My Grandpa’s Death Is Why We Have President Trump
My paternal grandfather flew into Hiroshima in September 1945. He’d been a Army Air Force pilot in the Pacific, providing supplies to far-flung offensives. He didn’t much talk about it unless directly asked, and even then it was like pulling teeth.
He was a GOP man to his death. In his final years, he alternated between Fox News and golf (on Fox Sports). He held old school views on culture and society: he would hardly have been out of place working at Sterling Cooper of Mad Men. He was not, at least as I remember him, a deeply moral or religious person. Conformity mattered: the rules were the rules, and you neither questioned them nor broke them. Challenges to hierarchy, to established order, could throw him into a rage. His cultural outlook was simple: that’s just the way it is, so shut up about it.
If I were to guess his vote in the 2015–16 Republican primary, I’d say he was a Jeb Bush man. Jeb was predictable: Jeb was safe. Jeb had two presidents in his family. Jeb was a lifelong, loyal Republican. Jeb’s presidency would be a bland return to a bland yesteryear. Jeb was the qualified man for the job.
But my grandpa could not vote for Jeb. By 2015–16 he, like millions of other World War II voters, was dead.
The ‘Decent’ Generation
Pew puts the GI Generation as those born between 1901 to 1927. People born in those years were very young during the Great Depression and World War II. They were middle aged when the Cuban Missile Crisis hit. They were retiring elders when Reagan brought morning back to America. They were an electoral spine of reliable voters for Gingrich’s Contract with America and George W. Bush’s election campaign.
Their absence is part of a classic Strauss-Howe Generational Crisis, driven by both the unleashed energy of Baby Boomers who now dominate the country’s political and media landscapes and the absence of the stability-obsessed GI Generation. This is the crisis we’re seeing played out: it is not so much that American voters have suddenly changed; it’s that there’s an entire set of voters who no longer exist.
Baby Boomers were born into an era of peace and prosperity unlike anything humanity ever enjoyed. They had virtually no living memory of an existential crisis, making them greater risk takers in both politics and life. They gambled on a mass reshaping of American life, from culture and politics to international affairs. But they were kept in check by a mass block of their elders.
Those elders are gone now. The anchor of stability that kept American life from unhinging has vanished beneath the waves of time. There is abundant evidence that the next anchor of stability will be Millennials, who will have no desire to repeat the culture wars of the Baby Boomers once the Boomers run out of political and social energy in the 2020s.
If we look at the chart above, we see why. The youngest of the surviving GIs are 90 years old, or barely .1% of the population. No political faction appeals to their values anymore.
Before the war, America’s cultural and political life was churning much as it is now. It is best embodied by the nasty character of Huey Long, the 1936 presidential candidate, who once said “A man is not a dictator when he is given a commission from the people and carries it out.” Does that sound a bit familiar, if old timey?
Why does that matter so much? Consider: would your Republican grandmother (or great-grandmother, depending on your age) have ever tolerated Pussy Grabber talk at the dinner table? Would she — and likely her friends — have ever voted for such a man? That alone would have disqualified Trump — in addition to all the other indecencies that are part of his record. His policies could never have appealed to a GI Generation obsessed with decency.
There was good reason for that. The GI Generation engaged in the most indecent of acts: a world war, fueled by murderous hatred and ugly discourse that produced gas chambers and atomic bombs. My maternal grandfather killed strangers in Europe in Patton’s tanks; my paternal grandfather saw a nuked city with his own eyes. How many of the GIs knew directly what it was like to kill and be killed?
When the war ended, both elites and citizens felt compelled to preserve the body politic through ruthless political correctness centered around Northern European Judeo-Christian values. These values were not perfect, but that sort of quibbling didn’t bother those who had firebombed Dresden and witnessed death camps.
Before the war, in the 1920s and 1930s, America’s cultural and political life was churning much as it is now. It is best embodied by the nasty character of Huey Long, the 1936 presidential candidate, who once said “A man is not a dictator when he is given a commission from the people and carries it out.” Does that sound a bit familiar, if old timey?
After the war, men like Long could not be tolerated. Elaborate edifices were produced by the World War II cohort to guarantee it. The FCC censored the air waves; suburban culture stifled politics at the dinner table. Watch season 1 of Mad Men and the world comes into clarity. Behind all the banal barbeques and Alpha male philandering lurks the great horrors in everyone’s lives: Don Draper’s Depression-era childhood in a cheap brothel, Roger Sterling’s Pacific campaign PTSD, and even a minor character’s remark that the last time he saw a Volkswagen he was throwing a grenade in it. Most of these events happened to them when they were barely adults: imagine losing not one but several of your friends at 18 on some distant battlefield. Imagine going hungry not once but for years as a child, and having that not the result of drugs or racism or just plain bad luck but the societal collapse of an economic system. You too would not think highly of the unpredictable candidate.
Now contrast that with Don’s first daughter, Sally Draper, who is a classic child of the 1950s. She is safe, fed, and, in many ways, spoiled. She can afford to experiment with both lifestyle choices and politics. Roger Sterling’s daughter is an even starker example: from growing up an Upper East Side princess, she ends the series as an anything-goes hippie on a sexually-charged commune. Neither Roger nor Don particularly disapprove of their daughters’ mores, yet they keep their own sexual predilections under wraps, hidden from view, for fear of disturbing a public peace they know from experience is fragile.
Throughout the campaign, both pundits and liberals kept dropping their jaws at the many Trumpian offenses uttered by both the campaign and the man himself. This should have been critical flaws that killed Trump’s candidacy: even Trump himself muttered as much.
But this was so 2008 thinking.
In 2005, as seen above, the youngest GIs were about 78 years old — well over 2% of the population. Considering that elections are often decided within such margins, not to mention primaries, their existence — and consistently high turnouts — meant offending their values was always enough to tip an election away from a candidate.
Cynical politicians used those values to their advantage, as the GOP did when they impeached Bill Clinton after he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Genuinely outraged GIs combined with faux outrage from younger cohorts who had political reasons to attack whom they increasingly regarded as the enemy. In those days, you could get an FDR Democrat to turn on a Democratic president over a values violation.
As the Trump campaign wore, pundits and liberals discovered the death of an entire generation. Baby Boomers do not have a unified cultural voice: they are the epitome of culture warriors. Younger Gen Xers are either cultural agnostics, not readily offended, or take up the liberal or conservative standards of their elders. Only Millennials appear to be coalescing around a unified cultural standard, but which standard is up for grabs.
As the Trump presidency wears on, these common cultural values will come into focus. The 2020s will be decisive: retiring Baby Boomers combined with inevitable aging will slow down their crusades of cultural conquest. End-of-life reflection may well cause them to cede the floor to their children. It won’t be until the 2030s and 40s that they shrink and slip away as the GIs have done. Yet like many past generations with whom they share similarities — like the generation of Adolf Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill — they seem likely to step aside once a new cultural consensus forms.
(Want to know more about the trajectories of the 21st century? Pick up a paper or hard copy of my book, The 21st Century Made Super, from Amazon today!)
