It’s been kind of a brutal week politically. There’s something to remember though: things will change politically when the baby boomers die off and millennials become the dominant political block in our country.
I don’t know that well how baby boomers think, but I do understand how my generation, Gen X, does, to some extent. And I think millennials see the world very differently than my generation does. It’s fair to say that I, and many of you, grew up in a world where Broderism, and worse yet Reaganism, was pushed on us by the media in a way that is not that different from what goes on in North Korea. I try very hard not to be both sides person, but the truth is…it’s hard not to have it in the back of your mind sometimes. It was pushed into our heads for so long. And also too, my generation always felt (correctly) that the world is a shitty place that we’d never be able to change. In a lot of ways, we are, to quote the boomers’ biggest obsession, like a dog that’s been beaten too much.
And a huge proportion of people over 60 have been completely brainwashed by Murdoch media.
A lot has been made about the how the kids at Parkland have reacted eloquently and angrily to the school shooting. They think it’s outrageous that we don’t have gun control but they don’t think gun control is a lost cause, and it’s not in their lifetimes. (It will be quite a while.)
I truly believe that the current political situation is just a phase. It’s a damaging one, unfortunately, but it will end. The group of people my age and older are a lost cause, but the next generation, whatever problems it may have, lacks the political pathologies that have taken our government into a ditch.
Omnes Omnibus
Great. You just started one of the stupid generational fights.
Rafe
This senior citizen might take offense at your remark about being brainwashed by the Murdoch media. Just sayin’.
Corner Stone
Wow. That really is some navel gazing bullshit.
Doug!
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m mostly talking about how my generation was propagandized in a way that younger people haven’t been.
Cthulhu
Definitely exceptions, but I agree that I do feel better about Millennials compared to my fellow Gen-Xers. Of course, we are a comparatively small generation and thus have less political power than the generations before and after.
That being said, there may be an age/life stage effect here as well, not so much a cohort effect.
Corner Stone
@Doug!:
What? Give me a break. They have been exposed to more, and more consistent, bullshit that was not homegrown.
Omnes Omnibus
@Doug!: Watch what happens.
Jeffro
Millenials and iGen want us to quit it with the generalizations and respect them as individuals. All of them.
oldster
Hey, I’m one of the olds, and I agree about this.
That’s part of why Hillary’s loss was such a heartbreak. It was clear to me that my generation, esp. the men in power, were never going to get with a truly progressive program. Die-hard racists, gun-nuts, libertarians, homophobes, abortion-fanatics: you can’t change their minds, you just have to wait until they die.
And if Comey had not intervened, and Trump had lost, it would have been the last hurrah of that whole batch of bad apples.
The good people are still going to win. But we lost ten years of progress through Comey’s meddling. And I may never see the future I got to taste during Obama’s presidency.
Amir Khalid
??
dww44
Interesting you mention that. My spouse and I are actually at the very front end of the boomer generation and for s…&giggles, spouse often clicks over to Fox and this evening happened upon the Jesse Watters show. Commenting on how dumb the guy is, we both wondered how is it that Fox still has a lock on a subset of Americans, largely us older ones.
I actually believe Fox is on the downside of its dominance of our political conversation. Gee whiz, their biggest prime time host is Hannity, who also is not very bright. But, it’s more than that, they are 100% in the tank for Trump and that’s gonna blow up on them. That eventuality is much anticipated in this household.
The Thin Black Duke
Nope, not getting off the boat, uh-uh.
Mnemosyne
As a Gen-Xer, I agree with you that, as a general rule, our generation sucks. The Baby Boomers are much more diverse politically, so it’s really the sheer weight of numbers that ends up tilting the field.
RPh
No doubt …. GenX is getting skipped in importance w/r/t politics & in business too.
Waiting for that Boomer to retire so you get your shot at moving up (business or politics)? Good luck ….
Omnes Omnibus
OT: I heard a loud domestic disturbance a while ago. I called the police and reported it – it sounded bad. They asked me to buzz them in when they come. How long must I wait? I called a half an hour ago. Why does it take this long?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT, but…
Parkland is Meuller’s fault.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
As a fellow Gen Xer I’m slightly offended. I never fell for that both siderism crap and I know plenty of others who didn’t either. So I’m countering your anecdotal evidence with a bit of my own. Furthermore while we are, in general cynical, didn’t we help elect Obama, which was anything but cynical? As for being propagandized, every generation is subject to it, it’s just a different flavor. IDK I see what you’re saying but I don’t agree and I don’t have any better evidence than you.
