For Gen X, few things signaled coming of age like a house key. It was a symbol of after-school autonomy beyond the watchful eyes of authority figures. This newfound independence was as much a gift as it was a necessity; the simultaneous rise of two-income households and divorce rates in the 1970s and ’80s meant empty homes on weekday afternoons, turning a generation of children into latchkey kids.
In our formative years, Gen Xers such as myself learned to handle matters on our own and became experts in tending to our parents’ things. Freedom came with responsibilities — the chores and homework, the watching over siblings and the not breaking stuff. But for a little part of each weekday, we had the keys to the kingdom.
Now middle-aged, this generation is increasingly in charge of a country in which just 17 percent of Americans have faith in government. More than 80 percent of Americans believe democracy is in crisis or facing serious challenges. The sensible step for a nation feeling this way is to undertake fundamental reforms and improve the government’s design and structure, which generations before us have done and the majority of Americans support. Instead, there’s a crippling deference to authority, the status quo and the long-standing structures of democracy, which are behaving like partisan outposts.
The country is in dire need of reform and principled leadership. Is Gen X up to the job?
It remains to be seen. Scholars have shown that this generation’s work ethic is characterized by creativity, pragmatism and independence. But they have also found that it lacks assertiveness and is the “most cynical of all the generations, with little faith in corporations, company loyalty, or authority.” Gen X — the 65 million of us born between 1965 and 1980 — now tends to be Republican-leaning; in the 2024 election, no generation was more pro-Trump. But it is also more progressive than older generations on social issues such as immigration, race relations, abortion and same-sex marriage. In this way, Gen X itself mimics the partisan divide in the country — those born before 1973 practice a more conservative politics than those born after, who are more likely to support Democrats. Sociologists have described them as “a generation of low expectations but high achievement.”
Latchkey childhoods helped foster a politics of stewardship that describes Gen X today. Sandwiched between baby boomers, who have ascended to the top of institutions, and millennials, who prefer transformational leadership, Gen X bridges these two larger generations and possesses characteristics of both. It carries their parents’ respect for institutions and structure alongside a recognition that sweeping change and progress are required to meet the times. That sensibility is a growing part of government. Gen X is now the largest cohort in the U.S. House, four of the nine Supreme Court justices and the largest share of the federal workforce.
It’s not that Gen X isn’t adaptable — its members came of age facing recessions and inflation, Watergate, the spread of AIDS and the end of the Cold War. But the present moment needs more than stewardship; it needs new ideas, new systems and democratic renewal — high expectations and high achievement. Previous generations amended the Constitution, expanded voting access, rebalanced federal and state power and reworked public institutions to account for social and cultural changes. Gen X, by contrast, has attended a long season of institutional drift — ascending in an antiquated system overdue for reform. The one constitutional amendment ratified during its adulthood concerned congressional pay, typifying the generation’s frustratingly practical nature.
Gen X inherited these weakening structures — courts, legislatures, elected office, fair governance — and now must rebuild them or move out of the way of people who will. There’s already a sense that it will be the generation history skips, with reports finding that they’re increasingly being passed over for CEO positions and may be the generation that fails to win the presidency. Its upbringing came with a requirement for gratitude and the understanding that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had done the heavy lifting — won world wars, resolved economic depressions, established civil rights and grew into a global power. And just as Gen X reached middle age, Donald Trump arrived with a nostalgia-filled, revanchist appeal to improve the country by reclaiming an imagined America of previous generations’ youth, the version we learned to revere.
This matters because democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires updates and renewal that cannot afford to be in awe of how things used to be. Trump’s return to office was not just a matter of populist grievance or partisan loyalty. It was also the consequence of a system that’s lost the people’s trust — and of a governing generation that’s responding by deferring to institutions rather than changing them.
Having the keys to the house does not signal the ability or the readiness to lead; it is responsibility without authority. The generation that grew up watching adults manage institutions imperfectly now occupies the same halls of power, tasked with management in an era that demands leadership, traditionalists in a time requiring redesign. Independence, once a temporary freedom in an after-school house, is as much a reward for sound management as it is a responsibility to make it anew.
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