I think the rap on the boomer isn't that they were uniformly horrible, but that they aged worse the preceding generations in terms of shitting on the bed.
It isn't usually framed this way but I think the hostility from younger people to the Boomers of the past decade is basically because of climate change.
There's a clear cultural idea that young adults in the 80s were exuberant about wealth and materialism as pushback to the woozy 70s, grubby late-60s, and mod mid-60s
The anti-boomer stereotype I'm familiar with is the peace-love hippie that became a materialistic yuppie. Not my generation that never believed in anything, and wore t-shirts saying "he who dies with the most toys wins" as an expression of our nihilistic materialism.
Seems surprising that Boomers would be causelessly terrible. My guess is two successive wars, TV, and mass suburbanization is bad for people and if we want to make things better we need to fix those things.
*the cultural impact of two successive world wars
It isn't usually framed this way but I think the hostility from younger people to the Boomers of the past decade is basically because of climate change.
Ned attempting to close the climate change framing deficit.
I've framed it this way twice but others need to join in.
It does sometimes blow my mind that I learned about climate change and global warming as a looming crisis in the 80s in pretty much exactly the same way that my children are learning about it. That it was well-known enough to tell an 8 year old then, and that so little has been done that that's about all that you do with an 8 year old today.
I put the data from Roper into a chart. Take this with a big grain of salt; I hastily copied it, and Roper's groups weren't uniform year-to-year. My main takeaway is that the particulars of each election were much more salient than age groups; strong polarization by age is only an artifact of the last few elections.
Who is the largest cohort of Fox News viewers? I'm comfortable blaming them for the carnage.
Dimly recalling some study that said that in terms of aggregate voting the generational cohort breaks depend more on which President was in office when you first vote matter a lot. So, the silent generation (came of age mostly during Eisenhower) mostly terrible in terms of voting, then there's a decent cohort of early boomers (born roughly 42-50) who were OK, then most of the boomers (born 50-64) are terrible, because Carter doesnt count for these purposes, then the first part of GenX (born 64-70) sucks politically, with a strong break around people born after 1970 and running through millenials (because George W Bush and apparently Trump don't count for this purpose, though it'd be interesting to know if the cohort born 1982-1989 [political maturity GWB pre-crash] votes differently than other millenials). Maybe I dreamed this up but it feels roughly right.
In any event I think its fair to say that as a collective matter the generations of relatively prosperous whites that came of age or enjoyed the biggest fruits of postear prosperity collectively, in general, shit the bed by ignoring what made their prosperity possible and their fellow citizens, and also by a cultural commitment to childish ignorance as a value, and that Trump is the result.
The anti-boomer stereotype I'm familiar with is the peace-love hippie that became a materialistic yuppie.
Yeah, that was a core story for Gen Xers. I'd be curious to know how much that actual path was followed IRL. I think the biggest cause of actual Boomer backlash is simple resentment of their cultural dominance: from 1964 until the very recent past, our country's entire cultural complex has been analyzing and valorizing Boomers and their preferred culture, and lots of people hate that. But being annoyed at the popular kid getting all the attention isn't really a critique, so instead people talk about supposedly awful things that the popular kid did or does, whether they're true or false, universal or particular.
Anyway, what I started to say was that honest discussions of the '60s talk about how few hippies there really were, and how many hidden straight-laced conservatives (most of whom joined the W administration and expressed their long-simmering bitterness by destroying the country). There's no doubt that the vast majority of people who were ever, in any but the most surface ways, hippies went on to live ordinary lives, but the actual about-face from Yippie to yuppy? I'd bet that that was a tiny fraction of the cohort.
4: That's wrong, I think. I mean about the World Wars, not the TV and suburbanization. Because all things considered, the generations that lived through the World Wars did much better except when it comes to raising the boomers.
with a strong break around people born after 1970
Hooray.
Hrm...I probably should've thrown Perot in there for 1992/1996, since surely Perot voters are assholes, too. But even with that decrease for those years the age comparison point stands.
12: I'm in the 1982-1989 cohort and I think the 2000 election, Iraq War, and the 2008 crash were the most salient things for us forming our views (weight those appropriately based when in the range a given person was born). I was lucky--was class of '07, while the class of '08 got shafted, so the recession matters less to me than slightly younger people and the Iraq War matters more.
