I wonder how Americans of a certain vintage explain 1968 to their grandchildren. “Well, kid, we had an assassination of a public figure. Then another. No, not those two. Those were gunned down earlier in the decade. Also, a segregationist won five states in the presidential election. Riots happened from which some cities never recovered. The Democrats held a convention in which the police rioted. Vietnam? Such were the protests, the president, who had angled for the job since he was a Texas road digger, relinquished it without a fight. Elvis’s comeback was quite the tonic, but still.”
How is it that America didn’t fall apart soon after all this? Watergate and Opec-induced inflation should have tipped people over the edge. How is it that public life cooled so much that 49 states agreed on re-electing Reagan and a Chicago convention in 2024 is a non-event?
Well, there’s this: the median American in 1968 was 26. Now? 38. And this isn’t an extreme age arc by world standards. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when students hounded their elders for insufficient fealty to Maoist doctrine, the median person in China was a scarcely believable 18. That number is now almost 40.