09-08-2018, 01:09 PM
According to Howe and Strauss the highest achievements of leading Idealist generations (Puritan, Awakening, Transcendental, Missionary, and Boom) are education, principle, and decisiveness. Trump is hardly erudite (he has almost certainly lost much of what he learned in college, as he sounds more like a typical high-school drop-out than like a college graduate); his principle is little more than a celebration of himself; he may be decisive, but he is decisively wrong. Idealist generations at their worst tend to be ruthless, arrogant, and selfish, with the best of their generations tending to mute such characteristics. Trump is those vices maxed out.
It is a myth that the hippies became yuppies and then obnoxious pigs like Trump. Trump has always been about himself above all else. Unlike most Boomers who have had to learn humility to survive in crappy jobs that they needed to take just to pay the rent and buy groceries (and disqualified themselves from becoming part of the economic elite in the process), Trump has lived a life of unrestrained privilege. He needs show no empathy toward anyone else.
The extreme polarization in economic results for Boomers is characteristic more typically of a Reactive generation. Maybe smart Boomers took the advice from high-school guidance counselors to heart when they got the message "do anything but blue-collar work, as that work will be rendered obsolete". Blue-collar work went to the dummies, so we got little talent into manufacturing and skilled trades from the Boom generation that had much intelligence. Smart blue-collar workers from the GI generation became the shop stewards and eventually union officials, and they were very good at such. Without such smart people in blue-collar work, the not-so-bright did the blue-collar work and did not go to night school to learn college-level writing, public speaking, and accounting that would have made them good negotiators. Furthermore, blue-collar work in American factories deteriorated, which may have spurred the off-shoring of much production -- and of course, industrial jobs.
The factory has been the most reliable means out of poverty in America -- more reliable than education (kids whose parents are well-paid blue-collar workers have more of a chance than those whose parents are ill-paid blue-collar workers), and we need remember this before disparaging blue-collar work as a direction in life. (Ironically the high cost of college education and the well-known glass ceilings in corporate bureaucracies may be causing many of the best-and-brightest Millennial kids to consider blue-collar life. It's easier to live well without a backload of college debt).
That has hurt unions, with half of all states now "Right to Work (for much less)" states. The unionized worker that was once the basis of the Democratic party vote is gone. States like Missouri and West Virginia that used to have large bases of blue-collar workers in mining and manufacturing have gone Republican. The Rust Belt showed signs of such in 2016, with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states that had not gone for any Republican nominee since 1988, going for Trump. Add to that -- Trump came close to carrying, of all places, Minnesota! Minnesota, the state proud of Hubert Humphrey as its son, and the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Trump exemplifies the worst of the Boom Awakening -- the boundless appetite for sex, and perhaps (if the rumors are right) drugs, and he is the draft-dodger who loves military shtick and regimentation so long as he has no risk of becoming cannon fodder. He married two women from outside the United States, perhaps so he would not have to deal with any "Women's Libbers", and the "Grab 'em by their p***ies" statement likely exposes his character. Sure, Bill Clinton has had his share of sleazy encounters, but Trump has had more and worse. I never heard of Bill Clinton walking into a female changing room... no, I am not talking about my experience as a janitor when nobody was around and cleaning up was my job. I can't imagine Donald Trump ever having been a janitor.
...as for the white population having fewer births than deaths, this may be over-rated (there are some Latinos who are very white in appearance, and is a child of one of those and a white of any kind also white?... and in view of miscegenation, how black can one be and be considered white? 1/8 or so if nobody knows and nobody talks?) But let's remember -- America is becoming more urban, and middle0-class people in tiny apartments are unlikely to have children unless they brought those children with them. The apartments are getting especially tiny in the highest-income areas in California, as a counter-example to depressed Martin County, Kentucky.
I see Donald Trump as at most a one-term President -- that is, if he does not reign under disgraceful conditions or the Grim Reaper doesn't take him with the aid of his atrocious eating habits. This is not to say that he will be the last Boomer President, and that should Trump be the last Boomer president (the youngest Boomers turn 60 in 2020), that we will not have a Boomer President who is erudite, principled, and decisive, who has outgrown selfishness before becoming President, and who is ruthless or arrogant only when such is appropriate. That could be the Redeemer President of our time. But if the last Boomer to ever be elected is Trump, then perhaps the Generation X President will have plenty of room in his cabinet for boomers at their best -- which means nobody like Trump. Obama,a s part of Generation X, could not get away with much... and knew it.
Or is Obama really a Boomer? He is certainly erudite, principled, and decisive... maybe a bit too civilized for the ruthless characters pushing the Tea Party opposition. A popular book entitled Assholes (yes, that is the title!) shows Dubya and especially Trump as well fitting the title, and Obama not fitting it well (that is a compliment!) So far I see him more like Truman or Eisenhower than like FDR, but he is much more like FDR than like Dubya or Trump. Maybe Howe and Strauss drew the line between 1882 and 1883 to put FDR among the Idealist generation and Mussolini, Laval, and Tojo among the 'Bad Boy' Lost Generation as leading figures of fascist evil. FDR had quite a few Reactive traits (a bit devious for most tastes).
