The Bulwark Podcast - Philip Bump: The Baby Boom Generation Is Winding Down

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

America has long responded to the needs of Baby Boomers, and the generation reshaped the country as it grew older. But now, its grip on the direction of America is starting to lessen, and that's creating inter-generational tensions. Philip Bump joins Charlie Sykes today. Show Notes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is March 16th, 2023. I'm Charlie Sykes, joined by Philip Bump, national columnist for the Washington Post and author of a new book about the baby boomers. So first of all, Philip, how are you? I'm well, how are you, sir? As a baby boomer, you guys are going to miss us when we're gone. I mean, the book is The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom, and The Future of Power in America. You know, I mean, it's sort of easy to dunk on the baby boom,

but you guys are. You know, you can look back on this and go, hey, geez, gosh, you know, kind of. I mean, look, you know, my parents back on this and go, hey, geez, gosh, you know, kind of. I mean, look, you know, my parents are baby boomers. So, yeah, absolutely. At a very minimum. But, yeah, I mean, I'm happy to get into it. But I think that one of the points of the book is that the baby boom generation broadly is misunderstood. And its scale alone leads to sort of negative perceptions among rest Americans.

I haven't talked more about it, but I agree. I'm actually joking because as a baby boomer, I've long been sick of the baby boomers. The most entitled smug generation ever, who then decided that every other subsequent generation was more smug and entitled. The book, and I want to get to it in a little while. I'm just reading from the back of this.

You have some great blurb action on your book. The book is The Aftermath. The Aftermath is a sweeping assessment of how the baby boom created modern America and where power, wealth, and politics will shift as the boom ends. How much longer than we'd expected will boomers control wealth? Yeah, we're not going away. Will millennials get shortchanged for jobs and capital as Gen Z rises? What kind of pressure will boomers exert on the healthcare system?

And how do generations and parties overlap? When will regional identity trump age or ethnic or racial identity? This is really good stuff. So we'll get to it. But you've been a busy guy. And we just have to run through the pattern here of the various things that are going on. Let's start with your most recent new Quinnipiac poll out that would suggest that Fox News is losing the PR war. You have two-thirds of Americans, including two out of five Republicans, saying that Fox News should be held accountable for the election lies. Now, as you point out, this does not mean they will lose in court, but

those are some pretty stark numbers for the C-suites over at Fox News. Yeah, I mean, it's ironic too, obviously, since a lot of the reason that they pushed forward with those lies after the 2020 election is because they were worried about losing business, right? It is not the case that every single Republican is a Fox News viewer, but obviously the network is heavily dependent upon Republicans for its base. And the fact that four in 10 of them think that there should be some accountability here is stark. I mean, look, the poll question for Quinnipiac is not very generous to Fox News. I mean, it presented very starkly, you know, here is what happened, Rupert Murdoch, recognizing that there had been misinformation that had been presented. And I think that as a someone who works for a newspaper, I'm obviously cognizant of the fact

that people think that there should be a level of accountability for incorrect newspaper, I'm obviously cognizant of the fact that people think that there should be a level of accountability for incorrect information that I think is sometimes outsized. You know, we get a lot of pushback, oh, the Washington Post, you guys are liars, and yada, yada, yada, should we shut down? And so, you know, and there are obviously First Amendment protections in place that I think most Americans don't spend a lot of time worrying about. All of that said, of course, it's very clear that Fox News was worried about its business in the wake of the 2020 election, saw how folks like One American Newsmax were gobbling up audience by just telling them what they wanted to hear, nonsense about how the election had been stolen, and then jumped on that train. And, you know, that most Americans think

that that deserves some accountability measure, I think is understandable. Okay, so let's also talk about Rhonda Sanders' pretty awful week so far. You can disagree with her or not, but going to Tucker Carlson and essentially embracing the idea that we should abandon Ukraine, the war that he described as a territorial dispute. The lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, kind of tough on him today. They call it Rhonda Sanders' first big mistake. Rhonda Sanders is sketching out a presidential campaign based on his manifest governing success in Florida

and is a fearless fighter for principles who ignores the polls. Then how to explain his puzzling surrender this week to the Trumpian temptation of American retreat. So give me your sense about how this is playing out among Republicans on the right, because there's been a lot of pushback and maybe even some surprising amount of resistance to him from the foreign policy establishment and from his rivals. How do you read the moment?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the basic explanation for the contrast that the journal draws there is that they're wrong, right? He's very, very keenly attuned to the polls. You know, he makes most of his decisions based on what he thinks is going to play well with the Republican base. I mean, whether or not that's polled or just instinctual, obviously subject to debate. But, you know, this was a really smart play by Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson gets out ahead of everybody, gets everyone on record, says, hey, I will give you airtime on my show to talk about Ukraine. And people who want to pander to his audience step up and give back to the Tucker Carlson audience what Tucker Carlson's been saying about Ukraine, right? And so you have people like Chris Christie, who have a more nuanced

