This isn’t a very deep post today, just some fun observations.
I am a domesticated creature who typically doesn’t go out very much. Also, I am unemployed, so I don’t have anywhere to go anyway. When everyone else in the household is away at work or at school, I do have one activity for exercise – walking about town, weather permitting (I should go to the gym, but that’s another story).
I live in a shabby little town in Pennsylvania, where there are just enough side streets to create walking circuits through the small neighborhoods that bracket either side of the busy main drag (the traffic is almost all going through town).
The myriad muncipalities are typically “townships,” though the town where our address is located is simply a “Census designated area” within a township. Don’t ask me why. I’ve blogged about life here before, which is kind of like being in a liminal space between the DEI city and the MAGA country.
The point I wanted to make with this post is that when I’ve been out walking, multiple times now cars have slowed down, and the drivers have lowered their window to ask me for directions! Like, don’t they have a smartphone for navigational purposes? Apparently, not everyone does.
Not to stereotype here, but invariably the driver will be an older white person – a Boomer, I’m sure. Ok, maybe they could be a Gen Xer since our generation is now entering its early 60s, but I’m pretty sure they are Boomers. They might be looking at a piece of paper, presumably with the directions they were trying to follow written on them, but as often happens with that old fashioned approach, they wrote something down that turned out to be illegible. I’m making up a story here.
Of course, I am happy to help these lost drivers, and I always can, since I have a smartphone. Which the drivers would know, since my phone is always out, because as I walk I play a casual game called Pikmin Bloom. Some of us here embrace the new ways of doing things. I just thought it was interesting that there are still people out there following the old ways.
In my reading, the Greatest Generation’s influence peaked around 1965 and began its slow surrender to the whims and desires of the Boomers from that point on. So, yeah, while we can say that the Boomers came of age during a period of immense social change, driving movements such as civil rights, anti-war protests, and shifts in cultural norms (e.g., feminism, environmentalism), they didn’t really dominate the workforce and political elite until the early 1980s (the shift from Hippies to so-called Yuppies).
Again, the Boomers were blessed from the start, growing up in a time of American confidence and expansion. Like most would-be “revolutionary” generations, after the raucous efforts of their youth, the real talent went into business and technology and the leftovers went into politics. As such, the Boomers remade our world with the information revolution but passed very little meaningful legislation, instead succumbing to a bizarrely counter-productive ideological polarization as they aged.
The Boomers accumulated vast wealth, but also presided over growing income inequality. Their consolidation of political power and economic resources created serious barriers for younger generations, and has contributed to a serious decline in our nation’s institutions — almost all of which now are held in low esteem as the Boomers begin to depart.
The Boomers’ long reign likewise distorted America’s perceptions and understanding of the Greatest Generation’s greatest legacy — namely, the international liberal trade order we now call globalization.
I see these parallels all the time with geostrategists like Barnett. They are pattern-seekers and they inevitably detect the same pattern of generational change found in Strauss-Howe generational theory. Barnett doesn’t see it in Strauss-Howe terms (that there are generational archetypes and cycles), but he does get that Boomers (Prophet archetype) grew up in post-war prosperity, and that they attacked the institutions established by the Greatest Generation (Hero archetype) in their youth (1960s), and dismantled them when they came into political power (now).
Different thinkers might come up with different explanations for these kinds of sociological patterns, but the fact that they all see similar ones tells me they are looking at something real.
Barnett laments what Boomers have done to the international liberal trade order, but it’s hardly surprising – they’ve been bitching about it for decades, at least in their right-wing camp. If you read Barnett’s substack posts, you will see that he see some good in this desrtruction, as it is pushes us along to needed reforms in the world order. And, of course, the destruction and recreation of the world order is exactly what Strauss and Howe predict as part of their “Fourth Turning.”
I will conclude this post by noting that I plan to start writing more on substack; I will probably post all my social commentary there, and only post more personal or ligher fare on this blog. Here is my substack link for some teaser posts I already have out there: https://stevebarrera.substack.com/
Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that the current administration has handed unprecedented power to a private citizen who is not an elected official or even a vetted official, and is acting outside of the legal framework defined by the U.S. Consitution. Another way to put it: he is acting illegally. As Timothy Snyder puts it, this, of course, is a coup.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
“It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution.
Well, yeah. It’s clear that the President does not intend to be checked by either the legislature or the courts. If no one stops him, the Constitution is a dead letter, and our status as citizens of the United States is in jeopardy.
