Weird. By a strange coincidence just this morning I was thinking that all of the non-stop pressure to "change the world" that is heaped on whoever is young at the moment produces anxiety immediately and frustration and/or rage when nothing much changes. Does that contribute to the poisonous political environment?
The other thing is that all the Millennial hatred for the Boomers seems ironic given that the Boomers are the Woodstock generation. Was there anything more revolutionary given the context of the times than the hippies? By contrast the changes from Millennials and Gen Z are far less consequential.
our general discourse about generations could be so 1000x more sensible if we rediscovered the distinction between "generation" and "age."
i long for the days of discourse about "teens," "twenty-somethings," "thirty-somethings," etc. i don't really understand why so many ~culture writers~ dropped those in favor of "Zoomer," "Millennial," "Gen Xer," "Boomer," etc. well, I mean, I do; the latter terms have a powerful sense of branding about them. but still, it's stupid and leads us in analytical circles such as you describe.
Regarding Gen X and generational differences: FB served up a discussion to me a while back where a Millennial writer was arguing that Gen X shouldn't get a pass, that they were just as guilty of the Boomers of squandering their opportunity to change the world. Somebody, presumably an X-er, responded with "Awwww, that's so cute that they think that we give a fuck what they think". And that was the end of that.
Most of us are imitating our parents even when we think we are in open rebellion against them. Pretty much everyone post WWII has been reenacting the late 60s hippie "don't trust anyone over 30" youth radicalism and failings in the exact same ways. Every subsequent radical youth movement has merely been variations on that theme. It's a little like that often repeated Marx quote "First as tragedy, then as farce." We still live on the world the Boomers made, are still playing by their rules and understand things in their terms whether we admit it or not.
Everything iny experience of the current left is that they have no actionable plans to run society differently, and just have radical slogans and obnoxious, pious posturing instead. Everyone just humors them long enough to get them to shut up and then just tries to quietly get on with their lives, correctly understanding, I think, that eventually it will all burn itself out and go away.
The focus on the saving power of a given generation/minority has also smacked of "no, it's the people who are wrong" to me.
Is your political movement failing? Well, obviously it's because the country has the wrong sort of people. It's definitely not because you failed to explain your ideas, or failed to account for the needs of diverse stakeholders, or failed to strategize and compromise to gain allies, or just flat-out ran a bad campaign--no, no! It's because *those people* suck. They're selfish assholes. But good news! They'll all be dead soon, or outbred by Hispanics, or whatever.
There's an unpleasant eliminationist flavor to it. While I think it's likely a universal human desire to want your (perceived) political rivals to simply go away, shit like "the boomers will be dead soon and then we'll make utopia" is not the sort of sentiment that ought to be tolerated in polite company.
As a GenXer (aka the forgotten generation—who grew up hearing about Boomers, Boomers, Boomers, until the constant media drumbeat changed to Millennials, Millennials, Millennials, which only faded once everyone agreed that they were hopelessly out of style with their side-parts and their skinny jeans: join the club of aging and therefore irrelevant and worthless women, ladies!) of course I had to click — but it turns out not to be about us at all, really! ;)
Even so, great point. Yes, no generation was ever going to save us, and especially the Zoomers aren’t coming to save us. Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies.
They appear to be, at once, both the most acutely unhappy and the most passive generation. It may be a stereotype that describes only a few (as the hippies or the WTO disrupters or the Occupyers described only a few) but Zoomers have a tendency to embrace the safetyism of their youth, to wait to be told when and where to go, to appeal to authority to save them, to want to be saved from discomfort or “being triggered.” You will see them spurred to action, not as previous generations who hoped to improve the lot of the masses, but when they have a complaint to lodge on their own behalf.
Or maybe I’ve just become a very uncharitable old lady, made more so by the fact that her generation never had its moment in the media sun.
Coming next week: a diatribe on why you should all get off my lawn.
One of the most impactful qualities that makes for a great parent and a shitty revolutionary: stability. When people inevitably give in to the desire to have a family (a lives-in-the-same-house, multigenerational family, not a framily of comrades) they start to see the merits of middle class life, even lower middle class.
The obnoxious Gen X'ers I went to school with were not very political, but when they were activists they were engaged in hard left shenanigans that just annoyed everyone else. They were somewhat arrogant, typically pretentious, self-satisfied, and had a tendency to scream at and condemn anyone who disagreed. People didn't so much disagree with them as shrug and depart in disgust. They turned people off by their very existence. That was why they lost.