answer, and then get slammed by Tucker Carlson on air. Or you have people like Trump and DeSantis, who go along with the Carlson worldview, which is more popular on the fringe right than it is with the establishment right. And so Tucker Carlson gets them to take this position in order to appeal to his audience and then sets them in stone to some extent, right? And so yes, the establishment Republican Party, and I don't mean that either pejoratively or comprehensively, but this group of people who has a different view of geopolitics than does Tucker Carlson, is obviously frustrated about it. But this is a reflection of how Tucker Carlson is playing the game in a smart way. He's leveraging his audience to try and force them into a position that is in line with what he wants. And yeah, I

mean, in the same way that a lot of people who are prominent in the Republican Party are frustrated by Tucker Carlson's antics in general, this is an example of where he outplayed them. So where is the directional arrow of the Republican Party going right now? I mean, Tucker Carlson is, you know, a leading figure of the entertainment wing of the party. So you have the two polarities. You have Mitch McConnell, who has been pretty solid on Ukraine. And then you have Tucker Carlson, who is, as you write, is reshaping Republican views of Ukraine. Where is this going? I mean, a month from now, what will the polls suggest the Republican base thinks about supporting Ukraine? Well, one of the bits of good news here for the Republicans who want to continue down the same path with Ukraine is that older Republicans

tend to be more sympathetic to the argument that the United States needs to step up and counter Russia. And there are obvious reasons for that. It grew up during the Cold War, so on and so forth. The DNA. Exactly. And of course, older Republicans make up more of the donor base than the voting base. So that's good. But it is also the case that support from older Republicans has actually declined since there's been an elevated skepticism that comes particularly from Fox News and to which, for example, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is increasingly apparently sympathetic. You know, at the end of the day, where does this go? I mean, this is still a Congress that is, you know, fairly evenly split in the House, controlled by Democrats in the Senate, and obviously a Democratic president. So I don't think there's going to be a significant change of policy.

But I do think that as we continue down this path, it's pretty likely that we'll continue to see an erosion of support from Republicans for a policy as it stands now, whether or not that actually affects change in Washington. You said that Tucker Carlson was being smart here, but what about Ron DeSantis? I mean, how do you evaluate DeSantis? This is his first foray into foreign policy. He's getting slapped up, you know, pretty hard by the Wall Street Journal. He obviously pays attention. So does this help him or does this complicate his bid to create this vast post-Trump coalition? How is that going to play with the donor base? And does that really matter? I mean, right now he's just making a play for the MAGA base and

he's going to say whatever the MAGA base wants him to say, right? I mean, so, but does that complicate the, I am the consensus choice to move past Donald Trump? I think what it does is for DeSantis, it allows him to occupy the same space on this as Trump to the audience, to the Tucker Carlson audience, which is very important to both of them looking forward to the primaries. I think that Ron DeSantis is very skilled and sort of, you know, like all politicians tell whatever audience they're talking to what they want to hear to some extent. Right. You know, and you do want your message. It's unusual for Marco Rubio to come out hard against Ron DeSantis, certainly. I don't think this is a significant bump in the road, because at the end of the day, I think Republican primary voters are going to be

spending a lot more time thinking about, and perhaps this is incorrect, but I think they're gonna spend a lot more time thinking about the culture war stuff on which Ron DeSantis has excelled in terms of appealing to the fringe versus geopolitics. So speaking of the culture war, you wrote yesterday a column titled A Viral Moment Reinforces the Hollowness of Woke as an Attack. And obviously a reference to to Bethany Mandel's meltdown. It is interesting how often you have Republicans who cite wokeness, and yet how seldom they're asked to define it. And even more seldom, are they able to come up with a coherent answer? So how does it reinforce the colonists? Talk to me about what you wrote. Sure. So Mandela's people probably saw this clip. She goes on this show, The Rising,

that's aired by The Hill and is asked to define woke and is unable to do so. And, you know, certainly there's an aspect of that. Anyone who's been on TV more than once has probably had a moment where they're totally caught flat foot and can't think of what they're going to say. And like, oh my God, the camera's rolling and they get stuck. Totally fair. That said, though, she also said, look, I defined this in my book. So I went back and actually looked at her book. And in her book, it's similarly nebulous. It's just sort of a descriptor that is used to describe whatever left wing thing she is opining on. Right. And in her book, it's similarly nebulous. It's just sort of a descriptor that is used to describe whatever left-wing thing she is opining on, right? And that is the pattern. The pattern is that woke is basically just a pejorative for things that people on the right don't like. Yeah. To some extent, CRT was the same way, although that was more heavily laden with racial

