I used to talk about this all the time and a bunch of people would say YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN LIBERAL. Suck on this:
It’s well known that America is rife with political division: Red vs. Blue; the coasts vs, the interior; cities vs. rural areas; the 1% percent versus the 99%. Less discussed is the yawning gap that has recently opened between young and old. America today is more politically divided by age than it has been in 40 years, according to a major new survey the Pew Research Center is releasing this afternoon. TIME got an exclusive look at the poll, and in this week’s print issue, now available online to subscribers, I have a story on its findings–specifically about the split that has developed between so-called Millennials, aged 30 and under, and Silent Generation seniors between 65 and 83. Testing a hypothetical matchup between Obama and Mitt Romney, Pew found that Millenials prefer the President by 26 points, while Silents tilt to Romney by 10 points. It might feel intuitive that younger voters will be more liberal. But in the 2000 and 2002 elections, the two groups voted almost identically. It wasn’t until 2006 and 2008 that a broad gap opened up–one that narrowed slightly in 2010, as young voters tacked right, but which is now wider than it was even in ’08.
This is funny too:
What’s happened here? To a large degree, it seems, this split represents two very different reactions to change in American life. Pew found that seniors are unhappy about trends like immigration and diversity, gay and interracial marriage. In one of the survey’s most striking facts, fewer than half of them say the Internet has been a positive development. Few things provoked livelier replies from the many seniors in interviewed in Florida for this story than the impact of technology on American life. “Kids are running amok!” one told me. Millennials, by contrast, barely even register the idea that the Web might do more harm than good: only 11% call it a change for the worse.
I honestly hope that I do die before I say stuff like “kids are running amok”. I’d like to put it in my living well that I be euthanized if I appear to be in danger of making such utterances.
Not trying to start any generational warfare here, I know plenty of seniors who don’t sound like that. I hope I will be one of them someday.
Baud
I’d mock seniors right now, but at the end of the day, they understand the importance of voting.
Linda Featheringill
Very nicely put. :-)
However, regardless of how we oldsters vote, change is harder to cope with as the years go by. People who derived their self worth from outside sources are truly in trouble when society shifts its approval to something else. And, yes, get off of my lawn.
JPL
Get off my lawn!!!!!!!
Steve
We had a mock Presidential election when I was in high school. Reagan got 100% of the vote, Mondale got 0%.
Linda Featheringill
Was it Socrates that gave us the classic rant against the younger generation?
Mnemosyne
In defense of the oldsters, I am acquainted with a very nice 101-year-old lady who’s happily puttering away on her iPad at her rest home looking things up for the other seniors.
Of course, she was always technology-minded (she was one of the first women admitted to the camera operators’ union) and probably was a communist in her younger days, so YMMV.
David Koch
That’s a fascinating and fresh observation.
People who don’t use the intertoobe are more reactionary.
People who do are more liberal.
Montezuma’sAl Gore’s revenge.jl
Because if you get old that way, you already are?
arguingwithsignposts
Should I pull up the quotes about that new-fangled “radio” making the kids stupid? Or the evils of the demon blues?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
As do I, and as, I suspect, did Messrs. Moon and Entwistle.
Litlebritdifrnt2
I’m 51, I was quite merrily a fiscal conservative and a social liberal most of my life and found similar candidates to vote for until I moved to the US. I clung to my conservative roots until “the party left me” so to speak. I think it has less to do with age and more to do with the fact that the Republican party has gone so far off the reservation right now (I mean come on, a fertilized egg is a “person” really?) The fact is that the majority of the country couldn’t give a shit about gay marriage, or abortions, or any other miriad of social issues. The majority of the country cares about the fact that the economy sucks and nothing else.
evinfuilt
@Steve:
I’m pretty sure I remember that, but I also think I would have gotten beaten up if I voted for Mondale (called a sissy at minimum.)
Ahhh, to be a child of the 80s.
Reality Check
Do they say anything about my generation (Gen X) and the Boomers?
Anyway, Millenians are (for the MOST part) spoiled, coddled brats. IOW they’re Baby Boomers but technologically literate and riddled with ADHD. God help us all.
Short Bus Bully
Wasn’t there a book written by Plato that was all about “those damn kids these days…”?
Glad to hear that the younger folks are finally realizing what’s at stake here. I can only hope that this trend continues.
Gin & Tonic
It’s that damned rock-and-roll music.
ErinSiobhan
I think my dad was an oddity in that he got more liberal as he aged. The first time I could vote, dad was PC (right), mom was Liberal (centrist), and I was NDP (left). We sat around, looking at each other, and wondering if it was worth the effort of going to the polling station since we were effectively cancelling each others’ votes. In the end, we all went.
As years went by, we all ended up in the middle, voting Liberal. If he hadn’t died fairly young, dad would probably be voting NDP now – he was reading a lot of Chomsky before he died. So there is hope for the older generation.
Taobhan
DougJ: “I hope I will be one of them someday.”
You will probably be one of them when you’re a senior. I am! I was more conservative as a kid than I am now.
Cris (without an H)
Another school got similar results, the ELECTORAL COLLEGE!
