This article is included in the latest edition of “Phronesis in Pieces,” found at billschmitt.substack.com. The edition also includes the story below, a commentary about the Olympics controversy and our viewpoints on what’s really real.

Passing a torch to a new generation? Not so fast!

President Biden announced his presidential relay-race intentions last week. But don’t let Vice President Harris’s Oval Office prospects conjure up images of a Fountain of Youth rejuvenating America’s soul.

Categories used by scholars of “generational theory”—such as Neil Howe, a guru on Baby Boomers, Millennials, and other age cohorts—suggest the election of Harris this November would merely add to the many years of Boomer control over the White House.

That’s because Harris was born in 1964 (October 20, to be exact), and age-group experts generally apply the Boomer moniker to anyone born between 1946 and 1964. Harris would be 60 years of age when elected.

It is true that Biden would be handing the reins to a younger generation. He was born in 1942, so theorists place him in the “Silent Generation,” as explained in Carrie Weisman’s good overview at the Best Life website.

But, fact-checkers, stay alert: Biden would be passing the torch to the same old generation we’ve seen before. America already has had twenty-eight consecutive years of Boomer presidents—Bill Clinton (born 1946), George Bush (1946), Barack Obama (1961), and Donald Trump (yep, 1946).

At this moment, it looks like the next president will be someone from either the start of the Boomer period or the end of those years. What a difference a birthday makes, or not!

Former President Trump’s vice-presidential running mate does represent a new generation. J.D. Vance was born August 2, 1984. That places him in the Millennial generation, which spanned the years 1981 through 1996.

Such torch-passing actually would bypass the people of Generation X, born between 1964 and 1980.

Members of Generation Z, born 1997-2012, must wait to be considered or ignored. The minimum age for election to the presidency is 35.

There’s one thing Americans don’t have to wait for, according to Howe, whose latest book on generational theory, The Fourth Turning Is Here, was published last year.

Howe differs slightly with other experts—the Population Reference Bureau and the Center for Generational Kinetics, for example—on such analytic details as the names and time-spans of certain age cohorts. But his cyclical view of history and combined generational influences is most notable for its prediction of an imminent “Fourth Turning.”

That’s a major, transformational crisis (on par with World War II and the Great Depression) which Americans of all ages will have to confront together. The turnings occur approximately every eighty years.

Let’s hope the next president will have vim and vigor for crunch-time leadership, plus a nationwide spirit of solidarity into which he or she can tap.

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