subtext than is woke, although woke itself has racial subtext. But it's useful. It's useful to be able to have a thing that you can say that Democrats and the left are doing. They're pushing a woke agenda as an idea to sort of reinforce this broader idea that there is a nefariousness to it. There is an attempt to reshape America, right? That's the implication. You're not just saying, you know, oh, here's something Democrats like. You're saying they have this agenda. They have this pattern and this path that they're heading down that is dangerous, right? It adds this level of nefariousness and insidiousness to just a general slam on Democrats and liberals. That's the utility of it.

What was surprising about that clip wasn't that she wasn't able to define it because it lacks any real definition because, you know because it's malleable. But what was revealing about that clip was instead that in the moment, it was very apparent that this was the case, which isn't usually how this plays out. So you've been paying attention to Donald Trump's stump speech, and I always urge people to actually pay attention to what he says because sometimes it is revealing. And you wrote about how his pitch to Iowa voters has changed since 2015. I think this is very interesting because, of course, in 2015, he was fresh. He was new. He was shocking. People didn't know whether you looked at him, you covered him, and whether he was going to melt down, he was going to flame out. So he's back in Iowa. How is his pitch different? What is the new Trump pitch or the fat Elvis Trump pitch to Iowa voters this time around? Your turn, not mine. I know. Yeah, it was fascinating. So what

I did is I went back to his first speech in Iowa in 2015 and looked at his speech this week in Davenport, which is the first speech he's given in Iowa this cycle, and compared them. And one of the things, obviously there's a difference in terms of content. He spent a lot more time this time talking about his record as president, which obviously he couldn't do in 2015. In 2015, he was also focused on two controversies that had emerged at the time and also helped boost his candidacy. He was in first place already by the time he gave that speech in Iowa in July 2015, those controversies being his criticisms about how immigrants coming over the border from Mexico were rapists and so on and so forth. And then his attack on John McCain as not being a real war hero, right?

Those two things played heavily in the Iowa speech. But one of the things that's interesting about the speech he gave now is that it's much more politician-y. So he spent a lot of time at the top of the speech, for example, recognizing elected officials who were in the audience and who had offered him support. Obviously, he didn't have a lot of endorsements in Iowa in 2015, so he couldn't do that as well. But it was a reflection of how he's learned how to play the political game to some extent. Also, it was fascinating just to see how much more time he spent attacking the left. In 2015, he was in a contested Republican primary as he is now. But, you know, obviously, then he was sort of in the thick of it. There were a lot

more candidates. He spent a lot of time attacking other Republicans and Hillary Clinton. This time, he spent a lot more time attacking the left more broadly, attacking Joe Biden, and of course, carving out some time for Ron DeSantis. So it was interesting just to see how his priorities had changed in terms of where he was going and how much time, honestly, that he spent this time just straight up pandering to Iowans. Oh, I did all this stuff for farmers. Oh, I love ethanol. You know, all of these things that are very politician-y in that in 2015, you know, I don't know if he could have told you what ethanol did in 2015, but you know, now it's a separate part of his pay. Yeah, he's not the first one to pander to Iowa of corn farmers. No. So let's talk about Joe Biden just for a moment. Biden has been

dealing over the last few days with the banking crisis. And as you point out, there's real risk for him both economically and politically around the use of the word bailout. So give me your sense of that. The term bailout is still toxic. And, of course, they're insisting this isn't a bailout. It's sort of a backstop. What are the risks for Joe Biden on specifically with the banking issue? Yeah, I mean, since the Great Recession, I think everyone's probably cognizant of this, the term bailout, the idea that the government is stepping in and bailing out anyone who is perceived as

not necessarily needing a bailout, especially a bank. There's a huge political cost to that. First of all, the framing of the bailouts 15 years ago when the Great Recession emerged, the government lost that fight, right? There could have been a way potentially to message this that didn't result in Americans probably having this sense of, oh my God, we bailed out the banks. That's absolutely insane, which took hold both on the left and the right, right? I mean, Occupy Wall Street was rooted to some extent in opposition to that action. That fight was lost. But this is also happening at a time, of course, when the broader sense of the government as an intervening actor is under

