What it means that my generation is the future of the G.O.P.
By Ross Douthat
If, as seems possible, Joe Biden wins the presidency by peeling away older white voters from the Republican coalition, liberals won’t just win the White House; they’ll gain a new generational villain to bemoan. Instead of laments about The Villages and sneers of “OK Boomer,” there will be a realization that the last bastion of conservatism in a leftward-shifting country may soon lie with my own Generation X.
Let’s stipulate that generational divisions are somewhat arbitrary and artificial, and that they track imperfectly with the age divisions favored by most pollsters. Generation X consists of Americans born between 1965 and 1980, which means that we’re currently in our 40s and early 50s, and pollsters prefer to poll the 45-64-year-old cohort, where President Trump’s clearest strength now lies.
Still, pollsters who track the generations show Xers as more Republican than other groups. In the Morning Consult survey, for instance, Joe Biden has led consistently with baby boomers since the spring, while Generation X is the only generation with whom Trump occasionally pulls into a tie.
Given that most people’s conservatism modestly increases as they age, this trend is probably a prologue, and Gen X conservatives will increasingly become the bulwark of Republican support — and the party’s leaders, whether in the form of Nikki Haley or Josh Hawley or Donald Trump Jr., Generation Xers all.
Which means that my generation, so often passed over, merits some ideological analysis. And Noah Smith, the economics writer for Bloomberg and an edge-of-Generation-Xer (born in 1980), offered the beginnings of one last week on Twitter. The formative world of Gen X, he pointed out, was one of Republican dominance in presidential politics, evangelical revival in American religion and diminishing social conflict overall. “Xers grew up in a nation that was rapidly stabilizing under conservative rule,” he writes, suggesting that many Americans now in midlife associate the G.O.P. with that stability and the subsequent trends pushing the country leftward with disorder and decline.
To Smith’s list of Gen X-ian distinctives I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics, the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials.
A critique of Gen X conservatism that started from this framework wouldn’t accuse my cohort of nostalgia for the racial or religious landscape of the 1950s; we don’t remember it, and we don’t want it to return. Instead the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton-to-Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them — which in turn makes middle-age conservatives too apt to see Black Lives Matters or Obama himself as reckless disturbers of the racial peace.
On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced. And the Gen-X conservative can struggle to move beyond what I’ve called Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that’s lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age.
