The failure of the Democratic Party

[TeacherinExile]

(02-04-2017, 04:24 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:Actually, the real flaw of Levin's "competing nostalgias," if you think about it for not too long, is this: He's basically describing the political longing of the Silents, Boomers, and Xers.  What can the Millennials (the largest generational cohort) possibly be nostalgic for, politically speaking?  All they've known is one long, rolling crisis: Clinton impeachment, Columbine shooting, Bush 43 election by "judicial appointment," the 9-11 attacks, the Global War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina fiasco, Crash of 2008.  Millennials don't really have the lived experience of the Reagan era, and obviously not the 50s and 60s either.

I didn't particularly care for Levin's prescription either, a concept he called "subsidiarity."  But he did crystallize my thinking a bit on 4T theory, the way he approached the problem of polarization as kind of a "tripod" (my characterization, not his)--cultural, economic, and political--unraveling in that order in this turning.

So why are you trying to pin his admittedly serious flawed thesis on anybody? 

As for Millennial nostalgia, I agree with an older thesis of Chas' (I miss him) that nostalgia for the 90s by aging Millennials will eventually be a thing (I mean, you can see little pieces of it already), though reflected more in the arts and culture (read: movies set in the period) than in the politics.

It's simple: don't waste your time reading it.  I blitzed through the book thinking it might offer some insight on 4T theory, which it did marginally.  I also read it because it was written by a relatively young conservative, and though I'm no longer on his side of the political spectrum, I try to keep an open mind.  (I've evolved before--and may do so again.)

Yes, every generation (my grown Millennial sons are no exception) will have some kind of nostalgia, for the culture at least.