When It Comes to Political Radicalism, Demography is Not Necessarily Destiny

The idea that the lived experience of this or that generation is genuinely alien to the others is exaggerated, and damaging to social cohesion.

Photo: Yeo Khee, Unsplash

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It has been 25 years since University of Toronto economist David Foot wrote Boom, Bust and Echo (1996), the massively influential book that trained us to think of ourselves as charter members of generational cohorts that have little in common. The damage to social cohesion wrought by Foot’s simplistic intergenerational paradigm was immediately evident, as the so-called Depression Generation ostensibly circled the wagons to fret en masse over alienated, underachieving Gen-Xers—who in turn had to watch their backs because the as-yet-unborn Millennium Kids would be a small, privileged cohort to whom everything would come easily.

It is impossible to read Boom, Bust and Echo today without groaning aloud at such cultural and economic miscues—and more generally at the hubris of Foot’s boast that demographics “can explain about two-thirds of everything.” But this does not change the obvious truth that Boom, Bust and Echo unleashed a veritable cottage industry of angry sequels, up to and including Bruce Cannon Gibney’s A Generation of Sociopaths (2017) and Helen Andrews’ Boomers (2021). As a bona fide academic researcher, Professor Foot legitimized a paradigm shift in the way we imagine our lived experience. He brought intellectual credence to the axiom that that the socio-cultural experience of this or that generation is genuinely alien to the others. This axiom is today at work every time we casually remark on the presumed entitlement mentality of Millennials or the alleged hegemonic arrogance of Boomers. It has become a kind of cultural shorthand.

David Foot was not the first writer to lay claim to the prophetic gifts of demographic analysis—far from it. But before him, self-styled pop-demography gurus were mostly called “futurists.” Some, like Alvin Toffler, became celebrity seers, building durable careers as public intellectuals. Others were less well-known in their own time and remain obscure.

Among the latter was the Canadian journalist John Kettle, author of The Big Generation. This book was published early in 1980 but evinced the unmistakable zeitgeist of “futurism” circa the 1970s, when Toffler and others were giving the genre its defining form. Kettle’s book makes for fascinating reading these forty year later, for it demonstrates a fixation on the temperament of young radicals that bears an uncanny resemblance to the anxieties many older Westerners express today.

Consider this recent lament by Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs:

Millennials were once portrayed as an apathetic generation. In the late 1990s, when the first millennials came of age, the Guardian writer Polly Toynbee described them as “airheads and know-nothings.” Over the past five or six years, however, the way this generation (those born between 1981 and 1996) is viewed has changed drastically. The rise of movements such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and Momentum, and the way “woke” campus culture has spread to the corporate world and beyond, have turned perceptions upside down. Today, millennials are typically seen as an intensely politicized generation, and specifically as a generation that embraces radical left-wing ideas. This is increasingly being extended to the first cohorts of the subsequent generation, “generation Z” or the “zoomers.”

Even more poignant is this recent lamentation from veteran Telegraph columnist Janet Daley, who, like many older conservative stalwarts, misspent her own youth as a Trotskyist:

There was a time when I understood the point of political infiltration. The whole idea was to propagate the principle, at every possible opportunity, that all society’s discontents and injustices could be traced to the evils of capitalism. The presentation of an anti-capitalist alternative was explicit and, in its own terms, coherent.

Needless to say, I changed my mind about all of that—as did most (but not all) of the organised Left in the West.

For the life of me, I cannot discern what is being proposed as a replacement for free market economics by the neo-anti-capitalist armies who have so triumphantly seized control of campaigns on climate change or anti-racism. What is their ultimate plan? What exactly are they proposing as an alternative social and economic order? So far as I can see, in the case of the more extreme wing of the climate change movement, the only morally acceptable outcome would be a kind of pre-industrial (even pre-agricultural) primitive communism as practised by hunter-gatherer peoples.

John Kettle’s The Big Generation exhibited all of these now-familiar intergenerational anxieties and more. The book’s promotional boilerplate identified Kettle as “a leading futurist” in Canada. But as a recent obituary noted (Kettle died in May 2020, aged 91), his pedigree included service in the British military and decades writing for such venerable publications as Canadian Architect and the Globe and Mail. Whatever trendy claim to “futurism” Kettle or his publisher might have indulged in 1980, he wrote as a charter member of what he called the “Depression generation” or “the dutiful generation”—the cohorts that “clean off their plates, turn out the lights when they leave a room empty, save jelly jars and pieces of string.”

Kettle despaired that the 6.7-million Canadians born between 1951 and 1966 were charting a course into adulthood that would not only change the country but ruin it. The thesis and tone of the book were summarized in Kettle's bold assertion that “We stand at one of the great divides of Canadian history.” The Big Generation was thus Kettle’s early-warning signal. “The Big Generation is essentially one great unit, bound together by the circumstances of their birth and by size,” he averred. “In some respects they are like extraterrestrial beings who have invaded the planet, bringing exotic, even alien, ideas and attitudes. In most of what they do they break sharply with the past.”

