Despair of a Gen-Xer

We were promised the end of history. Instead history is kicking us in the groin.

The world sucks and I feel like I am bearing its sucky-ness worse because of when I was born and raised. I’m Gen-X. I grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. I came into adulthood when it ended with all the promise of a genuine reordered world.

I write this piece as a need to rationalize my sense of gloom. But it’s also a survey. Do other people of my generation also feel a sense of forsaken hope. Or is it just me?  

The event that shaped my politics was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. He would lead us into nuclear war. His approach to the big bad Soviets was an arms build up and existential rhetoric rather than an attempt to coexist. The zeitgeist of that era is portrayed the movies The Day After and War Games, with the threat of nuclear conflagration hanging on a knife’s edge.[1]

I signed my senior-year high school yearbook with “See you in Nicaragua!” I genuinely felt that Reagan wanted to start a new Vietnam War in Central America with us as fodder. We only escaped the draft because Reagan used proxy troops funded by an illegal arms scheme and terrorist pay-offs made possible by subverting the U.S. Constitution. (The Iran-Contra Scandal was much more of a threat to our Constitutional order than the malfeasances of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, yet it is curiously the one that never triggered impeachment proceedings.)  It was an ominous time.

I grew up with an assumption that the Cold War was our immutable state of affairs. This was not something that we could end; we just needed to abide it.

By the late 1980s, however, things began to change. And I almost missed it. I recall an a-ha moment, at some point in early 1989 while eating breakfast. I was reading a newspaper story about the final Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or maybe elections in Poland. Glasnost and perestroika were in the air. I was so busy with college things – reading Goethe and listening to Stravinsky -- that I realized I hadn’t absorbed the pace of change. By November the Berlin Wall fell. Shit got real.[2]

I started my first professional job the same week that Germany reunified, in October 1990. As a foreign policy analyst, I had an armchair view of this new world. Congress sought a peace dividend from ending the arms race. The Soviet Union fell apart. States relinquished nuclear weapons. I was part of a coalition working to approve a package of aid to former Soviet states to help them democratize and disarm, which included a meeting in the Roosevelt room of Reagan’s Vice President’s White House. Imagine that.   

The phrase that best captured this new zeitgeist was “The End of History” from a 1989 essay and subsequent book by the scholar Francis Fukuyama:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

While I acknowledge the scholarly nuances of his argument (and the fact Fukuyama has updated his thesis and thinking), the “end of history” did frame our popular perception that we had prevailed – the “we” being democracy, liberalism, openness, rationality and a sense that the oneness of humanity triumphed over tribalism.

And yet here we are. The 2020s. Freedom House’s annual survey found that global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year in 2023.  Authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism are on the rise everywhere. In Europe, where the continent’s 20^th century authoritarian depredations can still be discussed in the open, far-right parties are in the electoral mainstream in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Hungary’s government has gone fully illiberal (thus acquiring a fan base among American conservatives). The religio-nationalist government of India moving is rapidly disproving the country’s label as the world’s largest democracy.

We’ve got one nuclear power (Russia) invading and occupying a neighbor (Ukraine),[3] another nuclear power (China) threatening to same (to Taiwan) and an undeclared nuclear power (Israel) committing war crimes, potentially genocide and apartheid, all with the military and political support of the United States. Not to mention genocidal conflicts and crimes against humanity in Sudan, Myanmar, China, Azerbaijan and elsewhere, or the swath of coups across the chest of Africa.

In the United States, democracy itself is being questioned. At the biggest gathering of American conservative activists (Conservative Political Action Conference) in February 2024, a keynote speaker pledged “the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this, right here.” This occurred as Republican primary voters are giving big wins to renominate Donald Trump, who has promised to be a dictator on day one, plans to round up undesirable people and put them in camps and to replace nonpartisan civil servants with party loyalists, encouraged Vladimir Putin to attack NATO allies while pledging not to defend them, and calls China’s dictator Xi Jinping “smart, brilliant” and strong. Oh, and he incited a mob to overturn a legitimate election result and keep himself in power. With impunity granted by his allies in Congress.

Kin to our embrace of Fukuyama’s famous phrase is the pop political philosophy we derive from George Santayana’s quote, often paragraphed as “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Taken together, they suggest all we have to do is study history to avoid reverting to the world we thought we had evolved out of.

Well, look around. See what Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Narendra Modi, Victor Orbán, Nayib Bukele, Benjamin Netanyahu, Javier Milei, Giorgia Meloni and friends are doing on the leading edge of neo-authoritarianism in places where democracy once prevailed. They’re not innovating, they’re using old playbooks. It feels like a revision of Santayana for the 2020s would read: “Many who study history intend to repeat it.”

I’ve read enough history books to know that history runs in cycles, and that malevolence is endemic to human experience. Intellectually I know that my sense of vanished hope is emotional and psychological and not based on some rupture of a law of human nature. But it hits nonetheless.

So that’s my thesis: that members of my generation feel the weight of reversion greater than others. Or maybe that’s just me. I want to hear your thoughts. Are you a Gen Xer who feels the same? Or a non-Gen Xer who does? Or neither or none? Leave a comment.

And so as not to end on a entirely dispiriting note, here’s Kris Kristofferson’s Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down.

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[1] Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic about how he used such movies and MTV to teach today’s students what it was like to live in that time.

[2] Of course, the Tiananmen Square massacre forced a split screen view of 1989. While we took it seriously at the time, there was a hope it was an aberration, something time has solidly disproved.

[3] Who thought the world see a tank war ever again?