BTW, it seems worth noting up front that Boomers are more politically liberal than the generations before or after: Gen Xers are the 2nd most conservative cohort*, after the Silent Generation (the Greatest Generation was the most liberal, but Millennials are probably more liberal, although I suspect that the comparison breaks down on fiscal/social issues; anyway, the Greatests are almost all gone, so...). One of the deep flaws in the stupid author's stupid argument is that it pretends that Boomers are/were conservative, as opposed to more conservative than you'd expect based on Woodstock retrospectives.
*as measured by voting patterns; don't know if there are other dimensions
Signing onto 12.last. My main complaint with the interview is really that the blame more properly rests with, basically, the (white) people who were 30-44 when Reagan was elected: the oldest among them had started screwing things up in the '70s, and all of them bear responsibility for the '80s, at which point the path though the '90s was largely established. Furthermore, those people are now 67-81, which is just an awful voting block.
I didn't realize dalriata was such a baby!
I don't think that you can just look in the aggregate at liberal vs conservative. I think appalling thing is how non-southern conservatives have gotten much, much worse from previous generations to the boomers. America is a country with a lot of conservatives and an electoral system that encourages two parties. A conservative party is going to win from time to time. That's not really avoidable. A conservative party as fucked as today's Republicans is what I blame the boomers for.
The irony of 18 is that I've always gotten along best with people whose parents were, like mine, pre-Boomers. In fact, come to think of it, I never even dated* anyone whose parents were Boomers. So I think that generation were better parents than Boomers were (and while I disdain Millennial bashing, I know too many college profs to think that tales of M ridiculousness are mere media creations), but worse politically.
*as in, went on more than 2 dates (or what have you) with
I read that interview and was annoyed at the generational broadbrush - not even any references to how voting was different by generation. Yeah, Reagan and the revolution he represented were malevolent, and supported by a lot of boomers, but also rich and middle-class white people of other generations, varying on a lot of factors. This stuff is intersectional too!
Let's also not forget that millennials were barely even a thing in the popular consciousness before the name was coined in the media. (I was well into adulthood before I had any idea I was one.) Not that generational shifts don't happen, but the extent to which we talk about them seems to be an area where weak Sapir-Whorf applies - without a universally accepted label to generalize on, a lot of those generalizations never seem to emerge. (As with decades.)
11: Median age of a Fox News viewer is 68. That puts them born in 1949.
That puts it squarely in the early-center of boomers, no?
honest discussions of the '60s talk about how few hippies there really were
I think it was Hunter S. Thompson who said that if everyone who said in retrospect they were a hippie in the 60's actually was, Nixon would have lost in a landslide.
20 is a good comment. Ooh, and I'll use it to reiterate 13.2: perhaps conservative Boomers are so awful because of that lingering hippie resentment. Lots of people wrote, during the W years, that to be a conservative male in the late '60s was to be basically what the red pill types think of themselves as: people doing things "right" and yet forced to watch the girls throw themselves at guys with long hair and weird clothes and poor career prospects.
Contrast that with previous generations, where, even if the upright citizens' brigade didn't get laid, they at least had the support of society and a clear path to success and respect. That sort of thing can lead to Rockefeller conservatism, which is driven by uptightness and probity, not hatred and resentment.
24: yes. Although I think that median age has held steady for most of its existence. That is, I'm pretty sure the median Fox viewer in 2000 was born a dozen years before the first Boomer.
Threw in Perot and corrected a few other mistakes. I hate that valley of suckitude where there's enough data that entering by hand is likely to have errors but there isn't enough to bother automating it.
19: Thanks, I think! (Assuming you aren't confusing me with the wiser and I think slightly older delagar)
24: As someone whose parents were born in '49, that feels exactly right. My father exemplifies the stereotypical boomer awfulness of burning down the system after he got his, although he was too much of a square to know about Woodstock.
I should know this, but: in the Kennedy/Carter primary of '80, what was the age breakdown between supporters? My instinct says that Boomers would have supported Kennedy, which would reinforce my thesis (that basically all the bad things that have happend were set in motion by non-Boomers), but I could be wrong about the split.
One of the reasons I feel antithetical to boomers is that I've spent the past 20 years of my life paying boomers' second (or third, or fourth) mortgages on the houses I live in, while being unable to afford to buy my own, in part because I'm paying all the fucking money to them.
And then, reading articles in which boomers lecture younger people on their fecklessness, or lack of financial probity.