attack, right? The post-COVID approach to how government gets involved and stuff is increasingly toxic on the right now because of the COVID interventions. The idea that the government should do anything, regardless of whether or not you call it a bailout, I think has less public support, largely because of decreased support on the right than it might have two years ago. And so it's a very, very fraught moment, both for government intervention in general and this specific type of government intervention. And so the Biden administration is trying very, very hard to say, look, no taxpayer dollars. We're doing this very limited thing. You know, whether or not people buy that

and whether or not it's accurate, it's very much subject to debate. But it's very clear how this is a political fight at the outset in a way that it probably wasn't the case in 2007, 2008. Okay. So since we're about to talk about old folks with the baby boomers, Joe Biden is technically not a baby boomer. He was born for like four years before that particular window. But I don't know if you have strong views on this or whether you've written about all this. I was reading one of the fact checks, I think in your paper, of Joe Biden's latest fabulous account of when he had the epiphany with gay marriage, where he tells a story about how in 1961 in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, he sees two well-dressed men kissing one another. And his father, you know, the Irish Catholic salesman

then turns to him and says, Joey, they love each other. As the fact check points out, he's told variations of this story over the years. They're often very, very different. What is your take on what goes on with Joe Biden? I mean, on one level, it's just like these stories that he tells, they're not malicious lies, but they're made up and they're easily mocked. I mean, what is with this guy? Yeah, well, I mean, look, this has been Joe Biden from the outset, right? But I mean, look at 1988. He runs for president very briefly in 1988. It's revealed he sort of adopted someone else's stories as his own on occasion. He gets booted from the field. He has long been a politician to just sort of tell stories and they kind of go off and they're

tangential. And, you know, there are inaccuracies in them. I mean, he was told this very famous corn pop story, which still gets thrown in his face. Right. Which is just a weird story to tell in general, you know, much less in the details where, you know, got a little murky. This is just how he is. You know, obviously, there is a big push from his critics to cast him as, you know, being mentally incompetent and so on and so forth. Or a serial liar. Well, yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, these things are different, right? I mean, this is not evidence, you know, him making up a story along these lines or exaggerating a story along these lines is not demonstrative of his age affecting his cognition because he's always done this is my point. And, you know, look, the extent to which you're going to give him a pass because he's a politician is

up to the individual. But yes, it is unusual and odd. I mean, the fact that they're generally inconsequentialized too. And the question, I guess, unanswerable is whether he's actually come to believe these stories or whether, you know, because he's told them so many times, I mean, it obviously is not a great thing. Let me just add too that everyone knows a dude who just tells a lot of stories, right? Like we all know people like that. Most of those people though, aren't constantly having those stories recorded and analyzed, right? And so if that is your nature, and I think a lot of politicians sort of have that nature to some extent, I think that's

also a disadvantage to him as well, to a large extent. Yeah. Okay. We do know people like that. I'm thinking of a guy that I actually once knew and the stories were fascinating. They were interesting. And then you realize, oh my God, they're probably all bullshit. And it's like, I wouldn't go into business with the guy. I don't know. It's just, it's a little bit disturbing and it keeps happening. But again, it doesn't seem to be in the same category

with these fundamental consequential lies that you get from Donald Trump. They don't feel the same. They just feel unnecessary and silly. And it's like, would you just knock it off more than, you know, I am deeply offended. Okay. So since we're on the subject of old people, you write in this book about the baby boomer generation, you know, it's been a decades long domination that's winding down right now. I mean, there are now more millennials than

boomers. Just for definition's sake, boomers are what, born between? 46 and 64. So I'm right in the middle there. So as of 2019, boomers accounted for about 71.6 million Americans down from their peak of about 79 million. I'll tell you what's going on. There are now 72 million millennials. So we boomers have dominated American society for so long. It's been taken for granted. So let's just talk about this, you know, what this transition is going to feel like, because we're right on the cusp of, you know, most baby boomers leaving the workforce, passing on,

that consequences for politics, for wealth, for culture, pretty dramatic. I think that the best place to start is for people to understand the scale of the baby boom. And I didn't understand it until I started researching the book. I'm a numbers guy, and so I tend to look at the numbers. 1945, there's 140 million people total in America. Over the course of the next 19 years, there's 76 million babies born. That's more than 50% of the total population that existed in 1945, right? And so when you think about the effects of that, it creates this huge surge in young people that needs to be accommodated.