Thank you, tip your waitress
Southern Beale
Well, one of my dearest friends in the world is 64 years old and got laid off for basically being old and costing the co too much and he’s become an even bigger lefty than me. I guess for every rule there’s an exception.
Reality Check
BTW, do remember that Boomers started out as hippies and ended up as yuppies by the ’80s. I don’t think generational political labels are static.
JPL
Paul Ryan’s plans to privatize Social Security and Medicare could change the trend. Even if seniors are not immediately effected by the change monetarily, they know there will be fewer doctors treating medicare patients.
piratedan
i have to admit I was “radicalized” by Watergate at the tender age of 15. Thought the idea of a more progressive 3rd party was a nifty idea but each time someone claimed to raise that banner they turned out to be someone that had all the ethics of a used car salesman…see Nader, Hamsher
Linda Featheringill
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato.
[Aha! I found it!]
Southern Beale
@Taobhan:
Me too! Not so much as when I was young as when I was in my 20s. But that said, I was never so conservative that I’d vote Republican. Never happened. But I was stupid enough to believe wingnut lies about “welfare queens” and other crap. Took getting out into the world to get an education to cure me of that crap.
Chris
@Reality Check:
I fully agree that those fucking kids should get off your lawn and get a haircut.
BGinCHI
Irony: the party the young people are voting for is in favor of having them pay for a system that supports older people but may not be there when they get to that age, versus the party the old people are voting for who are in favor of ending the thing they care about most, but stroke them on the shit they’re wrong about (gay marriage, technology, immigration).
Orwell seems to have undershot all of this.
Reality Check
@Chris:
OTOH I really fucking hate me some Baby Boomers, too, much more than Millennials. The latter may redeem themselves, the Boomers never will. Never.
Steve
@evinfuilt: I think I wanted to vote for Mondale, but nobody wants to be a loser. Peer pressure got me, or maybe I’m giving my 14-year-old self too much credit. The punch line to the story is that Obama made a major campaign appearance at my high school and they loved him. My town has changed!
General Stuck
I take stuff like this as a good thing. Democracies evolve, that is what they do, if they are doing it right. And is why it is the worst form of government, except for all the others/Churchhil. It may be part of broader human evolution, but within our little American hell, there are some pretty profound principles laid out for us to live by. It just takes time and progress that each generation moves the ball forward a little toward a more perfect union. Unless you are a white privileged republican hell bent on stopping anything that doesn’t put you at the top of the heap. Then you start acting crazy and shit, and quit playing altogether, holding your breath in a mass obstinate obstruction to moving forward. That is our dilemma, and the poll results tell me the next generation will be more inclined to read and understand our covenant toward equality of the individual, above all else. We might just make it, if the wingnuts don’t burn it all down first under the age old human flaw of need for power and control. The jury is still out on that.
harlana
My 80+ year old parents have never said that. They probably should have on countless occasions. But then they’re lifelong Democrats, go figure.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So the same generation that was raised on TV, was into that demon rock and roll, doing the hippee sex in the ’60s, spent most of the ’70s stoned while wife swapping at key parties is now screaming how the kids are sexing it up for Satan on the intertubes is destroying American morality.
Got to love an utter lack of self awareness when you see it.
JGabriel
I can’t see the word “amok”, without thinking of Duck Amuck
.
Steve
@Linda Featheringill: I remain skeptical. I’m not certain that this guy is right, but he’s probably closer to the truth. If Plato had really written it, someone would be able to cite chapter and page since it’s not like the collected works of Plato are that immense.
Mark S.
Huh, I always thought conception and fertilization meant the same thing. But I guess it makes a world of difference to the pro-life people.
Southern Beale
Gotta remember, there was a huge distrust of the govt. and institutions back in the 70s … same distrust that led to the “back to the land” homesteading movement. No one wanted to be part of the corruption, there was big disillusionment. No shock that those same folks would grow into senior citizens with a huge distrust of the govt, i.e., your modern Tea Party.
Southern Beale
Question for sci-fi fans from a writer friend working on a project:
Anyone? I got nothing ….
Bill Arnold
@Reality Check:
Why? (Asking seriously.)
Brachiator
I’ll have to track down the survey when I have more time. It sounds very flawed.
And the idea that people tend to become more conservative as they age is probably based on a crabbed idea of conservative vs liberal.
As an aside, news stories about OWS has led my mother to talk more about her fairly radical past, and if anything, she has become more radical with age.
Yawn. And many who were written off as irresponsible and feckless in the Roaring 20s later became “The Greatest Generation” during WW II.
Cain
I was also trending right fiscally, but was still socially liberal until of course the Republicans went nuts.
In general, I’ve found that as I get older (and earn more) that I’ve realized that paying higher taxes just protects me. Most people who are upper middle class don’t realize that whatever you’ve saved up can all go if you or your spouse have some kind of health event that is not covered. You’re screwed. Your investments are screwed if there is no regulation.
I didn’t drag myself out of the mud so that some jackass banker or 1 percenter fucks with my stuff. At the same time, we need to make sure that crony governmentalism (basically putting republicans in charge) are not stealing my tax dollars for stupid projects with no value to society.