Why is everyone focused on the past? Boomers are the old people who are right now voting to fuck people younger than them while screaming about keeping the government out of their Medicare. #notallBoomers
Last thing (cos I gotta go): When I was talking about cultural dominance, one interesting thing is that Boomers sort of rubber-banded '50s rock & roll into "their" story, but in fact the very oldest Boomers were 9 when "Rock Around the Clock" went #1, and barely 12 when he went into the Army. Essentially nothing that happened musically in the '50s was a Boomer thing, except for the poppiest, most novelty songs that would have appealed to tweens. And of course half the people at Woodstock would have been born after "Rocket 88" came out.
Now, a lot of Boomers have genuine fond memories of that music, but that's from either hearing it in the background as little kids or catching up with it in the Sea Na Na era. So when we talk about the rise of the teenager and the new idea of America as a permanent youth culture, that stuff predates Boomers, even though they embody the idea in the popular imagination.
BTW, this also explains why the invented '50s history created by the Sea Na Na crew became dominant: the people who lived the '50s teenage experience were utterly swamped b the people who just missed it. It would be like, I dunno, Millennials rediscovering NuMeta* and remaking it in their imagined image of it.
*I was going to say grunge, but the timing is wrong, I think. Millennial music started to dominate the industry something like a decade after Nirvana, which I think is too big a gap.
I'm sure Private Clock did his best in the army.
The only Boomers I'm in frequent contact with don't listen to rock at all. They're pre-Elvis, pre-Beatles all the way.
33: because that's not really correct. As I say in 17, it's simply false that Boomers are an especially conservative voting block. voting patterns by age tend to lump everyone above 65 together, but right now the majority of Boomers are still not 65, and the majority of over-65s aren't Boomers.
Lots of people wrote, during the W years, that to be a conservative male in the late '60s was to be basically what the red pill types think of themselves as: people doing things "right" and yet forced to watch the girls throw themselves at guys with long hair and weird clothes and poor career prospects.
Take out the part about girls and this is the best way to think of all reactionary movements everywhere. People see themselves as following the rules they were told to follow to get privileges, but people who don't follow the rules are getting the privileges anyway. The challenge is to convince them otherwise.
I agree with 32.1, housing policy is an important part of Boomer awfulness. And it fits with the general trend of Boomers pushing their children's generation into debt so that they can hoard all the money for themselves.
Right. I think that Moby, SP and ttaM are all on the right track. Perhaps Boomers weren't quite old enough to vote in Reagan, but they fell under his spell and have moved steadily worse over the past 40 years, and are currently some of the very worst.
I posted about this article on the other place, and was rather disappointed that no boomers wanted to fight about it.
38: Leave the part about girls in. Considering women to be rewards to be allocated among men in society as opposed to a part of society is crucial to the mindset.
Extrapolating from small n, the real millennial childhood musical nostalgia is for Super Nintendo video game soundtracks.
I would probably feel worse about the whole "housing" thing if I didn't live somewhere where the median income could afford to purchase the median house.
32 and 33: Yes. They've also been convinced of the importance of means testing benefits in place of general universal subsidies for things like public transit - and i'm Talking about fairly liberal people
Further to 33: Tea Partiers were mostly over-65s, and in 2009 not a single Boomer was yet 65.
I'm increasingly convinced that "Boomer" in this idiolect means nothing but "old [white] person". Which I strenuously reject, not only because it's stupid and sloppy, but also because, IME, there really is a fairly bright line between kids born during the war and those conceived after.
(the Greatest Generation was the most liberal, but Millennials are probably more liberal, although I suspect that the comparison breaks down on fiscal/social issues; anyway, the Greatests are almost all gone, so...).
Everyone forgets this when they dissect why places like Wisconsin are going Republican. Is it old white people going crazy by watching Fox News? Is it white people identifying more as white because there is more diversity now? Is it economic anxiety? All these things to some extent, but also there used to be a lot of old white people who remembered the Depression and were liberal, and now those people are gone. What's left is the... younger old white people.
BTW, this also explains why the invented '50s history created by the Sea Na Na crew became dominant: the people who lived the '50s teenage experience were utterly swamped b the people who just missed it. It would be like, I dunno, Millennials rediscovering NuMeta* and remaking it in their imagined image of it.
Go to 90s Nite at Belvedere's and witness this in action!