Corner Stone
@Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ: DougJ is a douchebag just working it. Just working it.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: You know what DougJ is doing.
efgoldman
@Doug!:
Duh! The evolution of cable, deregulation of broadcast media (Thanks, Ted Kennedy. You did as lot of great stuff, but this one was a howler.), creation and evolution of the intartoobz and social media….
That’s like saying transportation isn’t the same since the railroads went bust and the first passenger jets flew.
Talk about a grasp of the obvious
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: See comment 1.
Corner Stone
Give him a minute. He’ll make some stupid response shortly.
oatler.
To continue the All the Young Dudes refs,
I know what she wants
A judo hold on a black man’s balls
Jerkin Crocus didn’t kill me but she sure came near
Cheryl Rofer
A Boomer weighs in:
cokane
good stuff Doug. Important to remember that incredible progress has been made on a number of issues, just not on every issue. And ya, Trump & McConnel & Ryan wont be in power forever. Things always have had a kind of zig zag progress in US history.
Amir Khalid
I’m not so sure that millennials will be as monolithic a political bloc as you hope, Doug!. The problem with expecting bigotry or reactionsim to die off with the old bigots/reactionaries is that young ones come up every day. There’s always going to be a section of that age cohort that will for various reasons — thorough indoctrination by their elders/peers, their own negative impulses, exposure to hate groups, &c. — remain defiantly un-woke about a lot of things. Homanity being what it is, the size of that sub-cohort as a faction of the whole is probably fairly constant from one generation to the next. The kids in Parkland get it, but not everyone their age will want to.
ETA: All this is to say that the good fight doesn’t stay won. The good guys don’t get to rest.
cokane
I’d just like to add that I think you’re overharsh on boomers, they are a product of when they grew up and now their aged vulnerability, which media prey on. But boomers did move the needle on a bunch of serious shit during their lifetimes.
Fieldstone
I disagree with the gloom and doom. Gen Xers (I hate that term — we are the Baby Busters, a far more accurate moniker) are actually the first generation in a long time — at least since the Great Depression — that has become more Democratic-leaning as we got older. The problem is that we are a small, cynical generation sandwiched between two larger generations who love to talk about themselves, so we are often overlooked, but we are an important canary in the coal mine foretelling the end of GOP dominance.
We are the inflection point generation. Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation conspicuously became much more Republican as they got older. First Nixon and then the Reagan “Revolution”. Baby Busters started out strongly Republican leaning, but this has weakened considerably over time and are now about an even split. Millennials have always been strongly Democratic-leaning and the post-9/11 generation looks to be even more so. This is the GOP’s slow death by demography, with no end in sight. It is the source of their current insanity, this fear of being erased by the marching on of history.
* Baby Busters are roughly those born from 1970 to 1982 or so — we are the obvious trough in the American birth numbers. We were born in the era when American decline seemed inevitable for the first time and that fact is an important part of our ethos — we were born into oil shocks, losing in Vietnam, Watergate, huge increase in crime, cities hollowing out, liberalism in retreat. We have zero memory of the optimism endemic to the post-war era through the 1960s. I hate it when people born in 1964 or 1965 are called “Gen Xers” when they are clearly the end of the Baby Boom — optimism was still high through the late 60s. But note that “early Boomers” (centered around those born in the early 50s) and “late boomers” (center around those born in the early 60s) are sufficiently different to form two different political animals. Early Boomers are the 60s protestors, late Boomers are the Reaganites who saw liberalism through the lens of 1970s American failure.
Omnes Omnibus
@oatler.: Huh?
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @Cheryl Rofer: not that others didn’t but I predicted this two days ago – that Trumpov would say the FBI missed the shooter because they were ‘all in’ (DEEP STATE!!!) on #fakecollusion
There
Is
No
Bottom
efgoldman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I dunno (we may never know) who writes Hair Furor’s twitts. Of course the however many thousand FBI agents are ALL working for Mueller….
