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 Generation X midlife, entitled "13ers Entering Midlife: Doom Players," 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:
"Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth," F. Scott Fitzgerald said after the crash that hit his peers at the cusp of what should have been their highest-earning years. "A generation with no second acts," he called his Lost Generation peers--but they proved him wrong. They ended their frenzy and settled down, thus helping to unjangle the American mood. Where their Missionary predecessors had entered midlife believing in vast crusades, the post-Crash Lost skipped the moralisms and returned directly to the basics of life. "What is moral is what you feel good after," declared Ernest Hemingway, "what is immoral is what you feel bad after." "Everything depends on the use to which it is put," explained Reinhold Niebuhr on behalf of a generation that did useful things regardless of faith--a role the Missionaries chose not to play.35
This "no second act" generation lent America the grit to survive dark global emergencies and, in the end, to triumph over them. In the Great Depression, the Lost were hard-hit but refused to ask for public favors. In World War II, they manned the draft boards, handed out ration coupons, mapped the invasions, and dispatched the bomber fleets. They gave the orders that killed thousands but saved millions. From "blood and guts" generals to "give 'em hell" Presidents, the Lost knew how to prevail over long odds and harsh criticism.
This was the last time the Nomad archtype entered a Fourth Turning.
In a recent genre of action films (from War Games and Back to the Future to Terminator and Independence Day), a stock drama unfolds. A young protagonist--alone, unprepared, and immersed in a junky culture--is chosen by chance to decide the fate of humanity. The situation looks dicey. The protagonist, too, has slim expectations of success. But at a pivotal moment, this lonely wayfarer challenges destiny, deals with the stress, zeroes in on what matters, does what is required, and comes out on top. The most popular video games, following the same script, stress one-on-one action and deft timing. Find a treasure, grab the tools, rescue a princess, save the kingdom, slay the enemy, and get out alive. Everything is yes-no, full of code words and secret places--in a style one TV executive calls "Indiana Jones meets a game show."36
"I've glimpsed our future," warns a high school valedictorian in the film Say Anything, "and all I can say is--go back." The message to her classmates is understandable, because Nomad generations--what Christian Slater refers to as "a long list of dead, famous wild people"--have always been the ones who lose ground in wealth, education, security, longevity, and other measures of progress. Yet they have also been the generations who lay at the fulcrum between triumph and tragedy, the ones who hoist their society through the darkest days of Crisis.
The onset of the Fourth Turning will find Generation Xers retaining their troubled reputation, the only change being that America's troubled age bracket will then be perceived as more fortyish than twentyish. They will carry the reputation for having come of age at a time when good manners and civic habits were not emphasized in homes and schools. With their arrival, midlife will lose moral authority and gain toughness. Their culture will be a hodgepodge of unblending styles and polyethnic currents that will reflect the centrifugal impulse from which many Americans (including Xers) will now be eager to escape.
In the economy, Xers will fare significantly worse than Boomers did at like age back in the mid-1980s. They will fan out across and unusually wide range of money and career outcomes. A few will be wildly successful, a larger number will be destitute, while most will be losing ground but doing tolerably. The Crisis era's image of a middle-aged worker will be a modest-wage job hopper who retains the flexibility to change life directions at a snap. The prototype midlife success story will be the entrepreneur who excels at cunning, flexibility, and high-tech ingenuity. The prototype failure will be the ruined gambler, broke but still trying. The high-risk harbors where Xers will have bet their stray cash during the Unraveling (from lottos to Indian casinos to derivative markets) will, like this generation, be stigmatized and left to rot.
As they confront their money problems amid a mood of deepening Crisis, Xers will take pride in their ability to "have a life" and wall off their families from financial woes. Their divorce rate will be well below that of midlife Silent and Boomers. They will clamp down on children. In exchange for financial help, many will invite their better-off parents to live with them.
Surveying the Crisis-era detritus of the Unraveling, Xers will see the opposite of what the midlife Silent had seen in the Awakening-era wreckage of the American High. Where the Silent had felt claustrophobic, yearning to break free in a world that felt too closed, Xers will feel agoraphobic, yearning to root in a world that feels too open. Where the Silent had been torn between the socially necessary and the personally desirable, Xers will be torn between the personally necessary and the socially desirable.