Old white people are so racist that they're willing to wreck to country.
14: I'd expect the generation born after those changes had propagated through the culture to be the one that got fucked up. "Greatest Generation" folks grew up before the US was completely on a full perpetual-war footing like it is now.
Also, are they really the GREATEST generation?
If you look at the 2000 election the age affects on voting are very small, and if you look at the 1988 election the over 60s are more democratic than the 45-59. The current extreme reactionary behavior of old people is a recent phenomenon. So this isn't just about being old and white, it's generational.
But this isn't just about politics. The same thing has happened in corporate life, in universities, in local housing disputes, etc. At every turn Boomers and the people a little older and younger than them have squandered everything and made life for people in the next generations insecure, unsure, and debt-filled.
That said, the key line politically currently seems to be around age 45. (This results in something a little weird which is that you can see a break in polls that put 45 as a cutoff, but if 40-50 is a bracket you don't see the same break.)
On topic: Roy Moore tries to use a gun to solve his real problem.
Yes, 48 is right and underreported. When I worked in politics in Western PA in the 1990s, a big part of the job was going to nursing homes and making sure that those people were registered and voted early. By 2016, essentially all of those people were dead.
The current extreme reactionary behavior of old people is a recent phenomenon.
That's maybe a better way of saying what I was trying to get at in 20, except I don't think "reactionary" describes what has happened as well as "shit the bed". But I'm 46, so I'm probably wrong.
57: It's probably not your fault. Very few people who need to be in a nursing home live from 17 to 27 years longer.
My Boomer uncle says that the Fox News effect has been huge among his social circle. He basically can't talk politics with anyone his age because Fox has made them completely crazy.
That's what my dad said last year.
60/61. But that raises the question of why they believe Fox rather than for example NPR. Nobody makes them tune to it.
I think partially it's because they were already conservative to start with but also partially because of non-news parts of Fox News (i.e. there's a reason all the women who work at Fox have the same look and that you can see their legs when they read the news.)
62: I'm sure the fact that they watch Fox at all proves that they suck. But Fox has made them into extremists.
re: 41
For me it's not primarily about hating on boomers because they have the wrong values. It's because there's a massive inequity in resource distribution that they are the beneficiaries of, and it's completely understandable that younger people resent it.
Young people really are paying through the nose for everything, and getting nothing. That's particular stark in the UK where the safety net and the social mobility ladder that boomers benefited from is being destroyed. The wealth inequity and the societal changes are real, and they heavily disadvantage the young. And that holds whether or not older people are actually quasi-fascist Trump voters, or in the UK case, Brexiteers.*
So, my resentment is structural, although the lecturing by idle fucks who think they bootstrapped themselves into wealth rather than lucked into it, is additionally annoying.
* hint, Brexiteers are overwhelmingly older, and I fucking resent that shit, too.
I think Fox (and related stuff, like Rush Limbaugh) goes a long way towards explaining the problem Moby identifies. Sure, there was always going to be a right of center party that people who benefit from right of center policies (whether economic or cultural) were going to vote for, or lean towards. But it takes the echo chamber to start radically polarizing the views of the generally right-of-center inclined. There's lots of social science that says that deliberation with generally like-minded people pushes people to accept the most extreme view offered.
Incidentally, while the polarization is asymmetric, it is happening in both directions now, especially because of social media, as we see people who would very obviously have been Gary Hart/John Anderson/Bill Bradley type preppy liberal-ish anti-party professional class people yelling online about full socialism now.
The polarization on one side got too extreme for it not to happen in the other direction.
For myself, I'm sort of on the age cusp to have been one of the net beneficiaries. My friends who are slightly older than me, or who were lucky enough, or financially secure enough, to have bought houses long enough before the financial crash, are all doing very nicely indeed, thank you.
I made the stupid mistake of returning to graduate school in my late twenties, and getting trapped in perpetual "paying into boomers pension pots" peonage.
But compared to someone 20 years younger than me, I'm doing OK.
62/63: Right, it's the transformation from someone who's vaguely conservative and likes to see pretty blondes reading him news to someone who genuinely thinks that HRC personally sold uranium to the Russians (who are actually OK of course).
I mean, it's always been contemptible shit, but I think they've gotten much better at stoking rage and turning ordinary people into lunatics.
