The Aging of X

[Eric the Green]

(07-12-2018, 09:11 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-11-2018, 01:15 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: The US won't get a better government until the Boomers are out of it - and they won't improve until they're dead.

Boomers need one Disraeli, Juarez, Lincoln, Garibaldi, Gandhi, Churchill, FDR, Mannerheim, Adenauer, or (George Catlett) Marshall to undo the damage that not-so-great Boomers have done and thus redeem America. Donald Trump is everything wrong with an Idealist leader -- the exploiter who demands to be known as a benefactor. American Revolution? There were plenty of Idealists, then getting old if they weren't already old, as foci of Idealist tendencies and highly capable of setting a convincing moral agenda for the rest of us.

If you are thinking of X as leaders, Reactive types at their best typically take over at or soon after the end of the Crisis Era and accept the moral vision of the rapidly-disappearing Idealist generation as a moral agenda on autopilot. Thus Washington, John Adams, Truman, or Eisenhower. Without having their own grandiose vision, they set forward a calming mood. If you wonder where that puts the Gilded Presidents following the Civil War -- the Gilded took on many of the traits of a Civic/Hero generation if successful. Obama? He has the typical ethos of a 'mature Reactive' in his 60s -- and a temperament closer to that of Eisenhower than to that of an FDR.

I will predict this: Obama will not be the last of his type as President. The next effective conservative President, the sort who slows radical reforms in the name of sanity both fiscal and moral, will behave much more like Obama than like Trump.  Obama is a Reactive, and not an Idealist. An Idealist would not have authorized an underworld-style hit upon Osama bin Laden even if such was fully justified. Obama is not the sort to establish a grand new moral vision for America. He was simply before his time, someone too pragmatic for such.

I say Obama is clearly a hybrid, and probably a boomer. He outlined grand visions of idealism and tried to carry them out. He does not have the cynical attitude that Xers commonly have. He is certainly pragmatic and not entirely leftist by any means. But I don't know of any US president in history that I would consider thoroughly idealistic or leftist. And considering some actions by Polk, Lincoln and FDR, I would doubt that gangster-like actions by prophets/idealists are out of the question.

The main reason Obama was not able to carry through an ambitious idealistic program was the state of his country divided between center-left and a stubborn, powerful, extreme and uncompromising right-wing determined to oppose him, and which successfully used and rigged the system to do so, and continue to do so. No amount of Obama eloquence could have changed what happened. The voters in Nov 2010 are the only people responsible for any inadequacy of the Obama program for change.

Boomers and Xers have a virtually identical record of voting in recent elections and in opinion polls. Since people typically get more conservative when older, that suggests that the boomers are inherently more liberal. Also, they were more liberal and left in their voting record in youth than Xers were, and "Boomers" also includes the late 1950s cohorts and maybe the early 60s cohorts, and that distorts the supposed voting record of "Boomers," because that cuspal area is the most conservative of all voting blocks.

Of course, that assumes that voting for Democrats means supporting "good government," which our anti-boomer friend Hintergrund might not agree with.

Also, it is significant that most available leaders and candidates in the Xer generation are Reagan conservatives. So Xers, as voters in elections, may be about even overall in their D/R voting record, but those who have been motivated to become the leaders are supporters of the Reagan counter-revolution. Overall, the members of the "freedom caucus" in the House that blocks anything productive are majority Xer.

And that support of the Reagan counter-revolution is the direct cause, and only cause, of any lack of "better government" today. And the best available potential leaders for the remainder of this 4T are Boomers.


Therefore, demise of Boomers alone will not "improve government." It will be the exit of Boomers and/or Xers (and maybe some Silents) and replacement of them by Millennials that will potentially "improve" it. Replacement of Boomers by Xers will likely make it worse.

I could go on and on and knock Xers, but there are some Xers I consider fine people and even some good Xer leaders. So knocking an entire generation, whether Boomers, Xers, or whoever, is baloney. But I don't see any Xers, so far, who could beat 1946 cohort Boomer Trump or other powerful Republican candidates in a presidential election. If there were, I would be happy about it.