Note: The following page was published by Strauss and Howe in 1991. I have altered the tense as appropriate and inserted references to Clinton and Bush [43].
When Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, "You are no Jack Kennedy," and Howard Metzenbaum said of William Bennett that "he believes words speak louder than actions," these rockets landed on more than just individual targets. In the Greatest mind's eye, you could replace Quayle or Bennett with any of today's midlifers, and none of them could match a Greatest doer in his prime.117
Then again, the hubristic Kennedy--the war-hero President of "prestige" and "long strides"--was decidedly no Boomer. Nor did his "best and brightest" share anything like the common thread of consciousness among Boomers (Jody Powell, Hamilton Jordan, David Stockman, Peggy Noonan, Lee Atwater, and Richard Darman) who have visited the White House inner circle during the past few decades. As Quayle, Bennett, Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush [43] and others in their mid-fifties pushed aside the Silent in the generational succession to the Oval Office, their generation has already held one of every four seats in the House of Representatives, filled nearly every important office in President George H. W. Bush [41]'s West Wing, and broadly dominated the media--from Hollywood to National Public Radio to the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal. Whatever their stripe, Boomers have been far less interested in tangible constructions (what Metzenbaum called "actions") than in establishing a fresh moral regime.
Critics can and do call the rhetorical and righteous Boomers smug, narcissistic, intolerant, and puritanical, but one commonly heard charge--that of "hypocrite"--ill fits a generation that came of age resacralizing and has kept at it. Boomers are in no rush.
Oh, how I miss the Revolution," wrote the (conservative) Boomer columnist Benjamin Stein in 1988. "I want the Revolution back." Seventeen years earlier, Charles Reich had prophesied how new Boomer values would someday transform civilization "beyond anything in modern history. Beside it," he bubbled, "a mere revolution, such as the French or Russian, seems inconsequential." Reich misperceived the Boom's readiness to assume power and pandered to its trappings, but he understood its seriousness of purpose. From Jonathan Schell to Jeremy Rifkin, Charles Murray to Alan Keyes, Steven Jobs to Steven Spielgerg, Boomers are still doing what they have done for decades: giving America its leading visionaries and "wise men"--or just its preachy didactics--regardless of the age brackets they occupy.118
On December 2, 1989, Good Housekeeping published a full-page ad in The New York Times, welcoming America to the 1990s, "the Decency Decade, the years when the good guys finally win. . . . It will be a very good decade for the Earth, as New Traditionalists lead an unstoppable environmental juggernaut that will change and inspire corporate America, and let us all live healthier, more decent lives" and "make people look for what is real, what is honest, what is quality, what is valued, what is important." In ways other generations partly applaud and partly loathe, Boomers stood midgame in a many-pronged reworking of American society. The righteous fires of People's Park were still smoldering.119
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