People born in 1962 (or earlier) are the youngest folks that could have VOTED for Reagan in 1980. '66 or earlier if you want to lump in the '84 election. I was born in '68. I was 12 when Reagan was elected and I remember being moderately upset about it, as I was sure it meant that we’d end up in a nuclear war, and that he was very angry at Black people, which meant he was like the KKK, which upset me as a Jew who’d just seen a bunch of Nazis march through our town (remember Skokie, IL?)
At worst, GenX can share the blame for Bush(I) onward, but American conservative politics started the moment FDR got the New Deal passed and millionaires saw the poors getting some of THEIR money. And that’s all from GI/Silent generation. The Boomers pretended to rebel in the 60’s because (mostly) they didn’t want to get shot at and wanted to get laid, but once that was done, they went right back to the lessons of their elders. “We got ours. Fuck you.”
While true, they did not manage to dominate a major political party until post-Nixon. The modern “movement conservativism” that dominates the party begins with the southern strategy, and deepened it’s hold during the Reagan years via the Moral Majority, etc. The liberal consensus really moderated politics on some key issues (such as an expectation of taxation in return for some key government services, which even the more conservative, pro-business mainstream republicans would not touch, until such things got tied to the culture wars).
And of course some Gen Xers voted for Bush and other conservative figures, but the demographic has never been in the majority of the voting electorate. The Boomers are still dominant in pure numbers of voters… and Gen Z will apparently surpass us soon enough:
People born in all those other decades all eventually got their own actual generation name. Those of us from the '70s never graduated to a “real” name, so just got left with a generic placeholder name. Guess we’re all just a bunch of slackers that never did anything to stand out.
Gen Z, you better come up with some defining characteristic quick, or you’ll be stuck with just a letter too.
Normally, the “Lucky Few” is called the “Silent Generation” because how few of them have risen to major political positions. Although technically Joe Biden is a late member of the “Lucky Few”/“Silent Generation” making him the first (and likely only) President from that demographic. Which is interesting because the last four presidents were Boomers.
Nonetheless, they are real social phenomenons worth our attention behind these designations. Teenager is also largely a marketing term, but I don’t see people rolling their eyes and stomping their feet that we dare to pay attention to it.
just had this exact same discussion with my 14yr old, after I recieved an “OK Boomer” from him.
Made him read Douglas Coupland’s book – which he not only throughly enjoyed, but he has been hitting my music server in the house, downloading 80s music to his playlists.
I dont want to be marketed to, you see, like Lloyd Dobler,
I don’t want** to sell anything , buy anything , or process anything as a career.
I don’t want** to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed
or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.
Me, I feel the movie that captures the Gen X vibe best is Clerks. Kevin Smith is the voice of my generation (born in 1967, for full disclosure). We were the kids that saw disco come at the same time as Star Wars, learned about metric and caring for the environment in grade school during the Ford and Carter years, only to see the gloating Reagan types toss out all concern for the environment, saw Ghostbusters make the EPA into a villain. No wonder we embraced being slackers and hackers, retreating into new pleasures like Dungeons and Dragons and video arcades. We saw the hippie boomers lose out to the yuppie boomers, the “good” boomers apparently all dead or washed out.
Stranger Things captured the feeling for me of being in high school during the Reagan years all too painfully.
As for this mailing list, it’s targeted at the people that make me avoid class reunions like the plague. I hated mainstream 1980s culture. Screw MTV, I would rather watch Night Flight. To hell with Madonna and Foreigner, and Phil Collins era Genesis, I want Laurie Anderson and Pink Floyd.
And I already have an RSS feed for my Gen X nostalgia, called Boing Boing.