One Nation Under AARP

by Lynch, Frederick R.

• ISBN13: 9780520268289
• ISBN10: 0520268288
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-20
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

This book provides a fresh and even-handed account of the newly modernized AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons)--the 40-million member insurance giant and political lobby that continues to set the national agenda for Medicare and Social Security. Frederick R. Lynch addresses AARP's courtship of 78 million aging baby boomers and the possibility of harnessing what may be the largest ever senior voting bloc to defend threatened cutbacks to Social Security, Medicare, and under-funded pension systems. Based on years of research, interviews with key strategists, and analyses of hundreds documents,One Nation under AARPprofiles a largely white generation, raised in the relatively tranquil 1950s and growing old in a twenty-first century nation buffeted by rapid economic, cultural, and demographic change. Lynch argues that an ideologically divided boomer generation must decide whether to resist entitlement reductions through its own political mobilization or, by default, to empower AARP as it tries to shed its "greedy geezer" stereotype with an increasingly post-boomer agenda for multigenerational equity.

Author Biography

Frederick R. Lynch is a government professor at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Invisible Victims and The Diversity Machine.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Not Going Quietly	p. 1
Boomer Basics: Generation, Culture, Demographics	p. 19
Old Age in a New Society	p. 44
Boomers' Senior Power Potential: From Social Protest to Self-Preservation	p. 70
Crash Landing for a Self-Critical Generation	p. 95
Not Your Father's AARP: Bill Novelli Builds a New Boomer Brand	p. 129
AARP Turns Fifty: The Battle for Health Care Reform	p. 166
You Can't Always Get What You Want: Me, We, or AARP?	p. 192
Appendix: Methodological Odyssey	p. 211
Notes	p. 215
Index	p. 263
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