James E. Powell
My family pretty much is the Baby Boom. Seven kids, my eldest brother born in ’46, my youngest sister born in ’63. I’m right in the middle, Ol’ 55. I know it’s anecdata, but there is so much variation among the seven of us that I never believed there was such a thing as a coherent Baby Boom Generation.
For people like my eldest brother, who was drafted but stayed stateside, and my oldest sister, who was in college for the all the student protests, etc., the 60s meant one thing, for us in the younger end, they meant something very different. So can we stop talking about everyone born from ’46 to ’64 as if we share anything but age?
And while I’m sure hopeful about the coming generations (I teach high school, so I have something like a front row seat), I’d offer this cautionary note. Back when I was in high school and later in college, we were all into being the vanguard of the New Age. We swore we were not going to be like our parents’ generation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, we were not having any of it, and all that was going to be gone in our time. It worked out great. About two-thirds of my cohort reverted and have been voting Republican since Reagan. And each cycle they become more and more unhinged RW.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@efgoldman: the first one does have a lack Of random Capitalization that suggests Kellyanne may have been in on it. But that second one is pure trumpy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Fieldstone:
I was born in 1964. Please tell me how Sputnik and the Kennedy assassination affected me.
PhoenixRising
Those of us Xers who had to fight for our own citizenship didn’t swallow the both sides bullshit, because we knew who was trying to kill us or didn’t care if we died and who was going to get us the best available deal, even in 1992.
We’re ready to take our Both Sides Totebagger parents in one hand, our Bernista teen kids in the other and knock their goddam heads together. Stop your whining and drag your friends to vote Demcrat, you’ve both had it too easy.
But you’re welcome to speak for your fellow straight white men! I can’t know your experience.
Schlemazel
I think you are way over simplifying the beliefs of the generations. Boomers tended pretty liberal (despite all the phonies who were only anti-my-going-to-war) but settled in and became ‘good’ Reagan Democrats once they had some skin in the game. Certainly things are different now & later generations are not doing as well as boomers did when they were at the same stage. OTOH, the younger groups have been steeped in the glibetarian bullshit. A simple trip through the comment section of younger demographic web sites will show you that there are a lot of them. It is too early to tell how this will play out.
Omnes Omnibus
@Schlemazel: See comment 1.
Schlemazel
@Doug!:
Don’t see how you came to that conclusion. Boomers grew up with responsible media, later generations have spent their entire life surrounded by bullshit media
efgoldman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Since Ferret Head is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, he probably assumes no-one else can either
Schlemazel
@RPh:
Boomers will never retire. The ‘greatest generation’ made it possible to steal our pensions, taxed Social Security and generally saw to it that retirement is just a pipe dream
Omnes Omnibus
@Schlemazel: He is trolling.
ETA: He has great musical taste. He also trolls when he can.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
But then, whatever else KAC is, she’s not stupid, and she’s a lawyer
I wonder if that little Lindsey Graham clone they’ve been sending out lately is in FL?
Mnemosyne
@Fieldstone:
So if the Baby Boom ended in 1965 and the Baby Busters start in 1970, what about those of us born in those missing years? ?
IIRC, the end of the Baby Boom is in 1963 because that’s when the birthrate finally declined below “boom” levels, so the generation can’t be arbitrarily lengthened.
Suzanne
I was born in 1980, so I don’t know if I’m an Xer or a Millenial, but I don’t feel awesome about the people around me age-wise, both older and younger. Lots of shallow thinking and navel-gazing and both-sides-ism and lack of engagement.
Amaranthine RBG
@Omnes Omnibus:
Children are the future!
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: There are arguments that X began culturally in 1961. Which would bring in Obama. I have fuck all in common with my aunt who was born in 1946.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amaranthine RBG: Fuck your mother.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Most people suck.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the view from the right
I’ve never heard of Malor but his twitter bio says eh writes for the Federalist and the DC Examiner
Amaranthine RBG
@Omnes Omnibus:
Do you think your drinking is the cause of your mediocre professional accomplishments or a result of it?
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Saturday night’s all right for fighting.
Mnemosyne
@Amaranthine RBG:
What’s it like to start every morning as a sociopath?
Amaranthine RBG
@Mnemosyne:
Tell me more about sociopaths, you kitten killer.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amaranthine RBG: And your aunt.
You gun nut.