Gripped with deeply felt family obligations, Xers will resist the idea of relaxing their survival instincts--yet will sense the need to restore a sense of community. They will widen the continuing dispersions of technology and culture--yet will vote for politicians who promise to reverse it. Middle-aged Hispanic-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans (among others) will embrace their racial or ethnic identities--yet will yearn for new ties to the communal core.
The Unraveling's initial Xer pop elite will lose influence as their peers tire of the old ways and seek something similar and less frenzied. Those who persist in the discarded culturama will be chastised and perhaps even quarantined in the newly wholesome Millennial youth culture. A few aging outcasts will scatter around the world, feeling like those whom Doug Coupland calls "a White Russian aristocracy, exiled in Paris cafes, never to get what is due to us." Replacing them as the cutting edge of their generation will be a Revenge of the Nerds, slow-but-steady plodders (many of them ethnics) who will overtake the quick strikers who took one risk too many.
The Xer mind-set will be hardboiled and avuncular, the risk taking now mellowed by a Crisis-era need for security. Middle-aged people will mentor youth movements, lend stylishness to hard times, and add nuts-and-bolts workmanship to the resolute new mood. They will be begrudgingly respected for their proficiency in multimedia and various untutored skills to which old Boomers will be blind and young Millennials dismissive. Throughout the economy, Xers will be associated with risk and dirty jobs. They will seek workable outcomes more than inner truths. "We won't have a bad backlash against our lost idealism," predicts Slacker filmmaker Richard Linklater, since his generation "never had that to begin with." Like Hemingway, their moral judgments will be situational, based on how everybody feels afterward.37
As the Crisis deepens, Xers will feel little stake in the old order, little sense that their names and signatures are on the social contract. They will have reached full adult maturity without ever having believed in either the American Dream or American exceptionalism. They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn't seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation's core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. Not many of their classmates and friends will have built public-sector careers, apart from teaching and police work. Most Xers will have oriented their lives around self-help networks of friends and other ersatz institutions that have nothing to do with government.
The "we're not worthy" Xer streak of weak collective esteem will define and enhance their new civic role. Where the Boomers' Unraveling-era narcissism interfered with America's ability to exact even minor sacrifice for the public good, the Xers' ironic self-deprecation will render their claims unusually selfless. "We may not get what we want. We may not get what we need," chanted the young adults in True Colors. "Just so we don't get what we deserve." They will vote against their own short-term interests if persuaded that the community's long-term survival requires it. Where the Silent once agonized over procedural braking mechanisms, where Boomers had huge arguments over gesture and symbolism, Generation X voters will disregard motive and ideology, and will simply ask if public programs get results that are worth the money.
In the Fourth Turning's Next New Deal, Xers will be strategically located between moralistic old Boomers and cherished young Millennials. With Xers occupying the margins of political choice, no intergenerational bargain will be enacted without their approval. In The Breakfast Club, a Boomer teacher despaired of "the thought that makes me get up in the middle of the night: That when I get older, these kids are gonna take care of me." As elder benefits hit the fiscal wall, Boomers and Xers will, like siblings, half-remember and half-forget how they behaved toward each other in earlier decades. There will be some talk of ethnogenerational war, as non-Anglo Xers attack Boomer benefits as what former Social Security Commissioner Dorcas Hardy has called "a mechanism by which the government robs their children of a better future, in order to support a group of elderly white people." Led by ethnic populists, Xers will strike a hard bargain with elders they will collectively perceive as lifelong hypocrites with a weak claim on the public purse. So long as the Next New Deal hits Boomers hard, Xers won't mind if it's projected to hit themselves even harder.38
As the Crisis rages on, the era's stark new communitarianism will require Xers to rivet new grids in place. New-breed mayors and governors will abandon old labels and alliances, patch together people and technology, and rekindle public support for community purpose. Having grown up in a time when walls were being dismantled, families dissolved, and loyalties discarded, Generation X power brokers will reconstruct the social barriers that produce civic order. They will connive first to get the people behind them, next to bribe (or threaten) people into doing what's needed, and then to solidify those arrangements into something functional. They won't worry about the obviously insoluble and won't fuss over the merely annoying. Their politicians won't brim with compassion or nuance, and won't care if they have to win ugly. To them, the outcome will matter more than democracy's ritual aesthetics. Their hand strengthened by the demands of Crisis, Xers will sweep aside procedural legalisms and promises legislated by old regimes, much to the anguish of the octogenarian Silent. They won't mind uttering--and listening to--the sound bite that seems to sum up a situation with eloquent efficiency. To critics, the new style of Xer urban leadership will appear unlearned, poorly rooted in values, even corrupt, but it will work.