It is a myth that the hippies became yuppies and then obnoxious pigs like Trump. Trump has always been about himself above all else. Unlike most Boomers who have had to learn humility to survive in crappy jobs that they needed to take just to pay the rent and buy groceries (and disqualified themselves from becoming part of the economic elite in the process), Trump has lived a life of unrestrained privilege. He needs show no empathy toward anyone else.
The extreme polarization in economic results for Boomers is characteristic more typically of a Reactive generation. Maybe smart Boomers took the advice from high-school guidance counselors to heart when they got the message "do anything but blue-collar work, as that work will be rendered obsolete". Blue-collar work went to the dummies, so we got little talent into manufacturing and skilled trades from the Boom generation that had much intelligence. Smart blue-collar workers from the GI generation became the shop stewards and eventually union officials, and they were very good at such. Without such smart people in blue-collar work, the not-so-bright did the blue-collar work and did not go to night school to learn college-level writing, public speaking, and accounting that would have made them good negotiators. Furthermore, blue-collar work in American factories deteriorated, which may have spurred the off-shoring of much production -- and of course, industrial jobs.
The factory has been the most reliable means out of poverty in America -- more reliable than education (kids whose parents are well-paid blue-collar workers have more of a chance than those whose parents are ill-paid blue-collar workers), and we need remember this before disparaging blue-collar work as a direction in life. (Ironically the high cost of college education and the well-known glass ceilings in corporate bureaucracies may be causing many of the best-and-brightest Millennial kids to consider blue-collar life. It's easier to live well without a backload of college debt).
That has hurt unions, with half of all states now "Right to Work (for much less)" states. The unionized worker that was once the basis of the Democratic party vote is gone. States like Missouri and West Virginia that used to have large bases of blue-collar workers in mining and manufacturing have gone Republican. The Rust Belt showed signs of such in 2016, with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, states that had not gone for any Republican nominee since 1988, going for Trump. Add to that -- Trump came close to carrying, of all places, Minnesota! Minnesota, the state proud of Hubert Humphrey as its son, and the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Trump exemplifies the worst of the Boom Awakening -- the boundless appetite for sex, and perhaps (if the rumors are right) drugs, and he is the draft-dodger who loves military shtick and regimentation so long as he has no risk of becoming cannon fodder. He married two women from outside the United States, perhaps so he would not have to deal with any "Women's Libbers", and the "Grab 'em by their p***ies" statement likely exposes his character. Sure, Bill Clinton has had his share of sleazy encounters, but Trump has had more and worse. I never heard of Bill Clinton walking into a female changing room... no, I am not talking about my experience as a janitor when nobody was around and cleaning up was my job. I can't imagine Donald Trump ever having been a janitor.
...as for the white population having fewer births than deaths, this may be over-rated (there are some Latinos who are very white in appearance, and is a child of one of those and a white of any kind also white?... and in view of miscegenation, how black can one be and be considered white? 1/8 or so if nobody knows and nobody talks?) But let's remember -- America is becoming more urban, and middle0-class people in tiny apartments are unlikely to have children unless they brought those children with them. The apartments are getting especially tiny in the highest-income areas in California, as a counter-example to depressed Martin County, Kentucky.
I see Donald Trump as at most a one-term President -- that is, if he does not reign under disgraceful conditions or the Grim Reaper doesn't take him with the aid of his atrocious eating habits. This is not to say that he will be the last Boomer President, and that should Trump be the last Boomer president (the youngest Boomers turn 60 in 2020), that we will not have a Boomer President who is erudite, principled, and decisive, who has outgrown selfishness before becoming President, and who is ruthless or arrogant only when such is appropriate. That could be the Redeemer President of our time. But if the last Boomer to ever be elected is Trump, then perhaps the Generation X President will have plenty of room in his cabinet for boomers at their best -- which means nobody like Trump. Obama,a s part of Generation X, could not get away with much... and knew it.
Or is Obama really a Boomer? He is certainly erudite, principled, and decisive... maybe a bit too civilized for the ruthless characters pushing the Tea Party opposition. A popular book entitled Assholes (yes, that is the title!) shows Dubya and especially Trump as well fitting the title, and Obama not fitting it well (that is a compliment!) So far I see him more like Truman or Eisenhower than like FDR, but he is much more like FDR than like Dubya or Trump. Maybe Howe and Strauss drew the line between 1882 and 1883 to put FDR among the Idealist generation and Mussolini, Laval, and Tojo among the 'Bad Boy' Lost Generation as leading figures of fascist evil. FDR had quite a few Reactive traits (a bit devious for most tastes).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
