America Rebooted into Gen X Mode
Trump 47 is what happens when Gen X takes over
Generation X, aka 13ers (as in the 13th generation of Americans, of the archetype “Nomad”), is anyone two young to remember JFK’s assassination (about 1962) to about 1986. This includes Barrack H. Obama, but does not include Donald J. Trump. Nonetheless, Trump 47 is the first time in history the country is operating as if Gen X was running it.
Obama, though a Gen Xer, was surrounded by Boomers and even a few Silents (the people born from 1925 to 1942). The institutions, still mostly intact and respected, were designed by and for the post-WWII era. The corporations that mattered were the same—run by Boomers and Silents and designed and operated for the post-WWII world. No matter how Obama tried to change them, he couldn’t. They were too big and too stable.
But Obama could do something: he could destabilize them.
And he did.
Like the CIA, Obama mistakenly believed that his destabilization would work in his favor since he thought of it. So, he destabilized the institutions that were rock solid from 60 years of care, maintenance, and refinement. The FBI, the CIA, the State Department, universities, public health institutions, great American corporations, the armed forces—name the institution, Obama destabilized it.
But destabilization is not the same as destruction. Obama did not tear down the institutions; he built them up! He expected the institutions to fix their stability problems in his Image and Likeness. POWs are brainwashed by, first, being mentally, emotionally, and, if necessary, physically destabilized, then exposed to a new reality—a reality that stops the pain. When they operate in this new reality, they are not beaten or frightened or tricked. When they slip back into their old reality, the horrors return. Likewise, when an institution is is destabilized and offered a path to safety, it takes it. Joe Biden arrived just in time to throw the institutions their lifelines.
But just as the CIA’s best laid plan, perfectly executed, rarely achieve the Nirvana final outcomes dreamed of, Obama’s destabilization and Joe Biden’s ineptness exposed the rot inside these institutions for all to see. Not all said, “w—- t— f——?” but all saw and knew. The WTF crowd said, “burn it down.” The anti-WTF crowd said, “OMG! There’s nothing see here. Everything’s fine. Joy!” The WTFers paid for those institutions; the anti-WTFers did not. The anti-WTFers actual made bank from the unstable institutions, which lost all accounting functions in the destabilization process. They became ATMs for the “everything’s fine” crowd who, in turn, became the institutions’ greatest champions to point of censoring, canceling, and even trying to kill the WTFers. They created snappy slogans. “When you attack me, you’re attacking science.” “Diversity is our strength.” “I want to understand white rage.” “Listen here, Jack.”
But the WTFers, who were throughout the post-WWII, the champions of these institutions, were like, “Sorry, dude, but this is my money they’re wasting, my kids they’re mutilating, my house they’re squatting, and my store they’re looting.” WTFers responded with their own slogans: “Let’s Go Brandon,” “FAFO,” “Based and red-pilled.” The WTFers became rabidly irreverent. They laughed at the unlaughable. They parodied and ridiculed and mocked and demand extreme measures. They were unemotional, unless you count snark and sarcasm as emotions. They became cold, ruthless dismantlers of the very institutions they once idolized because they saw the rot inside and knew they were looking at a tear-down, not a renovation.
Total role reversal.
Now, let’s look at some descriptions of Gen X from the men who defined the generation even before Douglas Coupland named it. From Howe and Strauss’s The Fourth Turning: (remember that Howe and Strauss labeled this generation “13ers” before Coupland’s book, Generation X, was published.)
