Generations, Generation Gaps, and Their Effects on Politics

JoeMorgue

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JoeMorgue
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General spin-off from side topics in the Biden and other political threads.
 
I'm inclined to join the blame-the-baby-boomer camp.

But what years were they really 'in power'? Something like 92 through the present day? It seems like a lot of the societal rot that the boomers get blamed for started before the 90s. So my first impression is that the baby boomers just continued milking the country the way the 'greatest generation' did before them. I expect we millenials will do the same in turn.
 
Going to repaste in the Boomer apologia which I recieved from an unreconstructed hippie over lunch:
Boomers' accomplishments were primarily social, but laws did change to reflect our values. Remember that in our generation, as in all others, most people are conservative and progressives are a minority. There was never a unified front on generational goals. Here are some of the ways we changed society: We ended the Vietnam War. We led the sexual revolution. We destigmatized drugs. We insisted on women's rights, gay rights, Native American rights, and laws changed. The tech revolution was led by Boomers: Apple and Microsoft were Boomer companies; IBM only got into PCs to smother the competition. Hippie ideals continue to influence dress, diet, sex, careerism and acquisitive materialism. You would have to have lived in the Fifties to really appreciate how much we changed the world.
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I would probably credit Boomers with many of the legal reforms we saw in the 1970's striking down unequal treatment by sex, even though some of the sheroes (including RBG herself) were Silent Generation, and I'd probably also give them a fair bit of credit for moving gay rights forward in the 80s and 90s.

As to Beeyon's question about power, they've been the dominant generational voting bloc for as long as I can remember, and I expect they will still outnumber millennials at the polls in November.
 
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Beeyon said:
I'm inclined to join the blame-the-baby-boomer camp.

But what years were they really 'in power'? Something like 92 through the present day? It seems like a lot of the societal rot that the boomers get blamed for started before the 90s. So my first impression is that the baby boomers just continued milking the country the way the 'greatest generation' did before them. I expect we millenials will do the same in turn.
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That was essentially my point.
 
Beeyon said:
I'm inclined to join the blame-the-baby-boomer camp.

But what years were they really 'in power'? Something like 92 through the present day? It seems like a lot of the societal rot that the boomers get blamed for started before the 90s. So my first impression is that the baby boomers just continued milking the country the way the 'greatest generation' did before them. I expect we millenials will do the same in turn.
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Typical, forgetting GenX and appropriately, the forgotten generation.

Well, at least its not our fault, we never had any power.
 
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dudalb said:
Looking at results of this election, the boomers vote, the millennials don't.
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Of course, this has been true of essentially every generational divide. Old people vote, young people don't. I've been hearing this exact same complaint since I was one of the young people, who couldn't understand why so few other people my age weren't getting out to vote.

Young people just suck, is what I'm saying.
 
Horatius said:
Of course, this has been true of essentially every generational divide. Old people vote, young people don't. I've been hearing this exact same complaint since I was one of the young people, who couldn't understand why so few other people my age weren't getting out to vote.

Young people just suck, is what I'm saying.
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Tbf, they may not want to register to vote because they don't want to do jury duty.*




*
 
Horatius said:
Of course, this has been true of essentially every generational divide. Old people vote, young people don't. I've been hearing this exact same complaint since I was one of the young people, who couldn't understand why so few other people my age weren't getting out to vote.

Young people just suck, is what I'm saying.
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Which wouldn't be a problem if the Democrats don't at least try to pin (at least their initial) hopes on some huge "Youth vote turnout" that they always hope for yet never happens every... single... goddamn... election.

Now political power is the one thing the youngling's complain about just rolls off my back because that's all their own doing. The sad, cynical, "Oh well I'll vote when the present me a perfect candidate on a silver platter, why should I bother voting if they aren't catering to me?" nonsense is defeatist bull. Trust me if you can get.... 40% of 35 year olds and younger to the polls for a few election cycles the politicians will not be able to kiss your butt enough. You whippersnappers could get PewDewPie elected President if you wanted.

Do you think politicians like sinking all their resources into people who are going to die within the next two decades? You think they wouldn't rather sink their claws into and develop working relationships on people they can get 30, 40, 50 years of political support from?

