Why is Gen X so reactionary?

The truth about how we went from Generation MTV to Generation GOP is less about selling out, and more about the relentless power of nostalgia.

IT IS OVERWHELMINGLY LIKELY that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. It is similarly likely that Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s conservatives, is going to be the country’s next prime minister. If this does indeed come to pass, will Generation X finally get the reactionary government it has always wanted?

As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation”. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed. 

This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?

On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States.  For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X. 

Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC. 

 So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest? 

There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada. 

But there’s another, more common, theory, which argues that Gen X never sold out, because there was nothing to sell out in the first place. The argument goes something like this: The defining trait of Gen X was that it was always apolitical. The everything-sucks anti-establishment pose was mere contrarianism – a gut reaction against whoever might happen to have political or cultural power at any given moment. As Rahim Mohamed put it in The Line, “The only difference between today’s Gen-X counterculture and the one of yesteryear is that, whereas ‘The Man’ was once a suit-clad Yuppie holding a brick phone, today, he’s more likely to be a progressive urban software developer who rides his bike to work.” On this view, it makes perfect sense for Gen Xers to tilt Republican. The “anti-woke” agenda, for example, is “in actuality, a quintessentially Gen X full-court press against a progressive ‘establishment’ that comprises Hollywood, academia and activist corporations.”  

Again, this is an exceedingly common view, and frankly there is a lot to be said for the argument that the alt-right is the new counterculture. But it doesn’t really explain why the Boomers, the members of the original counterculture, haven’t themselves tacked as far to the right as many Gen Xers seem to have. 

One thing worth bearing in mind in these sorts of discussions is that political preferences are a lot less malleable and subject to change over time than we like to think. A recent paper on political preferences, entitled “The Great Society, Reagan’s Revolution, and Generations of Presidential Voting” argues that what overwhelmingly matters to shaping one’s views are the major features of the political landscape during your years of peak socialization, basically the ages of 14-24. In a sense, your political preferences are not much different than your preferences in music or fashion or movies or television or food: We overwhelmingly see these as having peaked in quality in our late teens and early twenties (check out this graph, it is wild).

The authors of the “Great Society” paper linked above have a model that divides post-War Americans into five generations – New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, 1960s Liberals, Reagan Conservatives, and Millennials. Their key finding is that the events forming partisan preferences (and which they claim accounts for over 90% of the macro-level variance in voting trends) occur largely between the ages of 14-24, and a generation’s preferred party is basically fully locked-in by 40. 

On their view, the defining period of the socialization of Gen X (whom they describe as “Reagan Conservatives”) starts with the Carter presidency – marked by stagflation, the energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis – followed by the extended “Morning in America” Reagan presidency and the foreign policy successes of George H. W. Bush. As they argue, the “it’s the economy stupid” focus of the Clinton years might have blunted the baseline conservatism of Gen X only somewhat, given that most Xers were by then well past their period of peak socialization. 

As is often the case, the Canadian experience parallels the American trajectory but in a more bleached out way: The defining political movements of Canada’s 1968 cohort would have been the last Liberal majority under Pierre Trudeau from 1980-1984, and the two conservative parliaments led by Brian Mulroney. This period was marked by relentless and bipartisan constitutional wrangling at the domestic level. To the extent to which there would have been a conservative socialization, it might have been first in Canada’s role as a side player in the end of the Cold War, and then, later, as a response to the effective bankruptcy of the country thanks to decades of (largely Liberal) deficit spending, which was fixed only by extraordinary fiscal austerity throughout the 1990s. This latter period is what might at least partly explain the dominant concern Canadian Gen Xers have for relatively straightforward economic issues. 

The tl;dr then: Why is Gen X so conservative? Because we were raised in conservative times.

If there is a lesson in this, it is about the overwhelming power of nostalgia. Nostalgia shapes pretty much everything in our culture, and there is no real reason politics should be any different. Whether anything can and should be done about that is a question for another time. — ap

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From the X-Files

• RIP Shannen Doherty. Here’s my earlier article about the death of her 90210 classmate Luke Perry.

• Happy 60th birthday Courtney Love.

• RIP Evan Wright, dead by suicide at 59. Wright was a remarkable journalist, and author of a masterpiece of war reporting, Generation Kill. The miniseries based on that book is hugely underrated and might be David Simon’s best work.