It is hard for me to ever vote for a Republican.
Going a little far afield here, but hey I was on a roll. :-) I’m going to say taht I hope I stay progressive when it comes to social changes. I think I’m already getting there. Social changes fascinate me..
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: That’s bullshit, it was our parents that were doing that key party shit.
Tom Q
My recollection is that, back in the 70s, the seeming omnipresence of counter-culture youth made it appear young people were overwhelmingly liberal, but that in fact that demographic voted much the same as the rest of the country. This is the first time in my lifetime (59 years old) where the gap truly seems to matter. I’d say it’s partly that the younger age group is more socially liberal, and partly that it’s far less white.
65-and-over probably represents the last generation that was old enough in the early 60s to truly resent the revolution that the Civil Rights movement created (with all its offshoots — women’s rights, gay rights, etc.). All the generations that followed take alot of that for granted. This is why the GOP is slowly fading — they’re too locked in to pandering to a group that is dying off and can never be replicated.
Steve
@Brachiator: Well, society becomes more liberal, so people can “become more conservative” relative to society just by standing still. People who were in favor of civil rights in 1964 haven’t slowly become segregationists as they grew older… but the civil rights issues we debate today are different from what they debated in 1964.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Tom Q: I agree, I’ll be 62 next week and the gulf between me and my cousins that are 4-5 years older is wide indeed.
Chris
@Tom Q:
But that also means a lot of them buy the “everyone’s all equal now, so why do we need affirmative action and an NAACP and all that” line. After all, racism’s over: you can tell from the way they’re certainly not anti-black, so what’s left to complain about? Etc, etc.
Linnaeus
@Brachiator:
“Greatest Generation” people (like my grandparents) would have been children in the 1920s. The “irresponsible and feckless” who came of age in the 20s would have been the prior generation (sometimes called the Lost Generation).
Tom Hilton
In other words, retirees will vote overwhelmingly for anyone who promises to get the Stevens Tubes off their lawn.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Tom Q: Quite insightful observation, Mr.Q (no relation).
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Linnaeus: Damn, people have no fucking clue do they?
blackfrancis
They Might Be DougJ?
General Stuck
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
You misinterpreted the quotes DougJ gave. The “Silent Generation” was pre baby boomer. They were our parents and the break in generational mores was stark from the Victorian Strictures of theirs that we boomers were rebelling against. Boomers went for Obama in 2008. The silent gen over 65 will again vote for the wingers, and boomers will likely go again for Obama. The only reason boomers and millenials don’t trump the silent gen, is that more of them tend to vote than any other group.
Short Bus Bully
@Linda Featheringill:
WIN.
Children crossing their legs? Do I dare ask if that’s a complaint picked up recently by wingtards?
Taobhan
@Southern Beale: “Me too! Not so much as when I was young as when I was in my 20s.”
Whatever values I had in my 20s came, first, from my very conservative family, and secondly from the very conservative area I grew up in (the Deep South). So, they weren’t really my values – I just inherited them from the people around me. Later, when I got out in the world, those values evolved into those I hold today, built on real-world experiences. I’m light-years from where I started out. Kind of makes it hard to have conversations with most of the people I grew up with. We don’t see eye-to-eye on most issues now.
Litlebritdifrnt2
@Southern Beale: Not human heads but there was a scene in “Labaryth” where scary monsters heads were thrown.
Catsy
What the fucking fuck?
This poll is from 2011, right?
gnomedad
@Tom Q:
And has to get crazier and crazier to keep them happy, it seems.
SW
I ran a muck back in the early seventies. The fucking thing smoked and kicked like a mule. But it never let me down in a pinch. Plus it was Amerikan made. I wonder what happened to that thing?
Nellcote
@Steve:
Access to the vote seems to be the same old same old.
mamayaga
@General Stuck:
Yes, the people who came of age late 50s-early 60s were very different from those who came along a little later. I’m 64, was radical when I was young and am radical now. The raging grannies that you always see protesting along with the youngsters are of that vintage. I don’t know anyone who was involved with civil rights/anti-war/women’s rights movements in the 60s and 70s who later became a wingnut or even a mild conservative. As an earlier commenter said, the 60s activists were never a majority, it just seemed that way. So when things died down during the Reagan years (and we were preoccupied with raising children) it seemed that the Boomers had become Reaganauts. In reality the Boomers who had been lefties still are.
El Cid
__
Unless, of course, you mean it in a positive way — i.e., ‘Yay! The kids are running amok!’ — and not in the literal ‘grab any weapon and in total opposite of character slaughter anyone you find’ type way.
Rosali
The youngsters who say that the Internet has made things worse are probably the ones who get involved in Facebook drama and refresh fb every five minutes to see if anyone liked their status.
Quaker in a Basement
Forget the kids. I’m hoping to live long enough to run amok myself someday.
Mark S.
@Catsy:
I guess we need another remake of the remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
barbara
I believe the oldest Boomers are now 66 at most, so many of the people being described here are not in fact Boomers. I’m 64 and when I graduated from high school, I had the sense that my senior class divided into those that faced the future and those that fell backwards into the conventions and fears of the 50’s.
