Introducing “Boom!”

WHY HAVE Americans born in the 1940s, like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had such a stranglehold on American power, and why do they cling on to it so tightly? To answer this, our US editor has interviewed dozens of prominent Americans born in the same decade. The result is a new six-part podcast series that begins this week. It is called “Boom! The generation that blew up American politics”.

Born around the same time as the atom bomb, they grew up in a country that was pre-eminent in technological, military and economic terms. Fear of mutually assured destruction lurked in their childhoods, but it was mostly blocked out by comforting domesticity. People form their political views between their mid-teens and mid-20s. For this group that time was the late 1960s, a decade of possibilities cut short by war, assassinations and street violence. Episode 1 focuses on 1968, the origin story of America’s extreme partisanship.

Episode 2 takes place a decade later, in 1978. It begins in Studio 54, the nightclub where elite Americans of the 1940s explored a different kind of liberation. It traces the rise and disappointments of the women’s movement and its mirror image, the social conservatism that was such an important part of Ronald Reagan’s winning coalition. Episode 3 focuses on 1987, the year Mr Biden first ran for president and Mr Trump published “The Art of the Deal”. It was a year of excess—“The Bonfire of the Vanities” topped the bestseller lists—and of hubris.

The 1940s generation arrived in the White House in 1993, at the start of another triumphant decade. Yet rather than come together after the cold war, the country’s politicians turned on each other. Episode 4 focuses on 1994, when this battle was beginning, aided by changes in media and technology that supercharged partisan animosities and conspiracies. Episode 5 skips forward to 2008, when power should have passed definitively to the next generation.

Episode 6, on 2020, explains what happened instead, and how it can be that someone born one year after America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the favourite to occupy the White House until January 2029. “Boom!” is free to listen to for subscribers to The Economist. You can find it on our app, or wherever you get your podcasts.■