X Doesn't Save the World

"Like all Gen X-ers, I have been confronted with the absence of my own generation's cohesion, and also, therefore, with the peculiar dilemma of having to choose the temporal direction by which I vacate the emptying space of my generation's tenure—either forward, into the company of younger cohorts who seem unaware that they have dark depths to themselves, and appear to believe that whatever darkness remains can be clarified by rules and language reforms; or backward, to the generation born in the shadow of the Bomb, who tried to break free no matter how blindly, and to discover their own depths no matter how sloppily. For all their foolishness, they knew they had depths, and often knew, wisely, that they were fools. So there is much to cherish from their world, and for a while now I have been trying to see whether we might salvage some of that earlier generation's legacy, and to ensure that it lives on."

At Harper's Magazine, Justin E.H. Smith writes that he is "feeling defeated, and it is a symptom of this defeat that I have withdrawn to live in the past."

"As the Great Casey Stengel Might Have Put It: 'Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?'"

"The thread that runs through all these failures is the Democratic Left's adamant refusal to base its political approach on the actually-existing opinions and values of actually-existing American voters. Instead they entertain fantasies about kindling a prairie fire of progressive turnout with their approach, despite falling short again and again in the real world. It hasn't worked and it won't work."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot writes, "How much is the Democratic Left losing? Let us count the ways."

And Michael Schaffer at Politico reports on Teixeira leaving the Centger for American Progress for the American Enterprise Institute.

Boomers' Rule, OK?

"Like, it's not the generation itself. It's just the fact that, like, the unwillingness to understand that things have changed, things are changing, and kind of keep it the way it is because it worked for them, assuming that it'll work for everyone else. And that's just not true."

Paul Solman at PBS NewsHour interviews Millennials about Baby Boomers.

And he adds interviews of Boomers themselves.

"The Gap Between Their Intentions and Their Ultimate Impact"

"If there's hope, it lies with Gen X. They are the last people with any memory, any foot in the pre-boomer world. The boomers were not Gen X's parents and they weren't Gen X's teachers, and that keeps them anchored and gives them some spark of life. The boomers, by clogging up the career pipeline, have refused to get off the stage and give Gen X its moment. So even though Gen X is aging now, we still have not yet seen all that they can do. We have not seen a world run by Gen X-ers."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews Helen Andrews, author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. 

"Promising Liberation for Everyone but Meaningfully Delivering It Only for the Entitled"

"Scan American history and the element that is most unique to the boomers' experience is their prosperity. By the nineteen-sixties, the standard of living was doubling each generation, a rate that had probably never been reached before, anywhere in the world—and in the United States has not been reached again since. The generational optimism and hope for change may have less to do with anything so nebulous as culture; it may, more simply, be the product of getting suddenly and phenomenally rich."

At The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells reviews Helen Andrews's Boomers.

Ok, Boomers?

"Age ‬doesn't just divide Republicans and Democrats from each other, in other words; age divides young leftists from both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party's front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation. ‬This is not a picture of Democrats smoothly transforming into the 'party of the young.' It's evidence that age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party."

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic argues that the "young left has become a sort of third party."

"It Might Be the Best General-Election Appeal Any of the Candidates Has Devised Yet"

"Democrats have been racing haphazardly to the left, with Warren often in the lead. Some of their ideas, like moving everybody off employer-sponsored insurance and onto a public plan, are toxic to general-election voters. But some ideas have appeal to the left and to swing voters. This is one of them."

Jonathan Chait at New York praises Elizabeth Warren's plan to increase Social Security benefits.

"The Answer, in Short: The Gipper"

"Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan—and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They've spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they're crouching into the defensive posture they've been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again.
"The Ocasio-Cortezes of the world have witnessed the opposite: The way they see it, Democratic attempts to moderate and compromise have led to nothing but ruin. Republicans aren't the ones to be afraid of. 'The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,' Trent told me."

Ryan Grim at The Washington Post writes that "[t]he way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them."

Alex Shephard at The New Republic adds to the discussion. 

"How Many People Must Live in the Street Before We Can Build New Homes?"

"Apartment bans are a case of rich vs. poor, longtime resident vs. newcomer, and, all too often, white vs. black, but they are something else too: generational warfare, a showdown in which older homeowners are telling younger renters that there's no more room. Seen that way, the housing affordability crisis serves as a useful framework for understanding a handful of urgent American issues that have stalled out, particularly intraparty conflicts on the left like those over student debt and climate change. Whether by intention or simply in effect, it has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, 'Fuck you, I got mine.'"

Henry Grabar at Slate argues that "[l]ike college debt and climate change, the housing affordability crisis is generational warfare."

"Older Americans Are Standing in the Way of Action"

"The ruling gerontocracy won't make it easy for younger Americans to translate their political energy into policy. HuffPost’s Michael Hobbs argued earlier this month that age may be the defining split in our democracy. Older Americans, he noted, are more likely to vote in elections and three times as likely to donate to political campaigns. They also tend to live in smaller rural states, giving them disproportionate influence in the Electoral College and the Senate. 'Without a dramatic increase in immigration or a sudden doubling of the birth rate, this is likely to be a permanent shift,' Hobbs wrote."

At The New Republic, Matt Ford argues that "global warming is every bit as frightening to millennials as the Vietnam War was to boomers."