Keep in mind that there were a lot of non-hippies in the 60’s — in fact, all of the people I knew that were hippies or radicals had been the despised outsiders in high school. Many of these elderly wingnuts were youthful wingnuts in their day. Some of them were busy beating up hippies. And they were just as fearful of change at the age of 18 as they are now.
fleeting expletive
My first vote was for McGovern. I’m supporting and advising my much younger friends in OWS. Rock on, young people!!
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@barbara: Yep, the class of 67 was just as split. . .at least I heard that since I was traveling abroad that senior year!
hrprogressive
Soooo….
Shorter Old People: Wahhhhh change is scary and we don’t wanna forget what the country used to be like when we could remember who our friends and neighbors were. Wahhhhhh.
The old farts of the current population remember time when you could be racist, bigoted, homophobic, sexist, and generally a flaming asshole and it was cool.
Now, a lot of society frowns on that shit.
When we get to be old, I’m not saying I won’t hate something that’s “new”, but at least we’ll probably live in a world where gay men being married elicits a “So?” response as opposed to “OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN AND JEEBUS BAAAHAHHHHGHGHGHHRHHGRETCHABDFSBGHH”
pablo
I’m 64 years old, (sob) I’ve never knowingly voted for a Republican.
What the fuck is wrong with me!!!!
El Cid
They’re also stressed that there are far too many different flavors of soup in the aisles. It used to just be a few.
MikeJ
@SW:
Took me three tries to pass the license test.
Kathy in St. Louis
Whiniest bunch of people ever. The older generation,of which I am a card-carrying member, has some very vocal, very conservative members who just don’t realize that they are part of the luckiest group of people to ever live on this planet. Americans between 65 and 80 have lived in the Golden Age, when there were lots of jobs, a pension on retirement, Social Security that is here for them, Medicare so that they don’t have to sell the home when a spouse gets ill just to pay the medical bills. Yet, what do they do? Whine, join the Tea Party, and, altogether, act like they deserve to never have a worry or care in the world. So many are conservative because to them it means that they can keep the status quo and all their money. I read their posts on political websites and can’t believe that they can’t see the level of selfishness that their posts convey.
As I age, I’m getting more liberal. Just to spite the old bastards of my generation.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@mamayaga: Exactly.
DFH then, DFH now, DFH forever.
PurpleGirl
@jl: Grumpy seniors were grumpy when they were young.
ETA: I’m probably going to be a grumpy senior but I’ll be a liberal grumpy senior.
Woodrowfan
Let’s not forget the Fox News affect. The oldsters watch the constant stream of Obama/liberal hate and the kids don’t.
I’m in my early 50s and have been a liberal Democrat since Humphrey in 68. FDR is still my hero and I suspect he always will be…
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@fleeting expletive:
Hah! Mine was for Shirley Chisholm (CA primary). McGovern was too much of a centrist for me.
piratedan
@Southern Beale: the closest I got is that Futurama episode/movie with the flying brains
Woodrowfan
@Southern Beale:
Dr Who, 10th Doctor. Forget the episode name.
Kathy in St. Louis
@gnomedad:
They may be dying off, but as Patrick Dennis once said, no nearly fast enough.
Lysana
@General Stuck:
My Silent Generation mother has been a Democrat all her life. I’m GenX, a generation you skip in that comment. But we’re used to being ignored. The Boomers controlled the dialogue for so long that by the time we were old enough to say something the Milennials started popping from Boomer bodies and the self-importance turned out to be an inheritable disease. Half-kidding. I do get sick of it, though.
Splitting Image
@Steve:
Thanks for the link. That essay is probably correct that the Socrates quote is not authentic.
This one, however, is absolutely real. In fact, it is probably the real source of the Socrates quote.
Aristophanes, The Clouds 1222-1244.
Kewalo
I’m 68 yr old and so I guess part of the silent generation. My first presidential vote was for Nixon. Even today I find that difficult to stomach. But it was a good lesson, I’ve never voted for another RWer and I never will. But I have to say I’m having a very hard time believing that so many of my cohorts would vote for the insane.
I go to a wonderful Texas blog that posted a picture I hope you will all take a look at. I think it is more prevalent than most people think.
http://juanitajean.com/2011/10/31/just-because-its-halloween/
Beware of old people for we have scooters to run you over, oxygen hoses to tie you up, teeth we can take out and bite you on the butt without even leaning over, canes to whack you with, and you haven’t even considered all the possibilities of what we can do walkers and Beach Boy music. We invented this damn protesting stuff. We’re back and we’re pissed off again.
JesterDel
@Steve: Heh – similar situation, but for me it was Bush I vs Dukakis. Think I was the only one who voted for Dukakis in rural PA that year…
Kathy in St. Louis
@Lysana:
I lunch about 8 times a year with women I went to school with many years ago. We’re all on Social Security. I was surprised when I did a count of the politics of these women. More than 65 percent of them are Democrats who voted for Obama and plan to again. The rest are Fox newsies, Tea Partiers, or just plain dumb and vote the way their husbands say. But 65 percent ain’t bad. It actually made me feel a tiny bit better about my generation.
