This bodes well for the Rs in the next several election cycles. But this generation also lacks loyalty (to employers, to unions, to political parties). If the Rs blow it there could be a quick backlash from this group.

OJ,

I can't thank you enough for this article. Being born in 1964, coming of awareness during the NYC fiscal crisis, Watergate and the Carter Fiasco I have always been of the opinion that the 60s were a party to which I was not invited but for which I got stuck with the bill.

Gideon, sure we lack loyalty, because that is a two-way street. The culture and the government betrayed us in our formative years, particularly if you are a White male, so why should it be entitled to any loyalty from us?

Bart --

I came across this article elsewhere, but my reaction was the same. I was totally surprised and gratified that my generation actually had a name. Moreover, the gist of the analysis has the ring of truth. I can't believe that in an era of overmarketing and overinformation I had never heard of this. Wonder of this was true for others.

I'm a member, too. (Hey, it's the Brothers Jones blog.) On the one hand, I have a problem with this sort of pop-psych demographic determinism. On the other hand, I love not being the tail end of the Boom. I can't stand those neurotic egomaniacs created by the loosening of social convention after WWII.

I've been saying for years that the "late Boomers" defined in this story have always been pulled along as unwilling accomplaces for the early boomer group, where their fads, whims and goofy behavior has been extrapolated by the media to include the later group, which had no say in the matter. That was the case even though, in the case of the tail-enders born in the 60s, they were kids barely out of diapers when the "voices of their generation" were making fools of themselves on the streets of the nation andon college campuses in the late 1960s, allegedly representing their true beliefs (as if "kill your parents" was the main thoughts of thousands of 4-year-olds during the summer of '68).

But, please, can't we get a better name than that? "Generation Jones" sounds like something else some early boomer has come up with and stuck onto the 1954-65 group (and it also that really awful 1970s basketball song).

I (a 1961-vintage human being) have never liked being lumped in with the "Boomers." I was thinking we should be categorized as "Generation W," being the one before "Generation X." Hey, wait a minute! . . .

As a full-fledged boomer, I've long felt we were the most spolied and tiresome generation in history, except for the ones that came after us. At least we didn't whine and gaze at our navels like you guys.

Ditto what Dave said (yes I'm a member too).

Peter,

I'm a 1963 model and I've always wondered about my compulsion to whine and navel gaze. I blame you oppressive Boomers.

I always figured the cutoff is whether you were devastated when demonstrators got beat up and shot and when the Weathermen blew themselves up and the like or whether you figured they had it coming. And then whether you saw the fall of Saigon as a tragedy or a victory.

My sibling group spans this date range ('47-me to '59)so I see the differences in my own family. But (early)Boomer bashing as an explanation for developments in the '60s and '70s has always seemed too facile to me, even if it is fun. What I most remember from that era is the total abdication of the elite adult power structure - the media, campus administrations, and the mainline churches - to a vocal campus minority. The radicals were extolled when they could/should have been expelled. So who's fault is that?

Remember, too, that early boomer leadership came from those 5 to 7 or 8 years older. The Port Huron Statement was signed in '62 when all us boomers were still in high school. I've often wondered if fear of the Vietnam era draft didn't create a pool of foot soldiers for older folks with their own agenda.

Standing up to be counted as yet another member of the GenJonesers (circa '61).

Pat:

Which is why the Greatest Generation is also the Worstest:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/170/

Pat --

It's true that the pre-WWII group of radicals latched onto the younger generation to be seen in th media as their supposed leaders (and there were a few notices of irony in the press when Abbie "Never Trust Anyone Over 30" Hoffman turned 30 right in the middle of the late 60s uphevals), its also true there were many "willing accomplaces" within the generation, along with the "useful idiots" that helped those on the left and others in the media spin the story that the path of the radical boomers was the wave of the future.

It's those people as much as people like Hoffman or Jerry Rubin that agitate the late boomers, because for the better part of three decades, the press would go running off in their direction to garner quotes about what an entire generation really thought (though this also had its benefits, too -- the media really convinced themselves in the early 1970s that this group was on the cusp of a new society, which is why they were so shocked, first about the results of the 1972 election and then the results of 1980, when the Youth of America who actually bothered to vote failed to live up to their stereotype).

I have a deep, deep dislike of the 60s boomers. And if I get into an argument with them, I let them know it.

It's up to my generation to correct their excesses.

Which is what we've been doing.

Which is why there are more SAHM moms and dads.

The Utopiaists (sp) have handed us WW IV.

We definitely be Jonesin'.

utopianists?

I (heart symbol with big red X superimposed) the Boomers!

They were like locusts, ravenously devouring everything in their path and leaving a denuded landscape behind for who came after, i.e., me and my cohorts.

Begone you plague!

Thanks, OJ.

My mind said more than one iaists.

And the Red State Diapers article is just another piece of this.

Hmmm.... maybe there *is* something to demographic determinism, after all. Many of the usual commenters are here and have claimed membership in the GJ cohort. Me, too (1959).

I've always objected to the idea that someone like me, born a few months before Sputnik, has something in common with a baby-boomer born in 1949. The biggest differece is that my parents were themselves children during WWII while the boomer's parents were adults. I was my parents first child, not their fifth. The Beatles, for example, meant nothing to me. For me, the 60s were astronauts. We got the leftovers of the sixties-- think Ford and Carter. College was a vacuum where guidance was not provided as the boomers moved on to get jobs in the administration (Carter and university).

But so much of this is just numerology.

Great, it's some kind of Little Rascals Clubhouse.

Orrin C. Judd '61

Raoul:

Oh, nice try. If I can't do anything about where I was born, you can't do anything about when you were born. Peace, man.

I guess I should put my two cents in as well. I was born in 1962. So can I come in the clubhouse too?

I'm a Jonesian as well, along with She Who Is Perfect In All Ways. Unlike the later "natalist" article, this one actually bears some resemblance to me.

SJP, 1960.

I like how the years keep changing.

Boomers ended in either 60 or 64, now 65.

As a founding member (57) of Generation Jones, I vote that we find a new name.

I don't really think that we deserve our own generation designation, we're a subclass of a generation. Generation generally connoted a cohort within a timespan of 25-30 years, but boundary drawing is always an arbitrary exercise, especially if you are trying to capture common experiential and demographic characteristics.

OJ got it right as far as the expectation to fight in Vietnam as a formative factor. Another one is that Jones' lack of attachment to the Kennedy mythos. We were all too young to care much about the assassinations of Jack and Bobby.

As a Bicentennial Baby and hence a Gen Xer (by some people's definitions, anyway), to all the foregoing I can only say "Whatever."

1955 makes me a 'tweener, it seems.

Missed an opportunity to get drafted by a year or two. Despite that, went right into ROTC (which provided an object lesson in getting pilloried for a thought crime).