Is Gen X up to the task?

Why the generation raised at the End of History is struggling as politics roars back.

‘Gen X. The only generation that became 30 at the age of 10 and still is 30 at 50.’ Sometimes a facebook meme carries more insight than reams of generational commentary, and this one nails the cultural narrative about my small, benighted generation. Born between around 1965 and 1980, we were adultified in childhood by premature exposure to sex, drugs, and working mothers, neglected as ‘latchkey kids’ who had to make our own dinner before anyone had heard about healthy snacks.

As the ‘slacker generation’, we were infantilised in our 20s by the absence of social purpose and meaningful work. When middle age came, we adopted the same cynical disdain to its expectations and inconveniences as we had to childhood. As in the later seasons of Friends, the ageing of our bodies didn’t really mean anything about our lives: we were still 30 at 50.

Of course, the charmed innocence of Friends had to come to an end sometime – in 2004 in fact, when the cast were in their 40s. For the rest of us, the aloof detachment from adult responsibility lasted until around 2016, when the world suddenly started changing and we realised that somehow, improbably, we were in charge. Politically, we could stay hidden behind the colourful Boomers – Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK – as Western societies took their first hesitant steps towards a populist break from the technocratic consensus. The trouble was that we were the technocrats, quietly running the corporations and the institutions of the welfare state. With one global pandemic now under our belts and World War III perpetually on the horizon, it’s probably time to ask whether we are up to the task.

First: a disclaimer. Like all generational stereotypes, the cultural narrative about Gen X is full of exaggeration and nonsense. I’ve spent my academic career battling with the problem of generationalism, which is a lazy and divisive trick to present social, economic, political, and cultural problems as problems of generations. The usual target is the Baby Boomers, who routinely stand accused of monopolising wealth and power for their own benefit; but we see it in claims that the Millennials are fragile and entitled, and that Gen Z (aka the ‘Covid generation’) is hopelessly damaged and frighteningly polarised.

So of course, that stuff about Gen X as latchkey kids, slackers, and cynics with which I began this article similarly belongs in the bucket of scepticism where we should put all generationalist claimsmaking, for the simple reasons that cohorts of a population never share the same outlook or experience, and that cultural trends express and exaggerate differences. Friends was just a TV comedy show, and even the label ‘Generation X’ was popularised by a novel, whose author, Douglas Coupland, has lambasted ‘the false assumption of human sameness’ that makes up generational discussions.

But generational labels and stereotypes do speak to something – and that is the impact of the historical period in which we grow up on the orientation we develop towards the world. For Gen X, our troubled relationship with adulthood does not come from the selfish Boomers leaving us to fend for ourselves, but from the period of intense depoliticisation in which we came of age. We reached adulthood as the Cold War was fizzling out, leaving us with the ‘End of History’, as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama astutely, if prematurely, termed it. The big global confrontations of the 20^th century seemed to have been resolved, and the role assigned to us was to drift along with it. If there was no history left to make, what did it have to do with us?

For those too young to remember, it must seem curious that the end of the Cold War brought little joy to Western nations. Our memories of the 1990s are tinted by the incredulous excitement that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the crazed consumerism of the dotcom bubble towards the end of the century. But the mood of the early 1990s was more of apprehension than jubilation. The faults and failings of the Soviet Union had at least made the West look good by comparison. When at last it fell apart, Europe and North America were forced to take a good look at themselves, and it wasn’t such a pretty sight. Recession, unemployment, and a lacklustre political disaffection all conspired to keep the celebrations on ice.

The image that formed of Gen X in this period symbolised what more sober analysis often failed to grasp. While the youth of Eastern Europe danced into their freedom, their Western counterparts seemed to be drifting aimlessly through a series of meaningless ‘McJobs’, sniffing glue in public parks and screwing anyone that moved. The price that had been paid for victory over the Evil Empire and its domestic friends on the political left seemed to be nothing more than a void; a slough of despond in which the young were only too keen to wallow. ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’ sang Nirvana in 1993. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide a year later, fans wore the slogan on a T-shirt.

At this point, leaders of Western countries should have grasped the nettle and engaged their populations in an intense, energetic debate about how to make the most of the new world in which we found ourselves, breathing new life into democratic decision-making by making big decisions about the things that mattered – public policy, for example, or persistent social inequalities. Youth should have been shaken from its cynical slumber and instructed that making history was not only a possibility, but a responsibility.

Instead, we entered a period of self-conscious retreat from politics that took the end of history as both its starting point and end goal. Economically, politics was sold out to the fast buck of globalisation and tech start-ups. Policy, under the stewardship of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, became subject to the managerial orthodoxy of the avowedly non-ideological ‘Third Way’. Voter turnout plummeted: in the UK’s 2001 General Election, turnout was at its lowest since 1918, with a similar trend in the US. This was the era that trained us as technocrats, making a virtue of our grumpy acquiescence and absence of idealism. And it’s why the current moment comes as something as a shock.

As the Boomers age out, Gen X is left to run the show. But we never really wanted to run anything, and we’re far from convinced that the show is ours to run. Many among our cohort have got with the populist moment, and shown admirable fighting qualities around such issues as gender politics and freedom of speech (more on that in future posts). But those embedded in institutions and the established political parties remain stubbornly attached to the lanyards and studied disinterest that have progressed their careers. They dealt with the pandemic by hiding at home with their laptops, and they’re dealing with global conflicts by dancing in Westminster.

Well, they’re going to have to grow up and get over it. History didn’t end, we’re not 30 anymore. Somebody’s got to take the reins, and it’s not like we trust the Millennials to do it.