The Baby Boomers' Deal With The Devil?

Alan Ehrenhalt, the Executive Editor of Governing Magazine, looks back at what the baby boomers have wrought -- and wonders if it was all for the best. From Newsweek's Boomer Files this week:

... it's hard to escape the sense that we were complicit in our own unique kind of unholy bargain.

Most of us born in the early years after World War II grew up in a world of stability and order: lasting marriages, moms at home, fathers with permanent employment, local merchants who knew us and watched us, neighborhoods where the people next door were ever-present and predictable. The three television networks ran essentially the same programs; the bread and soup and cereal all tasted alike. It was snug; it was also, as we all know, widely perceived as monotonous and a little claustrophobic, as well as unfair to many members of society.

... as they became adults the most fortunate soon found themselves tasting similar treats: the erosion of sexual restraint, the ability to travel virtually anywhere, magic electronic devices that brought instant knowledge and entertainment even Faust never imagined, and most of all, ever-expanding choice—the freedom to make important life decisions and then unmake them at will: new locations, new spouses, new careers, all subject to endless re-evaluation out of a concern that something more exciting might lie around the corner.

... remarkable as it might seem, quite a few of these baby boomers began to feel nostalgic for the limited life they had resisted so vehemently when they were young.

If you were born in 1947, as I was, then the odds are you spent your childhood learning one set of social customs and moral rules and the prime years of your youth throwing them overboard. That's precisely the revolution that the smartest and most articulate among us wanted and fought for—it's just been a very troubling revolution to live with.

The title of the piece: "The Faustian Generation."

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Ehrenhalt wrote The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office" and "The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America"