The long arc of Boomer politics, of resistance, and what Millennials & Zoomers can win starting now

Yesterday, I wrote – mostly to GenX, but also to Millennials and Zoomers – about holding the line one more time. In that post, I talked a little about how some of us have been doing that job this long in order to keep some semblance of a Republic until the cavalry – in the form of a group larger than the Baby Boom – could show up, and still have the tools to take power peacefully, and in a timely fashion.

Today I’m writing for Millennials and for Zoomers. I’m going to expand on yesterday, talk about history, talk about why politics have been as they’ve been in ways you maybe haven’t heard before, and I’m going to talk about the massive opportunity you have now to change this fucking game.

But I have to talk about history first. There’s context, and you need it.

Most of you reading this have never seen actual Generation X politics. Unless you’re from Seattle, or the greater Seattle area, you definitely never have. You’ve only seen Baby Boom politics. What you’re seeing now is still Baby Boom politics, the underlying dynamic unchanging and now crystalised, ritualised, and radicalised over the decades since they took power.

That’s happened in part because the Baby Boom never wanted to talk to anyone else, and didn’t have to. They had a saying – “don’t trust anyone over 30” – that inverted and became “don’t trust anyone under 30″ the moment they hit their 30s. As a group, they’ve despised everyone younger than them my entire life, writing early on that GenX was either “a generation of Darwinesque hyper-predators” (fun stuff if you’re 12) or “useless lazy slackers incapable of achievement” from the very beginning. Most of the time it manifests as simply being locked out and ignored, but I’ve had that raw generational contempt thrown directly at me, more than once – even here in Seattle.

But the thing about Seattle is… we outnumber them here. It’s the only place in the US where we outnumber them. They’ve had to deal with other people, whether they liked it or not. Because of that, they couldn’t really lock into that inward-facing self-reinforcing spiral. They had reality checks and external feedback they had to grapple with, and so… their politics stayed way, way more normal.

So if you want to know what Generation X politics would’ve looked like in a more traditional American pattern, where each generation is larger than the previous – hi. It’s in Seattle, and to a lesser degree Washington State. We’re willing to elect socialists who call themselves socialists and actually have something like a centre-left, and it’s not just downtown.

I mean, there are reasons that Donald Trump didn’t win the white vote here, and this is a big part of it. According to exit polling at the time, he didn’t get the non-college-educated white male majority here in 2016. It was close! But even with the dry side of the state involved – a lot of which is rabidly christofascist – Donald Trump didn’t even win non-college-educated white men, his core, statewide in 2016.

(It’s also a factor in why the Battle of Seattle could happen, I am just saying. I was there.)

But outside Seattle, and outside Washington State, you’re generally looking at Boomer politics. And I think Generation X has always kinda known that was going to happen, in that we were never going to have a turn at power. Certainly not at the national scale.

Some of us, in fact, have not just known that but have also understood it, which is a different thing. I spent enough time east for school, I could see what was coming and how it was going to play out, and how it was going to be such a long, long war for the Republic – and largely, an effort just to hold. To be a backstop. A centre-left line to keep civil society and elections until someone bigger than them could finally come along.

The fact that we even managed to win on a few fronts – queers, I’m looking at us, but not just us – that was amazing. And also outliers, let’s not kid ourselves. But I’ll take those victories and celebrate them.

So when everything looks so rigid and hopeless and stale, and when you’re seeing “elections don’t fix it, everything just gets worse,” that’s why it looks that way, even when it isn’t actually like that.

Because thanks to their sheer size, their sheer numbers, the Boom just plain outmassed everyone else since like 1980 and everyone’s had to play by their rules all this time.

We could win a round here and there, and even make some real progress in narrow but important areas. But we couldn’t change the game. Hence our fight to keep a civil society not in the politeness sense but in the sense of functional institutions sense, and the fight to keep elections not in the “technically there are elections” sense but in the “elections that can have outcomes Republicans don’t like” sense.

We are at the very tail end of that war now. We have almost won a war most people haven’t even been aware that we’ve been fighting.