Mnemosyne
@Amaranthine RBG:
Weak sauce. Hasn’t the NRA faxed your new talking points yet? I noticed your same old ones weren’t even getting replies in the previous threads. You’d better step up your game or your commission is going to get cut this month.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sigh
Sigh???
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
He is vile
Brachiator
This is just silly. I don’t think Doug! really believes it.
Tom Q
I think it’s a bit of a political myth that Baby Boomers started off all liberal/radical and then turned into middle-aged Republicans (though there was always Jerry Rubin to pose for that poster). The college-educated portion of that generation made a lot of noise and had much to do with introducing then-radical ideas into the national bloodstream, But the non-college segment were a lot closer to their parents, culturally, and there were always more of them. They, like almost all folk, voted more as they got older, and their sheer numbers drowned out the aging college radicals. It became a cliche to accuse Boomers of selling out once they got older, but I think the reality is they were never a majority in their generation,
Shorter: everyone I know who was flamingly liberal in college still is (some even to Bernie-extent); it’s the people who were never liberal who give Boomers the bad rep.
The encouraging thing about younger folk today is that they DO seem to be dominantly liberal, and their percentages of voting Dem see to have held steady over the past decade, suggesting they’re locked in for life.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid:
Maybe, but in the United States, the fraction that are white is smaller from one generation to the next, and that’s mostly what matters in this particular case.
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Q: The polling I’ve seen suggests that the Boomers became much more Republican just in the last couple of decades. I think it’s largely Fox News. It wasn’t when they became middle-aged, it was when they got old.
Meanwhile, GenX actually moved left. We were the most Republican generation in existence when we were young; now we’re not. Now it’s basically a smooth progression, where the younger you are the more Democratic you vote. I think that may have to do with party politics becoming starkly racialized.
Matt McIrvin
@Schlemazel: I think GenXers had near-fatal levels of glibertarianism in their youth and got a lot of it burned out of them by living through the George W. Bush administration.
Mnemosyne
@Tom Q:
I also suspect that smoking pot and listening to rock music are not actually reliable markers of whether someone is a liberal or conservative politically, but a lot of people made that assumption in the 1960s.
magurakurin
@Fieldstone: the late Boomers are sometimes referred to as Generation Jones. We got the empty cookie jar and then got to listen to our older siblings tell us how delicious they were…
but generations are mostly arbitrary. It’s fun to play games with them, but the truth is assholes abound in every generation. At that really is the problem. Assholes.
Tom Q
@Mnemosyne: Or growing your hair long. I remember the long-ago shock my sheltered self received when a guy with shoulder-length hair and a scruffy beard told me how proudly he voted for Nixon in ’72.
Mary G
I am a boomer born in 1955, snack in the middle and I am a proud bleeding heart liberal who’s gotten more liberal the older I get. Doug has been trying to troll Twitter a lot lately and been mostly ignored, so he’s bored. Also, too, this all boomers are, all millennial are, stuff is pure bigotry. Same as saying all white people are, all black people are. Groups are not homogenous.
Jack the Second
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If Trump uses the school shooting as the pretense for firing Mueller, I am totally up for the riot.
Matt McIrvin
@Fieldstone:
I was born 1968, always thought of myself as a core GenXer. You’re describing my childhood there.
BUT… our young adulthood happened during the relatively optimistic 1990s. The Cold War was over; declinism pretty much vanished and people started talking about the US as a globally unchallenged “hyperpower”; once the early-90s recession cleared the economy was roaring, the federal deficit vanished; there was this interesting technological explosion happening. All that happened with sort of a Third Wayish center-left administration in place, and it was easy to think of that as the future.
And then Bush got in, 9/11 happened and everything was shot to hell. And I think at some point in there a lot of GenXers got mad.
NotMax
Front page trolling is not a good look.
magurakurin
@Tom Q: I think people mistaking Silent Generation members for Baby Boomers is a big part of why the Boomers get slagged. The Boomer generation starts in 1946, so they started to go on SSI/Medicare in 2011. The people protesting Obamacare in mobility scooters with “Government off my Medicare” signs weren’t Boomers. That’s the Silent Generation.
Bobby Thomson
This shit again? Statistically millennial whites are almost as retrograde as their parents, and that will only get worse with white supremacists increasing college outreach and Trump legitimizing them. The only reason the millennial generation is so forward thinking is because it is much more diverse. A few anecdotes and media savvy individuals don’t refute broader trends.
joel hanes
In my experience, every generalization about “generations” has exactly the same analytic power, and should be accorded exactly the same amount of thoughtful attention.