Now one has to wonder why, with Congress in the hands of the Republicans, the party doesn’t simply undertake to rejigger the Federal bureacracy through legal, Constitutional means. Heather Cox Richardson argues that it’s because the deep cuts the President wants are unpopular, and Republicans in Congress prefer to distance themselves from responsibility for them. By doing that, of course, they are surrendering their role in government and their power.
But permitting a private citizen to override the will of our representatives in Congress destroys the U.S. Constitution. It also makes Congress itself superfluous. And it takes the minority rule Republicans have come to embrace to the logical end of putting government power in the hands of one man.
But I have to wonder – could it simply be that this administration sees doing anything by Constiutiional means as too hopelessly complicated and process-bound? Neither of the two members of the diumvirate (if that’s what it is) is temperamentally inclined to ask for permission to do anything. They might see their election victory as a mandate to implement their agenda by any means necessary, rules be damned.
How did we get here? When I look back over my political posts over the years (many of which seem so pathetically naive now), the path is pretty clear.
For decades, our Federal government has been gridlocked by hyperpartisanship, following a takeover by the Boomer generation (the infamous “Gingrich revolution” in 1994). From then on, it was effectively hobbled by its system of checks and balances, combined with the nearly 50-50 split between the partisan factions. The Boomers were more interested in arguing than in governing.
Along comes a paticularly nasty Boomer, who sees an opportunity to exploit popular discontent with this state of affairs and offers himself as The Guy Who Can Fix It. He’s clearly a con man, he’s reckless and he’s lawless, but that doesn’t deter a significant percentage of voters. Despite his lawlessness, indeed possibly even because of it, he wins a second term to the Presidency after a disastrous first term followed by a respite.
Who could see lawlessness as a qualification for holding office? Well, how about the generation that brags online about how they were raised without boundaries and stalks your social media feed with mocking laughing emojis? You know the one I’m talking about:
We played outside all day without adult supervision and rode bikes without helmets. We’re anti-snowflake. We believe in morals but we shun moral preening. We have little tolerance for the speech police, laugh at off-color jokes (even when we’re not supposed to), and are almost impossible to offend (unless you say “that’s offensive.”)
Am I generalizing? Of course. People are individuals, and not everyone in Gen X embodies these traits. But Gen X, as a whole, does—and it might help explain why Gen X put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.
Trump’s vulgarity and coarse language, which offends so many Baby Boomers and Millennials, is less likely to bother people in my generation. Hell, for some, it’s what they love about him. He’s the Happy Gilmore of politics, the boisterous upstart the fans love but the elites despise.
The argument is simple here. The Gen X attitude is: if the laws don’t work, then fuck ’em. Just ignore them. That’s how you get to where we are today, with a government that ignores the U.S. Constitution.
Can the Constitution be restored? Rebuilt? Or is this a Humpty-Dumpty scenario, like trying to unscramble an egg? It’s possible that, after the colossal failures and depredations that are bound to come with the new administration, some semblance of the old ways can be brought back. Perhaps altered to accomodate all that has changed in the interim.
Another substacker (one of my favorites), Thomas P. M. Barnett, sees it too. He gets the generational angle, though he doesn’t treat it as rosily. He recognizes the danger were in, and the fact that we’ve created a Terror State – what you always get with authoritarian rule.
That deeply-but-evenly-divided electorate wasn’t changing, resulting in change election after change election (stretching back to 2006) with no real change ensuing even as the general angst and anger of the electorate ballooned over time.
As much as the Left wants to blame Trump’s win on his duplicity (like denying Project 2025 right up to the vote and then immediately implementing it upon inauguration), the scarier truth is that the majority of Americans are open to letting this Trump smash! dynamic unfold.
It’s so Boomer, right? One last crazy, self-destructive “revolution” by that generation?
He is spot on with the Boomers being a destructive generation. They burned down the college campuses in the 1960s, and now they’re burning down the halls of Congress in the 2020s. Gen Xers, their accomplices in government, are happy to stand back and watch the fire. It’s a dangerous combination of generations to be in charge, but unfortunately we’re stuck with them – at least for a while. Younger generations will get their chance eventually. At that point, we can probably say we’ve made it through the Crisis Era.
Twenty years ago (was it really that long ago?) a geostrategist named Thomas P. M. Barnett pubished a book titled The Pentagon’s New Map. He introduced a new way of thinking about geostrategy in the post-Cold War era. Instead of seeing the world as divided between East and West – the old Soviet bloc vs. U.S. bloc – it made sense to see the world divided between the “Core” of functioning globalized states and the “Gap” of disconnected, poorly governed (or ungoverned) states that weren’t (yet) integrated with the global economy.