The first 13ers engaged in high-risk behavior coming of age, but today’s fledgling householders are beginning to turn against personal and public risk. (p. 97)
13ers have come to expect little of themselves as a generation—a fact that itself has become part of their collective persona. A similar trait arose in the generations of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower. (p. 68)
The 13ers’ global peers, today’s youthful “90s generation” (in France, the Bof generation, as in “who cares?”) are described in the media as fun-loving and rootless, environmentalist and entrepreneurial, pragmatic and market-oriented, globalist economically yet xenophobic socially, and less interested in politics than in making money. (p. 120)
Throughout the 13ers’ childhood era, the adult media battered their collective reputation and, over time, began to portray this generation as having absorbed the negative message. “We’re rotten to the core,” sang the preteen thug-boys in Bugsy Malone. “We’re the very worst—each of us contemptible, criticized, and cursed.” As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, teenagers began repeating this line, as when one student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.” (p. 195)
Parents were shunned if they tried to bring small children into restaurants or theaters. Many rental apartments started banning children. The ascendant Zero Population Growth movement declared each extra child to be “pollution,” a burden on scarce resources. (p. 195)
“Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said after the crash that hit his peers at the cusp of what should have been their highest-earning years. (p. 287)
Nomad generations—what Christian Slater refers to as “a long list of dead, famous wild people”—have always been the ones who lose ground in wealth, education, security, longevity, and other measures of progress. Yet they have also been the generations who lay at the fulcrum between triumph and tragedy, the ones who hoist their society through the darkest days of Crisis. (p. 288)
In a recent [1997] genre of action films (from War Games and Back to the Future to Terminator and Independence Day), a stock drama unfolds. A young protagonist—alone, unprepared, and immersed in a junky culture—is chosen by chance to decide the fate of humanity. The situation looks dicey. The protagonist, too, has slim expectations of success. But at a pivotal moment, this lonely wayfarer challenges destiny, deals with the stress, zeroes in on what matters, does what is required, and comes out on top. The most popular video games, following the same script, stress one-on-one action and deft timing: Find a treasure, grab the tools, rescue a princess, save the kingdom, slay the enemy, and get out alive. Everything is yes-no, full of code words and secret places—in a style one TV executive calls “Indiana Jones meets a game show.” (p. 288)
They will carry the reputation for having come of age at a time when good manners and civic habits were not emphasized in homes and schools. With their arrival, midlife will lose moral authority and gain toughness. Their culture will be a hodgepodge of unblending styles and polyethnic currents that will reflect the centrifugal impulse from which many Americans (including 13ers) will now be eager to escape. (p. 288)
They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn’t seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation’s core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. (p. 290)
“I’ve glimpsed our future,” warns a high school valedictorian in the film Say Anything, “and all I can say is—go back.” (p. 288)
The 13er mind-set will be hardboiled and avuncular, the risk taking now mellowed by a Crisis-era need for security. (p. 289)
Throughout the economy, 13ers will be associated with risk and dirty jobs.
They will seek workable outcomes more than inner truths.
“We won’t have a bad backlash against our lost idealism,” predicts Slacker filmmaker Richard Linklater, since his generation “never had that to begin with.”
13ers’ ironic self-deprecation will render their claims unusually selfless. “We may not get what we want. We may not get what we need,” chanted the young adults in True Colors. “Just so we don’t get what we deserve.” (p. 290)
13ers could emerge as the leaders of a Crisis-era populism based on the notion of taking raw action now and justifying it later. (p. 291)
They will vote against their own short-term interests if persuaded that the community’s long-term survival requires it. Where the Silent once agonized over procedural braking mechanisms, where Boomers had huge arguments over gesture and symbolism, 13er voters will disregard motive and ideology, and will simply ask if public programs get results that are worth the money. (p. 290)
This generation’s institutional rootlessness will make its leaders and electorates highly volatile, capable of extreme crosscurrents. Lacking much stake in the old order, many 13ers might impulsively welcome the notion of watching it break into pieces. They won’t regard the traditional safety nets as important to their lives. The real-life experience of their own circles will reinforce their view that when people lose jobs or money, they can find a way to cope, deal with it, and move on. Looking back on their own lives, they will conclude that many of the Awakening- and Unraveling-era trends that may have felt good to older generations didn’t work so well for them—or for the nation. Come the Crisis, many 13ers will feel that emergency action is necessary to re-create the kind of secure world they will feel was denied them in childhood. (p. 291)
Does any of that sound familiar?
We saw glimpses of this Gen X world from 2017 to 2020. But that administration was bleeding from the walls with Boomer and Silent angst. Even Gen Xers of that era—Paul Ryan, Reince Preibus, Jared Kushner—were Boomers or Silents trapped in middle-aged bodies. Trump, Bannon, and a few other from that administration exuded Gex X, but the administration as a whole did not.
But the intervening administration revealed the rot of more than just institutions—it exposed the fact the entire post-WWII world had corroded and grown hopelessly corrupt. The corporations, entertainment, science, medicine, technology, markets, the FBI, DOJ, and Defense Department, the CIA—all of it was rotting from the foundation up, as if someone had soaked the inner walls and sprinkled black mold spores throughout. When Biden came to office, the smell was impossible to ignore or explain away.
