New Republic: The Malicious Politics of Millennial-Bashing

[AN63093]

I voted "FA" just because I agree with the article's premise, insofar that the GOP tends to appeal most strongly to a certain demographic, and pushing that appeal with attacks from a generational angle is a necessary part of that.  So it's true; not necessarily a revolutionary point, but true nonetheless.

That being said, and yes, this is admittedly a tangent, but millennials, quite frankly, deserve to be bashed.  And this is coming from someone who is a millennial (albeit, a much older one.. I'm in that gray area between Gen X and Millennial, but technically a millennial).

Millennials are absolutely feckless and are apparently content to basically let the Boomers raid the cupboards, leaving them completely dry, while they sit there and mutter... "meh."  Examples include:

-Occupy Wall Street; you know, that absolute sham of a protest that lasted about as long as it took for it to get cold outside, and then, "screw this."  Not exactly the storming the bastille, that. Oh, but did I never hear the end about how revolutionary it was, and how everything was going to change.  Mm-hmm.

-The Women's March, where charitably speaking, 1 out of 100 people were serious about marching, the other 99, dragged there by their peer group so they could check-in on FB and instagram photos of participating. (See everybody!  I was there!!)  The best photos were collages that included at least one photo of their food, LOL.

-Apparently content to let policies continue that drive up housing costs, making many large cities practically uninhabitable for middle-class millennials, unless you choose to live in tenement conditions.  Many of these policies benefiting primarily Boomers, which I discuss in this thread here.   I can picture politicians such as Pelosi now, sitting in her palatial SF estate, cackling at the millennial serfs as they toil around her, living 2, 3, 4 people to a room in buildings violating code that need to be condemned.  The serfs themselves, happy as a clam, content to just carry on with a "yes, m'lord."

Meanwhile, the student loan bubble continues to expand (the new mortgage for millennials-- many of these people will not own an actual home before age 40, that is, if they ever do), while we continue to flush money into Medicare, because god forbid we actually use any of those funds for something other than extending a Boomer's life by 3 months, and all the while... the typical millennials' response to any of these being a combination of a shrug of the shoulders, and oh yes... liking someone on FB who changed their profile picture to match the social-issue du jour.  But hey!  I stand in solidarity with [insert aggrieved group that I'm pretending to care about].  This all happening while the Boomer sneaks out of the house like the Grinch, sack slung across his shoulder, the words "wealth of the United States" printed on the side.  Right before he heads off to do some wind-surfing ("Hey look guys, I'm still cool!  Age is just a number!")

Hey though, it's all good.  At least I got bottomless mimosas at brunch.  *takes photo of food and checks-in on FB with self-satisfied grin.*


God I hate being part of this generation.  It deserves everything coming to it.

[AN63093]

The time will come when Millenials will have had enough, and we will become as engaged as Boomers are today, or so I hope. Nevertheless, casting such a broad net is a disservice to everyone, including yourself.

I do so dearly hope you are right.  I am generalizing of course, but for every one of you, I suspect there are hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of the type I describe.  I'm freely willing to admit that my perspective may be limited, since my peer group seems particularly heavy with these types.  Then again, if you are an educated professional in a major metro area, it is practically impossible to avoid these ghastly sorts.

[AN63093]

God I hate being part of this generation.  It deserves everything coming to it.

I don't know, I mean I get what you're saying, but I don't view things like lower turnout among Millennials as special in any way. Young people always have lower turnout that reliably increases with age. It's been this way for a long, long time. That being said, at least we are doing better than generation x did.

Yes Virginia, that is the standard counter-argument to my point, and it's not necessarily a silly one.  It may end up being correct (time will tell, of course).  However, you are simplifying my point and missing the nuance- it's not just a question of turnout.  You are making an assumption that millennials will behave in similar patterns to older generations, a pretty critical assumption, in my opinion, when there has been a fundamental change in our society (e.g., the internet, social media, and so on).

