(10-14-2018, 11:39 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-12-2018, 11:41 PM)gabrielle Wrote:(10-09-2018, 10:55 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-07-2018, 10:41 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: CNN has one of the better articles on how the Millennials might look at things differently politically.
Unfortunately, they seem more than a little distracted. It's as if they live in a bubble that floats through the world of not-them. They don't feel any real attachment to that world, or any responsibility for it. They are angry about their lives; they see themselves as pawns in a game they don't play. Many are just accepting of their fate. It's sad, to be frank about it. If I have to use a single term, it's lethargic. I'm not sure what breaks that pattern.
That's interesting--young Gen Xers were described in just such a way back in the day, but the word we were summed up with was "apathetic," while here you use a word that implies that Millennials are just being lazy.
Young people can't and shouldn't be expected to save the world. They're still struggling to find their own footing in it, and they're also trying to enjoy their youth while they have it. Millennials certainly have the potential, due to their numbers, to become a powerful force in shaping the future.
But I don't think generations are as uniform in their beliefs and outlooks as some of you seem to think. A lot depends on the prevailing winds of the times, and that involves multiple generations.
I see things a bit differently. They already take enough time to have liberal views. I cannot see why young people can't vote, and I think just taking a little time to read a ballot and going to a polling place, or sending a ballot in, would not detract at all from enjoying their youth. On the contrary, if they voted, and voted correctly over several elections, they could have had a state, and a social zeitgeist, that enabled greater economic advancement than the continued legacy of Reaganomics has given them. That would have given them a lot more economic opportunity to enjoy life instead of toiling more and more for less and less, or just getting by on the largesse of their parents. Millennials simply do not have the option of enjoying life in youth that Boomers had, for example, because of the differing economic regimes in place.
They are liberal because they have seen the economic elites become the Establishment and treat most of them badly. The antithesis to the plutocratic aristocracy (or is it an aristocratic plutocracy) is its antithesis, liberalism. People who loudly proclaim that the rest of Humanity has the duty to suffer for their greed and indulgence should consider themselves fortunate to have not been taken before a wall and shot.
When I was a teenager and young adult, college was inexpensive -- about the cost of a hobby. If you were in college, you did not need a hobby because you lacked the time for it. If you did not go to college you probably had some time-consuming hobby that you could do because nobody expected to work more than 40 hours a week just to survive. Today people work harder and longer for less and pay much more for property rent and taxes. Is life better? I think not. Around 1980 the elites decided that it was best that college became expensive enough that one needed to work to pay one's way, ideally in a low-paying job that brings one physical exhaustion due to the frenetic pace, as in fast food. One would then have a focus solely on economic survival and not ask the questions that one might ask if one got a liberal education. A liberal education? No matter how good, it was disparaged because 'it might get you a job in retail', then (and still) the worst-paying sector of the economy except perhaps labor in food-service. Life has since been little more for most people, even with degrees, than suffering to make people already filthy rich even more filthy-rich. It may be hyperbole to say that those in the economic elites see their fine china or expensive cars more precious than the lives of workers, but it is almost so. Unaccountable power and unlimited indulgence can distort normal human behavior into such perversity.
Quote:Millies have the potential to shape the future, but there was no reason they could not have used it until now, or this year. It seems to be a fact that earlier young generations voted more often, especially at midterms when it counts the most and appears to count the least to those who don't understand basic American civics.
Achieving high political office is something that generations do not do until they are well into their thirties. The GI Generation may have
started winning Congressional seats and Governorships when they were in their early thirties as the most fervent generation of new Dealers. But note also that political leaders were rarely living into their eighties and even seventies as they do now... and staying in public office. That people are considering Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as prospects to be the 46th President tells something about the longevity of political relevance.
The rise of a young generation into high political roles depends heavily upon the disappearance of older generations and the failure of the middle-aged generation as leaders. So it was in the 1930s, and so it is today. The GI Generation itself set a pattern of remaining active and fit as long as possible, and not giving up on roles that defined them as persons, and the Silent have followed. Boomers are doing much the same thing as they become a generation of geezers. Will X? I don't know if they will get away with it.
The current politicians that we have are on the whole the worst that America has had (excluding the agrarian racists of the South) since the Gilded Age. Boomer executives have little of the legitimacy of wielding the power that they have as they do (being paid lavishly for treating people badly); GI executives often did not reach executive status until they were 50 or so and then got about ten times what someone earned as an assembly line worker -- too late for buying mansions, horses, and sports cars. Unlike Boomer executives, they probably did work on an assembly line before taking a sales route in an unpromising part of the country or taking engineering, accounting, or finance courses in night school. Today if one ever did work on an assembly line, one is shut out of any executive role because one might have some loyalty to or empathy for people other than the elites.
Quote:Much is expected from millennials rather than Xers, at least by liberals, because they seem to be better informed, and less gullible to the Reagan spell that led Xers to support the Reaganite Republican rule much more often than millennials these last few decades, along with the older generations. It's true no generation is monolithic, but voting patterns are certainly clear enough according to exit polls and other polls. Aside from a liberal bump among core Boomers, the only group substantially more liberal than others are the millennials, and the latest Xers shade that way as well. Today millennials are far more liberal in their views than others, and yet they have little faith or interest in elections when they can make their views count for something. Maybe some expect perfection, and so desert allegedly-liberal presidents and officeholders when they don't perform up to their standard, while others are just too lost in their cell phones or socializing and just forget. For whatever reason, they have not lived up to their civic archetype. Meanwhile of course, Boomers have fallen far short of their leadership potential in these times as well.
Older generations did too much harm to X. X is unusually pliant in politics because most have learned the lesson that "He who has the gold makes the rules, and nobody can do a damned thing about it but to keep playing the crooked game". Reactionary X politicians like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Pat Toomey, Scott Walker, and Rick Scott have fully sold out to people who act as if they are some caste exempt from responsibility to any but themselves. But today it is Boomer Donald Trump who exemplifies everything wrong in American politics.
I am satisfied that the Millennial Generation will be as excited about politics as any generation in the past (Silent and Boomers have been divided, and X isn't excited about its own, even if it is Obama, a very good President) once it is their politicians up for high office. The largely-X pols who got swept in with the Tea Party craze will themselves get swept away in the early 2020s. Watch the Latinos and Asians whom right-wingers terribly underestimate.
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.