Everything Trump is doing is exactly what a good Hollywood screenwriter and director would have their hero do in one of the Gen X movies mentioned. Everything Trump has been through would have explained and justified his actions and his attitude. Even before he won the 2016 election, he was spied on, lied about, falsely prosecuted, impeached twice, lied about, called stupid and mean, investigated, indicted, arrested, finger-printed, mug-shot, rifle shot, hunted, convicted, and left for dead.
But, like the protagonists in War Games and Back to the Future, he picked himself up, put a bandage on his ear, and determined to fix a country in rapid decline—so rapid and so deep that many of us (myself included) believed it was past the point of no return. (A possible I would still keep a hedge on.)
Trump’s second act is peak Gen X. Almost all of his key appoints are Gen Xers, and they’re acting like Gen Xers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a warrior Colonel, and he’s discharging his duties much more like a colonel than like the career State Department seat warmers that preceded him. (Lloyd Austin was a career office goon, as was Colin Powell.) Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, spent her first weekend in office kicking in doors with ICE, a .40 on her hip. Kash Patel, next head of the FBI, has forced dozens of top FBI people to resign—and he hasn’t even been confirmed. Trump has ordered the end of the Department of Education, gutted and reassigned USAID, tricked Canada and Mexico to adopt his will on border security and drug infiltration, deported thousands of illegals, banned DEI, BLM, CRT, transgender everything, all identity months, and sexual mutilation of children (which has been our vaunted medical industries chief source of amusement for the past six years.) He has wrestled the Panama Canal away from China and is on the verge of making Greenland the 51st state. Trump also found time to humiliate the president of Colombia while playing golf, get a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia, reach the highest approval rating of his life. And he’s only been in office two weeks.
What this means, of course, is that we’ve had the final political realignment of the 4th Turning. MAGA is not a moment in time, but the start of an era. The next 80 to 100 years will see 4.5 seasons (the final four or five years of Crises of the outgoing saeculum and the four seasons of the next) that be as distinct culturally, politically, and even architecturally as the 1970s were from the 1910s. Many brands and companies you grew up with and felt had always been and will always be will disappear forever. New “forever” companies will emerge or rise to take their place. We see this already in Tesla, Starlink, and X. (Oddly, the big tech companies are, in many way, more post-WWII than MAGA. Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple—they might not make it.)
70 years from now some young scholars find a dusty copy of The Fourth Turning and become inspired to write a new pre-eulogy for this saeculum we are about to enter. They will probably be of the Prophet archetype, like the Boomers Howe and Strauss. They will like be most fascinated by their younger Nomad siblings, as Howe and Strauss were, because the Nomads will be coming of age about the time they begin their venture. They will expand on what Howe and Strauss started, but will update their models with new research and better data. They will probably rate the accuracy of The Fourth Turning’s prophecies and find them remarkably good. (We can already judge that.) Then, they will fill in the time between 1997 and 2097 or so. They will identify the Gray Champion who saved America in its darkest hour—a champion too old to belong to the generation that defined the new epoch, but, at the same time, the epitome of that generation’s mood, temperament, and ethos. They will look back to the last two week of January 2025 and remark: “This two-week binge of change and reform was the dividing line between the post-WWII era and the MAGA era. They will be struck by how the country has sunk in significance but grown in reputation. They will note the American empire dissolved into the new American Republic and compare us favorably to the Romans who never found their way back to their roots. Finally, they will note that the foundation for this peaceful, prosperous, and quiet America was laid by the least likely group of all: wild, irreverent, slackers led by a Gray Champion pitchman, hotel magnate, and TV star.
And perhaps they’ll end by updating the second-last paragraph of Howe and Strauss’s masterpiece:
If the saeculum continues, a girl born today will come of age just before the Fourth Turning’s Crisis climax, enter midlife during the ensuing High, and reach old age during an Awakening. In all likelihood, she will live to glimpse another Unraveling. If health and history treat her well, she could (as a centenarian) witness another Crisis catalyze on the eve of the twenty-second century. She will have much to tell her youngest grandson—who, if he survives that circa-2100 Crisis, can teach the saeculum’s lessons to his own grandson who, in time, could grow old as another in a long line of Gray Champions. (p. 334)
With a kind note to one author’s mom who told him the stories that caused him to stop and read The Fourth Turning at moment when everything seemed to be falling apart.