The last baby boomer

The curious fact that the very young, vibrant and obviously coherent presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and the very old, stale, and deeply confused Republican nominee for president are both technically baby boomers provides an opportunity to point out the serious over-use of that term, given the arbitrariness of the concept.

That concept was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when demographers began to formalize the statistical fact that the Total Fertility Rate for American women rose above 3.0 in 1946, and stayed above that level for every year through 1964. Hence, the baby boom.

Trump was born in June of 1946, while Harris is eighteen and a half years younger, having been born in October of 1964. Now it should be obvious that a demographic concept that covers a 19-year stretch of birth cohorts is pretty useless for almost any genuine sociological analysis. Nobody would think, for example, that people who graduated from high school in 1989 have much if anything in common with high school graduates from 2007. But the quirky demographic fact that the TFR was above three for a 19-year stretch created what has become a very sloppy cultural category of “boomers,” who are all supposedly selfish and privileged and crushing the hopes and dreams of subsequent generations in mostly unspecified ways.

A secondary effect of this sloppiness is that subsequent generations have often been categorized in similarly broad demographic terms, apparently for the sake of consistency, although the definitions tend to be looser than they are with the baby boom. Hence Generation X is usually defined as people born between 1965 and 1981, even though people born in the early 1980s have nothing in common with people born in the mid-1960s. Etc.

Anyway, the socially constructed fact that Trump and Harris are both boomers really underlines how basically useless the concept in its original form has become. At this point, it’s just used as shorthand for “selfish clueless old person,” which certainly defines Donald Trump well enough, but has nothing to do with his birth year, which was a long long time ago, because he’s extremely old. Really really old. Much much older than Kamala Harris, who is young. Really really young by the standards of our gerontocracy, that is.

*Speaking of which, my favorite absurd detail about the absurd idea that Joe Manchin could or should challenge Harris for the nomination is that Manchin is almost exactly the same age Biden was in 2020! (He’s nine months younger).