The Generational Disaster of Trump, Bush and Clinton

In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency over George H.W. Bush, the transition in power was accompanied by a wave of generational commentary.

The election marked the passing of a remarkable roster of seven consecutive presidents who were born in the first quarter of the 20th century and whose early careers were shaped decisively by service in World War II. At the time, it seemed that this generation — 32 years from John F. Kennedy’s arrival to Bush’s exit — had hovered over the culture for a breathtakingly long stretch.

Donald J. Trump’s birthday — he arrived at Jamaica Queens hospital in New York 80 years ago today — prompts a striking realization. The children of 1946 are on track to loom over American life for even longer.

A few weeks after Trump came George W. Bush, at Connecticut’s Yale-New Haven hospital, on July 6. Then on Aug. 19, the youngest and the first to reach the presidency: Clinton, whose last name was then Blythe, was born at the Julia Chester hospital in Hope, Arkansas.

So there they are: three American presidents turning 80 this summer, old men by any measure. They have starkly different styles, temperaments and goals for their country. But they are united in some important ways. All in their own way and in their time were uncommonly talented politicians.

All three are also the preeminent representatives of the generation that trashed American politics.

Clinton, Bush and Trump surely hold significantly different measures of culpability for the squalor of American political culture. But all three children of 1946 are central characters in a decades-long descent in which Americans have been progressively more tribalistic in their political affiliations; ever-more coarse and insulting in public discourse; more mystified by and contemptuous of those who disagree; less trusting in government and most other establishment institutions, less confident in the country’s ability to reliably and rationally govern itself or fashion a consensus around solving long-term problems, or even to agree on the most basic standards of right and wrong.

Let’s distinguish this from the classic generational critique, distilled by the eye-rolling “OK, boomer” catchphrase that took off in late 2019 just before the pandemic. In fact, the massive cohort of Americans born in the decade following the end of World War II was one of extraordinary creativity and idealism. This generation was on the front lines of the racial and sexual liberation movements that transformed American life. Its music and films (Stephen Spielberg will turn 80 in December) shaped modern culture on a global scale. So too have its technology innovators (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both later-side boomers, from 1955) changed history as profoundly as any elected official of their times.

It is in the realm of politics that the legacy is rancid. This was a generation whose politics were defined by a single question, “Which side are you on?” The argument over the answer has kept the country preoccupied for going on six decades.

This generation’s penchant for a moralizing brand of politics — in which opponents are not just wrong-headed but in fundamental ways wrong-hearted, even wicked — began on college campuses in the 1960s in arguments over Vietnam and whether one looked sympathetically or contemptuously at the blossoming counterculture.

Few imagined that different incarnations of these early arguments would continue into adulthood and now old age. 1990s politics were a morality play pitting Bill Clinton who won the White House promising to repeal a “decade of greed and self-seeking” in the Reagan-era 1980s, against Newt Gingrich and self-styled Republican revolutionaries, who sought to use Clinton’s sexual transgressions to drive him from office. Clinton, who in most moods tried to be a uniter, survived only by posing the divisive “which side are you on” question to advantage: Many more people were with him than Gingrich.

9/11 looked briefly like an event that would transcend political divisions and unite the country around shared conviction. Soon enough though, George W. Bush’s confrontational leadership style and decision to wage war not only in Afghanistan but Iraq meant that national security became one more subject to ask which side are you on. The combination of Bush’s wars and the 2008 financial meltdown were key prerequisites to Donald Trump’s later takeover of the GOP.

Above all, it was Trump’s insight that the convergence of social media and always-on mobile technology meant that incendiary language and vicious attacks on opponents could be more than an occasional tactic. Harnessed with abandon, it could be the basis for an entire grievance-based political movement.

Historically, political arguments — no matter how heated or even violent — were a means to resolving important substantive issues. Historian James G. Randall in 1940 termed the parade of failed leaders and Supreme Court justices in the 1840s and 1850s “the blundering generation,” whose alleged short-sightedness and grandstanding led to a violent Civil War. Most later historians rejected the characterization. There was no middle path or incremental remedy that was going to prevent a climactic conflict over slavery, the most important question of the country’s first century.

In today’s politics, by contrast, the argument itself, and the occasion to excoriate the opposition, often is more important than the substance of the argument. This is how Republicans can rally behind Trump on Iran or tariffs or the intersection of presidential decisions with family business interests, even as his policies diverge from their own past positions and they would no doubt bitterly denounce the exact same choices from a Democratic president.

This highlights several distinctive signatures of this generation’s politics.

First, they often revolve around questions of values and virtue. That’s a different emphasis than the previous generation’s arguments, which were more typically about material things. If one person thinks marginal tax rates should be 40 percent, and another thinks they should be 30 percent, they might fight passionately but in the end it’s pretty easy to compromise at 35. In 1990 by contrast, Gingrich anticipated Trumpian politics by 25 years when he co-authored a famous memo urging Republicans to cast their opponents with such language as “sick,” “traitors,” “bizarre,” “corrupt,” and “pathetic.” Hillary Rodham Clinton usually didn’t talk this way in public, but there was the famous episode when she revealed at a fund-raiser she thought was private her view that half of Trump supporters belonged to a “basket of deplorables” with racist or sexist views. The language of the culture wars leaves little for opponents to say to one another.

Which leads to a second signature of the 1946 generation’s politics. They remain chronically unstable. In other chapters of American history big questions have been resolved with a new consensus. The 1930s battles over the New Deal, including the creation of Social Security, were as passionate as anything in contemporary time. By the time Dwight Eisenhower returned the White House to Republicans in the 1950s, both he and voters had moved on. Richard Nixon, likewise, didn’t want to keep arguing in the 1970s about the passage of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. By contrast, MAGA Republicans are still up for a fight about Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act 16 years after its passage.

Clinton, Bush and Obama all hoped that their presidencies would produce lasting ideological and partisan realignments. But none of them did — and each were followed by presidents of the opposite party who were dismissive of their predecessor’s records. Nor is it likely that Trump will fare differently. For all he dominates his party, his coalition has deep issue divides on national security and the role of big business, for instance, that promise to flare the moment Trump personally is gone from power.

That’s the final thing to say about the 1946 babies. They have been around a very long time — and there’s a strong chance they will be around a good while longer.

In 1946, the average life expectancy of U.S. presidents was 68 years. FDR, the dominant figure in American life for a dozen years — a feat Trump will soon match — had died the year before at the age of just 63.

For the past half-century, starting with Gerald Ford, presidents on average have died at age 95.

In one way or another, the generational cohort that vaulted the Summer of 1946 presidents will keep demanding to know “which side are you on” until the answer is “the side that is six feet underground.”

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