2024 is the last best shot they have. They want to keep power, because of course they do. They grabbed it early – skipping ahead of the Silent generation – and haven’t talked to anyone else about power since, just like so many of them never talked to anyone outside their cohort they didn’t have to. But this year is pretty much the end of their dominance unless they can rig everything to keep the appearance of power until they actually die, and they know it.

And by “they know it,” I mean, I actually heard Boomer rightists saying things to that effect in 2016, amongst themselves.

That’s why everything changes after this election, but not during this election. 2024 is the tipping point. Still the old rules, but hopefully the end of them.

If we win – and we will win if we fight – it’ll be because Millennials and Zoomers stepped in and said “that’s enough, grampa.” And everyone who actually works and understands politics will know it.

And since everyone will know it, everything – EVERYTHING – will start to re-orient itself around you. Around Millennials and around Zoomers. It won’t be all at once, but it will absolutely happen.

As long as you keep showing up, as long as you start doing the work, every mechanic of power, every political interest group, every big money, every piece of the machine will start to turn towards you. Because whatever else may be true, the professionals know where the power lies, and it’ll lie with you.

Not us, not GenX. We have a voice in Cascadia, and I love my country-not-a-country bioregion, but that’s the only place we get one. The power brokers will skip us, like they always have. They’ve never figured out how to market to GenX, they thought they were going to “own” Millennials (literal quote there on ‘own’ btw), and they have no idea at all what to do with Zoomers and I thank the gods for it.

It’ll be you, Millennials and Zoomers. You. You will be the ones everyone cares about, as the new power centre of politics. The Baby Boom will try to grab power back, but as long as you keep showing up, they won’t pull it off. In practical terms, it’ll be over.

If we win. Which we will, if we fight and fight together.

But for this election, we’re still under the old rules. The Baby Boom rules, the Baby Boom politics, the Baby Boom control. That’s why I’m praying this can be GenX’s last hurrah as a resistance force, and that’s why I write so much about holding the goddamn line once again, just like so many of us – not all of us, but so many – have done our entire lives.

One more time, no matter how much you hate having to pick between two doddering old monsters…

…we gotta hold the line. We gotta hold the line for your sake, and for our own. Just like we always have.

But after that?

After that, as long as you keep showing up…

…it’ll be all about you.

You’re so close to being able to start taking power and setting the agenda. After all these years, it’s finally the time when you can actually start to do it.

But you gotta help us hold the line in ’24, first. We gotta hold again one, last time, the old way.

And then it’ll be yours.

If you’re willing to take it.

Are you ready?

110 days remain.

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Some additional notes for all the people making this face:

• YES I KNOW GENERATIONS ARE NOT MONOLITHIC. This is a story that happens to be true, but like many stories, even ones that happen to be true, it’s written in generalisations.
• Yes, there are fash GenX, like there are fash Millennials (Hi, JD Vance) and Zoomers. There are also GenXers, particularly older ones, who pretend to be Boomers and/or decided they’re Boomer Lite. And yes, there are good and open and listening Baby Boomers who are in fact also amongst our ranks. If you’re one of them, thank you for your work and your years of honourable service, and be assured this isn’t about you. But I think you might recognise some of your friends.
• Yes, I’m speaking in generalities here, ones that are particularly applicable where they wouldn’t be otherwise because the Baby Boom had this hard generational identity trained into them early and because they took to it so hard and so completely and because they’ve clung so hard to it and because they outnumbered the generational cohorts before and after them.
• But even with all the above, I’m still right, and they know it. In 2026 and 2028 they’ll absolutely still try to rally, and they might scare some people in the midterms, but they’ll have dropped below the voting bloc criticality necessary to override everybody else, and it’ll be much harder. So if you want to argue they aren’t really done until 2028, you can, and you can do so with some validity. But even with all that, after this year, it starts getting easier. And pretty quickly.
• Yeah the younger members of this movement might try to start shit with guns. Fuck ’em. If their God Emperor loses, they get to fight the army and the police and I’m sure that’ll go great. Have fun with that, shitheels, and welcome to both your new best friends, failure and jail.
• No, Seattle politics are in no way perfect, but come the fuck on. I’ve travelled. I’ve lived elsewhere. It’s less broken here, and I’m pretty confident this is why.

 

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.