Why? I think it has to do with the life-changing effects of an inspirational presidential campaign during the years they were forming a concept of their career/life’s work.

Many of the older cohort will tell you that they’re in politics because of Bobby Kennedy (and the follow-on experience of Watergate). Many of the younger cohort will tell you about their first political experiences during the Bill Clinton campaign (and the follow-on experience of the Gingrich takeover.)

But there wasn’t anything like that in the late 1970s and 1980s. Just the (then) uninspirational Carter presidency and the 12 years of Reagan/Bush. Thus, no 40-year-old politicos.

Speaking as a 41-year-old with a fairly steady history of some or other progressive political work, but without a long-term organizational affiliation (I’m a useful bridger!) , I might well define the kind of person Schimitt’s counting as missing in action. But I don’t think he’s right about this as a major cause:

“There was almost no progressive activism on campus in the late Carter and Reagan years, which means that there are relatively few of us in our late-30s/early-40s in these organizations.”

I seem to recall quite a lot of activism on my campus, and Rutgers, The State U. of New Jersey in New Brunswick was not exactly a hotbed of radical student politics in the early 1980′s. There was anti-apartheid organizing. There were “Take Back the Night” marches, and rallies protesting Reagan’s bombing of Libya. There were anti-nuke organizations, and peace organizing–”The Day After” aired in 1983, right? There was the whole “We Are The World” anti-hunger movement. There were PIRGs (I interned and went on to work for one).

In short, there was a lot of progressive stuff going on.

So, if there’s a big dropoff of people in their 40s in the progressive establishment, I strongly suspect there are other reasons…inflation? Economics? We’re in the second big economic downtown of my two decades of adulthood.

The gap between 60′s-70′s idealism and 80′s-90′s pragmatism?

Were we too close in age to those 50-something bosses to get good mentoring? Or did we have some sort of edge-of-boomerdom sense of entitlement that made us too impatient to stick with a job for the long haul?

I have actually seens this problem more at the state and local groups I have worked for/with. At the the gigantic dinosaur where I am employed (for now), there is so much organizational inertia that you hardly even need an actual person to represent the old school.

Thanks so much for sharing this, I will pass it on.