Barnett’s book emerged out of a famous (in some circles) presentation on C-Span in 2004. The new map in question was based on a look at all the places where the U.S. military had intervened since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. They were all places in the Gap, essentially the part of the world that was most in need of security. The U.S., as the sole superpower to survive the Cold War, was the planet’s premier provider of security.
Logically, the strategic mission of the United States should be to “shrink the Gap” by working to economically integrate these failed states with the rest of the world. This would mean fewer military interventions in the long run. It would fulfill the post-World War II promise of the U.S. using its formidable military power to protect free markets around the globe.
You can see how this line of thinking might have dovetailed with Bush’s Iraq War, ostensibly an effort to replace a dictatorship in the Gap with a democratic state. Barnett was a rising star in the Bush era, and I followed him closely, including reading all of his books. I reviewed The Pentagon’s New Map here on this blog back in 2018, noting at the same time that with the failure of the nation-building efforts in SW Asia (mission not accomplished), his whole line of thinking kind of fell to the wayside. He didn’t post as much on his blog any more, and I lost track of him.
Then I discovered that he is on Substack now, and is promoting a new book. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to have found him there – Substack seems to be where all the intellectual Gen Xers and Boomers have gone to publish and promote their work, now that the other platforms have devolved into A.I.-generated troll farms. Barnett is in fact an Xer, born in 1962.
From what I can tell, he is arguing that while the U.S. has withdrawn from the world since the Crisis Era began, China continues the process of integrating with the economies of the Gap (now called the Global South). The Global South welcomes, indeed depends upon, this integration, and so China is emerging as a new global leader, now that America has given up. Barnett, of course, doesn’t refer to the Crisis Era of turnings theory as I just did, but he does mark the 2008 Global Financial Crisis as the turning point, so he is essentially in agreement with the timeline of the generational theory, if not the underlying model.
Here’s a quote from his post:
As I have noted here in the past: America was the market-maker in the system from 1945 to 2008’s Great Recession. Since then we have elected nation-building-at-home presidents (Obama, Trump, Biden) and have largely eschewed any role in promoting global trade integration — just the opposite. Instead of re-injecting just enough market-playing, I’m-in-this-for-myself vibes to rebalance our global posture between looking out for the world and looking out for ourselves, we Americans naturally go overboard in our reaction. We cannot merely adjust; we must pull a 180 and denounce all that came before (Globalization was a lie!). It’s just how we be.
So why did we go overboard (as Barnett puts it) in this country, becoming so obsessed with our Culture Wars divisions that we can’t even form a stable government or coherent national strategy? Overreacting to trends and overcorrecting, I think, comes with the generational cycle, and we might be more vulnerable to this cycle because we are a young settler nation that emerged from radical ideas of freedom and equality, and not bound by any long tradition.
We are also saddled with a Constitutional system that doesn’t work with an even two-party split. The checks and balances lead to paralysis when there is no majority party to assert its agenda. How we got to a 50-50 split, rather than a more workable 60-40 split, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s some natural law of partisanship, a strange attractor in the chaotic system that is modern society. Worst case scenario, a shadowy group is orchestrating it – but that’s just conspiracy thinking.
It also occurs to me that the U.S., being the wealthiest and most secure nation on Earth, can afford to brush off the rest of the world if it wants to. We can take our toys and go home, unlike nations that are caught in conflict regions or heavily dependent on trade. We can obsess on our internal problems, since we don’t realistically face much pressure from the external world. That we choose to do so is us exercising a kind of privilege.
He just puts it bluntly: the MAGA movement, with its Hitlerian leader promising a violent cleansing of American society, is the last bastion of white Christian supremacy, trying to stop the tide of non-whites and non-Christians from rising up and claiming their share of freedom and equality and their part in the American dream. He gets the generational aspect of it, recognizing that with Boomers and Xers at the top, the internal struggle will continue. And he gets the high stakes of it – neither side is going to back down.
I’m just glad Barnett ends up on the same side as me, because if he had turned out to be a Trump supporter, I probably wouldn’t have subscribed to his substack.
Oh, who am I kidding: of course I would have subscribed, just to get this brilliant man’s take on current events from that perspective. He’s got a head full of ideas that go against the grain of conventional thinking, and his arguments are always eye-opening for me. I’ve ordered a copy of his new book, and look forward to reading more of his substack posts in the future.
SNL 50, Featuring the Prophet Archetype in the Crisis Era
Last weekend we watched the latest episode of Saturday Night Live, proudly in its 50th season. We didn’t watch it live, but on the Peacock streaming service, on Sunday evening. The host was the very talented Arianna Grande (b. 1993), of the Millennial generation, and the musical guest was Baby Boomer Stevie Nicks (b. 1948).