This generation's institutional rootlessness will make its leaders and electorates highly volatile, capable of extreme crosscurrents. Lacking much stake in the old order, many Xers might impulsively welcome the notion of watching it break into pieces. They won't regard the traditional safety nets as important to their lives. The real-life experience of their own circles will reinforce their view that when people lose jobs or money, they can find a way to cope, deal with it, and move on. Looking back on their own lives, they will conclude that many of the Awakening- and Unraveling-era trends that may have felt good to older generations didn't work so well for them--or for the nation. Come the Crisis, many Xers will feel that emergency action is necessary to re-create the kind of secure world they will feel was denied them in childhood.
In this environment, Xers could emerge as the leaders of a Crisis-era populism based on the notion of taking raw action now and justifying it later. A charismatic anti-intellectual demagogue could convert the ad slogans of the Third Turning into the political slogans of the Fourth: "No excuses." "Why ask why?" "Just do it." Start with a winner-take-all ethos that believes in action for action's sake, exalts strength, elevates impulse, and holds weaknesses and compassion in contempt. Add class desperation, antirationalism, and perceptions of national decline. The product, as its most extreme, could be a new American fascism.39
The core feature of the Generation X midlife will be the Crisis itself. Early in the era, the Great Devaluation could quash many a midlife career and cause real hardships to families under their protection. Like the Lost Generation in the 1920s, Xers will have bought into the Unraveling-era boom market late and high--only to sell out late and low. At the same time, urgent necessity will lend new meaning to their lives. Many of the traits that were criticised for decades--their survivalism, realism, lack of affect--will now be recognized as vital national resources. The emergency will melt away much of the Unraveling era's old fuss about political correctness. Now Xers will hear far less complaint about their soldiers being too much the warrior, their entrepreneurs too much the operator, their opinion leaders too much the blunt talker. As the Crisis catalyzes, they will recall the old Jesus Jones lyric, feel themselves
Right here, right nowand know they are the generation on the spot. Though Xers will have little ability to influence the elements and timing of the Boomer-propelled Crisis, they will provide the on-site tacticians and behind-the-scenes bosses whose decisions will determine the day-to-day course.
Watching the world wake up from history
Middle-aged Xers will be the only ones capable of deflecting the more dangerous Boomer tendencies. The Boomers won't check themselves, nor will Millennials, so the task will fall to Generation X to force the Boomer priest-warriors to give it a rest when the fervor gets too deep, to get real when the sacrifices outweigh the future reward. An Xer may indeed be the intrepid statesman, general, or Presidential adviser who prevents some righteous old Aquarian from loosing the fateful lightning and turning the world's lights out.
At or just after the Crisis climax, Xers will supplant Boomers in national leadership. History warns that they could quickly find themselves playing a real-world Sim City, facing quick triage choices about who and what to sacrifice, and when and how. They will need every bit of those old Doom player joystick skills--the deft timing, the instinctive sense of what counts and what doesn't, the ability always to move on from one problem to the next. Whatever they do, they will get more than their share of the blame and less than their share of the credit.40
As the Crisis resolves, the society will be fully in Generation X hands. If all ends well, their security-minded leadership will usher the society away from urgent crusades and into the next High. If not, Xers will be left with no choice but to yank younger generations by the collar, appraise what's left of their society, and start anew.
This page was last modified on 07/20/2025 06:08:27