I used to respond to that in a way I imagine you are right now (i.e., rolling of the eyes), but I'm not so sure anymore.  I think there has been a fundamental change in the way people are socialized in their youth, the way people interact, the way people interface with politics, and so on.  I think it's possible that as a result, this generation will have either a) higher levels of apathy; and/or b) and this one is more dangerous, higher levels of being distracted by non-issues, trivial minutia, and stupid little stuff like that (sort of a "wedge issues" on steroids), and these types of issues will be among fault lines that help drive hyper-polarization.  I think that society is becoming increasingly polarized, instead of less; it will be in part due to this, and it will also increase racial stratification.  Techno Timmy had a rebuttal of this; he posted an interesting paper in another thread (can't remember where) that suggested polarization wasn't increased by social media use.  That might be true, but even so, it still doesn't necessarily answer my greater point.

Have you read that new Atlantic article "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"  I can't remember if it was posted on this forum, or I'm thinking of a different forum, but it's an interesting article.  Its main conclusion is that post-millennials are being socialized in a completely different way- their youth do the following things about half as often as earlier generations: date, drive (or get their license), or even just get out of the house and hang out with friends.  Most youth literally just sit in their house on the phone all day.  Snapchatting has essentially replaced going to the mall with friends.

Now whether that's good or bad in the grander scheme of things, who knows.  But I do think those tendencies are the type that will exaggerate the trends I am describing.  It will be less prominent in millennials, since many millennials aren't young enough to have grown up in this way, particularly some of the older ones like myself (when I graduated college, the iPhone hadn't come out yet, flip phones were still king, and Facebook was a novelty site primarily used for posting drunk pics of yourself hitting the beer funnel).  But I do think some of those trends are present in millennials nonetheless, and they are precipitating a different attitude and approach people have towards politics, that may manifest itself in a way that turnout cannot solely explain.

[AN63093]

I don't think it's just a class thing, or "having the views of a 70 year old," MasterJedi.  I know a lot of you guys don't like Reaganfan and think he's a rube, but I can relate to what's he saying and he has a point.

I grew up in an upper middle to upper class household in Manhattan; I assume a setting worlds apart from his (based on how you describe it), but it wasn't necessarily all that different in terms of technology.  Some of my friends didn't have computers until the late 90s, sometimes right up into the early 00s.  A lot of it would depend on how tech-savvy (and interested in this stuff) your parents were.  My dad was a bit of a computer hobbyist, so we always had a computer in the house, even from before I was born, an old IBM machine complete with 5 1/4 floppy drives.

But the computer was very much a work machine and for my dad's programming hobby and it wasn't something I messed around with much, and certainly wasn't part of the culture.  We had an NES for that.  Yeah at school we had a bunch of Apple IIe computers, but they were practically a novelty thing at the time and computers in the house were sporadic.  I had some friends whose parents hung on to the typewriter for as long as they possibly could.

I'm older than Reaganfan, in the earliest set of years considered millenials, so I'm in a bit of a gray area where I probably have more in common with Gen X in many ways.  Some of the stuff he's talking about (prevalence of texting, facebook, twitter, etc).. I was already through most of college by the time that stuff took hold.  I was in law school when smartphones started to become popular, and at that time, it was still all about the Blackberry.  So I understand my perspective is a little bit different, but then again, he's old enough to still remember the 90s and have a childhood pre-internet, pre-kids having cell phones, etc., which I think is the key.

By the mid 90s, we had several computers connected on a LAN and internet as well (dial-up, of course), but this was atypical and very much not mainstream.  Tooling around on this stuff all day when your friends wanted you to come hang out at the arcade in the movie theater would cause you to be labeled a shut-in, geeky loser.  Quite a far cry from today, when the average teen basically sits at home all day, preferring to snapchat on their phone over hang out with their friends in person (this isn't just my hot take, there are statistics to back this up- check out The Atlantic article I posted on the last page for more about this, it's an interesting read).  These trends were already starting to become apparent among the younger millennials, and I don't think Reaganfan being old enough to spot them has much to do with his personal upbringing.

So when he says there is quite the cleavage point among millennial groupings, and people on one end may feel as if they grew up in a different world... well, I get it.  It's not just a class thing MJ, and quite honestly, it's a little pejorative of you in suggesting that.