In his 1980 book The Changing of the Guard, David Broder confidently proclaimed that "America is changing hands" and predicted that what he later called the "Fat Fifties Generation" would soon break out from under the Greatest shadow and attain national leadership. That didn't happen.48
By the late 1980s, people of all ages still looked to aging Greatest for leadership and, increasingly, to Boomers for cultural direction. One Silent candidate after another fell prey to a combination of dullness, a media-coined "stature gap," and that generational bugaboo, the "character issue" Two decades earlier, young Silent reporters had neither been willing nor able to torpedo Greatest candidates (John Kennedy, for example) the way the mostly Boom press did the midlife Silent over issues such as adultery (Gary Hart), plagiarism (Joe Biden), issue flipflops (RIchard Gephardt), misbehavior of family members (Geraldine Ferraro), or technobabble (Michael Dukakis).
In 1988, Gary Hart proudly termed his like-aged candidates a "generational revolution." Reagan referred to them as "kids," the press as "the seven dwarfs"--and, yet again, the Silent nominee fell to a Greatest who warned against "the technocrat who makes the gears mesh but doesn't understand the magic of the machine." "If you understand the Silent Generation, you understand Mike Dukakis," quipped one biographer of the governor whose very nickname--"Duke"--reminded voters how unWaynelike (and un-Greatest-like) he was.49
As rising adults, the Silent once gazed up at midlife Greatest they then called "the establishment." Through the 1980s they came to recognize that they were the establishment, at least on their resumés--but, somehow, the faces they see in the mirror or meet at lunch didn't exude the powerful confidence they remembered of the Greatest. Peering down the age ladder only added to their feelings of power inadequacy. What especially "chill[ed] the blood" of professed liberals like Senator Moynihan was the recollection that in their youth, "the old bastards were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives and we are the old bastards."50
Liberal or not, the grown-up Lonely Crowd persisted in its plasticity--at times yielding to Boomer passions, other times heartily endorsing whatever the system churned out--affirmative action, the free market, an incentive tax rate, a UN resolution, the compromise verdict of some expert panel, whatever. On both sides of the political spectrum, the Silent much preferred to discuss process rather than outcomes. In politics and business, the Silent have been a proven generation of bureaucratizers. Compared with the Greatest-dominated Congresses of the early 1960s, Silent Congresses of the mid-1980s convened twice as many hearings, debated for twice as many hours, hired four times as many staff, mailed six times as many letters to constituents--and enacted one-third as many laws. Eighty-four committees had oversight responsibility for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the years just prior to its scandal.51
In the hands of the Silent Generation, America grew more accustomed to deferring or learning to live with problems than to taking aggressive steps to solve them. Thanks to the size and complexity of the U.S. economy, tenured professors foresaw at worst a slow parabola of national descent while Brookings' Henry Aaron remained confident that the nation could "muddle through without absolute decline." Congressional leaders set priorities through decision-avoidance mechanisms such as the Gramm-Rudman Act (or its sequel, "Gramm-Rudman III").52
Opinion ruled in Silent-led America. In the 1990 election, voters confronted the largest number of citizen-initiated ballot measures since the Progressive Era election of 1914. (The California ballot alone had 28 initiatives, accompanied by a two-volume, 230-page voter's guide.) But if opinion rules, the Silent hate to admit that any rule is final. From judicial appeals to NFL instant replays, the 1980s marked an all-time high in institutionalized second-guessing.53
The foreign policy trend-setters leaned toward James Baker--style multilateralism and a deference to international law, what Joseph Nye called "soft power, the complex machinery of interdependence." Industrialists were replaced by technocrats who managed "M-Form" corporations, financial holding companies long on flexibility and short on product identity. Businesses ran "cultural audits" of their employees, Ben Wattenberg's "Gross National Spirit" index charted the nation's feelings, and John Naisbitt heralded such "Megatrends" as an "Information Age" of "high-tech/high-touch."54
Endowed foundations turned their attention to every new personal injustice. Oil companies portrayed themselves as nice guys, eager to placate their most hostile critics. A Silent-dominated Judiciary Committee rejected a like-aged Supreme Court nominee (Bork) for being too abrasive, while embracing another (Souter) for promising that personal opinions would "play absolutely no role" in his rulings on abortion. The Census Bureau checked bridges and sewers to see that every American was counted, while leaders of industry put up little resistance to a costly new law requiring them to retrofit for the handicapped. By 1989, nineteen black Silent had been elected to Congress, five more than among the three prior generations (Missionary, Lost, Greatest) put together. Nine Silent Hispanics have so far become congressmen, more than the combined number of all prior American generations.55
