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Through the two candidates, two Americas were trying to define themselves—a new America, struggling to be born, not necessarily promising, and an old America, its virtues not necessarily outworn. In this clash, Ronald Reagan won.
Even before the 1984 election was decided, we had a glimpse of things to come—for the surges affect both parties, will go on and are certain to change our political culture to absorb the new cultures. Perhaps the best way of telling the story of what happened in 1984, and what is likely to happen by 1988, is to go, step by step, through the forces that rocked this strange year.
The first of the upwellings—the emergence of a new generation in American politics—was surprising only for being a surprise.
Generational upheaval is as characteristic of politics as it is of life. All through American history, the young behead the father generation, and the greater the triumphs of the fathers, the longer their influence lasts. The Revolutionary fathers led this nation for almost 50 years, until Andrew Jackson displaced them in 1828. The Civil War leaders lasted almost as long—until Theodore Roosevelt, a child in the Civil War, replaced them in 1901. In 1960 the Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in Europe was succeeded by a naval lieutenant of the same war. That war generation still holds on, but this year a new generation first flexed its muscle.
It was the size and quality of this new generation that most disturbed politics in 1984—first on the Democratic side and then later, with possibly greater future impact, on the Republican side, as young men maneuvered for the succession in 1988.
The quickest description of the new people, Democratic and Republican alike, was "the baby-boom generation." When the veterans of the "good war" of 1941-45 came home, nature worked its seduction on them. The first command of nature was to find a mate, then to find a job, then a home, preferably in the suburbs, where they could raise children. The result of the mating urge was a biological explosion. From a national birth rate of 18.8 per thousand before the war, the youngsters pushed the number up to 26.6 per thousand in 1947. There were 2.4 million babies in 1939, 3.8 million in 1947, and the crop hit its peak of 4.3 million in 1957. By 1984 the children of the baby boom were between 20 and 38 years old and accounted for 75.5 million of all American citizens—43% of those of voting age. They were ready to change the world their parents had designed—and they were different.
Theirs was an open world of new sciences and new wonders of technology; experiment lured them to try anything new. That might be a foreign car, a beeping microwave oven, a computer incomprehensible to oldsters, a simple word processor or advanced data base access that gave new tools to leadership. Their social values were different too. They found living together, man and woman, without marriage unobjectionable; the Pill had divorced sex from commitment. They were likely to be tolerant of homosexuals; they were tolerant of women in the workplace. To reach them politics had to offer something new too.
But what? No one could define this for