THE YOUNG GUNS – OUT WITH THE OLD

May 31, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 35

As far as I can tell, Sean Duffy is the only world-champion lumberjack and reality television star running for Congress this year. Duffy is the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District. A district attorney, he’s married to another television star, Rachel Campos-Duffy. They met on the set of MTV’s The Real World: Road Rules All Stars in 1998. They have six children. Duffy’s a member of the House Republicans’ “Young Guns” recruitment program and has earned Sarah Palin’s endorsement. But most important, his candidacy—and the prospect of a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives—led 20-term incumbent Democrat David Obey to announce his retirement. The seat is open, and Duffy has a strong chance to win it.

The first thing that strikes you about Duffy is his age. At 38, he wasn’t even born when Obey entered Congress. Duffy is 33 years younger than Obey. He could be the son of the man he hopes to replace. Duffy and Obey grew up during different times. They were influenced by different events. They view the world through different lenses, and they have different priorities. “My oldest child is 10, my youngest is two months old,” Duffy says. “I have a unique concern about the America my children are going to inherit. Is it going to be as great as the America I inherited?”

Duffy is not alone. Congress is in the midst of the most significant generational shift since 1974. The congressmen and senators who came of age during the Nixon years, mainly liberal Democrats shaped by Vietnam and Watergate, are on the way out. A bunch of youngsters, mainly conservative Republicans shaped by 9/11 and the financial crisis, is on the way in. It’s a trend that will influence our politics for decades.

And it’s been a long time coming. The average age of senators declined between 1955 and 1981, and the average age of representatives reached a low of 47 in 1983. But these averages have been increasing, in fits and starts, ever since. There was a brief dip in 1995 with the Republican Revolution, but the trend quickly resumed. In 1995, the average age of representatives was 51. The average age of senators was 58. Now the averages are 57 and 63.

Expect those numbers to be much lower when the 112th Congress convenes next January. Congress will look more like Aaron Schock, the 29-year-old Republican congressman from Illinois’s 18th Congressional District, and a lot less like Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who turns 93 this November.

The change is obvious when you look at recent primaries, special elections, and retirements. In early May, Utah Republicans ditched the 76-year-old incumbent senator, Robert Bennett. Two 40-somethings are battling to replace him. (Representative Jason Chaffetz, 43, is already thinking about challenging the 76-year-old Orrin Hatch in 2012.)

In Kentucky, 47-year-old Rand Paul is running to replace the 78-year-old Jim Bunning. In Arizona, former representative J.D. Hayworth, 51, is challenging John McCain, 73. In Massachusetts in January, 50-year-old Republican Scott Brown replaced the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who died at 77.

In Hawaii, 71-year-old Democratic representative Neil Abercrombie is retiring to run for governor. It’s likely that Republican Charles Djou, 39, will replace him. In North Dakota, 53-year-old Republican governor John Hoeven is the frontrunner to replace Democratic senator Byron Dorgan, who is retiring at 68. Former congressman Rob Portman, 54, is running for the seat of outgoing Ohio senator George Voinovich, 73.

Who are the most dynamic and interesting leaders in the Republican party today? Individuals like Bobby Jindal (38), Marco Rubio (39), and Paul Ryan (40). At 46, Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor are the adults of this group. Mitt Romney, 63, is an elder statesman.

A similar, if less pronounced transition is taking place inside the Democratic party. Last week, 48-year-old Mark Critz won a special election to replace the late Representative John Murtha, who died at 77. In Pennsylvania, 58-year-old Joe Sestak defeated 80-year-old incumbent senator Arlen Specter. (This is after Specter left the Republican party in order to avoid a primary loss to 48-year-old Pat Toomey.) On May 11, 46-year-old Mike Oliverio defeated 14-term incumbent Alan Mollohan, who is 67. An entire cohort of septuagenarians is being washed away before our eyes.

A certain conception of politics may vanish with them. The 1974 election was a reaction to the Watergate scandal and Vietnam war. The Democrats who ran that year promised to reform Washington in the wake of Nixonian corruption and end American involvement in Southeast Asia. But this is ancient history for the young candidates running today. They don’t remember Nixon or Kissinger or Vietnam. Many of them are too young to have participated in the Cold War. For them, Reagan was a grandfatherly figure who appeared on television. These youngsters may have watched the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the protests in Tiananmen Square, and Yeltsin on a tank outside the Supreme Soviet, but they had little understanding of these events at the time. For them, the landscape of politics was shaped by 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008.

They are reacting to the establishment’s response to the financial crisis. The establishment theory is that the panic was caused by too little government. So, beginning in 2008, the government intervened massively in the economy. It took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It seized AIG. It authorized the TARP bailout of the major banks. It bailed out GM and Chrysler.

These policies may have begun under Bush, but Obama has maintained them. And Obama goes a step further. He says the country has been on the wrong track since 1981. He says America requires a “new foundation,” based on a large and active central government, to make our country great. From the stimulus to health care to cap and trade to more taxes and more federal involvement in education, all of Obama’s policies fit into this new foundation. But Obama was not prepared for the backlash against his vision.

The antiestablishment theory is different. It says government policy contributed to the housing bubble and overleveraged banks and that self-interested elites are using government to make things worse. The next generation of congressmen is anti-bailout and anti-D.C. They are terrified of the debt America has accumulated over the last two years. They are willing to consider radical solutions like Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future.” “I have a fear of creeping government influence, creeping socialism into our lives,” says Sean Duffy. “And I think it’s one of the battles of my generation. It’s sad that we have to re-fight this battle. But it’s coming back with a vengeance.”

This is a group that came of age during the 25 years of barely interrupted prosperity between November 1982 and December 2007. The individuals in this group matured during America’s “holiday from history” in the 1990s. They have not known the draft, or war on the scale of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. But September 11 shattered their confidence that America would always be safe. And seven years later the financial crisis shattered their confidence that America would always be rich.

This one-two punch is refashioning American politics in unpredictable ways. What 9/11 did, says Duffy, is “shake the foundation of the sense of security that I grew up with.” For instance, September 11 was a hinge event that motivated 32-year-old Adam Kinzinger, the GOP candidate in Illinois’s 11th Congressional District, to join the Air National Guard and eventually serve in Iraq. But it took another hinge event, the 2008 financial collapse that empowered the Obama agenda, to motivate Kinzinger to run for Congress. His overriding issue is government power. Kinzinger’s opponent, incumbent Democrat Debbie Halvorson, didn’t hold any town halls last August to defend her support for Obamacare. Kinzinger held eight to explain why he was against it.

The ultimate irony is that President Obama, 48, is not only part of the generational turn, he’s accelerating it. Obama promised a new politics, but his inexperience and ideology led him to cede power to the archons in Congress, experts in the old way of doing things. The liberal lions gloried in the return of the transactional welfare politics of their youth, but the public quickly soured on their policies. So the liberal restoration is bittersweet. Obama gave the old liberals one last chance to enact a decades-old agenda. But the future belongs to Sean Duffy.

Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard and the author, most recently, of The Persecution of Sarah Palin (Sentinel Books).