MikeJ
@Kewalo:
Bullshit.
Roger Moore
@mamayaga:
Especially the anti-war stuff, because the Vietnam War was genuinely unpopular. Just as the OWS people today get a lot of support for their anti-Wall Street rhetoric, even though not all of the things they say are nearly so popular.
CarolDuhart
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’ts the kids who danced to Elvis and Sinatra who are the most reactionary. These kids were the silents. You know, the “Mad Men” generation? That’s who we’re talking about. Too old to enjoy the freedom of the boomers, too young to be civic-minded GI’s, they came to resent their younger peers who got the freedom.
I’ll help you get it easier. Were you raised on tv or on the last of the radio serials? Tv introduced millions to a wider world in the most effective way possible, visualization-people saw. They were part of the radio serials generation. Beneficiaries of drugs first available in the 1950’s they are living longer and healthier than before.
Chuck Butcher
My mother’s mom and dad were about as left as it got in the thirties, she grew up to be pretty much main stream “liberal”. She’s now 84 and more left than ever and I’d guess headed farther that direction.
Me? I was radical as a youngster, I’ve probably moderated some – except by definition in today’s nutty political climate. I am, btw, 58 – a somewhat later Boomer…
Mary G
My mom would have been 88 on Tuesday had she not passed away last year. She was an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and a life-long Republican. Until 2007. She’d been voting Libertarian more and more (being a California state employee under Reagan’s governorship started her souring on the Republicans). In 2007 she announced to me that she was re-registering as a Democrat and planned to support Barack Obama. You could have knocked me over with a feather. We even had a “Hope” yard sign one of the neighbors put up without asking. Not only did she not insist on taking it down, it is carefully stored in the garage for next fall.
Here in formerly deep-red Orange County there was a lot of disapproval and peer pressure from people her age. Being my mother, she told them to stop listening to Limbaugh, turn off Fox, read a newspaper and think for themselves. There was, however, also a lot of “Don’t tell anybody, but I am also unhappy with the Republicans” from her more timid friends. They would never admit it to a pollster, but they are not all in as much of a lockstep as they appear to be.
CarolDuhart
@Lysana: Again we Jonesers are being ignored. We (not the boomers) are the parents of the millenials. People my age started having kids around 1980 or so (no kids here) along with late blooming boomers who had kids later than our parents did. Our generation began to live a lot of the stuff our older siblings did in the sixties for better or worse, and passed along more tolerant attitudes.
A Ghost To Most
@Southern Beale:
Third LOTR movie, siege of Minas Tirith, ogre says “release the prisoners”, and a catupult throws a bunch of heads into the city
Woodrowfan
@CarolDuhart:
I think of us as “Late Boomers’ but I agree with you.
Roger Moore
@Kathy in St. Louis:
I think the attitude is best summed up by Woody Allen’s “90% of life is just showing up.” If you actually believe that and have experienced life that way, then having things go against you is going to suck.
Canuckistani Tom
@Woodrowfan:
Don’t recall that one, who was his companion?
PurpleGirl
@Southern Beale: Does ring ring a bell.
A blog you could try is Making Light, hosted by Teresa and Patrick Neilsen Hayden. They both work in Science Fiction publishing and geek stuff. (Patrick is head of Baen Books, IIRC.) Their commentariat has a lot of Science Fiction readers/movie watchers, etc. Some one there may know. They don’t have an open thread up right now but they do have them a lot.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
They are worth reading, in any case.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gin & Tonic:
Hell with that, it’s the waltz.
RSA
Seriously, old people? I know you were born between 1928 and 1946, but you’ve had 44 years to get used to Loving v. Virginia. Give it up already.
Rihilism
At 45, I am blessedly middle-aged, and therefore despise both the young and old regardless of political affiliation.
However, I look forward to the day when I can act all confused/distracted/doddering/deaf so I can cut in line at the grocery store express checkout without repercussions.
“Whaaaa? Whatsit? The line smarts back tear? I am so sorry to hear about your back, my dear, but it looks like I’m up next. Hang on, hang on, this’ll just take a second, and then we can talk more about your smarting back…
No, the price was $3.50/lb. I think you need to do a price check… Oh, it is $3.55/lb. Well, can you ask that nice young man to put it back for me? I mean, I love the stuff, but not at those prices…
Paper or plastic, paaapeeer,…, or plastic? Oops, I forgot I had my reusable bags with me. Silly goose!…
Now, where oh where is my checkbook.”….
fuzz
This is completely anecdotal, but I remember my Boomer father saying that the Silents were different even during the 60s. My dad was born in 44, he grew up listening to rock and experiencing the whole counter culture movement and also Vietnam and all the other issues that went along with that time period. His brother, born in 1937, was always different. They listened to different music and might as well have grown up in completely different eras despite just a 7 year age gap (Examples include drug use, growing up in the early 50s only the biggest bad asses did drugs, by the 60s lots of people did).
