How America's most popular horror writer has spent fifty years fantasizing about revolution while his generation held the reins

There's something infuriating about watching a generation that has controlled every lever of American power for three decades still cast themselves as scrappy rebels fighting the system. The Baby Boomers—born between 1946 and 1964—have dominated the presidency, Congress, corporate boardrooms, and cultural institutions since the Clinton administration. They show no signs of stopping. The average age in the Senate hovers around sixty-five. We've watched octogenarians cling to Supreme Court seats until death rather than cede ground to successors. And through it all, they've maintained the mythology that they are the counterculture, the revolutionaries, the ones who would remake the world if only the entrenched powers would let them.

No writer embodies this maddening contradiction more completely than Stephen King.

King was born in 1947, ground zero of the postwar birth spike. He came of age protesting Vietnam, built his empire on Watergate cynicism, and internalized the Sixties catechism "never trust anyone over thirty" so deeply that he's spent fifty years writing about corrupt institutions and righteous outsiders—even as he became a wealthy, influential insider himself. His apocalyptic novels form a revealing trilogy of generational psychology: The Stand, Under the Dome, and The Institute. Read together, they expose the Boomer self-conception in all its contradictory glory—perpetual rebels who somehow never notice they've been running the show all along.

As critic Kat Rosenfield observed: "His was a generation that fancied themselves revolutionaries, that fetishised youthful irreverence and made 'Never trust anyone over 30' into a catechism; imagine their horror at waking up one day to discover that they had become the ones with all the wealth, all the power, all the butts in all the seats of our nation's elected offices." Except they haven't woken up. That's the horror younger generations are living through—watching people in their seventies and eighties insist they're still the resistance.

The Stand: Burn It Down (So We Can Be In Charge)

The Stand appeared in 1978, when Boomers were still young enough to plausibly claim outsider status. A superflu engineered by the U.S. military escapes containment and kills 99.4% of humanity. The survivors split between the righteous followers of Mother Abagail in Boulder and the dark disciples of Randall Flagg in Las Vegas. It's Biblical in scope—King calls it "dark Christianity"—but the subtext is pure Boomer wish fulfillment.

The pandemic doesn't just kill people. It erases institutions, hierarchies, the accumulated failures of the previous generation. Everything the Boomers blamed on their parents—the military-industrial complex, environmental destruction, soulless corporate conformity—simply vanishes. What remains is a blank canvas. The Boulder community holds democratic town meetings. They form committees. They reject the corrupted technological systems that created the plague. It's Woodstock with consequences, the commune fantasy scaled up to civilization-building.

"The place where you made your stand never mattered," King writes. "Only that you were there...and still on your feet." Activism as theology. The belief that caring enough, showing up enough, being authentic enough will somehow produce utopia. It's a comforting philosophy if you've never actually held power and been forced to make impossible choices. It's a damning one if you've held power for thirty years and the world still looks like this.

The novel's villain, Randall Flagg, represents everything the Sixties counterculture defined itself against: authoritarianism, technological death worship, military-industrial overreach. His Vegas is American excess as grotesquerie—neon lights and nuclear weapons. The moral framework is simple: we are the light, our parents built the bomb, the choice is obvious. It must have been intoxicating to believe this in 1978. It's considerably less charming now that the generation of light has been making the choices for decades.

Under the Dome: The Rebels Become the Villains

By 2009, the Boomers had become what they once rebelled against, and King—to his credit—seemed to notice. Under the Dome is a claustrophobic nightmare about what happens when the wrong people control a crisis. An invisible barrier descends over Chester's Mill, Maine, cutting it off from the outside world. Resources dwindle. And into this vacuum steps Big Jim Rennie, a used-car salesman and town selectman who seizes authoritarian control with terrifying efficiency.

King described the novel as "an apocalyptic version of the Peter Principle." Big Jim hoards resources, manufactures crises to justify his power grabs, and genuinely believes his cruelty serves the greater good. "In Chester's Mill," he declares, "the only official government we're recognizing right now is our own, soldier, and I am its representative." He's a Boomer who never updated his self-image—still the scrappy local businessman fighting outside interference, even as he becomes the tyrant.

