Of more significance is the fact the generation born after about 1990 is in the process of acquiring its political voice and its basic political outlook. It is willing to open issues the Baby Boomers thought closed, especially about economics. The present generation does not yet know what it wants, but it increasingly realizes it does not want the world the Boomers built. That means no to a form of “capitalism” that takes capital away from most Americans and hands the financial sector 40 percent of corporate profits, no to a form of globalization that constructs a one-world corporate oligarchy in the name of “freedom,” no to an attitude toward the environment that essentially turns the earth into a disposal consumer product, and no to certain forms of Christianity that look more like Roman war cults than the Sermon on the Mount. It might ultimately mean a shift from public/private dichotomies, over which the Boomers obsessed, to big/small dichotomies in which bigness in general, both in business and government, is seen as unrepresentative and corrupting. However, that is speculative.

Whatever happens, I predict that the next 10 years will constitute the present generation’s “mythic age” that guides their politics for the rest of their lives in the same way the 1960s formed the Boomers’ “mythic age” and the Great Depression formed the New Dealer’s “mythic age.” The youth of Occupy Wall Street — and I am not of their generation — own the future. Like no generation since the Boomers, they are present at the creation of what comes next. Fox News can demonize them all they want, but they are numerically the biggest generation in American history, and they are coming into political awareness at the very moment biology has begun to close the book on the Baby Boomers.