You show your willingness to vote, every time in every election like the old folks do and you will run this country.

But other things are less self determined. As long as the Baby Boomers stay in the job market and just refuse to leave there's never going to be jobs for the younger people.
 
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Horatius said:
Of course, this has been true of essentially every generational divide. Old people vote, young people don't. I've been hearing this exact same complaint since I was one of the young people, who couldn't understand why so few other people my age weren't getting out to vote.

Young people just suck, is what I'm saying.
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Which is why I always thought that the main reason the Bernie supporters gave for Bernie winning in November, that the would bring out young voters in greater numbers then anyone has seen, was so much malarkey. Just another version of the "Lost Tribe" theory of politics.
 
dudalb said:
Which is why I always thought that the main reason the Bernie supporters gave for Bernie winning in November, that the would bring out young voters in greater numbers then anyone has seen, was so much malarkey. Just another version of the "Lost Tribe" theory of politics.
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But as the one with the worst attendance record in the senate, failing to show up and vote is really the most Bernie thing they could do.
 
d4m10n said:
Going to repaste in the Boomer apologia which I recieved from an unreconstructed hippie over lunch:

I would probably credit Boomers with many of the legal reforms we saw in the 1970's striking down unequal treatment by sex, even though some of the sheroes (including RBG herself) were Silent Generation, and I'd probably also give them a fair bit of credit for moving gay rights forward in the 80s and 90s.

As to Beeyon's question about power, they've been the dominant generational voting bloc for as long as I can remember, and I expect they will still outnumber millennials at the polls in November.
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I'm not sure I'd credit the Boomers with gay rights. In my experience most of that generation I've encountered have been to some degree homophobic. It's the people younger than that who push for gay rights.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I'm not sure I'd credit the Boomers with gay rights. In my experience most of that generation I've encountered have been to some degree homophobic. It's the people younger than that who push for gay rights.
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SCOTUS saved the day on that one. Gay rights was going to die a bloody death in the halls of national government until SCOTUS made it a moot point.

Plenty of so called liberals were cowards on the issue and wouldn't have lifted a finger to make it happen.

I wouldn't call that a triumph of popular will. It was a good result, but it really was just a stroke of luck.

The way things are going, it could easily snap back the other way. SCOTUS precedent seems to mean less and less as the conservative judges take over.
 
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TragicMonkey said:
I'm not sure I'd credit the Boomers with gay rights.
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I didn't give them all the credit, I pointed out who was doing gay rights activism in the 80s & 90s. It's not as if gay rights activism skipped a generation from Harvey Milk to Dustin Lance Black.
 
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Gay rights are weird (hey there's a phrase I hope I get quoted on out of context...) if you look at the time frame.

Loving Vs Virginia made inter-racial marriage legal in the United States in 1967, when the US Supreme Court put down the precedent that inter-racial marriage fell under the protection of the Equal Amendment and Due Processes clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Same-sex marriage, although still sadly on somewhat shaky ground legally one could argue, was made legal nationwide in 2015 through various court cases and Constitutional challenges.

But here's the thing. At the time of the Loving V Virginia in 1967 public support for interracial marriage was at about 70% of Americans didn't approve of it. It wasn't until 1994, nearly a full 3 decades later, that a majority of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Even now about 18% disapprove of it.

Compare that to same sex-marriage. It was almost ten years after public support for same-sex marriage became supported by most people that same-sex marriage become legal nationwide.

Now no two civil rights timelines are ever going to match up perfectly and the inter-racial and same-sex marriage debates didn't follow the same paths; we had a parallel argument about sodomy the physical act which overlapped with same-sex marriage debate especially in the early days and probably affected it and that weird "Okay they can get married they just can't call it getting married" thing but even accounting for all that the same-sex marriage debate should have happened and been over with and old news in the late 70s or early to mid 80s, early 90s at the absolute latest.

I've heard people, probably accurately, argue that without the AIDS epidemic causing a resurgence in homophobia it would have happened loser to those earlier timeframes.
 