In her opening monologue, Grande joked about not wanting to upstage the musical guest, but then promptly burst into song. She is an amazing singer, as well as an amazing actor, and I was honestly worried she would be a hard act for the septuagenerian musical guest to follow.
Well, I shouldn’t have been worrying, because Nicks stepped up with a powerful performance of her song “The Lighthouse,” a political anthem and call-to-action, written after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Dressed all in black, on a barely lit stage, she embodied the dark and foreboding mood of her generation, which has always been at the forefront of angry political protest.
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power Unless you stand up and take it back Try to see the future and get mad
In the generational theory I often advocate on this blog, the Boomer generation, of which Nicks is a member, has the Prophet archetype – moralistic, values-obsessed, known more for words than for deeds. And with her long, flowing gray locks, Nicks sure looked like a Prophetess as she sang out her warning cry.
Now in elderhood, Boomers are facing their final chance to impress upon younger generations the importance of their message. You can feel the sense of urgency in Nicks’s lyrics.
It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had You don’t have much time to get it back
A video of the performance follows, with full lyrics (the closed captions on YouTube are a bit off). This is really just so Boomer generation. EDIT: The SNL video is not available any more so I switched to the official music video.
I have my scars, you have yours Don’t let them take your power Don’t leave it alone in the final hours They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power Don’t close your eyes and hope for the best The dark is out there, the light is going fast Until the final hours, your life’s forever changed And all the rights that you had yesterday Are taken away And now you’re afraid You should be afraid Should be afraid Because everything I fought for Long ago in a dream is gone Someone said the dream is not over The dream has just begun, or Is it a nightmare? Is it a lasting scar? It is unless you save it and that’s that Unless you stand up and take it back And take it back I have my scars, you have yours Don’t let them take your power Don’t leave it alone in the final hours They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power Unless you stand up and take it back Try to see the future and get mad It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had You don’t have much time to get it back I wanna be the lighthouse Bring all of you together Bring it out in a song Bring it out in stormy weather Tell them the story
This is the first official picture released by the White House of #KBJ. The photo was taken by Lelanie Foster, a young black photographer from the Bronx.
The confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the 116th Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court is being hailed as an historic event. From reactions on social media it is plain that partisan blue zoners are relieved that the latest replacement on the Court has occurred during a Democratic Presidency, and succeeded despite the partisan split in the Senate. No one could forget the Republican controlled Senate’s political tactics in 2016 that handed the nomination of Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement to a Republican President. That Jackson is the first black woman to serve on the Court is also rightfully being hailed as an important historic milestone. It reflects the long secular trend of the elevation of women and minorities as equals in our civil society. It is meaningful, in my opinion, that this historic moment occurred during the Presidency of Joseph Biden, who is from the generation of the civil rights movement – the Silent Generation. This moment is a fitting capstone to his generation’s legacy of fairness and inclusion in American life.
There has even been some notice of the fact that with Jackson’s appointment, the Supreme Court will, for the first time, have four women Justices serving on it. This reflects another secular trend of increasing gender equality on the Court. The first woman Justice was appointed in 1981 (O’Connor); this increased to two women Justices in 1993 (Ginsburg) and then to three in 2010 (Kagan following Sotomayor’s replacement of O’Connor). Ginsburg was also replaced by a woman (Barrett), suggesting that not even President Trump could bring himself to interrupt this historic progression.
When Justice Stephen Breyer (circled) vacates the Supreme Court, there will be no more Justices from the Silent Generation serving on it.
There’s another story that seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Take a look at the birth years of the current members of the Court. The Justice who is retiring and being replaced by Jackson is Stephen Breyer, born in 1938. He is the last remaining member of the Silent Generation to serve on the Court (the first was actually O’Connor; only six members of his generation have served on the Court). After Breyer’s retirement, all of the Justices will be either Boomers or Gen Xers. Jackson won’t just be the fourth woman on the Court, she will also be the fourth Gen Xer. This is another historic moment for the Supreme Court: the replacement of the Silent Generation by Generation X.
The other three Gen Xers on the Supreme Court were all appointed by President Trump. It is not surprising that Trump was able to find suitable red zone aligned jurists among this generation, which leans conservative and Republican. These three appointees may well be his administration’s most lasting legacy. They will steer the Court in a conservative direction for a long time to come. Even if, by some twist of fate, Biden should get the opportunity to replace another Justice, the Court will still be majority conservative (5-4 instead of 6-3). What does this new alignment, both generational and ideological, mean for the future of the Supreme Court?