It’s different than today, I’m 26 and feel like I’ve more or less grown up in the same environment as a 19 year old (or for that matter a 30something), for the boomer/silents that wasn’t true.
PurpleGirl
@Mark S.: Oh no, please. When the movie first came out I was a high school senior and had a fight with fellow student. He was staunchly against the movie, I mean he thought the interracial thing was just against nature. I told him there was very little tension for me in the relationship — the couple were roughly of the same educational and social class, so where was the problem? Yeah, her parents (her father) went crazy over it, but again I came back to their social/economic status. I thought the movie was somewhat ridiculous. (Yeah, I was the bleeding heart, liberal, pinko commie in my family.) (And damn proud of it!)
I just found that movie so contrived.
SiubhanDuinne
@General Stuck:
It’s nice to be an outlier. I’ll be several months into being 70 when the 2012 elections take place, and I will proudly and enthusiastically vote — again! — for Obama.
PurpleGirl
@barbara: Yes, Yes, Yes.
I’m a middle boomer born in 1951. First entered the labor market in 1973, right after a recession, and kept paying in lower salaries. Also from a working class background and the first child to finish college in my family. (And I’m the youngest of three.) The Boomers were not and are not monolithic except in the numbers. Their beliefs were all over the place.
Tom Q
@fuzz: I’ve always thought of it as pre- and post-Elvis. The soundtrack of people’s lives radically changed in the mid-50s, and plenty of people simply refused to accept that (my father still acts as if Benny Goodman’s coming back some day). Music has obviously mutated plenty since, but there’s a continuum from ’56 or so on; the stuff from before seems born of a different culture.
SiubhanDuinne
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
Shirley Chisholm, yay!
Judas Escargot
@barbara:
Funny thing: I graduated HS in 1985, and had the exact same sense.
fuzz
@Tom Q:
Exactly, my dad and his brother were right on that line, and it only got worse from there, because beyond music the 60s affected people born in 44 way different than someone who graduated from high school in 55.
Example, both were in the army. My dad spent a year in Thua Thein, my uncle has nothing but positive memories and sees the army in a totally different way having spent a few inter war years in Texas.
CarolDuhart
@Tom Q: Not just music. Clothes. Before Elvis, everything seems so formal, even in situations where more casual would seem more appropriate. Even in the mailroom you had to wear at least a tie. and I recall dressing up to go downtown in the middle sixties. My the end of the decade, when I went to high school, people wore blue jeans just about everywhere except to church, and even the church gave in eventually. Late fifties baby, remember beige, turquoise, and mostly brown. Early seventies, I wore multicolored paisley, and everywhere was neon.
Julia Grey
Mine too. Canvassed for Gene McCarthy before I could vote, an eye-opening experience in retail politics. Never touched the pitch of Republicanism, although my husband was one when we married. Voted for Nixon and Reagan!!! We’ve been married 33 years and of course I rescued him from perdition. He’s a good Dem today.
My 80+ parents are both Dems, although my father probably wavered at various points in his life. He’s a retired colonel in the Army reserve and did some time in Vietnam, and his mother’s family was wont to refer to FDR in the early 30s as “THAT MAN in the White House.” *
That said, he recently contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, so if he DID sin in the past, he’s making up for it now.
_______________
* His mother herself, however, became a union gal after the family banking fortune was depleted after The Crash, she got a divorce, and suddenly she was forced to go to WORK as a linotypist!
She once described to me the eye-opening experience of walking back into her apartment the first day after her staff was let go and for a moment being furious that everything was just as big a mess as she had left it that morning. She learned a lot from all that, of course, and I think she started voting Dem by the 40s.
Too bad more of the rich people in our current Crash didn’t have similar experiences.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
72 was the first election I was old enough to vote in. I came home from Vietnam in Sept 69, 2 months before my 20th birthday and the voting age was still 21. 25 months overseas and I couldn’t vote. I did go to the 72 convention in Miami and express my displeasure.
Woodrowfan
@Canuckistani Tom:
Martha, they find the Master was PM. all the globes floating around killing people, inside them were human heads…
granpa gocart mozart
Kids today with their Snoopy Snoop Dogs and their Googling all the time . . . in my day Snoopy was a cartoon dog and googling is what you did on a hot summer night with your girl and only if her parents weren’t home. If that was good enough for us it should be good enough for them. Harumpf!
jurassicpork
What we’ve needed from the beginning was a liberal manifesto. Luckily, my alter ego Mike Flannigan kjust happened to write one.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Lysana:
This is the most perfect statement I’ve ever seen of how it feels to be a member of GenX.
I’m stealing it.
Cacti
I’m a later X-er, born in the mid 1970s. The “good old days” remembered by the silents were completely unknown to me. I grew up in the era of de-industrialization of the rust belt, shrinking wages, and unsupervised latch-key kids because both parents had to work to sustain a middle class standard of living. I came of age in the era of over-education and under-employment.
