Thread by @WinthropWickard

This was an excellent blog post. As I commented on it, I think the starting point should be the fall of the Berlin Wall. A whole bunch of trends begin at around that point: Boomers inheriting power from the Greatest, the crime decline, the rise of the mass-market computer... 1/n

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1140877055807983616

@Scholars_Stage asks: what is the end date of the period going to be? We haven't yet met it, but there's a strong sense it's coming soon. While cheap, shallow generational analyses are common, the period from about 1990 to 202X (to be determined is the Boomer Age. 2/n

1990: oldest Boomer is 44, youngest is late-20s. At least four Boomer presidents take power from 1993 onward; three of them (Clinton, Bush Jr., Trump) were born in a single summer (1946).
2030: oldest Boomer is 84, youngest 65. The President is almost certainly Gen X. 3/n

In geopolitics, this is an era between Cold Wars. The first Cold War ends on November 9th, 1989, though it takes a couple years for the settlement to finish.

We are probably stumbling into a Cold War with China that will define much of the first half of the 21st century. 4/n

We don't know what the contours will look like, but there is a general sense that we are back in an uneasy, unstable world.

Geopolitically, three eras:

1. The Berlin Wall to 9/11: America only superpower, world at peace and mostly prosperous, salad days of globalization. 5/n

Intervention limited and mostly only needed against small-time tinpot war criminals like Milosević.

2: 9/11 to 2016. Unipolarity beginning to reverse, but American mental model remains that of the 1990s (remember Romney getting laughed at for 2012 worries about Russia). 6/n

3. 2016-???: Shock and confusion upon learning that America is no longer the only Great Power in the room and hasn't been since about the start of the decade. Intervention needed perhaps now more than ever, but the hangover from Iraq means there's little appetite for it. 7/n

Socially, also three eras or so, mostly but not entirely overlapping.

1989-2005: Bush Sr-Clintonite consensus. Abortion safe, legal and above all rare; gay marriage anathema on the right and suspicious on the left. Socialism not taken seriously off campus, communism never. 8/n

Consensus on racial politics: colorblind ("I'm not racist; I don't see race!")

Beginning around 2004-2005, this period ends and a decade of liberal ascendency starts. I would date it to Katrina and the Iraq stagnation, which (I think) really sunk the Bush administration. 9/n

2. Katrina to Obergefell. Liberal ascendency socially, hastened by the financial crisis. Guiding lodestar is same-sex marriage, which unites various strains of liberal around one litmus issue. In the background, the Great Recession hollows out Middle America. 10/n

Opioids begin to replace churches and "pas d'ennemis à gauche" starts to take hold towards the end. Nobody notices--yet.

3. Post-Obergefell, the biggest liberal issue ends in a win--and everybody splinters in different directions, trying to invent their own litmus test. 11/n

2016 stuns the nation with the news that the apparent socially-liberal consensus wasn't what it looked like. Three years later, we still don't really know what it *was*. Recovery comes into full blossom, but a vague sense of foreboding sets over the nation. 12/n

Like the fragile stability of the interwar period, it is clear that something very big and probably very bad is going to happen quite soon, marking a clear break in history. Nobody really knows what it is yet, but there are a lot of plausible bad possibilities. 13/13