I am not a legal scholar, so I can only speculate from the perspective of an educated layman. One thing I think is certain is that we will see breaks from precedent. This is already evident in the uncertain fate of Roe v. Wade – the dreaded (by blue zoners) overturning of that decision may be coming. One of the Gen X Justices, Gorsuch, reputedly disdains precedence and would prefer to craft his own conservative judicial philosophy. This sort of independence of thought is just what you would expect from Generation X.
Another trend I see is the continued success of the conservative mission to roll back the administrative state (a Silent Generation legacy) in favor of individual freedoms (a Generation X legacy). Case in point: the recent Court ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s vaccination mandate. Given her background as a public defender (the first to be appointed to the Supreme Court), Jackson herself might be inclined to rule in that direction.
Once Breyer has retired this summer, only one Justice will remain on the Supreme Court who was appointed in the twentieth century: Clarence Thomas, who will be the oldest, in his mid-70s. No serving Justice will remain from a generation older than the Boomers, and there will be four from my generation, Generation X, all appointed in the past five years. It’s actually quite remarkable that all of the Supreme Court Justices will be younger than both the President and the Speaker of the House, and that their average age will be slightly lower than the average age of U.S. Senators.
You would think that the Judicial branch would be where the old wisdom of the country resided, but a move to pack the Supreme Court with conservative thinkers has put my generation there instead. This historic generational shift in the makeup of the Court will have repercussions for years to come. Long-standing legal precedents and regimes that have been taken for granted are clearly in for a significant upheaval.
On this blog I often write about generations, and when I do I often find myself writing specifically about the generations online. For example, I have posts about social media, where I’ve observed how different generations experienced social media at different life stages, thus having a different relationship with the technology. It’s like what I really blog about is the Internet, and that’s not surprising given that I spend almost of all of my waking life there, whether at my paying job or working on personal projects like this blog.
It’s nothing new; on my old blog, I had a background section about the generations, and it emphasized their presence on the Internet. For example, I noted that the GI generation did not have much Internet presence, and that it was members of the Silent generation who were typically portrayed as the older people just learning how to get online. Meanwhile, Boomers and Gen-Xers were the Internet entrepreneurs, and the Millennials had their own unique online portals. I was writing all of this in the early to mid-2000s, so a lot has changed. If you go to my old site, you will find that some of the external links still work, but many, if not most of them, are dead now.
Back then, I focused on “the web.” Web 2.0 was young, and social media was still evolving as a concept. You might note that in my background section, social media makes an appearance on the Millennial page, in scare quotes no less. Twenty years later, I think it’s natural to associate social media and the ubiquity of apps and crowdsharing with that generation; it goes hand in hand with their consensus-seeking peer personality. Now that social media apps, with their relatively closed platforms, are supplanting the more open world wide web, what has changed about the presence of the generations online?
Well, for one thing, everyone is on the Internet now. You can’t really talk about any particular”online generation” when the Internet is part of the background of everyday life. At best there’s the idea of “digital natives” to cover all the people so young that they can’t remember when there wasn’t an Internet. But I think all generations from Boomers on down are comfortable with life online.
I would say that, as a rule, different generations tend to congregate in different platforms. Facebook and Twitter, and what’s left of the old world wide web are where you find the older generations, while Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok are where the younger generations are. This assertion is based on no data at all; it’s just my impression. While all of the living generations are on the Internet, they have different reputations online and different presences as a generation. Let’s call the sum total of all that a generation’s Internet profile.
First, for the Boomer generation and older, I’d say their Internet profile doesn’t looks so great. There’s not much around specific to the Silent generation, except for pages that amount to encyclopedia entries. Boomers as a generation have a terrible social media presence, since they are mostly the butt of jokes. As I noted in an earlier blog post, there’s a Facebook group devoted to making fun of Boomers. And we all know about “OK boomer.” As individuals, plenty of Silents and Boomers are in command of their social media presence, particularly celebrities and prominent and powerful officials. I imagine that many elder leaders actually have teams of younger people managing their social media accounts.
The Millennial generation’s Internet profile is a bit of a muddle. For one thing, younger Millennials would prefer to disassociate themselves from their older generational peers and call themselves Generation Z. Articles about the gap between Millennials and Gen Z are generally silly fluff, but the real story here is that there is a reluctance among Millennials to embrace their generational moniker. Despite the fact that the term “Millennial” has become a commonplace and is ubiquitous in online discourse about the state of society, Millennial individuals are not keen on taking on their generational name as a brand.
