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All this has me worried—but only a little, because the youth vote doesn’t loom that large in the American electorate. It should loom large, because millennials, or the cohort born between 1981 and 1996, number 72 million, making them not the greatest generation but certainly the largest. Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, is the second-largest cohort, numbering 70 million. The third-largest cohort is my generation, the Baby Boom, born between 1946 and 1964, which numbers 69 million.

There was a time, from the airing of Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett miniseries in 1954-5 through Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Woodstock, The Big Chill, and Bruce Springsteen, when the Baby Boom owned popular culture. It was heady stuff, though mostly for my older siblings, because it was led mostly by older Boomers. (I could comfort myself that I was three years too young to register for the Vietnam draft.) With passage of the 26th amendment to the constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18, the Baby Boom aspired to own the political culture, too, and in 1972, the first presidential election in which 18 to 20 year-olds could vote, George McGovern pinned some hopes on a youth-driven victory. Instead, President Richard Nixon won re-election in a landslide.

What happened? The Democrats learned two hard truths. The first was that the Baby Boom was, ideologically, much more diverse than reading Newsweek would have you believe; many Baby Boomers were conservative.