"Because the rhetoric and rage, the street protests, the idealism, the claims that this time, it’s for real - we’ve seen it all before."
We have, and each time, I would argue that it moves us in a direction. "Victories" like the one in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act are exceedingly rare. But each generation's movement can push things in a direction, a form of generational incrementalism. In GenX we had political correctness. It didn't revolutionize the world, but it gained a foothold. Millennials and Zoomers have grown the ideas that developed roots in the late 80s / early 90s, and they are now blooming in whatever it is we are calling wokeness. I'm not sure any of this is possible without Gen X's "revolutionary" period.
Gen Xer here. I agree with the fundamentals of the piece (that "radical" youth are trotted out by the radical media every few radical years to explain how they are going to radically change radicalism, not like those weak-willed faux-radicals from a few years ago who ended up being full of shit even after the New Yorker told them how to be radical, can you believe it?)
I will say, though, that while I agree that the WTO protests were bigger, better organized, and more serious than a lot of what came after, I never actually saw much political consciousness in my generation. Wesleyan might have been an exception. Otherwise we were pretty much stoned grunge folks, intentionally apathetic. Actually we were mostly perfectly normal human beings NOT being stoned or listening to grunge and just trying to get jobs and careers and spouses and babies, but why talk about vast majorities? The important stuff was on magazine covers.
That said, and while I agree that there's usually a lot of sound and fury in the analysis of the next generation that looks suspiciously similar to the sound and fury in the analysis of the previous generation, there DOES seem to be a lot more potency in the wokeness movement than there ever was in the PC movement of my generation. Just personally, we relentlessly made fun of the PC crowd at the time it was happening, and there was no retribution; there couldn't have been, the movement wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for that. Is that true for the Woke? What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Agree, though, that the socialist, climate change, gun control, foreign policy change (???), etc. movements are utterly dead in the water, and mostly never really got going. Maybe not climate change, actually. That's got real life to it, just not in the radical "everyone but me will have to do with less electricity and fuel" crowd. But the incrementalism crowd seems to be successful.
Fantastic write up Freddie. I think there's a dirty little secret your piece is picking at: there's no great revolution brewing because life is pretty damn good in America*. The millennials weren't financially fucked, and no modern generation growing up in the most prosperous country in world history is. Wealth inequality isn't inherently evil or necessarily a bad thing at all if the majority of the population is relatively wealthy and healthy and moving up the ladder. This is a major reason why asian and latino voters aren't as reliably left leaning as dems had hoped-- why vote for dramatic change when the status quo helped you find a better job and buy a bigger house. Racism hasn't magically disappeared of course, but the US has made incredible progress on civil rights and today it is effectively career and social suicide to espouse racist or homophobic beliefs. So the fact that each generation grows out of their radical revolutionary phase doesn't mean they're a failed generation, but rather that they were lucky enough to be born during a time when revolution wasn't necessary.
Of course the youth are coming to save us, as far as we will ever be saved. As it was, ever shall it be. There will always be young people to take a stab at saving society, young people to insist on change, and to keep alive the possibility of things being different. And there will always be middle aged people to do the work of holding society together and raising the next crop of youthful visionaries, and the old to provide the wisdom and memory and needed judgmental grumbling. What’s going on now, or in 1990 or in 1968 doesn’t seem to be much different than it was during any generational high point, except that we are in a strange moment where many grown adults seem to have abdicated their own role in this pageant to worship and idolize the young and we’ve completely given into bashing and denigrating the older generation, which people somehow see as an enlightened way to behave, but I tend to see as a convenient excuse to just hate on old people. Do Boomers suck? Sure, but not uniquely. Surely not more than Gen X, the Bezos generation, or millenials, the Zuckerberg generation. The best we can do is take advantage of the endlessly renewing cohort of 20-something’s who still have energy and hope, temper it with the reality of the adult grind of holding it together and enacting g the change demanded, and to not forget that the old people really do know a thing or two that we might not, and then just cross our fingers we live in normally turbulent times and not the worst of times.
I hate claims that <insert your preferred group here> will save us. It's a gross abdication of responsibility. Let's fucking save ourselves.
Weird. By a strange coincidence just this morning I was thinking that all of the non-stop pressure to "change the world" that is heaped on whoever is young at the moment produces anxiety immediately and frustration and/or rage when nothing much changes. Does that contribute to the poisonous political environment?
The other thing is that all the Millennial hatred for the Boomers seems ironic given that the Boomers are the Woodstock generation. Was there anything more revolutionary given the context of the times than the hippies? By contrast the changes from Millennials and Gen Z are far less consequential.
