Baby boomers keep tight grip on American culture

The remarkable ratings success of the rebooted “Roseanne,” a show that last aired when I was 17 years old but commanded a larger audience in its return than any sitcom now on network television, has unleashed a thousand takes about the show’s political significance.

Who’s going to win “Roseanne” voters in 2018? Can Hollywood entertain Trump country without betraying its principles? Can a member of the #Resistance watch “Roseanne” in good conscience?

All of these takes are,

I’m sorry, tiresome. So let’s try to analyze the return of the Conner family in strictly cultural terms, without directly referencing the present occupant of the White House. The show’s sky-high ratings probably owe something to Roseanne’s political views and blue-collar goddess reputation, but above all they are a case study in the power the baby boom generation still wields over our collective cultural imagination. And not only that: They testify to the extent to which the boomers, for all the destruction trailing in their wake, might be the only thing holding American culture together at this point.

That’s because if the boomers were destructive, they were also creative. The boomers were the last generation to come of age with some traditional edifices still standing, the old bourgeois norms and Christian(ish) religion and patriotic history, which gave them something powerful to wrestle with, to rework and react against and attempt to overthrow. And because they came of age within a common culture, their revolution was experienced as a communal experience itself, something that united millions simply by virtue of their being young and Western in 1965 or 1969 or 1975.

In an essay on “Golden Ages” in his “Prejudices: Philosophical Dictionary,” Robert Nisbet argued that a great period of ferment and achievement often features a “dialectical antinomy.” This is a fancy way of saying that you need ideas and trends and forces in tension with each other (community and individualism, the secular and the sacred, new ideas and settled consensus, younger and older generations) to ignite “the blaze of creativity.”

In the movies and television, this tension led to an extended reworking, deconstruction and reinvention of classic American genres (the Western, the war movie, the gangster flick, the sitcom), something that happened first in cinema and then extended more gradually into TV. What David Chase did with “The Sopranos” and David Simon with “The Wire,” and before them figures like the late Steven Bochco and Matt Groening and yes, Roseanne Barr, was all an extension of the era-defining pop cultural ferment that began in the 1960s.

But now we are in the twilight of that era — and it is not at all clear that the boomers’ successors are prepared to react with anything like the same creativity and vigor.

In part that’s because technological and social change has left the rising cohorts of Americans too divided to build something new together. And in part it’s because the boomers themselves contributed mightily to fragmentation, leaving too little standing when they tore things down, bequeathing a spirit of transgression and permanent revolution that’s run out of things to deconstruct and is either feeding on itself, lapsing into torpor, or generating niche forms of radicalism on the further left and right that are too weak as yet to produce revolution or renewal.