First of all, marketers jump on it and sell diapers to parents and things along those lines. And there are huge marketplaces that are created. But it also creates strains. And the government has to scramble. What do we do? We got to build schools. We got to hire teachers. And that pattern continues over time. So one of the things about this moment that I think is under-recognized is that we are

just simply reaching the point at which this huge surge of people has reached age 65 and 70, and they're starting to retire and is forcing all this change. That retirement, of course, means changes in the workplace. It means changes in politics. It means turnover of positions of authority and power. But it also means that for the first time, really, literally for the first time since the baby boom emerged in the late 1940s, there is a younger group of people that is contesting for power. Ever since, you know, look, I'm Gen X. I was born in the mid-1970s. And, you know, there were not a lot of us. And so we never really contested for power. We were never able to push back and the boomers say, hey, we need these resources as well. But now we're at this point where as the boomers power is waning and being

turned over to younger generations, the younger generations are saying, hey, we need things like pre-K and we need things like more funding for schools and stuff for our kids. Well, the boomers had very real needs for as they age, you know, retirement plans and senior housing and things, you know, medical care. So there is this real contest for power that really is framing a lot of the generational debate we see in the moment. So how would you characterize the baby boom generation? What was distinctive about this generation compared to its predecessors and its successors? What are the markers? The first one is obviously scale. I mean, not to reiterate that, but when we compare the

baby boom to younger generations, say the millennial generation, there are some things. The baby boom obviously is not a monolith. You know, it is tens of millions of people. It's not, you know, it can't be, you know, not only is it not a monolith, it is also not as heavily Republican as people assume. It is slightly not a monolith, it is also not as heavily Republican as people assume. It is slightly more Republican than Democratic, but it's not this hard right constituency. But there are things that differentiate it from younger Americans. It is, for example, more heavily white. The baby boom started and took place during a period when immigration was restricted in

the United States. That was lifted after the baby boom ended. And as a result, we have more immigrants and more children immigrants in the United States than we did at that time. It is less college educated. There was an increase in college education that occurred with the baby boom, but that trend continued, accelerated afterward. So young people today are much more likely to have a college degree than were baby boomers. Young baby boomers are more likely to go to church and to be religious than younger Americans. And so you can see how that helps us understand why younger Americans are more liberal. Those things overlap with liberal politics,

right? Less likely to attend church, more likely to be college educated, more likely to be a person of color. Those things are correlated with being more liberal. And so part of the sense that we get about baby boomers and old generations as being more conservative is even though they themselves are slightly more Republican than Democratic, not particularly conservative, they're much more conservative than younger Americans. And so that contrast helps reinforce why younger Americans see older Americans as more conservative, is because they are more likely to be conservative than our younger Americans. While the baby boom itself is not comprehensive, you know, it is not homogeneous in terms of its characteristics, there are things that set it apart from younger Americans. So I want to get to the politics and power in a moment. Let's just

talk about the shock to the job market when you have this many people who are leaving. When you were researching the book, you know, a couple of years ago, you talked to a demographer who told them that within two years, we're going to be gasping for workers again. And lo and behold, as you wrote recently, businesses are now facing these massive challenges in the workforce. So what's happening here? Well, I mean, obviously, this is not all a function of baby boomer retirements. But this is why the demographer predicted this would happen, that we have this spiking ratio. One thing that demographers look at is the ratio between working age Americans and senior Americans, because senior Americans tend to rely on resources that are generated from tax revenue that's produced by working Americans. Right. Before the baby boom retired, essentially, that ratio was fairly stable, but it started to skyrocket as baby boomers started hitting retirement age.

And as such, it's unclear whether there's going to be the level of support, tax dollar support from working age people that is necessary for this new surge in older Americans. So, yeah, we see if you look at jobs numbers, if you look at labor force participation data, you can see that baby boomers are starting to drop out of the workforce. That most retirees at this point are members of the baby boom generation. And that simply means that you have this massive search of people that came into the workforce in the 1960s and 70s that is now leaving the workforce and leaving all these holes. And so demographers, if you ask them, and I did, obviously, they say, well, you know, either you have to have more kids or you have to bring more people into the country, or you have to risk collapse of your social safety net, right? And so the choice now is, what are we going to do? And of course, the irony here is that choice is being made by the people in power who tend to be disproportionately baby boomers. Well, I thought it was interesting that you noted that somehow

the fact that people born in the boom's biggest year, 1957, all hit 65 last year, didn't attract much attention. That really was a milestone. So I guess the question is, what is going to happen to this social safety net? What is going to happen to social security? Because very clearly, you have a lot of people in politics who still think that it's the third rail. And even though they may dip their toe in it, nobody really wants to be the one to reform social security. So where are we going? Because the numbers are pretty stark. A lot more people now drawing down, not enough people paying in. What happens? What gives? Right. So, I mean, to some extent, there are a lot more people drawing down. When we talk about the rate at which the funds that power things like Social Security are depleting, to some extent, that was to be expected. That's how the system is built. You put money in when you're working, you draw it down when you're retiring. And now that we have more people retiring, that's what we would expect to happen. I think one of the ways in which we are sort of have blinders on when it comes to political decision making is we assume that trends will continue without, you know, the sort of like Newton's laws of motion that unless acted upon by an outside force, political trends will continue. But we forget that there can be outside forces, right? And so yes, you're right, there will need to be some sort of way in which either the amount of money that people get upon retirement is decreased, which I think is very politically unpopular and very worrisome to older Americans, or that we backstop how much money is going into it, if it's raising taxes to the wealthy, if we change retirement age, which is a short term solution, potentially, you know, but something will be done. I mean, obviously,