Alos, perhaps not understood among those who don't watch: during the day, they do a reasonable imitation of real news (adjusted for 24 hour cable news definitions of "real news"). For the 6-8 hours after Fox & Friends ends, it's only a bit more skewed than the WSJ news pages. Before and after, it's the editorial pages at their worst, but it's not Hannity 24/7.
My barber used to have it on fairly often (I think he stopped last year, but it might have been sooner), and you'd have 10-15 minute stretches where the only complaints you'd have would be the sort of left-right squabble we had here 10-15 years ago, where there's 40% tendentiousness and 10% actual BS, but the rest was a plausible reading of the facts about the world (during those hours, probably the worst skewing is the chosen coverage, e.g. not talking about Flynn's arrest).
I don't know about the finances of people 20 years younger than me, but they seem to have nicer butts.
4, 52: I don't follow. How is the war footing supposed to have affected the Boomers? If Boomers essentially are people born in the 1950s, 60% of them were never subject to the draft (last conscription Dec 1972).* So what, they grow up watching Vietnam on TV? They grow up in the military-industrial warfare state? How are either of those things supposed to turn them into assholes?
*Which fact on its own suggests to me that the entire notion of Boomers is just bullshit. You don't get a clearer cohort-defining experience than drafted/not-drafted, and the "Boomers" split 40:60 (or 25:75; but the women weren't living in a vacuum).
In my experience, the Boomers who were drafted are often still really bitter about it. This is understandable, but it seems to be directed only at people who weren't drafted not people who drafted them.
I guess the people who drafted them are now dead anyway.
66.2: I'm increasingly curious just how liberal the next unified Dem government will be. The lefty cynics are certain it will be business as usual with some movement at the edges, but those people were also 100% certain that Manchin and some of the other Senate Dems would be all too happy to give cover to Trump, and they couldn't have been more wrong (it's so weird they haven't adjusted their priors, isn't it?).
I'm not desluional enough to think that they'll take on all of my most radical pet projects, but, especially if the #metoo wave keeps cresting, there could be the biggest generational change since at least Gingrich's pack of vandals, and maybe even the Watergate class of '74. That could really make a difference, because not only would they be just more liberal in general, but they'll also a. have a more aggressive/partisan bent, and b. not buy any of that compromise horseshit. There's overlap between those two, but I think that, among the old guard, even the most liberal, committed Dems still wanted to see bipartisan solutions to problems.
Of course Northam and Jones showing up as squishes this week suggests otherwise, but I'm talking about where the bulk of the party is in 2020, not its right edge in 2017.
72: Makes sense; but the US drafted 1940-45, 1950-72. Either drafts turn everyone into assholes (in which case, whither the liberal GI generation); the draft had little effect, asshole-wise; or the Boomers reacted differently to the draft. The second option seems to me the most plausible.
Yes, because the Boomer draft was not universal. People like Trump and Bush 2.0 were able to dodge it, along with a bunch of dirty hippies.
Also, I'm not sure there was really a five year break in the draft. My uncle was too young for WWII, but drafted to keep an eye on the Germans. I don't know exactly when, but it was before U.S. involvement in Korea.
Wikipedia is confusing me and I can't ask my aunt for reasons that I'll call social.
The draft was reauthorized in 1947, but apparently only took very small numbers before 1950.
My uncle may have been drafted in 1946 (before the WWII draft ended) or in the reauthorized draft. I don't know how much older than my dad he was. My dad almost certainly would have been drafted when the Korea War started if he hadn't signed up anyway.
Draft inductions by year. Inductions in 1946 were greatly reduced but still substantial (almost 200,000), zero in '47, tiny in '48 and '49, then got substantial again in the 50's.
79: It was reauthorized in 1947 but it had remained authorized through that year, it looks like.
Weirdly, the internet knows how old my uncle is. He coulnd't have been drafted in 1946, so it must have been '48 or '49 (or the first half of '50').
Or maybe I'm confused it was after the Korean War started but he just got sent to watch the Germans anyway. Somebody was watching the Germans all through the Korean War.
Gather around young children and I'll tell you about a long ago time when the problem with Nazis came from Germany and it was the Americans who resisted fascism.
74: I don't think the main issue is liberal v moderate, it's whether they're ready to pull the trigger on eliminating the filibuster.
Obviously the title of JRoth's book blaming everything on the silent generation should be "Silent But Deadly."