Zero.
Might as well argue about the relative merits of groups who share astrological signs, or membership in any other grandfalloon
kattails
@Mary G: Damn, wrote a nice long comment and then forgot to hit “post”, so I will go with this nice refutation. I was born in 1951. My entire local boomer group votes absolutely and votes Democratic. College educated environmentalists, a Unitarian minister, nurses, a forester, carpenters. I’m a waitress and painter. A group recently started up working to resurrect the Democratic party in our town, perfect opportunity for the other generations to kick in some energy and focus the direction. Where are they? Most of the right-wing political conversations I overhear are coming from males of the generations immediately after mine. And dear God are they uninformed/brainwashed.
Aimai
@Doug!: just wait! How ridiculous to think that the forces of reaction can’t propagandize and bewilder young people.
Barbara
@Tom Q: The very essence of what was meant by the term the silent majority.
swiftfox
@James E. Powell: Agree here with Fieldstone as well. My younger siblings and I were born within 3.5 years of each other, from ’59-’62. Yet there is quite a bit of variation. They both swallowed the Hillary email kool aid. Both work very hard and I’d consider them both limited information voters and quite a bit more materialistic than myself. I received an MS in wildlife; my sister became a nurse, my brother never finished college but probably makes more money as a senior project manager than she does as an ER supervisor. Shocked me to hear last fall that he also swallowed the Vince Foster kool aid. Yet he also has told me he believes in evolution. So there is quite a bit of variation in baby boomer politics.
BellyCat
@Fieldstone: Well stated. I like Baby Busters, but Lost Babies might be even more accurate.
Only small quibble is that teh Googles indicates the last birth year for Baby Boomers 1964. Seems right to me.
Gvg
Doug j likes to troll. I do not understand the appeal but his analysis of his generation might be projection.
I think the original label of baby boomers was for purposes of marketing and advertising. They did buy a lot of products and courting them made companies money. It was very useful to sales. Politics maybe not so much.
How you personally think or act has no relavance to statistical analysis of a large group of people. This is statistics and anecdotes or personal views do not show a real constructed statistical analysis to be wrong nor do your experiences translate into one. Doug is talking about his views of his group but he didn’t provide any actual large measured data about his cohort.
I’d be interested in some real data that defined the age grouping it was going to use and then tracked their behavior over time.
Kay
This doesn’t make any sense, DougJ. The high school kids who are speaking may be pro gun regulation (and we don’t know their other views) but this guy is 19:
Zinsky
I see oatler beat me to the punch at comment 23, but your song lyric reference, Doug!, is from the song All the Young Dudes, which I’m sure you know was written by David Bowie but popularized by the band Mott the Hoople.
With regard to your premise about different generations approaching the fatuous “both sides do it” canard differently, I try to avoid broad, sweeping generalizations about young vs. old because there are a lot of good people in all generations of Americans. There are also a fair number (although a small minority) of just plain shitty people in both. Some broad comments can be made though – the younger generation clearly leans more liberal than their parents or grandparents. This is a hopeful sign. They also are far more reliant (dependent?) on their screens (devices) than their parents. It’s very hard to get many of them to put down their goddamn iPhones and actually physically attend a caucus or meeting and be present in a human sort of way, because they are so busy texting, Snapchatting, Instagramming or whatever to be present and interact face to face. This is worrisome. We cannot let evil like Trump win, because we are too busy with our iPhones!!
WaterGirl
Thanks, Doug, for the hearty fuck you to me and half the people on Balloon Juice. This really pisses me off. There must be a thread I can read where I won’t be dismissed and insulted.
Glad Barack Obama didn’t have your attitude when I went to 4 statesduringnthe primary season, including Iowa, to volunteer for him maybe before you knew who he was, but most certainly when you would have been saying he didn’t have a chance. Fuck you.
AnonPhenom
Keep fucking that chicken, Doug.
The “divide an conquer” shit never fails (though what the divider is may have to change from time to time).
Doug is a very useful Third Way tool.
AnonPhenom
the above is from Linnete Lopez who thinks everything will be fine when we get rid of the boomers.