The dome functions as metaphor for the systems Boomers built and now refuse to dismantle. "King always believed that although the characters in the novel live under a dome, separated from the rest of the world, the reality in his opinion is that we all live under a dome." We're all trapped within structures we didn't choose, governed by people who rose through mechanisms divorced from competence or morality. The generation that promised to tear down walls constructed an invisible one and called it protection.

Notably, the novel's hero is Dale "Barbie" Barbara—an Iraq War veteran, essentially a Millennial thrust into conflict with Boomer power structures. King seems aware, perhaps unconsciously, that his generation has become the obstacle. The torch must pass. Yet even here, the novel requires external intervention—children touching an alien power source, begging for mercy—to resolve its crisis. The young cannot save themselves through action alone. They need the deus ex machina that King always provides when the implications get too uncomfortable.

The Institute: Sorry About All This

The Institute (2019) completes the trilogy by inverting the power dynamic entirely—and reads like an apology letter King's generation will never actually write. Adults aren't flawed protectors or even corrupt leaders here. They're the explicit enemy, systematically kidnapping and torturing children with psychic abilities for a shadowy government program.

The Institute's staff justify their cruelty with utilitarian logic: they claim to have prevented nuclear holocaust "over five hundred times" by harnessing children's powers. The needs of the many. Sound familiar? It's the logic of every Boomer policy that sacrificed the future for present comfort—gutting pensions, inflating housing costs, ignoring climate change, loading younger generations with debt for educations that no longer guarantee employment. We had to. You'll understand someday. It was for your own good.

One caretaker sneers at her young charges: "You kids who think you own the world." The generational resentment is explicit, ugly, undeniable—and completely backwards. The kids don't think they own the world. They know they don't. They're simply trying to survive in institutions designed to extract their potential and discard the remains. The novel's young protagonists form bonds of solidarity their captors cannot comprehend, and ultimately save themselves through collective action.

"I just love that this story was about the kids and about the kids saving themselves," noted the television adaptation's writer (Available on MGM+). "This message is pretty magical and undeniably relevant, highlighting how kids are forced to fix the world that the rest of us have...not fixed." The ellipsis speaks volumes. Not fixed. Not couldn't fix. Just... didn't. Chose not to. Were too busy maintaining their grip on power to consider what comes after.

The Rebel Who Wouldn't Leave

King's arc across these three novels mirrors his generation's trajectory with uncomfortable precision. The Stand is the fantasy of starting over, of inheriting a clean world purged of parental failure. Under the Dome is the nightmare of discovering you've become the thing you hated—and still can't stop. The Institute is the dawning recognition that salvation, if it comes, will come from the young, and it will come despite you, not because of you.

This is why King remains so beloved by Boomers and increasingly alienating to everyone else. His fiction validates their core mythology: that they are fundamentally good people trapped in bad systems, that their failures are institutional rather than personal, that the revolution is always just one apocalypse away. Millennials and Zoomers read the same texts and see something different: architects of the status quo cosplaying as its critics.

King left Twitter in late 2024, citing "toxicity." His political pronouncements had drawn increasing fire from younger users who found his establishment liberalism inadequate to the moment. "OK Boomer" had become the default response (in addition to uncomfortable reminders about that scene in It. You know the one). The man who built his career on understanding American anxieties found himself out of step with them—or rather, found that the anxieties had shifted. We're no longer afraid of the institutions. We're afraid they'll never let go.

King has always understood that horror works best when it reflects genuine fear. For fifty years, he's been writing about the terror of powerlessness, of being trapped in systems designed to destroy you. He just never seemed to notice when his generation moved from one side of that equation to the other. 

The Boomers are still waiting for their chance to remake the world. The rest of us are waiting for them to realize they had it—and wondering what we'll inherit when they finally, reluctantly, let go.