Generation asshole: I'm not finding a chart that satisfies me, but ISTM entirely plausible that the same lead in gasoline that created violent criminals also created the assholes who currently are fucking us over. The key thing I want to find is whether the half generation ahead of the Boomers was also subject to elevated lead levels because, as I've said repeatedly, they seem much more culpable than the average Boomer (who was born at the end of '55, mathematically speaking).
and b. not buy any of that compromise horseshit. There's overlap between those two, but I think that, among the old guard, even the most liberal, committed Dems still wanted to see bipartisan solutions to problems.
I will be so glad when Democrats stop reaching across the aisle and openly accept that any attempt to do so is just Lucy with the football.
The best part of that will be that the liberal internet can finally retire the overused Lucy and the Football metaphor.
||
Good news!
Inauguration Protesters Found Not Guilty On All Charges In Jury Trial
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/inauguration-protesters-found-not-guilty-on-all-charges-in?utm_term=.eyrJkpD7P#.sbEEKG1mp
||
The metaphor will retire, but it will start watching Fox News out of boredom and become horrendously racist and crotchety.
71: I mean that the way our society organizes "peacetime" behavior now uses the mass-mobilization methods optimized for war, and before the 1915-1945 transitional period we didn't do that so much.
92: That is good news. I'm hoping they don't try to move the other trials to a community with more assholes. I suppose that doesn't work in D.C. because they don't have a whole state to work with.
The metaphor will live as long as daily papers continue to run the Peanuts comic.
How long do you think print-edition daily papers will exist? I bet they go away when the boomers die.
Take out the part about girls and this is the best way to think of all reactionary movements everywhere. People see themselves as following the rules they were told to follow to get privileges, but people who don't follow the rules are getting the privileges anyway. The challenge is to convince them otherwise.
This is exactly right until the last sentence. The challenge is to convince them that it's a good thing to have fewer rules that must be followed in order to have a good life. Abortion politics is a leading example: opposition to abortion is 100% about not letting women being able to get away with being slutty sluts, but it turns out that sex is actually fun and it's a good thing for people to be able to have sex without risking an unplanned child.
On topic: Roy Moore tries to use a gun to solve his real problem.
He shot himself?
94: Sure. But again, how does that breed assholery? Going slightly onto a limb, damn near all of modern life is built out of mass-mobilization methods developed for war, and not just in America, and not just in the early Cold War.
99: He was removing a gun from his pocket with the barrel pointed at his "girl you'll be a woman soon" region.
Maybe post-Trump the evangelicals will just pivot back to explicit racism and forget about abortion again.
So you're saying that he failed to perform the necessary last step to achieve his objective? "Pointed at" is pretty much how trying to be a Senator turned out too.
I feel like I've exhausted Standpiping on this point.
Thanks to JRoth for doing yeoman's work in this thread (I'm still slightly confused about what is the motivating reason -- but everything he's saying makes sense).
If I were to make generational generalizations, I wonder if Boomer's had more faith in the power of individual persuasion and less interest in thinking about/confronting structural forces (which might be odd considering that they came of age during the Civil Rights movement). But I'm thinking about the political generation gap that shows up in Accidental Courtesy (which is such a peculiar story that it probably shouldn't be the basis for generalizing): http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/accidental-courtesy/
My nonscientific observation of white Northern boomers is that the Civil Rights Movement was the Jesus-dying-for-their-sins freeing them from the original sin of systemic oppression. From there on out, it's all individual ability. All privileges were duely earned.
You can only know the location or velocity of a Northern boomer, not both.
The act of observing the Northern boomer requires you to bombard them with protons or photons. I can't remember which, so I just throw glow sticks.
101: They've spent their whole lives on an upward trajectory at the center of an expanding empire. Pretty much the most privileged position possible. They confuse their increasing share of the pie with an expansion of the pie (and economists are happy to serve as apologists for this narrative - the Boomers have been nothing but flattered by the establishment their whole lives too). The name for this is "progress." So they'll happily make deals that assume the growth's gonna come from somewhere, and lash out when Progress reverses and their kids or grandkids end up homeless or dead.
The pie has expanded. The rich have just decided to keep all of the gains.
I think "generation" is mostly just not a useful unit of analysis for this sort of thing.
Generational Franco is still dead.
110: There's something to that. It's easier to believe that the government is giving your stuff to black people because liberals than it is to believe that government has been given you extra stuff your whole life. Especially if you're an asshole.
