Yeah-how about working toward a solution instead of griping about something, the details of which you are clearly ignorant? A great number of us did NOT elect the current denizen of the WH so you are clearly blaming the wrong people for the appalling situation you describe. I work with people who are way younger than me who did vote for Trump and God alone knows why. This disaster is not on me at all.
Yeah, it’s hard not to take it personally but the reality is that those 65 and older went for Trump by seven points in '16 and those 45-64 (which overlaps generations, by my count) voted for him by eight points. We are still in the early stages of a generational shift that could lead to massive changes in the way we govern the nation.
Again, though, focusing on the generational aspect tends to obscure the far more significant political aspect. Voters didn’t vote for Trump specifically because they were old, but because they were Republican/conservative/anti-liberal/just plain ignorant.
The reason conservative/libertarian pundits are trying to push this anti-boomer attitude nowadays is to distract people from how toxic their particular political agendas turned out to be. Like I said, conservatives fear that the elderly conservative establishment is doomed in the fairly near future, and their best hope is to try to doom the elderly liberal establishment along with it by deflecting ideological antagonism into generational antagonism.
So we are now claiming that polling with a 7% or 8% difference indicates that an entire generation is doing bad stuff? Someone needs to brush up on their math. A difference of 50% might indicate that an entire generational cohort was a serious problem, but not the figures quoted. That is just bad math by those who want to promote a spurious claim that an entire generation is “bad.”
Alternatively, we could look at the numbers from the WP story New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency and draw the conclusion that with a failure to vote of 33% (18 - 49 year olds) the younger generations chose to let Trump win. Based on the huge disinformation campaigns waged over the last many years that are driving down voter participation, I am not going to “blame” younger generations for Trump , but it is hardly realistic or fair to stand on the sidelines and whine when something does not turn out the way that one wishes when one (or a large percentage of one’s chorts) made no effort to participate.
Not only did many Boomers vote for the deranged Trump, many others voted for the deranged Clinton. Boomers are so numerous that they have dominated the electorate since Reagan and have supported the worst generation of political leaders in US history, leading the regime to its current faltering status. The Boomers have fielded a dimwitted and unsophisticated intellectual and political elite so vapid and ineffectual that a charlatan hoodwinked millions a few hastily chosen characters at a time. Past goofballs like William Jennings Bryan never had a chance against the sophisticated elites of prior eras.
Clintons are what pass for sophisticated elites of the Boomer era. The decline of the US political regime is obvious through recognition of that fact alone.
An entire generation of pols disgraced themselves and their countrymen by embarking on the Iraq War, the height of Boomer paranoia and illiteracy. What happened? The pols still find themselves lauded by their respective parties, set up and knocked down election after election. McCain. Romney. Clinton. Now Biden. All losers. All Boomers propped up by Boomers. What a sad era in American history.
Trump did not occur in a Republican vacuum. No. He did not rise from a Republican constituency. He came from NYC. He would have found a home in the Democratic Party of 20 years ago. If it wasn’t for immigration rhetoric (not his actual policy which barely departs from Obama), nobody would know he was a Republican. He is the ultimate RINO and the anti-Reagan and anti-Obama, yet he does not depart from the actual policies enacted by Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama and loved by Boomers. The fact that he is a Boomer is undeniable. He exudes Boomer just as Clinton exudes Boomer.
Yes the worst of Boomerism is not what the Republicans bring to the table. It is not what the Democrats bring to the table. The worst of Boomerism is what they agree on.
Annnd you’re replacing these horrible ‘Boomer’ candidates with who?
CMC fnord!
The damage is done. The federal political regime will continue to degrade until the US breaks up into many sovereign entities, small republics alongside democratic and capitalistic city-states. Millennials and following generations will find that problems will be best solved locally. Their appetite for totalitarian control will abate after repeated failures to enact social democracy on a national level.
Two-party national politics is a vestige of primitive capitalism, imperialism, and nationalistic pro-state propaganda in the wake of WWII.
So, “Your shit stinks’ but I’m not gonna present my shit for examination.”? That about right?
CMC fnord!
My only point is that we boomers could have done a lot better than using our massive numbers to help Donald Trump (and Bush and Reagan before him) win the presidency. As a generational cohort, we did not educate ourselves properly and we did not note the imminent end of American exceptionalism and the need to take positive action, the kind of action needed to make, or maybe keep, us the greatest nation in the world. We had the power of numbers and instead voted for Donald Trump in the face of all the evidence screaming at us not to. It doesn’t take 50 points at the ballot box to be a disappointment in that regard.