it's not the case that we're simply going to deplete this and there will be no change. I make that point, and it's a fairly obvious point, but I make that point to also say that when we think about what political projections look like over the long term, we also need to recognize that politics are malleable in that sense too. And so it is not the case that we should assume that patterns of political partisanship will continue as they are over the long term simply because parties themselves can change. So I think just generally speaking, I don't know what the solution is for things like programs for older Americans, but I am very confident there will be a solution because this is what we do. We adapt and that's the nature of politics. So your subhead is the last days of the baby boom and the future of power in America.

What does seem to be one of the markers of our current political situation is that we have a lot of baby boomers who are not letting go of power. I mean, the fact that you have all these people in their 80s and, you know, in their upper 70s who are still there. The baby boom generation is proving rather sticky in terms of clinging to power, isn't it? And that creates its own, obviously, tension and dilemma. No, absolutely. But again, this is a function of scale, right? If you think about the pool of jobs that are available in the United States, and just imagine you have a set number of people in the country

and a set percentage of them decide to work into their mid-80s, right? If you take a set percentage of the population that decides to do that, and then you massively scale up that population, then you have a lot more people who are sticking in those jobs, right? And so yes, it is the case that the baby boom is accustomed to power and accustomed to attention, thanks to being the locus of everything that is going on in the United States since the mid 1940s. But it's also the case that just because there are more people around, it means more of them are likely than, you know, if you have the same number of people that decide to work late into their 80s, you're just going to have more people who are working late into their 80s and more people therefore who are occupying these positions longer than you might anticipate. You know, there are lots

of ways. We see this pattern repeat in a lot of other places. Like, you know, if you have people that decide to live in the same home and not move, you know, not downsize or move to senior housing, if it's always been a consistent percentage, it's the beginning of time of how many people do that. If you suddenly scale up the population of people, you're going to get a lot more people staying in their homes and keeping housing prices high and so on and so forth. So we see the same pattern, simply the scale of the baby boom, meaning that past traditional patterns and expectations simply become more so. And that can have effects that are viewed negatively by other generations. So let's just talk about partisan politics. Who will these future Republican voters be and how does that affect democratic strategies? You wrote a piece

recently about, you know, MAGA's appeal to older voters. How is this going to change now the alignment of the parties? So the MAGA appeal is interesting because it really leverages the idea that the baby boom and older generations are much whiter than young Americans. And so when we talk about this concern that's very sharply articulated by people like Tucker Carlson, and more subtly so by a lot of others, this idea that America is changing, that overlaps with this changing diversity and concerns about race, that MAGA, the Make America Great Again, it really is intentionally trying to appeal to. So there's one aspect to that. But when we look down the line, when we look at the future, there was this assumption, particularly with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, that as America got more diverse, it would necessarily become more

democratic. This competes, though, with the idea that, you know, as people get older, they tend to get more conservative, which I don't think is a well-founded idea, both from the standpoint of there's not a lot of research showing that and from the standpoint that as Americans get older now, they're more likely to be non-white Americans. And is it the case that, you know, black Americans got more conservative as they got older? No, they continue to vote pretty heavily Democratic, right? Sort of overlapping party and ideology there. So the question is, what happens in the coming decades as Americans, as this younger cohort gets older and as older Americans continue to be, you know, just drop out of the population? I think the important thing here goes back to the point I was just making, is that the Republican Party has it very much within its power to change and

to change to appeal more to younger Americans. And in fact, I think this is under-recognized, it has changed in order to increase its appeal. In 2004, the Republican Party was very fervently anti-same-sex marriage. It has softened that position. There are still elements that are very anti it, but they just softened that position. That position is very important to younger Americans, right? So we've already seen how the party itself has changed. I think it is likely that what we see over the long term is obviously a continued two-party system in the United States. Over the short term, if the Republican Party continues to try and reinforce, if it makes the same bet it made in 2015-2016, which is not to try and increase its appeal to non-white Americans, but instead to go