This takes me to my generation, Generation X. Of all the generations, Gen X is the one which most willingly – eagerly, even – embraces its identity online. Gen X’s Internet profile is like a bold statement – don’t you forget about us! There are so many Gen X themed YouTube channels, podcasts, social media pages and accounts that I am not even going to list any here. Instead, I’ll pick that up in a future post. Suffice it to say that many Gen X individuals see themselves in terms of belonging to their generation, and a lot of what Gen Xers obsess on in their online content and sharing is nostalgia for their past. You know, that time before there was an Internet.
You may have seen a chart like the one on the right, which I took from Wikipedia’s page on workforce productivity. It shows labor productivity growth compared to wage growth since the end of the Second World War. What’s remarkable about it is how the two statistics track one another for a period of two decades or so, but then suddenly veer off, dramatically so for non-managerial workers. Workforce productivity starts growing much faster than nonsupervisory workforce compensation, as the latter curve flattens out.
What this means is that for a good couple of decades (the length of a generation), after 1948, as output per hour of work improved, so did the compensation for that work. The improvement in the value of labor was transferred to the workers themselves. But suddenly, in the early 1970s, gains in output were no longer matched by gains in wages. The improvement in the value of labor benefitted only those managing or employing the labor. This trend continues to this day, and is at the root of what is wrong with the economy, with its massive income and wealth inequality, and lack of economic opportunity for the working class.
There are actually a slew of economic indicators that shifted dramatically in the early 1970s, along with political and social indicators. They are all captured on a site here. This shift can be seen as the start of a new economic regime.
So what caused this shift to a new regime? Arguably, a shift in social priorities and the rise of a new generation into the workforce. In the early 1970s, that generation would have been the Baby Boomers. They brought a new inner-world, moralistic focus into American life. For Boomers, work was a personal mission, a matter of defining the self, not a matter of bargaining for rights and responsibilities as part of a collective.
Consequently, union membership declined as this generation entered the workforce, yet another indicator shift to join the ones on the site I linked above. Boomers were pursuing their own individual agendas through their work, not participating in building any kind of functioning system, as their union-joining forefathers had done. Boomers gave us the concept of the workaholic, someone for whom the work itself was the reward. Success in work became a status symbol for the inner-driven, wealth-obsessed yuppies of the 1980s – a sign of individual merit and self-worth.
By the time Generation X started working, labor rights had become completely passé. Gen Xers entered the workforce with an attitude of self-determination, as free agents, always looking out for the best deal for themselves. They gave us the concept of the perma-temp, the employee with no benefits or safety net, who drifts from employer to employer. As a Gen Xer might have put it, “it’s just a job.”
Gen Xers were the young adults of the boom times in the 1990s, when economic growth was high and productivity growth was on the rise. But in the new opportunistic economic regime, economic growth no longer acted as a rising tide to lift all boats. Instead, it was like a wave that some successfully rode, and others did not. Workers separated into economic winners and losers, with far more of the latter. Today, Gen Xers are middle aged, and one has become the richest person in the world. Many others have utterly washed out.
Now Millennials are the young adults in the workforce, doing much of the nonsupervisory production work which has experienced so little gain in compensation compared to the actual value it provides to employers. The “slackers” of Generation X, raised with low expectations, may have been willing to tolerate these circumstances. They may even, like Kevin in 1984’s Repo Man, have seen opportunity in them (see the video clip below). But not so Millennials.
Raised with high expectations, in a structured environment that rewarded following the rules, Millennials have not taken well to the free-for-all job market they have inherited from Boomers and Xers. Many Millennials have gone into massive debt for a college degree, only to discover that the jobs which a college degree opens up don’t pay well enough to justify the cost. Milestones of financial and personal success, such as buying a first home or starting a family, are elusively out of reach for Millennials, given the economic disparities that have grown over the course of the meritocratic, “neoliberal” regime established by Boomers and Xers.
Millennial disappointment with this state of affairs is visible in the many memes that fill social media feeds, comparing the economic circumstances of their generation with those of past generations and highlighting their disadvantages. Talk of “late stage capitalism” and enthusiasm for progressive politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez point to disillusionment with the current economic system. Could Millennials even be willing to embrace – gasp! – socialism? Red zone pundits would certainly like you to think so.
This brings me to my subreddit of the week, /r/antiwork. This subreddit has taken off in 2021, in concert with all the news stories about the “Great Resignation” and the labor shortage.
On /r/antiwork, the workers of reddit unite to commiserate over the awful conditions and abuses suffered by workers today. They post about the absurdities of our system, like costly health insurance that provides almost no benefit, and low salaries for jobs with high education requirement. They proudly tell stories about how they quit their last position, and encourage and praise union efforts.
Do reddittors really think we can reach a state where no one needs to work? Or is this subreddit simply a forum for venting about the miseries of living on the flattened curve of low compensation employment, where so many are stuck today?
