Toxic pasts and stolen futures? Generational conflict and the modern culture wars

In the first two decades of the 21st century, overblown claims about generational conflict – captured in narratives of ‘Boomer blaming’ – have reimagined today’s social, economic, political and cultural problems as the fault of generations who came of age in the mid- to late 20th century. This has fuelled a paradoxical antagonism towards the recent past. On one hand, the 20th century is imagined as the final instalment of good times: in this narrative, the young have had their futures ‘stolen’ by the mistakes of their elders. On the other hand, the values and attitudes associated with older generations are considered to have left an enduring imprint of inequality and injustice on the young, whose struggles for identity require the energetic repudiation of all that has gone before. This context of ‘temporal crisis’ (Leccardi, Jedlowski and Cavalli, 2023) underpins the sense that different generations exist in competing realities in the present day, lacking shared language or values. A prevailing mood of cultural pessimism regarding the past and present stretches forwards, in an insecure, risk-aware orientation towards the future. This paper explores why the current ‘culture wars’ take the form of a conflict between living generations, and the ways in which relations between living generations also mediate and limit the reach of cultural conflicts.