War has such far-reaching consequences and implications for society, politics, and culture, it’s not only difficult to ascertain those myriad ways, but sometimes, we also need the benefit of decades to better gauge the aftermath. As it happens, Philip Bump, national columnist for The Washington Post, tackles this in his 2023 book, The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. See what I did there with “aftermath”? After WWII, by the end of 1945, more than 4 million soldiers returned to the United States. And they had babies. Lots of babies, in what became known as the Baby Boom generation. That generation, which began in the summer of 1946 (do the math on returning soldier + gestation), has completely altered the landscape of American life for the past 78 years, still continues to, and will likely continue to until at least 2042. In that sense, Bump’s book is both an “aftermath” of the Baby Boom generation, and a prognostication of the throes of that generation over the next 20 years.
One programming note: I listened to Bump’s book on audio, read quite well by Matthew Berry, and that’s an interesting experience considering what Bump is known for — at least what I know him for following him on Twitter and reading his work — which is numbers and charts. Berry states quite a few times, “In the print edition of this book is a graph depicting …” If I took a drink every time he did … So, I had to use my imagination. I think in parts, it would’ve been helpful for me to see those charts, i.e., have the physical book handy, but nonetheless, I found the book an engaging listen across 12 hours.
Between mid-1946 and mid-1964, the bookends of the Baby Boomer generation, 76 million babies were born. That’s staggering to consider, as Bump outlines, because in 1946, the American population was 141.3 million. To put that into context, that would be like if 180 million babies were born between 2021 and 2040. Imagine what that would do to American society, politics, and culture. Of course, I write this as a member of the Millennial generation (encompassing 1981 to 1996), when 72.2 million babies were born. Obviously, given the passing of time, Millennials are now the largest generation in America.
What undergirds Bump’s analysis of the Baby Boomer generation and how American society, politics, and culture reoriented in response to the influx of babies, and then teens — essentially, the “teen” was itself a product of the Baby Boom — is that America is starting to reorient away from the Baby Boomers because of the aforementioned Millennial generation (and Generation Z after us), and because of the changing demographics of what it means to be an American. To the latter, Bump points to U.S. Census data and projections that made a lot of news after the latest Census in 2020 that white people would be a minority of the population by 2060. There is all kinds of variables to parse, and parse Bump does, about such a projection (like what it even means to be any race or number of races and ethnicities), but he ties that back to the animus that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016, and which also by 2060, brings into the projection considerations whether the U.S. will even be constituted (heh) as a democracy then or a “united states.” (That seems hyperbolic on the face of it, but why assume our form of government will always be the way it is?)
What I love is that they found the first Baby Boomer, and Bump all these years later, also found and talked with her. Kathleen Case-Kirschling, born on January 1, 1946 (which disrupts our neat and tidy generational math, but hey), is considered the first Baby Boomer, and then became, naturally, the first Baby Boomer to file for Social Security retirement in 2007. In her lifetime, the U.S. has changed considerably, from a country with only 8,000 U.S. households having a television when she was born to 45 million households having them toward the tail end of the Baby Boom. Not to say anything, of course, of globalization, the internet, and the iPhone (which took far less time to be in the possession of most Americans than the television). Heck, when Kathleen was born, roughly 40% of the country still didn’t have washing machines! This is also why Bump makes the counterintuitive seeming, but correct, point that it’s weird to brush aside Boomers as technologically inept when they experienced an unprecedented amount of technological change in their lifetimes.
Putting Kathleen’s life, and that of the Boomers, into such a longview of contextual history, the Baby Boomer’s overwhelming and continuing influence on American society, politics, and culture is fascinating to consider and study. At the top level, consider we’ve had four Baby Boomer presidents in succession: Bill Clinton (two terms), George W. Bush (two terms), Barack Obama (two terms), and Donald Trump (one term). President Biden is actually part of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928-1946). Who knows when we will get our first Millennial president? (Sorry, Generation X.)
Indeed, though, as Bump outlines, the pace of the reorientation in response to the Baby Boomers is hard to imagine — in other words, the sense of morass modern government has, and the way in which it impedes flourishing makes a similar reorientation today unfathomable — because, for example, in one part of California alone, one new school a month was being built in the 1950s and 1960s. Understandably, because schools were going to be the first entities on the “frontlines” of the boom.
An aside, but I also enjoy the throughline of the last three nonfiction audiobooks I’ve listened to, One Billion Americans, Arbitrary Lines, and now, Aftermath, because all three prescribe the same two solutions to pull America out of its morass, one way or another: build more housing, and accept more immigrants. That’s the secret sauce to America’s flourishing!
I’m skeptical of some of Bump’s book, like the talk about class inequality and Millennials being poorer than our parents — and remember, I’m listening to the audio, so I can only take so many notes and the power of recall is what it is, so this a generalization of his arguments — because, in short, I don’t think inequality is a driving force of the problems we see in America, and the evidence doesn’t appear to be there for the latter claim. Nonetheless, the broad strokes of Bump’s thesis that America, en masse, reoriented itself to the Boomers, is in the process of reorienting away from the Boomers, and that reorientation away from the Boomers is creating a racial backlash (not just among Boomers, for the record, I think most of the January 6 rioters, for example, were the oldest among Generation X at 41.8), and of course, much of that is among so-called evangelicals.
Of course, again, the most interesting fact of Bump’s book is that we’re not actually in the “aftermath” quite yet. There are still around 61-ish million Baby Boomers. As they continue to retire and die, how will that shape America, too? That aftermath is still to be written.
If you’re a history, politics, society, culture, and all around nerd, like me, then you’ll be enthralled by Bump’s detailed, thoroughly reported and researched, data-filled walk through history and into the future.
Milam's Musings 