One might be forgiven for wondering whether such generational categories are anything but a pundit’s lazy approach to thinking about historical change. The imagined subject of “the generation” tends to be middle class, white, and liberal by default, while the hypothesis of generational identification serves to obscure the ways that our society is divided, especially by class and by race. In what sense is the life experience of a white Princeton graduate in 1995 comparable to that of an African-American Detroiter who attended community college and graduated in the same year?
Even if its sociology was off, however, the idea of Generation X can still tell us something: it frames a particular way of approaching politics. To be Gen X was to be disaffected from the consumer norms of the 1980s, but to be pessimistic about any chance for social transformation. It was to be ironic, skeptical, deflating of pretension and authority, detached from social movements and political parties alike. Implicit within this pose were the seeds of a quiet radicalism, a distance from the world as it is that could, under the right conditions, blossom into an open challenge, as in the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. But more often, this stance was interpreted as anomie, a withdrawal from political life.
Whether or not this sensibility was actually shared by that generation of people born between the 1960s and the 1980s—whose politics were far more varied than the stereotype suggests—matters less than the way the cultural category sought to present the problem of political life in the age after Reagan, the first years after the end of the Cold War. The idea of Generation X was, in a way, a symptom of the broader crisis of the left after the 1970s (and even more, after 1989). The disappointment intrinsic to it reflected the sense of failure following the student mobilizations of the 1960s, which had romanticized youth as the vanguard of social revolution. The children growing up in the aftershock of the collapse of those movements could not help but appear less engaged by contrast; one might say that Generation X was taking the political reality of defeat and redefining it as a cultural position. But today’s crisis of the center raises a question the trend pieces have overlooked: what remains of Generation X in an age of more radical transformations?