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It still pisses me off that so many people think gay marriage is the whole sum of civil rights. It's nice that I can get married, sure...but right now I can still be fired from jobs for being gay. A lot more people have to work than have to get married.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It still pisses me off that so many people think gay marriage is the whole sum of civil rights. It's nice that I can get married, sure...but right now I can still be fired from jobs for being gay. A lot more people have to work than have to get married.
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And a lot longer before acceptance is widespread in public life. For example it still isn't safe for two homosexuals to even hold hands in public in most places.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It still pisses me off that so many people think gay marriage is the whole sum of civil rights. It's nice that I can get married, sure...but right now I can still be fired from jobs for being gay. A lot more people have to work than have to get married.
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Darat said:
And a lot longer before acceptance is widespread in public life. For example it still isn't safe for two homosexuals to even hold hands in public in most places.
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All 100% true but I wonder which one is the better cart to put before the horse, so to speak.

Is it better for the government to ensure... administrative equality (perhaps not the exact right term but close) or for the equality to come from

In other words is it easier for a society to see people who are being treated equally by the government as equals or easier for a government to promote equality on behalf of the populace?

I mean again "Well it's better if both ways happens" is obviously true, but still.

//Hopefully that made some sense//
 
dudalb said:
Which is why I always thought that the main reason the Bernie supporters gave for Bernie winning in November, that the would bring out young voters in greater numbers then anyone has seen, was so much malarkey.
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JoeMorgue said:
Which wouldn't be a problem if the Democrats don't at least try to pin (at least their initial) hopes on some huge "Youth vote turnout" that they always hope for...
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They/we don't. Anti-Bernie folks just keep saying so to smear Bernie and his supporters with it.

JoeMorgue said:
...yet never happens every... single... goddamn... election.
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Except when it has, like when Clinton and Obama were elected. (Yes, as the examples show, I mean real-world-level turnout that actually does go up & down, not some overwhelmingly gigantic superwave that nobody anywhere actually ever said would happen no matter how much you want to pretend we did.)

(Funny memory about Clinton's first election: on Election Night while the TV networks were all reporting incoming results live for hours, Anderson Cooper got what seemed to be his first gig on a real TV network. Before that, he'd been on "Channel 1", which did short segments designed to be shown in high schools each morning with the traditional "morning announcements", with hosts who were probably all college students or maybe very recent graduates, clearly cast for their close-to-high-school age. And his entire role was to represent the young because he was so young himself and familiar only to the youngest in the audience, so, whenever the anchors figured it was time to reiterate the theme of the night, about how many young voters were voting that year and how much difference they were making, they'd go to Anderson, who seemed to be standing on the second floor looking down on the main set, so he could say essentially "Yes, indeed, there are more young adults voting this time than usual, and that's becoming a really important feature of this election", and then they'd switch back to the real anchors. It was funny how obvious they were being about it, but, more than that for those of us who knew him from Channel 1, it was weird to see him outside of Channel 1, and now it's still weird to see him in a role other than "official network representative of the young to talk about the young". :D)

Anyway, the real point is, it's worked before. But just as the young can have their higher-turnout years, the old can too, and they did this year, for whatever reason.

JoeMorgue said:
The sad, cynical, "Oh well I'll vote when the present me a perfect candidate on a silver platter, why should I bother voting if they aren't catering to me?" nonsense is defeatist bull.
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Interesting... what's been standing out to me is the defeatism built in to the other side of the DP, with things like thinking a candidate who supported what most Democrat voters (in some cases, most Americans in general) really want could never possibly win and only someone who acts like a Republican can (even though the only Democrat winners in recent decades were those who campaigned closest to that)... and the insistence that even if progressives won they'd never get anything accomplished because there are still non-progressive politicians for them to deal with (even though politics is never so absolute and real change can happen in small pieces at a time that accumulate and fighting for something even if you lose this time can at least set up a win some later time but it can't if you don't fight for it at all).

Combined with the "what's the point of voting, my vote won't make any difference" problem, it looks like the difference between these two kinds of Democrat is not whether they're governed by a looming theme of capitulation or not, because they both are in a way, but where & how they do their capitulating.

