That’s exactly what I said: the parents had lived through the Depression and at least one had been either a WWII vet or at least a young adult at the time.
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Er? What?
Who says this?
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The same person who said ‘If you don’t vote Democrat when you’re young, you have no heart. If you don’t vote Republican when you’re older, you have no brain.’
That person can get stuffed.
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Do you think younger people are nostalgic for the good old days of segregated water fountains?
The really conservative wing of the Republican Party are the old folks who yearn for the Good Old Days ™ and want their way of life back. They won’t get their way of life back, because the Good Old Days ™ were not that good. Nobody would want to live in that era if 1) they didn’t grow up in it and 2) they were affected by the negative aspects of that time period.
Younger people tend to be less anti-gay than the older generations, and tend to support the War On Drugs less as well. Racism unfortunately is not going away, and is only changing shape.
I can see GenXers and younger getting interested in the Republican Party because they prefer the libertarian right to the authoritarian left. It’s an attractive option if you want government out of your personal life and don’t particularly care about systematized injustice. However, I do care about social justice, and it requires a lot of handwaving/outright lying to say that the Republican party is small-l libertarian at all, and the Tea Party wasn’t astroturfed.
Not exactly. It’s more along the lines of wanting to keep things the same versus wanting to move on. And yes, that person can get stuffed.
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Not really but “The GOP isn’t for young people” isn’t quite the same as saying the Democrats are the party of the Young. “Neither is” can be an answer.
Lots of young folks see the Democrats are cozy with business and banks and not doing a damn thing to help the lives of anyone under 40. The Democrats care about “too big to fail” and protecting bankers during a crisis, not in protecting the money and options of folks, like the young, with few options.
So why vote Democrat then? They aren’t the party of social justice. They’re just the party less overtly against social injustice than the GOP. Plenty of police forces are full of Democrats.
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You’re preaching to the choir. I’m not a Democrat either, and I’m barely under 40.
Out of the two major parties, the Democrats should seem more attractive to young people, because they’re supposed to be the liberal party and therefore should be more interested in progress. However, as I mentioned earlier, the Republican party is/was trying to rebrand itself as being more libertarian, even though it really isn’t.
Out of the two major parties, I would think the Democrats would try to do more outreach to younger generations than it is. I’m also surprised but not surprised that it isn’t even reaching out to liberals anymore.
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How utterly insightful.
(By the way, I’m not normally considered a boomer, not that facts have anything to do with anything…)
Oh, I don’t know about that.
Martin Shkreli is a GenX-er, isn’t he?
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Early Millennial, I think.
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He’s within the generational cusp, so he’d be considered among the ‘MTV (micro)generation’—a ‘Xennial’ or proto-millennial. Not that labels matter in this case. Generations come and go but assholes are born every day.
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True that. I’m solidly Generation X by any definition, and I know of at least 5 classmates from high school who have made heavy personal investment in the payday advance industry or the Koch brothers.
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That’s the real irony.
Used to be that people like sociologist would coin these terms, and I guess there was at least a little validity in the distinctions – after all, people born in roughly the same time and place would probably share some attributes, at least in broad terms. The danger, of course, is – as always – mistaking our taxonomies for reality (finger/moon, menu/meal, etc.).
Now, of course, the exercise is placed firmly in the hands or marketers, as is so much in today’s society. And folks are meant to mistake the category for something more real. And folks happily play the game, thinking that the marketing categories represent something a lot more real than they do.
That’s sad, IMO, and doesn’t bode well for the as-yet-unnamed generations to come…
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I still don’t get the concept of ‘generation’. Yeah, the post-WWII ‘baby boom’ was a swell in birth rate but since then, has this pattern repeated itself in 15-20 year cycles? I just can’t shake the sense that these distinctions—Gen X, MTV generation, Millennials, Generation Z—are just artificial boundaries that function as rebar for our cultural narratives. And, as you pointed out, this construct then provides a simplified scheme for those in sociology, journalism, and marketing. Especially marketing.
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People your age would say that.
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You know, the people who got to grow up with record low poverty, and record high prosperity and opportunity.
The Greatest Generation set out the buffet that the Boomers ate up out of sheer numbers and all the Millennials found were scraps after Gen X dashed in and grabbed the last slice of pizza.
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I think it depends on the perspective of who you ask. Some consider the Boomers to be actually two divisions, early and late (who were the last-slice grabbers) and 1967 to be the beginning of the Bust Generation.
With the recession and the energy crisis going on in the 70s, resulting in “stagflation” for places other than Texas or Alaska, I think this is worth considering.
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I know a lot of Gen X’ers that would disagree with this. A lot of us (not me to some extent) feel like the boomers took everything and took all the power (and took over culture) and then refused to let go until age started forcing them, handing things right over to millenials and skipping us mostly.
The 90s become belies some of that though, at least economically.
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Born in 83, so yeah?
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It’s generally about marketing, but some of have tried to make it a historical theory:
https://www.amazon.com/Generations-History-Americas-Future-1584/dp/0688119123
Worth a read, though I’m not convinced by it. I would argue that people believing in something can give it real world weight and consequences. A believe in things like generation gaps helps to make them a reality in our social lives.
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