I am looking forward to May 1968 round 2, brought to you by TikTok. It won't amount to anything but the discourse will be fierce.
our general discourse about generations could be so 1000x more sensible if we rediscovered the distinction between "generation" and "age."
i long for the days of discourse about "teens," "twenty-somethings," "thirty-somethings," etc. i don't really understand why so many ~culture writers~ dropped those in favor of "Zoomer," "Millennial," "Gen Xer," "Boomer," etc. well, I mean, I do; the latter terms have a powerful sense of branding about them. but still, it's stupid and leads us in analytical circles such as you describe.
Regarding Gen X and generational differences: FB served up a discussion to me a while back where a Millennial writer was arguing that Gen X shouldn't get a pass, that they were just as guilty of the Boomers of squandering their opportunity to change the world. Somebody, presumably an X-er, responded with "Awwww, that's so cute that they think that we give a fuck what they think". And that was the end of that.
Most of us are imitating our parents even when we think we are in open rebellion against them. Pretty much everyone post WWII has been reenacting the late 60s hippie "don't trust anyone over 30" youth radicalism and failings in the exact same ways. Every subsequent radical youth movement has merely been variations on that theme. It's a little like that often repeated Marx quote "First as tragedy, then as farce." We still live on the world the Boomers made, are still playing by their rules and understand things in their terms whether we admit it or not.
Everything iny experience of the current left is that they have no actionable plans to run society differently, and just have radical slogans and obnoxious, pious posturing instead. Everyone just humors them long enough to get them to shut up and then just tries to quietly get on with their lives, correctly understanding, I think, that eventually it will all burn itself out and go away.
The focus on the saving power of a given generation/minority has also smacked of "no, it's the people who are wrong" to me.
Is your political movement failing? Well, obviously it's because the country has the wrong sort of people. It's definitely not because you failed to explain your ideas, or failed to account for the needs of diverse stakeholders, or failed to strategize and compromise to gain allies, or just flat-out ran a bad campaign--no, no! It's because *those people* suck. They're selfish assholes. But good news! They'll all be dead soon, or outbred by Hispanics, or whatever.
There's an unpleasant eliminationist flavor to it. While I think it's likely a universal human desire to want your (perceived) political rivals to simply go away, shit like "the boomers will be dead soon and then we'll make utopia" is not the sort of sentiment that ought to be tolerated in polite company.
As a GenXer (aka the forgotten generation—who grew up hearing about Boomers, Boomers, Boomers, until the constant media drumbeat changed to Millennials, Millennials, Millennials, which only faded once everyone agreed that they were hopelessly out of style with their side-parts and their skinny jeans: join the club of aging and therefore irrelevant and worthless women, ladies!) of course I had to click — but it turns out not to be about us at all, really! ;)
Even so, great point. Yes, no generation was ever going to save us, and especially the Zoomers aren’t coming to save us. Not only are the Zoomers not coming to save us — the Zoomers barely leave their homes to mingle among themselves, to learn to drive, to sneak off to get drunk or high, to have sex — all the things that earlier generations did for fun, before fizzling out into middle age. We have kept these kids so sheltered and infantilized that we send them off to college now like so many 10-year-olds. They conduct very busy social lives on their phones, punctuated with occasional get-togethers where they all announce how “awkward” they are. A bunch of middle schoolers in adult bodies.
They appear to be, at once, both the most acutely unhappy and the most passive generation. It may be a stereotype that describes only a few (as the hippies or the WTO disrupters or the Occupyers described only a few) but Zoomers have a tendency to embrace the safetyism of their youth, to wait to be told when and where to go, to appeal to authority to save them, to want to be saved from discomfort or “being triggered.” You will see them spurred to action, not as previous generations who hoped to improve the lot of the masses, but when they have a complaint to lodge on their own behalf.
Or maybe I’ve just become a very uncharitable old lady, made more so by the fact that her generation never had its moment in the media sun.
Coming next week: a diatribe on why you should all get off my lawn.
One of the most impactful qualities that makes for a great parent and a shitty revolutionary: stability. When people inevitably give in to the desire to have a family (a lives-in-the-same-house, multigenerational family, not a framily of comrades) they start to see the merits of middle class life, even lower middle class.
The obnoxious Gen X'ers I went to school with were not very political, but when they were activists they were engaged in hard left shenanigans that just annoyed everyone else. They were somewhat arrogant, typically pretentious, self-satisfied, and had a tendency to scream at and condemn anyone who disagreed. People didn't so much disagree with them as shrug and depart in disgust. They turned people off by their very existence. That was why they lost.