And yet, for some reason, a small plurality of my generation favors Republicans, notwithstanding the fact that 30 years of Reaganomics has made us as likely to be downwardly mobile from our parents’ standard of living as upwardly mobile.
brettvk
@Kathy in St. Louis: FSM bless you. This poll got covered on All Things Considered tonight and the report was devoted to discontented olds — people just a little younger than my mother, defined by the poll as 65+. The segment interviewed people who were whining about how the world had changed for the worse, as evidenced by the contrasting sexual content of “Gray’s Anatomy” versus “Marcus Welby.” It was jaw-droppingly stupid, both in the reporting and in the attitudes displayed. These people are in the last generation that will have a secure safety net, and they’re worried about TV dramas…
CarolDuhart
@Ozymandias, King of Ants: But the reason why the Boomers had so long was that the older Silents wouldn’t let go of their bigoted, narrow ways. Even now the Silents won’t really let go-they’re the Tea Party now, angry that change is happening anyway.
Judas Escargot
@Cacti:
Glibertarian seems to be the default political posture for GenXers (IMO, anecdote != data, etc… but that’s been my experience).
Matt McIrvin
I’m 43, another GenXer. Kids my age were the Reagan Youth. Those of us who were liberals were a decided minority.
In college, geeky GenXers discovered libertarianism and never shut up about it.
I spent most of my young adult years as a mildly liberal, Clintonian Democrat. I find myself skewing leftier and leftier as I get older and will probably be some kind of Commie by the time I’m 70. Meanwhile, I suspect many of my generation will never put down the Atlas Shrugged, and they’ll probably be a problem once they’re retirees and they start voting in every single election.
Cacti
@Judas Escargot:
I’d say that’s accurate based on my own anecdotal observations. Glibertarian on economics and left-ish on social issues.
Cacti
@brettvk:
People with a secure safety net can afford to obsess about things like whether “teh gheyz” can get married, or if the President is near.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@CarolDuhart: It didn’t seem that way to me.
My parents were born in the mid-30s, so they’re Silents but I’m late GenX, born mid-70s. (I was an oops.) So by the time I came along, a lot of the authority had already passed to the Boomers.
jake the snake
The Boomer Bashing does get a little old, not that a lot of it is not deserved.
I was pretty much a leftist back in the late ’60s.
Went to being a mainstream liberal in the 70s. When
Reagan was elected, I felt personally betrayed and spent most of the 80s and 90s pretty much apolitical.
When Bush invaded in Iraq, that pushed me back to the left.
In some ways, I am further to the left than I was in 1968.
RossInDetroit
I’m a ’59 baby. I think the perception that one or another generation dominated the country culturally is largely a reflection of the media coverage. Without writers needing neat population groups to make generalizations about we wouldn’t even have the concepts of Boomers, Xers, GenY, Millennials, etc.
Take away the arbitrary boundaries and you have to work harder to say something worthwhile about human behavior. Writers rarely volunteer to do things the hard way.
RossInDetroit
My grandmother is 93 and still super alert and aware. She used to vote R (we think) because Grandpa did. Now she’s righteously outraged about what the GOP has become. Just can’t shut up about how terrible they are. Well informed, too. It’s interesting to get the perspective of someone who’s got a good 70 years of personal experience paying attention to politics.
Joel
Who fucked around with complete disregard for human life and the environment?
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill:
I remember, in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian collection, a block of stone from an early Dynastic quarry school carved with a rant about how modern apprentices were lazy, venal, privileged little toads who only paid attention to their work if they were beaten on a regular schedule. To which my father, the native New Yorker, quoted an old Yiddish proverb: “The ears of a boy are in his back; he hearkens when he is beaten.” Some things don’t change!
In a more general sense, the current generational divide makes me think about Gloria Steinem’s 1970s essay about why college-aged men tended to be radicals who would gradually harden into reactionaries, while college women were frequently quite conservative but became more “liberated” as they got older. Her explanation was that (at the time, at least) the relatively privileged mostly-white males had the least market value when they were young & not yet in the Old Boys Network — they were radical because they resented being at the bottom of their particular income/status pyramid. As they “grew up”, prospered in their careers (much easier in those halcyon days), they had much more to defend, so they became correspondingly defensive. “Coeds”, on the other hand, were at their peak social value in a culture where young, inexperienced but educable women had the best chance of selling themselves into a “good marriage” to a prosperous (older) husband… once those same women were old enough to be competing for scraps in the workforce, or competing to hold their meal-ticket spouses against ensuing waves of younger, fresher college girls, they’d either harden into Tammy Fay Bakker-hood or get all mouthy and wimmens-libby radicalized.
I think we’re seeing the same thing with different age cohorts today. College kids, of all sexes, see themselves at the bottom of the economic pyramid, hopelessly trapped with student debt and unable to get jobs that would let them pay off those debts. Older people, Boomers and Silent Generation alike, are also losing their grip on the middle class — but “we” break into two different streams. Some of us get (even more) radicalized, because we no longer feel like we’ve got anything to lose if we raise a stink; our Tea Party opposites (even the ones who’ve already lost their jobs, their homes, their families, their hopes) harden into alte-kacker caricatures, convinced that if only more of the Dems/women/coloreds/kids/gays could be punished back into line then America would go back to the Good Old Days.
