Baby-boomers are in effect during anti-Trump demonstrations. Why then?

I looked through photos of anti-Trump and anti-doge protests in the United States during the weekend, and I couldn’t help but notice something: there was certainly a lot of gray hair.

This considered me different from what I remember in the recent demonstrations of the past – like Black Lives Matter and the demonstrations of Israel / Gaza, where young people seemed to lead the charge.

I am apparently not the only person to notice. On R / 50501, one of the Reddit forums for organizing the events of the weekend, someone posted: “We were really able to give it to the boomers.”

“I saw three fairly important demonstrations today around the place where I lived,” said the person. “Guess who arose and gave the greatest demonstration of support? Boomers.”

My colleague Lakshmi Varanasi also reported something similar recently. She reported two “Tesla Takedown” demonstrations last month in Michigan:

I noticed that the crowds of Ann Arbor and Troy were mainly people over 65, white, and withdrew from jobs that depended on public funding as teachers, teachers in local universities and social workers.

The journalists of commercial initiates who checked the demonstrations last weekend against the country’s locations also noticed a similar trend: “Many said they were the most worried about the economy and their retirement investments, who decreased in tandem with Trump price ads. “”

Anecdotally, I noticed something for this purpose in the suburbs of New York where I live – the small strikes of protests in city squares in the past few months or two seem to be largely made of women over 60 years of age. (It may have to do with the global age demography of the suburbs, so I haven’t read too much in it.)

However, I have some theories to explain why so many baby boomers arise to protest.

The first is that baby boomers (which are generally 61 to 79) are at retirement age or nearby. They are most concerned with the fate of social security and their retirement portfolios. These two things were thrown into chaos. Elon Musk described social security as “Ponzi’s largest scheme”, although he also said that valid beneficiaries could get more advantages once he has finished rooting waste.

And the new prices have sent the stock market to a nose during the last week, which could harm the retirement accounts of people who are really withdrawn. If prices on all kinds of things are increasing, it also harms retirees on a fixed income. Keep in mind, many baby boomers like Temu.

But let’s be honest: a 65-year-old Trump voter, who examined their investment account in dismay on Friday, was not going to decide to run for anti-top demonstrations on Saturday. Baby-boomers, like any generation, are not a monolith. (Boomers also voted for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the 2024 elections.) And people who attended a demonstration have probably have the same political orientation for decades. This is not a case where the last weeks have radicalized and changed the spirit of all Boomers.

However, I think it is possible that recent events have activated certain dormant cells – older Democrats who had remained at home for the student demonstrations of Gaza or the Black Lives Matter 2020 steps.

I asked Robert Cohen, professor of history and social studies in Nyu whose work focuses on the history of protest movements, from his point of view on all of this. He warned against radical generalizations.

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Cohen recognized that the baby boomers who had lived – or had participated – the protest movements of the 60s and 70s can, in fact, have a slightly different perspective and justification for anti -top demonstrations today.

“What does” make America mean again “? This means America less social changes in the 60s,” said Cohen.

Consider some of the things that baby boomers are proud of their generation to put pressure for: civil rights, women’s rights, environmental causes – they may feel an urgency to go to the rescue of these threatened things.

A generation that attended concerts for live help, the concert for the Bangladesh, and made a Christmas song with the lyrics “know that it is the Christmastime?” Could have a different perspective on the implications of withdrawing USAID from developing countries where part of his work was to tackle global hunger.

People over 65 are the most reliable voting block, and this can be significant here.

“It is really more difficult for (politicians) to reject them both because they vote more, but also because they were there, and it is not like a kind of young exuberance,” said Cohen.

I should again give a notice of non-responsibility that any radical generalization on generations is always Go short. (Trump himself is a baby boomer, after all.) And all my testimonies on the demography of the age of the demonstrators this weekend are purely anecdotal.

But if our image of a demonstrator of recent years was a young with blue hair, we may have to update a retired pants in Capri pants and a “best grandmother in the world” shirt.