harder on its appeal to white Americans, I think that has short-term negative consequences for the party. But I think over the long-term negative consequences for the party. But I think over the long term, because the population is changing and because the issues that are salient to younger people will probably continue to be salient to them in the same way moving forward, that it's likely the Republican Party will simply change and modify its positions in order to attract some of those voters. Okay, but there are cross-currents here. I mean, you know, obviously you have some softening of the position on same sex marriage. But then, of course, you have the escalating culture war going after, you know, drag queen story hour in Florida, Ron DeSantis, you know, going after,

you know, anything with, you know, prurient interest, which really sounds like a wing of the Republican Party, the dominant wing of the Republican Party that is embracing church lady politics rather than, you know, what's been described. I took it from Jane Koston's recent column, you know, the horny bro conservatism. You know, yes, you have, you know, younger men, you know, we're talking about masculinity and, you know, and money and misogyny and all of that stuff. There is an appeal there. But how are they going to recognize the hard right culture war emphasis on banning pornography, banning abortion, all of these

things, you know, going after alternative lifestyles. How does that play into this demographic change? Because the church lady doesn't seem to me to be a winning formula for these younger voters. No, I think you're right. But I don't think they're trying to appeal to younger voters right now. One thing, and I don't have data to back this up, so this is sort of my theory, and I haven't articulated this in a piece anywhere, but I really do think that part of the reason we're seeing this focus on trans issues and on LGBTQ issues more broadly is because it allows the Republican Party and the right to tap into the same sort of frustrations that long drove their focus on issues of race. Obviously, there are still obviously very high profile issues of race and immigration and things that are used as ways to try and appeal to the Republican base.

But I think that by focusing on those LGBTQ issues, it allows them to tap into those same sentiments while not explicitly alienating people who aren't white, right? It gives them that space to tap into, oh, here's America's changing and it's bad, but to do it in a way that isn't talking about immigration and race and therefore potentially turning off black and Hispanic voters. You know, does this turn off younger voters? Yes, it probably does to some extent. Does it also potentially serve as a wedge issue for more socially conservative non-white voters? Yeah, potentially, right? So I don't know that this is a conscious decision or a polling back decision, but I think that part of it is simply them trying to still

leverage this outrage at changing America, but do it in a way that isn't race-centric. So let me pick up on something you said before, because I think it's been one of the, I would say, almost, you know, cliches of politics, not just American politics, that the older people get, the more conservative they become. This goes back to Winston Churchill. If you're not a socialist when you're 17, there's something wrong with your heart. If you're still a socialist when you're 40, there's something wrong with your head, that sort of thing. So what do the numbers tell us about whether or not as people get older and they become more responsible, they have jobs,

they have kids, they have mortgages, but they don't become more conservative? One thing to realize here is that the history of this sort of research really isn't that old, right? Good public opinion pollings, less than a century old. Social science research has matured in the past half century or so. And so it's hard for us to say in the United States that this pattern has been enforced. Obviously, there's anecdotal evidence, the sorts of things that Churchill wasn't pointing to Gallup polling to make that claim, right? You know, it has been the pattern that the baby boom has drifted to the right over time, at least in terms of partisan voting, but I don't know that it's as dramatic as people think. There is also research that's cited in the

book that suggests that people sort of make up their minds on politics to a large extent between the age of 14 and 24, and that holds fairly consistently over time. But let's assume, let's just assume for the sake of argument that this is what has been happening in the past, that as Americans get older, they get more conservative. I just don't know if even if that were true, which there's not a lot of evidence for, that would still hold for the current population of Americans as they get older because the current population of Americans is so heavily non-white. Is it the case that Hispanic and Black and Asian Americans will get more conservative over time, will tend to vote more Republican over time using those things to some extent interchangeably? Or are we basing this assumption on existing power structures in

the United States, which heavily favored white Americans over the past three centuries, right? You know, is it the case that that assumption is necessarily itself entwined with the sorts of things that lead people to Republican politics in the first place? It's hard to say, you know, I will say one of the things I found as I was doing the book, when you look at the Census Bureau's projected demography for the year 2060, and you compare that with current states, the United States, the state that looks most the way the Census Bureau expects the country to look in 2060 in terms of race and age is the state of Florida, right? The state of Florida does not reinforce the idea that demography is destiny when it comes to liberal politics. It is, you know, it is a diverse state and it is a very heavily Republican state at this point in time. You know, there are obviously caveats to that, but, you know,

