The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials.

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials.
By Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais
Sunday, February 3, 2008; Page B01

The scene at American University last week was electric: thousands of young people filling an arena to hear venerable Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy endorse Barack Obama for president and praise the Illinois senator's ability to inspire and move a new generation of Americans.

It was the perfect setting for Obama, who has been focused on this new "millennial generation" from the start. Almost a year ago, in a speech to African American leaders in Selma, Ala., he underlined the differences between two different types of generations: the "Moses generation" that led the children of Israel out of slavery, and the "Joshua generation" that established the kingdom of Israel. The first was a generation of idealists and dreamers, the second a generation of doers and builders. With that speech, in which he associated Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton with the former generation and claimed the mantle of the latter for himself, Obama fired the first shot in an election battle that's being fought along the dividing lines between these two generational archetypes.

American history suggests that about every 80 years, a civic (or Joshua) generation, emerges to make over the country after a period of upheaval caused by the fervor of an idealist (or Moses) generation. In 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968, as members of new generations -- alternately idealist and civic -- began to vote in large numbers, the United States experienced major political shifts. This year, the civic-minded millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, are coming of age and promising to turn the political landscape, currently defined by idealist baby boomers such as Clinton and George W. Bush, upside down.

Reared by indulgent parents and driven by deeply held values as adults, members of idealist generations embroil the nation in heated debates on divisive social issues as they try to enact their own personal morality and causes through the political process....Though each party has come out on top in one idealist era or another, the end result has been weaker government institutions and political deadlock. As politics becomes more polarized, voters sour on the two political parties. In the 1950s, most voters had favorable attitudes toward at least one and often both parties, but by the 1990s, most had negative impressions of both. Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras....

***

Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues....

***

Today's millennials are the largest generation in U.S. history -- twice as large as Generation X and numbering a million more than the baby boomers....

***

Millennials' political style is...similar to the GI generation's. They aren't confrontational or combative, the way boomers (whose generational mantra was "Don't trust anyone over 30") have been. Nor does the millennials' rhetoric reflect the cynicism and alienation of Generation X, whose philosophy is, "Life sucks, and then you die." Instead, their political style reflects their generation's constant interaction with hundreds, if not thousands, of "friends" on MySpace or Facebook, about any and all subjects, increasingly including politics. Since they started watching "Barney" as toddlers, the millennials have learned to be concerned for the welfare of everyone in the group and to try to find consensus, "win-win" solutions to any problem. The result is a collegial approach that attracts millennials to candidates who seek to unify the country and heal the nation's divisions....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102826.html?nav=most_emailed

[rodeodance]

1. Obama IS a baby-boomer.

[BooScout]

2. The millennials apparently have problems with facts....

Jeeze louise the caca and the spin just keeps getting deeper. Now watch a whole slew of them come in here and insist that Obama is not a baby boomer.

[Adelante]

7. He was born late in the baby boom, that is true

But he didn't come up or come of age in the baby boom culture, as I did. There is a generational difference in that way. I never understand the difficulty here.

[BooScout]

10. Oh yes he did.......

Because I grew up and came of age at the same time he did and I like to think I know my own generation tyvm.

[Recursion]

17. And JFK was not a boomer, but appealed to them

The "first shots" of a generational coup tend to come from someone of the previous generation (Kurt Cobain was a boomer, after all, albeit one of the last ones by most definitions of the term). Only the very first wave of Gen X is even old enough to run for President, and the millenials have only been old enough to vote for a few years.

[Iris]

3. You mean these millenials? They don't have to be confrontational, Mommy does it for them.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/06/19/State/Mommy__tell_my_profes.shtml

http://ucdavismagazine.ucdavis.edu/issues/su05/feature_1d.html

I've also heard them called "The Loophole Generation" in academia because of their tendency to nit-pick class policies to find ways out of doing something (or doing it well), often spending more time negotiating grades (again with Mommy or Daddy in tow) than it would take to do the actual work.

[Recursion]

23. I was thinking more like these millenials

(those are the founders of YouTube)

Seriously, the anti-youth messages I'm seeing here are disturbing, and I'm 31.

[Recursion]

24. Dupe

Looks like the "your post didn't go through" message means it actually did...

[sailor65]

4. Reminds me of what my Dad used to tell me

"You'd better hurry up, move out, and take over the world while you still know everything!"

edited for spelling

[DeepModem Mom]

5. That's a good one, sailor! nt

[Desertrose]

20. I love that one...and its so true!

I knew everything in my 20's and now that I'm closing in on 60 :shrug:

[VolcanoJen]

6. Twice as large as Generation X?

Yikes! As a bona fide Gen-Xer, what am I to make of that?

:scared:

[Recursion]

16. The whole point of X is there were almost none of us

There was a huge dip in American birth rates in the late sixties through the seventies, thanks largely to the availability of the pill and, not to put too fine a point on it, Roe v. Wade. A lot of people culturally define Gen X (a term whose meaning has shifted significantly since Coupland's book 16 years ago) as people born from roughly Roe v. Wade to roughly about the time that "Baby On Board" signs started appearing on cars -- that is, at a time where one might say that having children was not widely seen as a good thing. Also culturally, we were raised in the "new model" of the nuclear family, often as latchkey kids with two working (and increasingly, divorced) parents.

A good discussion of the term is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

[VolcanoJen]

21. Very interesting, and thank you

I still find us to be a fascinating, albeit tiny, generation. :-)

[BlackVelvet04]

8. Alienating boomers is a great way to get elected....

NOT. They comprise the largest block of voters in the country.

[Alexander]

14. Hillary: "Young people think work is a four-letter word."

Gee, I wonder why Obama's winning the youth vote? Maybe because he doesn't insult younger voters? :eyes:

[Recursion]

18. Even Chelsea ripped her a new one for that

I swear I was spitting blood when I read that speech she made. People my age are working 2 and 3 jobs trying to scrape by precisely because people her age spent the past 3 decades destroying the social compact that made their success possible. Where people get the idea that young people don't work is beyond me: we work increasingly insecure and low-paying jobs without benefits because they want their 401K's to keep growing.

[K Gardner]

22. I'm a boomer.. and so are most of my friends. We're not alienated and we're voting with our

children, for Hope and Change!

[kurth]

9. Obama to Boomers: Fuck Off And Die ??

[amandabeech]

11. My parents, their siblings and their friends were all GI generation folks.

How Winograd (wasn't he head of the Mich. dem party at some point?) could compare them, with their years in the depression, their service in WWII, to the kids I work with today is beyond me.

The authors seem to rely on statistics and write as though they have never had to deal with either group.

[NJObamaWoman]

12. I'm a millennial baby YAY....Go Barack! See ya in Jersey on Monday

[arendt]

13. Looks like inter-generational "tribalism" is the media meme of the week. What toxic crap.

There is a cottage industry in this name-that-generation political pop-psychologizing. It is always divisive, never uplifting.

See my current thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4368843

arendt

[blues90]

15. The WP . what a cheap shot artical .

All of a sudden everyone is an expert on generations , generations they never lived in .

Since I am an early boomer with no children I can say I have no more of an idea of what the " millenials " are going through than they know what I went through . I see the difference in how society has become and how things have drastically changed and how through the years this country has down down hill especially since 2000 rolled around where the down hill slide of the Reagan era picked up speed .

But to compare and divide generations has always been a problem and is always where we all fail in the end .

The last thing we need right now is a huge generation gap wider than ever before , they are driving this wedge and they will split the log .

[Joanne98]

19. John McCain is 72, his mother is 95. Wait in line like everybody else.