"An Increased Turnout of Under-30 Voters in, Say, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan Could Easily Have Changed the Results of the History"

"Demographic groups that preferred Trump were three times as likely to be a bigger part of the voter pool than nonvoters. Among groups that preferred Clinton, they were about 50 percent more likely to be a bigger part of the nonvoting community."

Philip Bump at The Washington Post writes that "New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency."

"The Beating Heart of Trumpism"

"In the shithole remarks we see it very unadorned: why do we want more low-quality non-white people? To Trump, it is an obvious and urgent question. Arguments about cultural assimilation are often prettied-up in right-leaning policy journals as concern that too rapid immigration doesn't give enough time for assimilation and thus threatens social stability. That may be true at extremely high levels of immigration, though here in New York City we have a massive immigrant population (documented and undocumented) and we seem to do fine as the safest big city in the country. But with shithole you get to the heart of it which isn’t these prettified, intellectualized theories but rather a voice of contempt and dehumanization about people who–let's just say it–aren't white.
"'They are taking over' is the backdrop of Trumpism. The shithole comments make that crystal clear."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reacts to the latest expression of racism from Donald Trump.

"It's Really the White Middle-Class Boomers Who Exemplify All the Awful Characteristics and Behaviors That Have Defined This Generation"

"I'll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they've done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it's been replaced by a cult of individualism. It's hard to overstate how damaging this is.
"On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they've only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it's a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along."

Sean Illing at Vox interviews Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

"Policy Makers Shouldn't Listen to Supply-Side Orthodoxy"

"Tax cuts have generally proven to be a big bust during the past few decades. Former President George W. Bush pushed through a series of substantial tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, but growth failed to return to 1990s levels. More recently, experiments with lowering taxes at the state level have showed very disappointing results. The most glaring example is Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's tax-cutting program, begun in 2012. In the years since Brownback slashed taxes, the state's finances have been drowning in red ink. But economic growth didn't pick up, and Kansas has lagged behind its neighbor Nebraska in both labor supply and income per person."

Noah Smith at Bloomberg View reminds readers that "[t]he old recipe of tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal austerity does little for growth."

Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic writes that, in regard to the Republican tax policy, "[t]he baby boom is being evicted from the penthouse of American politics. And on the way out, it has decided to trash the place."

And in a 2015 article for the Economic Opportunity Institute, Scott Sorscher points out that [o]ur moral, social, political and economic values changed in the mid-70's."

"Habitat For Humanity Investigated For Working Conditions After 92-Year-Old Laborer Collapses On Site"

"At press time, witnesses reported seeing the gaunt old man being forced onto a plane to go dig wells and lay pipe at a rural African project site just hours after being released from the hospital."

From The Onion.

K, Owed

"What went wrong? The 401(k) began as a technical adjustment to the tax code, one meant to mostly impact high-earning executives using profit-sharing plans. People like Benna, a benefits consultant, convinced the Reagan administration that the language of the statute allowed for all employees to put aside a portion of their salaries on a tax-deferred basis. It was supposed to supplement corporate pensions. Instead, in something almost no one foresaw, the 401(k) replaced them.
"In 2017, we know that this historic accident isn’t working out for many people."

Helaine Olen at Slate writes that "Life has become too expensive for many of us to save adequately."

"Old White Men Remember a Time When America Worked—for Them, at Least"

"In understanding what Ball calls 'Trump’s graying army,' it is important to understand that a majority of today's seniors came of age at a time when a college education really was not necessary for most jobs—in many cases even management-track jobs. And so, many of them had upwardly mobile careers and are now settled into relatively affluent retirements—the beneficiaries of that rapidly fading, once-dominant institution, the private pension. Slicing and dicing Americans according to educational attainments remains the best measure we have of class divisions, but at the top end of the age spectrum, calling people 'white working class' because they don't have a diploma can be misleading."

Ed Kilgore at The Atlantic discusses Donald Trump's popularity among the elderly.

"What Amer­ica Has Been, and What It Is Be­com­ing"

"Elect­or­ally, this di­ver­gence has be­nefited Demo­crats in pres­id­en­tial elec­tions be­cause the groups com­fort­able with Amer­ica's evol­u­tion are cast­ing a grow­ing share of bal­lots in those con­tests. But it's helped Re­pub­lic­ans to con­trol Con­gress by deep­en­ing their hold on com­munit­ies out­side of America's urb­an cen­ters, where these changes are con­cen­trated."

Ronald Brownstein in National Journal contrasts the Republicans' "coalition of restoration" and the Demo­crats' "co­ali­tion of trans­form­a­tion."

Baby Busters

"It's increasingly clear that Generation X, and possibly millennials, haven't learned from the boomers' mistakes. My son will rightly criticize me someday for my generation's love of SUVs. He’ll probably wonder why he has to pay higher taxes or work several more years just to get a retirement that's worse than my dad's or maybe even mine.
"Every generation wants to leave a better world for the ones to follow. I truly believe that boomers had no idea, for a long time, that the sum of their choices—of their quest to make life as good as it could be for themselves—might be a worse world for their children. But it's apparent now."

Jim Tankersley in The Washington Post calls on baby boomers to sacrifice for the future.

"Harper Lee Announces Third Novel, 'My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune'"

"Morrison added that, without spoiling too much, he could reveal that the book’s final pages feature a fully notarized last will and testament signed by the author herself."


From The Onion.