I think it's important to recognize both that it's not well-founded necessarily that people get more conservative over time, particularly with this group of people, but also that when we think about what demography looks like, it doesn't necessarily lead the places that people had assumed. So what does America in 2060 look like? The baby boomers will be gone. They will be almost all of them will be gone. I mean, count on that. I actually was meeting with a financial planner. This is like a digression, a financial planner who was, you know, going through various projections and everything from my wife and I. And then at a certain point, my numbers just stopped. I was like, wait, you just killed me. You just said, I don't have to worry about money in this year because I'll be dead. You come into my house and

you've killed me in the spreadsheet. So let's assume that most baby boomers will be going, what does America look like? I mean, look, look, try interviewing a bunch of baby boomers about what it's like after they're gone. It's rough. But sorry, go ahead. So, I mean, what does the country look like in terms of this? Because there have been a lot of hopes and fears that are resting on this question, right? The Tucker Carlson approach is they are trying to replace you. America will not look anything like it's been in the past. And then you have people on the left who are saying America is not going to look like anything in the past. And this is a great thing. And,

you know, as demography changes, you know, all of our politics will just inevitably flow. How different will America feel and look and work in 2060? You know, the Census Bureau does these projections of demography, and it expects that America will be much more heavily Hispanic, about as heavily Black. It'll be mostly that non-Hispanic whites will be less than 50% of the population. That's what the Census Bureau expects. But that is overly simplistic. And the Census Bureau would absolutely recognize that it's overly simplistic, right? The Census Bureau is a great organization, does great work.

It knows that it's overly simplistic. And it is detrimental for us to consider it in a simplistic sense. So there are some caveats that I think are important. The first is that when we talk about white in this moment, our understanding of what it means to be white in America should be far more nuanced than it actually is. There's a fascinating change made between 2010 and 2020 in the census. And what they did, when you say what race you are, it also has a field saying, you know, basically tell us anything else about your racial identity. And so you can fill in anything. You know, I check the box that says white, but also, you know, my grandfather

emigrated here from Cuba. And, you know, I also have an aunt that, you know, is born in Kenya, or whatever it happens to be, right, you know, whatever complexity you have. And so what happened is, in 2010, they would take that box where you read in what it is, and they took, you know, a certain number of characters, like eight or 10 characters, and then they'd assess that and say, so if it said, you know, Cuba, then they would add Cuban to your thing, right? And so you would be white and then Cuban potentially, right? And this is a terrible example, but you get the point. In 2020, they used all of that. They used many, many, many more characters. And so they could allow for much more complexity in terms of how people identify. And so the result of that is between 2010 and

2020, there's a massive spike in the number of people who were identified as white and some other race, right? And that wasn't because all of a sudden there were a lot more Americans who were not purely white, to use a gross and toxic phrase. It was because the Census Bureau simply did a better job of capturing how people identified their racial identity, right? And so it's a reflection in that sense of how white already doesn't mean the sort of white that people like Tucker Carlson seem to celebrate. The other side of this is that when we look to the future, how the Census Bureau captures Hispanic identity is they assume that people who are Hispanic will continue, their families will continue to identify as Hispanic. Polling shows that's not the case. And demographers

expect that what we'll see is a pattern similar to what happened 100 years ago when we started to see lots of immigrants from Italy and Southern Europe and eastern Europe and other parts of the globe that were sort of white adjacent in a way. And we're sort of looked upon, you know, there's this horrible, horrible op-ed in the Washington Post 100 years ago in which it was like lamenting the scourge of like gross people from Italy coming to the United States, these anarchists, right? You know, just a horrible thing. But that was a common view of Italians. And now it's just like Italians are just white people, right? Because they intermarried and they became part of families. And as one demographer put it to me, it became a lot more useful just to call those people white than to say, oh, well, I'm Italian and German and Irish and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was just part of this whole group identity of what it meant to be white. And the expectation of a lot of

demographers is a lot of Hispanic Americans will be folded into that same definition. Now, that introduces all sorts of challenges, but that also then changes what America looks like in 2060, at least on paper. So the melting pot is still a thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because it kind of fell out of favor for a while. Remember, people said, well, we're not a melting pot. We are this rich mosaic. What you're saying is it still works. It's still happening.

It is still happening. And I think, though, that one of the things that we're aware of is there's a difference between the melting pot working and looking at that as a positive feature of the United States and the folding of people into an identity of white that then continues to perpetuate power structures that benefit white people, right? So those are two ways of looking at the same thing, the latter of which obviously highly negative, the former of which positive. And the question is the extent to which white as a power structure then continues to have the potentially negative repercussions that it can have over the course of history. The book is The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America by Philip Bump. Philip is national columnist of the Washington Post, where he focuses largely on the numbers behind politics. And he writes the weekly newsletter, How to Read This Chart. Philip Bump, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you for having me, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.