I think that what this subreddit is really bringing to light is the pent-up demand for significant structural economic reform. A new generation with new priorities is in the workforce, and a new regime is required to meet their needs for an economy that provides fair rewards for work, and fosters financial security and not merely the opportunity for personal achievement.
Unfortunately, the only policy the U.S. government can come up with is to borrow and spend to keep the economy hot. While that might relieve the pain for some in the short term, it’s doubtful it will change all those economic indicators for the better in the long term, or quiet the dissenting voices of /r/antiwork. For that, major economic reforms would be needed, to transfer the value of labor back to the workers themselves. Maybe then they won’t mind coming to work so much.
Young Gen Xers bullshitting about work in the mid-1980s.
You might look at that title – “An Emerging Values Consensus” – and think, are you kidding?? The Culture Wars and the partisan divide between liberals and conservatives (or the blue zone and the red zone) have been a fixture in our society for decades now. I’ve already written a series of blog posts on the topic, in which I concluded that we were experiencing a “Red-Blue” identity crisis as a society. Which way will we break? Or could we even break into two – split into two societies altogether, possibly violently? There is serious discussion of impending civil war out there.
You’ve probably seen the above map before. It’s from the 2000 Presidential election, and shows the counties that voted for Bush in red and the counties that voted for Gore in blue. It’s around this time that the red zone-blue zone idea came about – the idea that there were two different “values camps” with competing visions of what America should be. Baby Boomers were in mid-life then, and their values-orientation dominated American culture. Their passion and moral zeal is what made the divide between the two camps so deep and so unbridgeable, damaging our political system to the point that many now wonder if it can be repaired. Just think of the events of January 6th this year to understand what I mean.
Back around that time, on an old fashioned web site that I built, I attempted to list out the differences between these two values camps. The list is a bit over-generalized, a bit stereotyped; I can’t deny it. I’m sure many people believe a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. But to some extent these differences do define the partisan divide, and the thing is, as the partisanship has just worsened and worsened, it’s gotten to the point that it doesn’t really matter what your particular “nuanced” belief system is. The political struggle has become existential, and you have to pick a side and stick with it.
Or not, I suppose. You could just not belong to either side. I have a feeling that many of my generation, Generation X, are in that particular “values camp.” It’s the camp of people who mind their own business and just want to be left alone. As the map below show, if non-voters counted in the electoral college (I know, that makes no sense) then “Nobody” would have been elected President in 2016.
This isn’t to say that non-voters lack values or moral beliefs, just that they might be having trouble finding a political party to fit into. As I already suggested, most people probably take their beliefs a little from the red side, a little from the blue side. It’s even possible to show that the country isn’t so starkly divided geographically as the “red zone-blue zone” maps suggest, by measuring both Republican and Democratic votes per county and constructing a “purple” spectrum map like the one below.
Red v. Blue spectrum version from the 2016 Presidential election.
All I’m trying to say here is that the neat division of values into two columns doesn’t necessarily reflect how people think. And now that Boomers are aging out of mid-life, being replaced by Generation X, moral righteousness as a guiding principal of politics is losing its shine. As I already blogged, Boomer moralism has rendered politics dysfunctional. Younger generations yearn for a practical approach to politics, one that can solve the many thorny problems facing our society. It is perhaps unfortunate, then, that the current mid-life generation, Generation X, which is known for pragmatism, also eschews politics.
I’m just rehashing what I’ve already written about before, so back to the title of this post and the idea of a values consensus. Assuming America is not going to split into two societies, we’re eventually going to settle for some version of “a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B” that works for the majority of us. This will grow more and more apparent as the morally righteous Boomers, who pretty much can’t ever have their minds changed, age out of public life. Those who disagree with these values, who reasonably can claim that there is no “consensus” since they disagree, will be relegated to the sidelines of public life. In fact, you can already see this happening. Isn’t that exactly what hashtag movements, cancel culture, de-platforming are all about? Effectively, if unfairly, enforcing a majoritarian viewpoint?
So what exactly is the consensus that is emerging? I actually tried to predict what it might be way back in 2002 when I first created the red values v. blue values page. Then I tried again and again around the time of the 2016 election. How exactly am I doing this? Well, my admittedly non-scientific approach is simply to monitor discourse on major platforms on the Internet to see what’s going on. I check the reddit hivemind, since I really do think that is the premier site where Millennials are forging a consensus using the tools of social media.