Sam
Why do you think young people can’t be brainwashed? It may be Reddit and 4chan, but the result is similar.
L&DinSLT
@oldster: Oh for crying out loud, generalize much? My parents are avid Fox watchers, but they’re in their late 80s. My dad started with Rush in the 90s (?) when he was on KFBK in Sacramento. I always say Rush stole his brain. We do not discuss politics. Do the math and my husband & I are in our mid-60s. I came to this site via ABL on Kos, so it’s been a while. I’m sorry we got the cheap real estate, tuition and disease free sex. Our friend cohort ranges from young singles to single parents to couples with children age two to college graduates. We know a few people our age. Boomer bashing is tiresome.
Gelfling 545
You should damn well know how many baby boomers think. You can read our thoughts here daily. I am heartily sick of people waiting for me to die at which point all things will be wonderful when I’ve been fighting this fight since before you were born or thought of. i would just note that most of those marchers for white supremacy didn’t look all that old to me. Don’t think Jill Stein got many votes from us either.
karensky
@Omnes Omnibus Yah. I am 73 and have never voted for a Republican. I hope to make it to 78 to keep organizing for city and state elected officials, for good public schools, all civil rights, including age discrimination. What the fuck.
Gelfling 545
@WaterGirl: I’ve decided I’m done reading Doug’s posts. This attitude has crept in here before but I believe this is the first from a front pager. If I want to read dumb ass assumptions, I can get them elsewhere. And I have no interest in the writing of someone who views me as a hinderance rather than an ally.
beergoggles
@Bobby Thomson: This!
But don’t rely on that diversity to save anyone. When whites become a majority minority, they will only get more radicalized. Privilege is hard to let go.
No One You Know
You must not be looking at the ages of people proudly holding Trump signs. Or listening to what’s coming out of their mouths.
There’s a bar in my city whose Jewish proprietor threw out a bunch of white pride recruiters…wanna guess how old these guys were?
I bought psychographic research for several years. The commentator upthread who brought up the marketing piece is exactly right: these generational names are creative generalizations designed to capitalize on Fear Of Missing Out among groups of people–and, since they’re psychographic, they don’t depend on age-related demographics.
The “generation” of people who think IGMFY will remain. There is no magic die-off. In fact, rising levels of panic will spot more frantic IGMFY behavior, with a real risk of normalizing it.
J R in WV
@Tom Q:
I was in the service and being shuffled around the nation in ’72, and hadn’t really been home to register since I turned 21 (the voting age in the long ago and far away) so didn’t get to vote against Trixy Dick Nixon. The last election I didn’t take part in, really.
Well, I missed a bond levy election one time, but it passed 70-30 or so, which was expected. It pays for VFD trucks and EMT services county wide, and is a wildly popular expenditure. So no guilt felt there either.
Proud Yellow Dog Democrat – will vote for the yellow dog under the porch before I vote for a Republican. Except for Bernard Sanders or Dr Stein.
J R in WV
@J R in WV:
And 30% of people DON”T want fire departments and ambulances??? Where do these people live? MARS?? Every night on the news they get to see people just like them watching their house burn up, or an ambulance driving people away from a terrible traffic accident!!!
gorram
The thing about these generational differences is that a lot of times they miss the forest for the trees – millennials are a more diverse generations (both because younger people immigrate more, both to the US and out from it, but also because more vulnerable populations die off faster – and especially if we’re talking LGBT-related diversity in addition to race, the lingering demographic effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis can’t be understated).
If you look at the White sections of the millennial demographic, particularly the White cisgender, and straight men, it’s a pretty familiar set to what you’re talking about in terms of believing the nonsense in the media environment. They’re just a smaller proportion of the population, so they don’t have as much dominance in political discussions among ourselves and as easy a time claiming to speak for us in the bigger context.
I think that puts the deportation-minded policies, the restrictions on immigration, and all of the other policies currently being pushed into a useful perspective – it’s about tailoring the millennial cohort so it looks and acts more like prior generations, as much as fixing the current status quo so that subsequent generations have a more secure majority of White people and so on.
John Steed
Every generation believes that things will get better when the previous one dies off.
You probably should have a backup plan.
John Steed
@Gelfling 545: Indeed. I’m sure that the latest generation will truly be the first to really vote left. But just in case, Doug probably needs a backup plan.