I know lots of Trump voters had very hard lives, but the rich ones voted Trump even more than the meth users who get the press.
The black people and the illegals took my meth.
110: Ok, that makes good sense, in terms of not knowing how lucky you are. American victories did indeed make that luck possible, but I question whether the Boomers appreciated this any more than they appreciated anything else. On that last, for instance: the American empire actually expanded before the boomers, in WWII, and after their formative years, in the 1990s; and the defining event of their youth was the failure of American arms in Vietnam.
It occurs to me that some of the discussion I remember of generations in TFA actually took place on Becks' blog.
It looks like my comment wasn't posted. The thing I blame the Boomers for is convincing people - even pretty liberal people - in the value of means testing benefits for the truly needy as opposed to promoting generous universal programs financed through progressive taxation.
They benefited from the legacy of the GI bill and post-war government spending, but the 90's promoted the idea among Democrats that that was irresponsible and unaffordable.
I blame the Boomers as a generation for that.
You can redeem boomers for $.10 in Michigan, if they are made of glass.
Someone should make a Seinfeld joke at this point.
I think the Boomer political saga has often been an intra-generational fight that has wanted to understand itself as inter-generational. First, it was a fight over how much to identify with the political, economic, and cultural inheritance of their parents, and then it was a fight over how to understand and explain the X/millennials that came after them. The same Boomer normies complaining about longhairs are probably the ones complaining about avocado-eating 20 somethings playing video games in their basement.
If you read even just the intro to the Port Huron statement, it's basically an appeal by a small set of Boomers for the rest to get as woke as they are about the ostensible vacuity of their privileges:
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
The clashes in the street in Berkeley in the 60s were Boomer radicals trying to prevent Boomer normies from enlisting. The Clinton-the-toker and Kerry-the-traitor sagas were just a continuation of these intra-generational spats into middle and old age.
Was that the original Port Huron Statement, or the compromised second draft?
I blame boomers for the fact that Bonanza is on the TV here. I'm waiting for ankle x-ray.
The Big Valley, with all its capitalist apologetics, was no better than Fox, though.
Doesn't Michael Landin count for something.
I don't think I have a firm position on to what extent the Boomers are responsible for the mess we're in, but the snide derision they (particularly the white menz) enjoy directing at Millenials is itself worthy of specific derision and scorn.
129: Yeah, that's my position, too. I really like the Kids Nowadays.
||
I just had Chinese food for the first time in a while- came in to work to do grant writing on a day we're closed so bought lunch which I don't usually. The fortunes are apparently joining #MeToo:
"Have faith in the force of right and not in the right of force."
|>
17 - as far as this statement - "the Greatest Generation was the most liberal"
I know you caveated that you were talking about voting patterns, but I'm pretty sure black people and women might disagree with this just...a bit.
GG's may be great supporters of the welfare state because they lived through the depression and/or are currently supported by social security and medicare, but we're going to need better definitions of "liberal" if those are the only parameters we're using.
88: yeah, we need to write off the Republicans. They're irredeemable and must be expected to do the wrong thing. Our political strategies for when we retake power need to be based on pulling the Democratic squish on the margin to do what's right. Offer the Republicans nothing. Offer Jones/Manchin what we must.
Goddammit why did I agree to write a grant that's due in early January. Ruining my whole vacation.
6,9: maybe we need to make it clear that the old folks homes of 2030+ are going to be located on today's shorefront. You've got 12 years, (white) Boomers, to decide whether that means a beachside resort or a ride on an ice floe. And the ice floes better not all be melted.
GG's may be great supporters of the welfare state because they lived through the depression and/or are currently supported by social security and medicare, but we're going to need better definitions of "liberal" if those are the only parameters we're using.
The definition is "Democrat voter"
137: Right. If it's 1980 and you vote Carter, you're on the liberal side, whether you're doing it for economic reasons or other. For much of the GG's voting history, liberal economics vs racial justice was at least a possible electoral alternative, but it's been fully 40 years since anybody could vote for a presidential candidate who was decent on economics for hoi polloi but bad on race*, and 25 years since anyone, anywhere, could vote for a racist candidate who wouldn't also try to steal from the workers' wallets.
We know what it looks like when white folks value racial signaling over pocketbook issues, and it's not the GG voting pattern.
*maybe not even than; I'm giving Ford some probably undeserved credit here