"Because the rhetoric and rage, the street protests, the idealism, the claims that this time, it’s for real - we’ve seen it all before."
We have, and each time, I would argue that it moves us in a direction. "Victories" like the one in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act are exceedingly rare. But each generation's movement can push things in a direction, a form of generational incrementalism. In GenX we had political correctness. It didn't revolutionize the world, but it gained a foothold. Millennials and Zoomers have grown the ideas that developed roots in the late 80s / early 90s, and they are now blooming in whatever it is we are calling wokeness. I'm not sure any of this is possible without Gen X's "revolutionary" period.
Gen Xer here. I agree with the fundamentals of the piece (that "radical" youth are trotted out by the radical media every few radical years to explain how they are going to radically change radicalism, not like those weak-willed faux-radicals from a few years ago who ended up being full of shit even after the New Yorker told them how to be radical, can you believe it?)
I will say, though, that while I agree that the WTO protests were bigger, better organized, and more serious than a lot of what came after, I never actually saw much political consciousness in my generation. Wesleyan might have been an exception. Otherwise we were pretty much stoned grunge folks, intentionally apathetic. Actually we were mostly perfectly normal human beings NOT being stoned or listening to grunge and just trying to get jobs and careers and spouses and babies, but why talk about vast majorities? The important stuff was on magazine covers.
That said, and while I agree that there's usually a lot of sound and fury in the analysis of the next generation that looks suspiciously similar to the sound and fury in the analysis of the previous generation, there DOES seem to be a lot more potency in the wokeness movement than there ever was in the PC movement of my generation. Just personally, we relentlessly made fun of the PC crowd at the time it was happening, and there was no retribution; there couldn't have been, the movement wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for that. Is that true for the Woke? What does everyone think of this argument that the Woke revolution has some legs under it (https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over) as compared to Freddie's argument that it's another cycle in leftist impotence (if I'm characterizing you right, Freddie)?
Agree, though, that the socialist, climate change, gun control, foreign policy change (???), etc. movements are utterly dead in the water, and mostly never really got going. Maybe not climate change, actually. That's got real life to it, just not in the radical "everyone but me will have to do with less electricity and fuel" crowd. But the incrementalism crowd seems to be successful.
Fantastic write up Freddie. I think there's a dirty little secret your piece is picking at: there's no great revolution brewing because life is pretty damn good in America*. The millennials weren't financially fucked, and no modern generation growing up in the most prosperous country in world history is. Wealth inequality isn't inherently evil or necessarily a bad thing at all if the majority of the population is relatively wealthy and healthy and moving up the ladder. This is a major reason why asian and latino voters aren't as reliably left leaning as dems had hoped-- why vote for dramatic change when the status quo helped you find a better job and buy a bigger house. Racism hasn't magically disappeared of course, but the US has made incredible progress on civil rights and today it is effectively career and social suicide to espouse racist or homophobic beliefs. So the fact that each generation grows out of their radical revolutionary phase doesn't mean they're a failed generation, but rather that they were lucky enough to be born during a time when revolution wasn't necessary.
*Obviously there are still lots of problems to solve around energy, climate change, housing, etc, but I tend to think our best chance at these is going to be through something like Derek Thompson's proposed "Abundance Agenda" which will be achieved via modern capitalism (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/scarcity-crisis-college-housing-health-care/621221/)
Of course the youth are coming to save us, as far as we will ever be saved. As it was, ever shall it be. There will always be young people to take a stab at saving society, young people to insist on change, and to keep alive the possibility of things being different. And there will always be middle aged people to do the work of holding society together and raising the next crop of youthful visionaries, and the old to provide the wisdom and memory and needed judgmental grumbling. What’s going on now, or in 1990 or in 1968 doesn’t seem to be much different than it was during any generational high point, except that we are in a strange moment where many grown adults seem to have abdicated their own role in this pageant to worship and idolize the young and we’ve completely given into bashing and denigrating the older generation, which people somehow see as an enlightened way to behave, but I tend to see as a convenient excuse to just hate on old people. Do Boomers suck? Sure, but not uniquely. Surely not more than Gen X, the Bezos generation, or millenials, the Zuckerberg generation. The best we can do is take advantage of the endlessly renewing cohort of 20-something’s who still have energy and hope, temper it with the reality of the adult grind of holding it together and enacting g the change demanded, and to not forget that the old people really do know a thing or two that we might not, and then just cross our fingers we live in normally turbulent times and not the worst of times.