Among the alien attitudes the Big Generation demonstrated, according to Kettle, was a wholesale rejection of their elders’ work ethic—and along with it, the nobility of stoicism. To borrow from the popular parlance of today, Kettle’s Big Generation was populated by churlish, entitled snowflakes:

Unlike their parents, who had jumped at the chance to deliver papers or wash dishes or cars for the spending money to buy a few cherished toys, the children learned that there was little connection between rewards and work; the “rewards” were benefits that arrived almost as a right, and work was simply a nuisance. Big Generation never knew what it was to go to bed hungry, to go without shoes, to be cold, to wear cast-offs, to sleep three or four in a bed, to wear damp clothes until they dried on you…. They reach for painkillers at the least hint of discomfort as if pain were an alien experience that would be dangerous if allowed even the smallest foothold.

In a full chapter dealing with the movement of the Big Generation through the Canadian school system, Kettle's ideological critique was even more explicit. Despite the sacrifices and the ingenuity of older cohorts in engineering the vast growth of schools and universities to accommodate the Big Generation, the young had squandered their educational inheritance. “As a result of the chronic shortage of able and experienced teachers, young and cheerfully ignorant teachers quickly came to form a majority in the profession.” The Big Generation’s incompetent leading wave thus ended up teaching those who trailed:

It takes experience and persistence to grade children and their work consistently and fairly. Grades were abandoned. It takes rigour and application to operate a structured curriculum, to hold a class of children of varying capacities to the outline of a pre-planned program of learning. Curriculums went. In many schools, essay were no longer marked, exams were not set, grades were not allotted; almost everywhere the university entrance exam was dropped. Almost everywhere the strap was abandoned. Whatever seemed stiff, formal or even definite was questioned, and whatever seemed soft, flexible and imaginative was welcomed.

Indulging in the timeless tradition of denigrating young people for attempting to navigate a complex and confusing world over which they have little control—think here of the archetypal “Lost Generation” that preceded Kettle’s, or the “Gen-X” and “Millennial” stereotypes that followed—Kettle affixed to his Big Generation the essential quality of alienation:

Alienation is the feeling that one is in a group but not part of it. A large number of the Big Generation are in the Canadian society but not of it. They do not share its values or goals; though still resident, they are still ex-patriots in spirit, self-exiled rebels. The country they dwell in is increasingly a counterculture set up in opposition to the dominant conventional culture, or a unique and personal universe with only one citizen.

Pampered, precocious and preening, Kettle’s Big Generation was synonymous with the narcissistic self-indulgence of the “Me Generation” popularized in the 1970s by the American writer Tom Wolfe. Yet it was also the forerunner of the “Screwed Generation”—a term popularized circa 2010, ironically, to codify the hopeless demographic hand dealt anyone who had the misfortune of being born after the Big Generation. Said Kettle of the latter:

No generation has been so cajoled with promises of a bright future. None has been so ill-prepared by education for the realities of adult life. None has come out of school with such high ambitions and expectations. Few have encountered so unwelcoming an economy.

As for the question of ideology—per Kristian Niemietz, Janet Daley and their many conservative confrères who perceive that today’s coddled young radicals refuse to grow up—Kettle’s observations were prescient. He simply assumed that his Big Generation would cleave unerringly to its radical zeitgeist and chart a course into adulthood that would remake Canadian society and politics in the image of campus activism:

By the 1990s it will be—or could be—the dominant voice at the polls. What will happen then? A decline in all political activity? A big swing to one of the existing parties? A new political party? A new kind of political action? A terrorist guerilla movement? All of these look possible. Given the inertia of all parties, the NDP could easily be the official opposition in Ottawa toward the end of the 1980s and could form the government some time in this century.

Seen in retrospect, of course, John Kettle’s intergenerational angst was overdrawn, even fanciful. The ink had barely dried on the pages of The Big Generation before the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had ushered in various iterations of cultural and political conservatism (neo-conservatism, neo-liberalism, etc.) so amenable to the Big Generation that a Democratic president could declare in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”

The point is not to nitpick about this or that prognostication from Kettle or anyone else, but to put the deceptively easy (and erroneous) assumptions of pop demographers into context. The claim that “demography is destiny” holds only in so far as longitudinal data can presage large-scale trends that are rooted in biological reality. Demography may be an excellent actuarial predictor of citizens’ needs for health care, education and pensions, for example, but only because populations’ aggregated demand for such services have proved resistant to ephemeral social and political trends. Likewise, demographic analysis may tell us a good deal about aggregated voting blocs but—as we well know from the tumultuous experience of electoral politics over the past decade—it tells us little about how individuals will actually vote, and even less about what political precepts they will carry into the voting booth.

That the world did not turn out as Kettle prophesied ought to comfort anyone alienated by the current crop of leftist activists who appear to actually want to “burn it all down.” Indeed, seen in hindsight, The Big Generation appears to affirm the essential truth of the old canard attributed to Edmund Burke: If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.

So take heart. The ardent young Trotskyists and Guevarists in our midst may yet turn out to be among the Telegraph’s most revered conservative tastemakers. Or vice versa.