The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The United States had a population below 140 million when World War II ended in 1945. It would add more than 70 million babies before 1964. At war’s end there had been only one year in the nation’s history when as many as 3 million babies were born. By the early 1950s, annual births were over 4 million and they kept rising into the 1960s. It was not as big a leap in fertility as people often imagine. Sexuality had not been “pent up.” Birth rates had been rising steadily during the war—since 1933, in fact. But over time, high fertility gave those born after the war an extraordinary preponderance. In the first years of the twenty-first century, there were about 80 million Baby Boomers in the United States. For a generation, they made up 37 or 38 percent of the voting population. By contrast, the generation born between 1930 and 1945 peaked at about 18 percent of the electorate. It produced no presidents. The Boomers’ demographic weight allowed them to seize control of, enforce, and re-orient the social transformation their elders had inaugurated. In a free-market democracy, population translates directly into political power, through votes. It translates indirectly into economic power, through market share. And it eventually translates into cultural power, because advertisers (and, less avowedly, artists) aim to titillate and flatter large audiences. From the get-go, no generation was more fussed over and pandered to.