No I presented my shit. Your shit stinks largely because of an inability for Boomers to implement solutions outside of two-party national politics. Proposing “new and better” leaders into the same paradigm is not going to help much.
Annd you non-boomers still haven’t presented us with your brilliant ‘solutions’ to all the problems you keep whining about.
CMC fnord!
Millennials and following generations will find that problems will be best solved locally.
So, no actual solutions it is then!
CMC fnord!
If we’re being honest, “boomer” is just a label to deride people for being old and voting for their own narrow economic interests. The exact definition has varied based on political trends.
I am old enough to remember when the boomers were stereotyped as superficial overeducated insincere ex-hippies. Their greasy ponytails were a frequent target of mockery by political cartoonists. They were a favorite piñata of goons like Rush Limbaugh who declared the Clintons as being the boomer standard-bearer.
Yet somehow overnight the public imagination has morphed them into gun-toting nationalist Republicans who are too stupid to tell fake news from real. Both generalizations can’t be true.
Our little conversation is evidence of the Boomer mindset. The Boomer must have some grand plan for fixing everything. This is because the Boomer grew up after WWII. By golly we had a plan in WWII! Nazis are bad. War on Nazis! Poverty is bad! Let’s have a War on Poverty! Drugs bad! War on Drugs! Terror bad! War on Terror! It would be funnier if it wasn’t so tragic to so many.
Decentralized problem solving is the proper means for approaching today’s problems. I don’t have all of the solutions but I strongly believe that the framework must change from the authoritarian one we have now.
Millennials came of age with the internet. They just haven’t applied this decentralized framework to political governance. Decentralization will be the key for the foreseeable future.
This is a pretty good take actually.
This is false. It can seem true if you believe the lie that Republicans are about small government, freedom, and fiscal responsibility. But if you look at the ways that Reagan spoke softly about what Trump speaks loudly… Trump is the end result of Reaganism. Reaganism was where we decided that TV presence was the only thing that mattered. Reaganism was where decided that government exists for businesses and should be run by business people. Reagan invented the racist stereotype of welfare queens. Reagan popularized knee-jerk anti-elitism. Reagan preached fiscal responsibility while blowing up the debt. Take the filters of politeness off Reagan and you’re left with Trump.
The people I know who voted for Trump are all Republicans and always have been. Their core values haven’t changed. Only the overtness and intensity have changed.
This is actually a pretty good take. Boomer-era consensus politics were terrible, in hindsight. I would (did) vote for Bill and Hillary a thousand times ahead of any Republican, but in hindsight they were awful in so many ways.
Yup. While I certainly don’t disagree that Trump himself would return to the Democratic Party in a heartbeat if he thought the Democrats would offer him the same scope for ignorant bigoted authoritarian bloviating that he gets from the Republicans, the fact remains that the Republicans are far more friendly to Trumpism than the Democrats are. And yes, Trumpism is fundamentally just the logical extension of Reaganism: the underlying principle of “Let’s have the government run by the people who deride and despise government” was never going to lead anywhere good.
Yep, the whole idea/meme is the same one that basically conservative old people (twenty-something’s grandparents’ age) who vote in droves are ruining the country. I heard it when I was in college- back then it was aimed at the WWII vet generation who were thought to be mired in the Depression and WWII, and not in step with the modern realities of life- they were thought to be racist, sexist and generally war-mongering. The baby boomers were at the time, pretty much working and keeping a low profile.
Now it’s their turn- they’re now perceived by the twenty-something crowd as the root of all evil. I’m sure in another 20 years, some twenty something kid will be writing polemical screeds about how Generation X fucked everything up.
Also, I want to point out that a lot of the stuff that the author is pinning on baby boomers is probably more accurately pinned as the last gasps of the Greatest Generation as grumpy old farts reacting to the 1960s through 1980s. I suspect they were the real political power bloc until the late 1990s.
This is spot on. Just look who the presidents or the PMs were until the 90s (and later).
As an eyewitness to the grumpy old fart reactionary era, it was common to hear words to the effect of ‘all the changes that would happen when the baby boomers take over’. What people never appreciated is that the boomers would be greying by the time they got ‘control’.
Reagan was born in 1911 and was 69 when he took office. He was five years older than my father. Don’t be tying him to Baby Boomers.