John Kitzhaber wore blue jeans and cowboy boots to all four of his inaugurations as governor of Oregon. He played guitar on stage at his inaugural balls (in 1999 he belted out a version of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”) and at age 67, he still wears collar-length hair and a full moustache. He resigned last week in scandal, following influence-peddling by a fiancee who is 20 years younger than him, whom he took up with immediately after divorcing his second wife.
He could have avoided ignominy by realising, in his penultimate term, that his best years were behind him. In the end his embarrassed Democratic colleagues had to pry him out of the mansion. The secretary of state, and the majority leaders of the State house, all women, demanded he quit.
In his willingness to elevate his individual identity over his institutional role, and in allowing his personal life to be conflated with the politics of a whole state, Kitzhaber offered a clear expression of a cringeworthy archetype: The Boomer Dad.
By now we have been ruled by Boomer Dads for a generation. Together, they have offered a mortifying catalogue of affectation and and self-indulgence.
Bill Clinton was the randy dad who might just hit on your girlfriend. Tony Blair was the “cool” dad who played his Stratocaster in the church band but still tried to micromanage you well into adulthood. George W Bush was the born-again dad who went from party guy and alleged rail-snorter to white-knuckle dry drunk, without ever making a single good decision.
In Australia, former prime minister Paul Keating was the overweening dad who learned his self-confidence in the “school of life”. Tony Abbott is the accessory sports dad whose physical vanity leads him to spend Saturday mornings in lycra on the cafe terrace. And if Abbott is eventually usurped, we may yet have to endure Malcolm Turnbull, the smug, wealthy dad who likes to play the boho, donning a leather jacket for nights out in Darlinghurst. Like other Boomer Dads, he seems to have trouble acting his age.
The political Boomer Dad displaced the sober-suited days of noblesse oblige conservatives and plain-spoken representatives of the working class. In its place we got a groovy patriarchy, administered by men who never quite grew up. Even as they dismantled the welfare states that their own parents shed blood for, in the airs they put on these men conveyed their desperation to be liked. And liked not just in the pragmatic terms of political popularity, but as individuals. These dads want to be our pals.
This is one reason that the barriers between politicians’ public and private lives have gradually dissolved. Just like the child who wanders into their parents’ bedroom at the wrong moment, we know more about these men than we ever wanted to. Often this is explained by changes in the nature of news; inevitably, Boomer Dads at the end of their careers scold the media for being intrusive and insatiable. But this is disingenuous: these dads are addicted to oversharing.
As James Stanyer points out in his work on the “intimisation” of politics, baby boomer leaders have been comfortable with the “open display of emotions and personal disclosure” as a campaigning tactic, by contrast with the reserved leaders of earlier phases of democratic life.
Blaming the media also obscures the fact that politicians have expanded their sense of self, as popular political engagement has atrophied. Thrusting their personalities upon us is an attempt to compensate for the fact that they can no longer claim to be the leaders of movements. The strategy of inviting personal connection is an attempt to spackle the gap that has opened up between politics and society. These estranged Boomer Dads “want to rebuild a relationship” with us.
It’s a commonplace that the 1960s politics of individual liberation, once detached from radical political aims, became mere selfishness. But we can see how the decay of boomer politics also licensed the Dads’ belief that they as individuals were more important than democracy or its institutions. When we think about Abbott bringing back knighthoods and giving one to Prince Philip, or Blair joining Bush’s war on the basis of personal conviction, despite the fact that the nation was marching against him in the streets, or Kitzhaber’s determination to go around for one more term (just one more) – the only word that will do to describe the defining attitude of Boomer Dads is entitlement.
This sense of entitlement has informed a wide range of public policy for a very long time. It was recently reported that Australia’s baby boomers will be exempted from any moves to include family homes in assets tests for pensions. That’s odd, given the prime minister’s repeated invocation of our budget’s (alleged) ill-health as a form of “intergenerational theft”. The richest age cohort, who have benefited from decades of negative gearing and an unstoppable urban housing boom, will likely not be asked to give up any of the wealth accumulated in their houses as they collect social security payments. The rest of us will. Never stand between a Boomer Dad and real estate.
As we move to clean up the messes that the Boomer Dads made, we should not be led into a renewal of intergenerational warfare. The failure of the politics that has been in decay since the 1960s began with its fetishisation of generational identity over other bases of solidarity. Younger politicians, especially in Europe, are showing that effective leadership lies not in flaunting or imposing one’s individual values, but in working against entrenched privilege on behalf of an inclusive social movement. They’re also showing that snappy dressing has nothing to do with blue jeans and cowboy boots.
