence of incompetence. Elder contempt for this world will strike younger people as dangerous. Yet regardless what youth think of these old messengers, they will respect their message and march to their banner.111
Thus will the Gray Champion ride once more.
Eight or nine decades after his last appearance (the "wise old men" at the helm during World War II), America will be visited by the "figure of an ancient man . . . combining the leader and the saint [to] show the spirit of their sires." Again will appear the heir to the righteous Puritan who stood his ground against Governor Andros in 1689, the old colonial governors of the American Revolution who broke from England; the aging radicals of the Civil War who pitted brother against brother with a "fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel," and "the New Deal Isaiahs" who achieved their rendezvous with destiny.112
Whence will come the Gray Champion? Picture the Boomer Overclass of the Unraveling, aged another twenty years. Picture William Bennett's "Consequence and Confrontation" missives; Al Gore predicting an environmental cataclysm; James Webb's summoning a "ruthless and overpowering" retaliation against foreign enemies; James Fallows rooting for a "7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock"; "Apocalypse Darman" and "Default Newt" with their budget train wrecks; Earth First saboteurs, willing to sacrifice other people's lives to save trees; and Army of God antiabortionists summoning the terminally ill to "use your final months to torch clinics." Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, uncalmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade--all at a time of maximum public peril.
The full dimension of the Boomer persona will only emerge when today's better-known 1940s birth cohorts (whose youth was marked by relatively few social pathologies) are joined in public life by the tougher-willed, more evangelical 1950s cohorts (whose youth was marked by many more pathologies). That is the mix that will beget this generation's elder priest-warrior persona, vindicating the early Unraveling-era warning of Peter Collier and David Horowitz that Boomers are "a destructive generation whose work is not over yet."113
As the Crisis deepens, Boomers will confront the end result of their lifelong absorption with values. They will have laid a long trail of Unraveling-era rhetoric, much of it symbol and gesture, but now the words will matter. When James Redfield (or his elder equivalent) describes his peers as "a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a . . . great transformation," the summons will no longer be for pensive spiritual reflection but for decisive civic action. Boomers will comply with Cornel West's suggestion that "the mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage--come what may." Their habitual tendency to enunciate unyielding principles will now carry the duty of enforcement.114
The final Boomer leaders--authoritarian, severe, unyielding--will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In domestic matters, old Boomers will recast the old arguments of the Culture Wars into a new context of community needs. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion--crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. In foreign matters, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms.
The same Boomers who in youth chanted "Hell no, we won't go!" will emerge as America's most martial elder generation in living memory. Whatever the elements of Crisis, old Boomer leaders will up the moral ante beyond the point of possible retreat or compromise. The same Boomers who once chanted "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!" will demand not just an enemy's defeat, but its utter destruction. They will risk enormous pain and consequence to command youth to fight and die in ways they themselves never would have tolerated in their own youth. They will believe, as did Cicero, that this moment in history assigns "young men for action, old men for counsel."115
Old Boomers will find transcendence in the Crisis climax. As they battle time and nature to win their release from history, they will feel themselves in position to steward the nation, and perhaps the world, across several painful thresholds. It is easy to envision old Aquarians as pillars of fire leading to the Promised Land--but just as easy to see them as Charon-like monsters abducting doomed souls across the Styx to Hades. Either is possible.
As the Crisis resolves, elder Boomers will have not the last word, but the deep word. If they triumph, they will collectively deserve the eulogy Winston Churchill offered to Franklin Roosevelt: to die "an enviable death." If they fail, their misdeeds will cast a dark shadow over the entire Twenty-first Century, perhaps beyond. Whatever the outcome, posterity will remember the Boomers' Gray Champion persona long after the hippie and yuppie ages have been forgotten to all but the historian.116
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