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By Root 6707 0

Although the Great Depression ended in 1940, World War II concluded in 1945, and the most dangerous moments of the Cold War had passed by the mid-1960s, those searing historical traumas lived on in the memories and consciousness of the men and women who had lived through them. It forged their collective identity as not only the Greatest Generation but also “the prudent generation.” The press mocked President George H. W. Bush for using the word “prudent” so often, but it was a favorite word of many members of his generation—and for good reason. They had encountered more than one black swan—the one-in-a-million kind of disruption that can capsize the whole world and turn rich into poor, the settled into refugees, the carefree civilian into the battle-scarred soldier, and the eternal optimist into the cautious investor. Taken together, their life experiences made that generation prudent, inclined toward collective action, and comfortable with government and expert authority.

As the Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel put it, our parents’ generation came of age at a time “when we took the importance of government for granted—when world events made obvious the importance of government and collective action on behalf of the public good. The shared premise was that the public realm mattered and that government action was a necessary instrument of the public good. The debate was over how much and to what extent.”

Collective action on behalf of the public good, after all, had been necessary for survival, and it was by fighting the Depression, winning World War II, and containing the Soviet Union—by doing big, hard things together—that the Greatest Generation achieved remarkable success.

As the Cold War ended and that generation started retiring, it was replaced in positions of leadership by the baby boom generation (to which we, the authors, belong): the cohort of seventy-eight million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. We have to admit that the conduct of our own generation, in contrast to that of our parents, has been more than a little selfish, pampered, and, at times, reckless and irresponsible.

Unscathed by great disruptions, unburdened by the necessity of great sacrifice, unpressured by the daily effort of confronting a huge global predator—and, in addition, hurried and besotted by new technologies and electronic markets that have encouraged short-term thinking—the baby boom generation has in too many cases displayed too little fiscal prudence, too much political partisanship, and too short a sense of history to engage in the collective nation-building at home that America badly needs today.

A well-functioning political system must be rooted in something deeper than itself: a culture, which is most vividly expressed through certain values. We believe that as the boomer generation has assumed a dominant place in American society, the country has strayed from three of the core values on which American greatness depended in the past.

The first of these changes involves a shift from long-term investment and delayed gratification, which were characteristic of the Greatest Generation, to short-term gratification and get-it-now-while-you-can thinking, which alas is typical of the baby boom generation.

The second change is the loss of confidence in our institutions and in the authority of their leaders across the society. Related to this is a shift in how this society sees people in authority, whether politicians or scientific experts—a shift from healthy skepticism to cynical suspicion of everything and everyone. This shift makes generating the kind of collective action we need to solve our big problems and update our traditional formula for prosperity that much more difficult.

The third shift in values is a weakening of our sense of shared national purpose, which propelled us in—and was reinforced by—the struggle against fascism in World War II and against communism in the Cold War. As we have emphasized, although the Cold War had its dangers and excesses, and although no one should wish for its return, it