JoeMorgue said:
As long as the Baby Boomers stay in the job market and just refuse to leave there's never going to be jobs for the younger people.
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And BBs will be coming up with ways to tell the young it's our/their fault.

* * *

I wouldn't have any problem with Baby Boomers merely not having done enough for leftwardism in their time and leaving more still to be done, if that were all there were to it. But they didn't just fall short. They're actively working against the cause now.

It's not just "I've already got my health care & Social Security & cheap education & retirement funds & lifetime accumulation from working at good wages/salaries, so now I don't care if you do or not"; it's a step beyond that, to "I've already got all that, so now I'll make sure to keep voting to block you from ever having any of it". They've literally made it so that the world will benefit from their deaths.
 
d4m10n said:
Going to repaste in the Boomer apologia which I recieved from an unreconstructed hippie over lunch:
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That list of so-called "accomplishments" is the most scathing INDICTMENT of a generation I think I've ever heard...are they really proud that Apple and Microsoft, two of the most abusive and exploitative corporations ever, are Boomer creations?
 
Puppycow said:
Some day they will.


And some kids from a yet-to-be named generation will coin a clever new way to tell them off.
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Isn't that the truth. I haven't heard so much whining about how the older generation was so awful since...well...I was whining about my parents' and grandparents' generations forty years ago. Plus ça change...
 
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It occurs to me that we would solve the "[demographic x] doesn't vote" problem by making voting mandatory. It should be a crime NOT to vote.
 
Quarantine means a rise in unplanned pregnancy. They're already calling this incoming batch "Coronials."
 
Stacyhs said:
Wow. I've seldom read such a condescending POS. If any age group is taking Covid 19 seriously, it's the over 60's.



https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/opinions/boomers-boronavirus-millennials-pariser/index.html
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I wonder if there will ever be any concrete data on which people acted most and least responsibly during the outbreak. I see lots of finger pointing, but no real evidence.

At least in the US, there did appear to be a political distinction, at least in the early days. Pro-Trump conservatives seemed determined to underplay the severity of the disease.

All Boomers don't watch Fox News, but Fox News watchers are overwhelming elderly with a median age of 65. I strongly suspect the Fox News audience were among the least responsible when it comes to this outbreak and following best practices. These people are the easiest to identify because they were the most strident in ignoring their social responsibility, but I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who aren't so outspoken about their noncompliance.

Other than that it's all anecdotal. The "I won't inconvenience my life" mindset seems to be common enough across all age groups.
 
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Boomers: "Okay the Corona Virus is a big deal because it affects people our age! Quick horde toilet paper!"
Millennial: "Okay Boomers does this prove we need universal healthcare?"
Boomers: "Shut up!"
Millennial: "No you shut up!"
Boomers: "Go eat an avocado!"

Gen X: *Sits in the corner, humming "Covid-19" to the tune of "Come on Eileen" over and over and giggling*
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Boomers: "Okay the Corona Virus is a big deal because it affects people our age! Quick horde toilet paper!"
Millennial: "Okay Boomers does this prove we need universal healthcare?"
Boomers: "Shut up!"
Millennial: "No you shut up!"
Boomers: "Go eat an avocado!"

Gen X: *Sits in the corner, humming "Covid-19" to the tune of "Come on Eileen" over and over and giggling*
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This Gen Xer tends to go with "My Corona" to the tune of My Sharona by The Knack. But that's just me.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
SCOTUS saved the day on that one. Gay rights was going to die a bloody death in the halls of national government until SCOTUS made it a moot point.
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Except for all the ways one can legally discriminate against queer people, like employment, housing, and so on. Those are of course moot for some reason.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Except for all the ways one can legally discriminate against queer people, like employment, housing, and so on. Those are of course moot for some reason.
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I think a lot of so-called liberals were happy to put this issue on the back burner after the SCOTUS decision. A lot of these Democrats are not reliable when it comes to the matter of civil rights for queer people.

I think the party was happy to declare victory after the SCOTUS decision and deflect any further attention from the issue, which leaves the unresolved issues you point out.
 
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