Now maybe this puts me in a bit of blue zone bubble, since all the red zoners are moving to alternate sites like Gab and Parler (so I’ve heard). But doesn’t the fact that red zoners are shifting to less mainstream platforms tell you which way the consensus is going? Honestly, I think there are only two areas where the red zone’s view still has traction, and that is in the two most contentious points of the Culture Wars – gun control and abortion rights.
So here’s where I think we end up:
Pro-gun rights
Pro-marijuana legalization
Equal rights for LGBTQ
“Counter-culture” mainstreamed (everyone has a tattoo these days)
Pornography accepted
Continued restrictions on abortion, though it will never be fully banned
Justice and police reform
Reform to improve the lot of lower economic classes, even if it’s “socialism”
Pro-environmentalism policies to deal with climate change
A path to citizenship for “dreamers,” but immigration otherwise limited
Acceptance of a multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious society, to the chagrin of White Christian Nationalists
So now that this Culture Wars crap is out of the way, can we end the filibuster already and get some Universal Healthcare?
Boomer Moralism and Today’s Dysfunctional Politics
I’ve read somewhere, more than once, that the Baby Boomers are the worst generation of political leaders in U.S. history. They are presiding over an era of extreme political partisanship and government paralysis. What I mean by “presiding” is that they are the majority of top political leaders, and that it is their generational peer personality that is primarily responsible for the combative, partisan nature of politics today. As I reviewed earlier, some Boomers acknowledge this, and that it’s even worse than you think. Basically, with Boomers in charge, nothing will ever get done, and government is doomed to be an ever-worsening shitshow.
At the heart of the problem is the moralistic character of the Boomer generation. This character was evident in their youth, which was famous for campus unrest and protests against the government policies of older generations. When Boomers aged into mid-life and entered politics themselves, starting in the 1980s, they brought their righteous indignation with them. Politics became more about confrontation over moral principles, and less about actually instituting policy.
This tracked with the overall evolution of the social order, which was steering away from the outer world and collective action, and toward the inner world and individual empowerment. It was what Strauss & Howe call the Unraveling Era, when the demand for social order reaches a nadir. But now that we are in the Crisis Era, and the demand for social order is rising, the confrontational, partisan mode of politics is proving to be severely detrimental. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, for God’s sake!
Which brings me to this remarkable essay by Julius Krein, called “The Three Fusions.” I bring it up because the author pinpoints moralism and ideology-driven politics as the root of this era’s failures of government. I’ll briefly review the essay, without going into what he means by his three fusions, or the details of how he breaks down the ideologies of the Left and the Right.
In “The Three Fusions,” Julius Krein argues that moralism in politics has undermined the democratic nation-state, which is why neither political faction (Left or Right) has been successful at implementing its particular political agenda. The problem is neither faction really wants the collective to be empowered, since each sees virtue as residing in the individual, not the collective. Both the Left and the Right end up trying to advance their goals by putting responsibility on individual morality alone. Each side’s vision of an ideal society can only be achieved by having all individuals freely internalize its moral principles, since neither side will allow for the empowerment of collective will through state action. Hence the ridiculousness of virtue-signalling memes buzzing through our social media feeds, as though given enough time they will cause a majority of the populace to internalize the correct moral viewpoint. But that doesn’t happen; each side’s social media bubble is impervious to the memes of the other. Representative democracy can’t work with two factions in total opposition and government consequently gridlocked by partisanship. So we’re stuck without any means to empower the state to serve the national interest.
Krein is a Millennial, born in 1986. His generation is of the opposite archetype of the Boomers, so it’s no suprise that his instinct is to turn away from moral correctness as the legitimating principle of government. He clearly yearns for a more practical, functioning mode; one that acknowledges differences in belief about morality while still allowing for collective decision-making. I think many in his generation do, as their political activism shows.
But how to get past the dysfunctional Boomer paradigm? And to be fair, it’s not just the Boomer generation that bears a responsibility for excessive moralism. Younger generations are playing along, even Millennials – just scroll through Twitter to see what I mean. They are following the lead of their visionary elders, which might work, if only there were a more clearly dominant vision.
Eventually, as the generations age, moralism will fade away on its own accord. But by then the damage done may be irreparable. There’s certainly no resurrecting all the people who have died from Covid-19. And it might be too late to restore trust in democracy, or to revert the trend of ever-widening inequality. We’ll end up in a 21st century dystopia.
I honestly think that getting to a dominant vision is probably the only way to a resolution of this problem. It allows the Boomers to fulfill their archetypal role of visionary, and the younger generations their roles as well. It won’t matter that the dominant ideology has logical contradictions. Obviously, not everyone is going to like it. But it’s either that or twisting in the wind and enduring the pain of a broken system. Lord knows we’ve endured enough pain as it is.
.svg)