U.S. DEMOCRATS’ GENERATIONAL CHANGE
I Can’t Wait for Gen X to Take Over
What will the Democrats be when the gerontocracy breaks its grip?
Poor Generation X. It’s a well-worn meme at this point that members of this generation are chronically overlooked whenever the opinions of different age demographics of the U.S. are analyzed in the media. TV graphics departments often leave the population segment born between 1965 and 1981 right out of their creations. The latchkey generation, whose defining social experience of youth was looking after themselves after school, remains defined by a lack of attention from the media in middle age.
TV producers will have to answer for themselves, but the reason that Gen X has been left out of U.S. Democratic Party political attention is that the years of this generation’s youth — the 1980s through the mid-2000s — were largely wilderness years for the Democrats and the zenith of U.S. conservatism.
From Ronald Reagan’s first presidential victory in 1980 through Newt Gingrich leading the GOP takeover of the U.S. House in 1994 for the first time since the ‘50s to George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, the Democrats were on the back foot for all but the first two years of Bill Clinton’s first term. And those years were a story of the first Baby Boomer president either rescuing the nation from the Reaganite GOP or somehow being ensnared in scandal.
The pattern somewhat repeated itself in the Obama administration, where it turned out the young Boomer president had two years to work with Democratic majorities before the Tea Party congressional shellacking.
In all of this, Gen X figures on the Democratic side haven’t had much chance to gain any kind of prominent foothold.
But a generational change in the party may be possible at the end of the Biden era. That end may come in 2025 or 2029, but the shift to a new set of leaders will come at some point.
What would that look like?
The past is a foreign country
One big change would be for the Democratic Party to drop its white Boomer/War-Baby nostalgia for the mid-20th century United States. Not only is this set of political beliefs far too close to Trumpism, but it also cuts off the discussion of future possibilities which is the entire point of small-d democracy and non-sham elections.
Not to mention the fact that this political fixation on that period alienates everyone younger than the Boomers. Gen X, Millennials, and Zoomers have lived in a U.S. that bears such little resemblance to the Boomers’ U.S. that they may as well be different countries.
Yes, liberals’ rhetoric has started to emphasize that the post-war U.S. was still structured by Jim Crow segregation as well as sexism and homophobia, but most white liberals still pass around the sense that things were better economically and politically from 1940 to 1965.
The reality is much more mixed. Unions were (briefly) much stronger during that period, but overall the country was much poorer than it is today. Manufacturing experienced a hollowing out in the 2000s, but even in the face of rising tuition, the percentage of Americans with college degrees is now much higher than it was in the 1960s. While employment in the sector is near record lows, manufacturing output is up.
Politically, the mid-20th century U.S. was dominated by a New Deal order that, while rhetorically and aesthetically more committed to working people than the present era, kept Jim Crow in place. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition of pro-business white Northerners and (obviously white) Southern segregationists dominated Congress. This is something everyone left of center in the U.S. seems to have overlooked or memory-holed.
Gen X’s entry into American life came after the defeat in the Vietnam War, the backlash to the civil rights movement (that we are still living in), Watergate, and the dislocation of offshoring and deindustrialization. They are not utopians.
So Gen X leadership could re-orient the U.S. to focus on actual contemporary problems: under-urbanization, systemic racism that now manifests in higher rates of de facto housing segregation than in the 1960s, the anti-democratic turn of white right-wing Americans, underdeveloped social democracy, high child poverty, the collapse of independent media, and a poor quality school system based on faulty ideas among others.
We could try to have a manufacturing-based economy and less racism simultaneously, for the first time in U.S. history. We could, yes, try to have some rules for Meta, Alphabet, and Google made by people who know that the internet is not a series of tubes.
Without the nostalgia of the Boomers, the Gen Xers can give the country the “These are the reasons you suck” speech that it urgently needs.
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
The observations of historian and rather accidental public intellectual Timothy Snyder, have gotten a lot of attention in recent years. He’s been in demand as a commenter on Putin’s war on Ukraine and as a scholar of the Holocaust at a time of resurgent global reactionary politics.
Perhaps his most immediately applicable idea is that this moment in global politics is characterized by a lack of a future — there is little focus on possibilities and ideas for the next few decades, little contemporary fiction that imagines life in a century, and few politicians putting forward affirmative plans of their own.
Snyder sees authoritarians like Trump and especially Putin as practicing a kind of politics that ignores the future and keeps society in a nostalgia-fog feedback loop of both past glory and constant threat.
Needless to say, this is not a context where liberal democracy thrives.
Now, Biden isn’t Trump, and Bidenomics is an effort to (very unevenly) move the U.S. towards a politically and ecologically sustainable future economy, but the fact is inescapable: in Election 2020, American voters replaced the messenger of nigh-fascistic nostalgia with … the oldest man to hold the office.
And the oldest man to hold the office embodies a politics of longing for the “good old days” of bipartisan (Conservative Coalition) politics that has no thought of the political or cultural future. Even Bidenomics is about a return to past manufacturing strength as much as or more than it is about the future.
Where is the American future? Well, it lives in the generations that have been rising and waiting, getting on with life under neoliberalism and militarism while the Boomers and even some people older than Boomers kept hold of power.
Breaking the Cycle
So Gen X’s stereotypical cynicism is justified. More than that, they are the last people to call themselves anyone’s heroes, let alone saviors.
But that’s exactly what can give us a real, responsible near-future to look to. Not utopian, pie-in-the-sky dreams. Not paragons of a cultural moment or readers of “the national soul”. Just a practical effort to recognize and deal with the frankly pretty crummy reality in front of us. That’s what the Gen X Democrats offer: a grumbling, guess-I’ll-just-do-it free-range attitude to getting home at 3 pm and making themselves mac and cheese.
They talk differently, too.
See it in Stacey Abrams founding Fair Fight and expanding voting access to Black and other POC Georgians after losing the governor’s race to the shenanigans of Brian Kemp.
See it in Alex Padilla quietly being, effectively, the single U.S. senator to 39 million Californians as well as a dependable Democratic vote.
See it in Ruben Gallego, Arizona congressman, Senate candidate, and former Marine who saw combat in Iraq, being blunt about the nature of politics (“Politics is dark and hard. It’s not a bunch of people trying to do their best. It’s who can shank each other in a smarter way”) and quietly sarcastic about the way things have been done (“Sometimes you have to maybe not work hand and hand with your loyal opposition”).
See it in Chris Murphy, the former congressman from Newtown and now Connecticut’s junior senator, using an actual talking filibuster against the NRA.
This is what the Democratic Party needs to be at this moment — the party vigorous and capable of defeating Trumpism by calling a spade a spade, having concrete ideas, and being clear-eyed about the responsible work needed to make the U.S. a decent society.
