While the AARP is open to anyone over 50 - a cohort which now includes increasing numbers of Baby Boomers - the organization's demographics now fall solidly across the pre-Boom Silent Generation (b.1925-1945), and it shows. Silents, in Strass and Howe's taxonomy, are considered an "adaptive" generation, motivated by a desire to infuse the collective spirit of their next-elders (in this case, the Civic "Veteran" Generation) with a sense of fairness, social justice, and self-awareness that is painfully absent from the culture during their formative years.

In their youth, in the 50s and 60s, Silents were the impetus behind the civil rights movement and the early dawnings of feminism. They were also the humorists and literary gadflies, including Harvey Kurtzman, the genius behind Mad Magazine, Woody Allen, Philip Roth, and the irreplaceable George Carlin. Unlike Boomers, Silents are not as deliberately disruptive in their social protest (Carlin notwithstanding), because their orientation is toward achieving actual change rather than self-actualization. The difference between Silent Generation and Boomer political activism is the difference between William F. Buckley and Newt Gingrich, for example.

Strauss and Howe, among others, have observed that this quiet determination to drive social change, combined with the disaproval with which many aging Adaptives view the noisesome protests of their younger Idealist siblings, can develop into a leadership philosophy that prizes compromise, not just as a method, but as an end unto itself. This has plusses and minuses. While younger Adaptives can provide much-needed agility in static systems (as the young President Theodore Roosevelt did in breaking a political logjam in the early 20th century, and as the generation of organizational leaders of the 1980s and 90s did when creating a more inclusive workplace), elder Adaptives from previous American generations proved to be some of the most disasterously ineffective executives in the country's history because they will do practically anything to avoid pitched conflict.

This brings us to the AARP, whose latest advertsing campaign, "Divided We Fail," saturates cable news political coverage. Its pointedly non-partisan message is that politicians need to "stop bickering" and solve problems like healthcare, social security, and the economy. It recalls the cranky centrism of Ross Perot in 1992, but unlike that campaign, it offers no solutions and presents no single figure around whom the compromising problem-solvers of America can rally. And while Perot came at the high-water mark of Silent political and cultural influence, today the "let's sit down and reason together" message seems utterly old and tired.

The fact is, both parties have ideas on how to address the problems that concern the AARP and others, and their approaches are, by and large, fundamentally incompatible. We don't need to "stop bickering," as if our principled differences were just childish misunderstandings: we need to air the differences as loudly and clearly as possible. We don't need to compromise. We need to choose.