Peter
Did you hear the All Things Considered story about this today? With the Marcus Welby, MD references to the Good Old Days? They could have conveyed exactly the same information by just playing a clip of Abe Simpson yelling “MAAAAATLOOOOOOCK!”
vtr
I am a boy, 67, born 3 days after D-Day. if you think you’re to the left of me, you’re wrong.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
There always seems to be a percentage of people who think life is not tough enough(at least for everyone else). If it was then people would just buckle down and work harder. And the corollary is the other group of people who would like life to be just a little bit easier because they see many around them with what looks like an easier life. They aren’t greedy, they just want life to work a little better. Group A is conservative. Group B is liberal. Group A has little to no empathy for others and sees themselves as rugged individuals(I work hard so should everyone else), group B sees themselves as part of the whole and therefore has empathy for their fellow humans(Life is a struggle for all of us, some less some more but all struggle in some way).
I personally think this is hard wired to at least some degree but I could probably be persuaded that I’m wrong.
Canuckistani Tom
@Woodrowfan:
Ah, OK, that’s the three parter Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords. I didn’t get it at first because in the episodes all the heads were in shiny metal flying spheres.
tkogrumpy
@vtr: I’m 71, born the day the P51 Mustang made it’s maiden flight and I am to the left of you. I don’t have a lawn to shoo you off, but I do have a pasture and your welcome to amble though it..Bring your boots.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@JesterDel: Mock votes in school?
In 1964 in Junior High it was Lyndon Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater. My vote went to Clifton DeBerry of the Militant Worker’s Party.
To repeat: DFH then, DFH now, DFH forevah!!
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: When I was in 9th grade, our school had one, and John Anderson beat Jimmy Carter, who beat Ronald Reagan.
RossInDetroit
My first vote was for Reagan in ’80 because I thought I was a Conservative, and that he was too. I was mistaken about both of us. I’ve since come to live more conservatively than the GOP acts and to vote more liberally than it wants.
eyelessgame
“Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.” – almost certainly not from an Assyrian clay tablet 4800 years ago, but a sentiment as old as dirt.
Porlock Junior
@Splitting Image:
The Aristophanes passage is fun, but the precise source of the quote has been dug out by — surprise — Quote Investigator.
The page gives the original quote and traces the first blatant distortion of the source to the Oakland Tribune in 1922.
Porlock Junior
@Steve:
Ok, ok, you beat me to it. So I gotta read every damn posting before I comment, just because you insist on not using the string “Socr” for me to search for? Pshaw. And congrats.
Porlock Junior
@mamayaga:
“In reality the Boomers who had been lefties still are.”
As is also true of the pre-Boomers, among whom were nearly the whole Civil Rights movement before the end of the 1960s. Including, of course, the Little Rock Nine who dared to walk to school in that hellhole in 1957.
But the anti-racists in my generation were even less numerous than in yours; perhaps they really were and are numerically insignificant. I’m not going to mention Abbie Hoffman here, who, after all, is no longer with us; or Wavy Gravy, now pushing 75 and still kicking ass — non-violently! — with his clown shoes. You kids can look them up when you’ve got off of my grass.
It’s odd that post-Boomers are as hostile to Boomers as to pre-Boomers, a fact often and easily observed in threads on this very blog. Rather unfair, truly. Should we mount a protest movement and present our non-negotiable demands?
Update: Perhaps it’s because the Boomers were the post-Boomers’ parents. You know how that goes!
Splitting Image
@Porlock Junior:
I think that’s the same essay Steve linked to earlier. What I meant was that Freeman seems to have had The Clouds in mind when he wrote his essay. Probably a few other writers as well, but Aristophanes is a gold mine of quotes about the Athenian generation gap.
Later on in the play, the son of the main character beats up his dad and justifies it by arguing that you beat a child to make it behave and his father was well into his second childhood. Q.E.D.
Lee
Pssssssssssssssst. It’s “Living Will.”
soonergrunt
@SiubhanDuinne: I so had you pegged for late 40’s/early 50’s at the eldest.
harlana
All the lefties have come out of the woodwork! A little late for Halloween, but . . .
muahahahahaaa!!
Lee Baker
I’m 66. Over the years I’ve encountered my share of what I think of as the prematurely old: Close-minded, “tacking right”, lacking in imagination, ungenerous, and all puffed up with their own importance. All that and plenty of them in their twenties. I recognized years ago that being “old”, in the sense of a mental sclerosis, is not at all a function of age.
Ken J.
At the risk of igniting a flame war digression, I’ll repeat something I have said elsewhere:
The current proposals to bring China-style regulation to the USA Internet (PROTECT-IP in the Senate, SOPA/E-PARASITE in the House, formerly COICA) are potential land mines under Obama’s young-voter support.
Yet Obama’s supporters in the entertainment business have made it clear that getting some version of these laws enacted is their top priority.
Does Obama want to let his Hollywood support melt away, or does he want to campaign for the youth vote as the President who fucked up the Internet? He’s probably going to have to pick one of those two options, if Congress sends him one of these bills.