Under the Silent elite, America became a kinder, more communicative place. It also became culturally fragmented and less globally competitive. The Silent new elders were less successful in forging a sense of national or personal direction than any generation in living memory. Like Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart, many Silent felt disquieted by the lack of connectedness they saw in American life. While Kevin Phillips described an America shadowed by an "End of Empire frustration" and Barbara Ehrenreich a white-collar workforce haunted by a "fear of falling," Jack Kemp foresaw exhilarating prosperity and George Gilder "a global economy of commerce . . . a global ganglion of electronic and photonic media that leaves all history in its wake."56
What mostly emerged was fuss and detail, a world view of such enormous complexity that their own contributions often turned out (as one technician described the Hubble telescope mirror) "perfect but wrong." Sensing this, they felt--deep down--a wounded collective ego. Having grown up playing the child's game of Sorry, the Silent could not abandon what Sheehy called their "resignation," a vague dissatisfaction with jobs, families, their children, themselves.57
The Silent have been the only living generation whose members would rather be in some age bracket other than the one they currently occupied. A 1985 study had found the fiftyish Silent preferring "the twenties" over any other decade in life--an age many felt they had never really enjoyed the first time around. From midlife onward, the Silent have fueled a booming market in dietary aids, exercise classes, cosmetic surgery, hair replacements, relaxation therapies, and psychiatric treatments.58
Approaching their own old age, many still found themselves emotionally obliged to surviving parents and financially obliged to struggling children in what Robert Grossman termed "Parenthood II." Many opted for early-retirement pension bonanzas that the nation could afford simply because (as Easterlin accurately predicted) their generation was relatively small in numbers. Most aging Silent found themselves wealthier, but more confused as to purpose, than they had ever imagined they would have been at this phase of life.59
As Toffler suggested in PowerShift--and Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos--they sensed that the pace of social and economic change had accelerated beyond anyone's ability to control it. The best Americans could do, suggested Toffler, was to run faster themselves. The peers of Gail Sheehy thus encountered a new mid-fifties "passage" that Daniel Levinson described as "a silent despair, a pressing fear of becoming irrelevant." Many also felt that endearing if paralyzing quality Ellen Goodman saw in Pat Schroeder's brief run for the Presidency: "a desire to make it to the top" with "a deep concern about how you make it."60
Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother, observed the title of Lois Wyse's 1990 book, targeted at Silent first-wavers who began to transform elderhood around a decidedly un-Greatest-like other-directedness. Travel agents reported a new boom business in "grandtravel" (grandparent-grandchild trips) and new interest in "Elderhostels" reminiscent of the way the Silent had toured Europe as youths. Self-styled "kids over 60" formed a "SeniorNet" computer network. In 1989, affluent mid-sixtyish Social Security beneficiaries formed a "21st Century Club" whose members assigned their checks to a philanthropic trust fund. The Silent-led Virginia state legislature raised revenues by limiting tax breaks for Silent (but not Greatest) retirees.61
And Ralph Nader mobilized "Princeton Project '55'" around the "suppressed crusades among the classmates," many of whom had become financially successful beyond their collegiate imaginings, but who shared an eagerness to join Nader in attacking "systemic social problems." Their agenda was large. In 1986, the Union of International Associations catalogued 10,000 world problems awaiting solution--and the Silent Generation was running out of time.62
The Silent, like their adaptive predecessors (the Enlightenment, Compromise, and Progressive Generations), have thus far glided through history. Blessed with economic good fortune, they have been spared both the outer sacrifices of their elders and the inner trauma of their juniors. But they have been denied adventure and have never felt fully comfortable at any age. The Silent have spent a lifetime realizing two important facts: First, they are not Greatest; second, they are not Boomers. As they grow older, they will still be aware of those two facts. At the same time, the aging Silent will grow increasingly worried about the fate of the generation they raised--the young Generation X--whose unromantic outlook on life seems so oddly different from what they recall of their own early years.63
This page was last modified on 07/20/2025 06:29:05