The evolution of political generations in 2024.
During a discussion that seems like a year ago but was only six weeks removed from this writing, I bemoaned to my wife that at age 61 I’d have to wait another four years to be confronted with a candidate for president that is my age or younger. To think, I would have to be 65, retirement age (although writers don’t retire, we burn out and fade away simultaneously) to experience this. Then one month ago from the time I cranked out these words, the entire political world flipped, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is 59, grabbed the Democratic baton. A few weeks later she tabbed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, 60, as a running mate. Voila! Suddenly, that four-year wait disappeared and with only weeks left in the 2024 campaign for president, the Dem ticket trails me in age and quite apparently embraces my decades-plus call for a new generational voice even beyond mine.
This past week’s Democratic Convention layout and themes have reflected this. (Full disclosure: I am on this before the nominee speaks, as I am heading to our family’s annual sojourn to LBI, and I shan’t be taking up beach time in front of this word machine). There is clearly a concerted effort for the Party to shift dramatically from the past into the future – obviously for strategic reasons because their former presumptive nominee is 81 and mostly disliked – but nevertheless unfurls speeches jammed with wide-ranging buzz words selling Harris’s “Never Going Back” mantra. Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s spectacularly effective speech imploring a new generation to “Put down your phone and do something” speaks to the tech-heavy zeitgeist from Millennials to Gen Z. That was followed by her husband’s “taking to the streets instead of a cyber highway to get involved in how their lives are shaped by politics” rhetoric which was highlighted by the “Don’t boo – vote” phrase that challenges the anonymous Twitter-verse bitching. All of this combined nicely with appearances from the TikTok and YouTube influencers who set trends beyond alternative media, which is already drowning out traditional news outlets seals the deal.
Last week I described this race as one of feels, but it is also very much one of generational evolution.
I have written here many times about how I am not a Baby Boomer nor am I an X. I have friends and colleagues around my age that were too young to be drafted into the Viet Nam War and/or gobbled acid at Woodstock, but are also a tad too old to have suffered an MTV overdose or ridden the cynical waves of Reality Bites. For years I called it the Lost Generation, but that was already taken by Fitzgerald and the Flapper set a century ago. Others tried Generation Jones, which makes less sense.
By 2008, I alluded to the fresh nature of Barack Obama’s run for president – the highlight of my political lifelong obsession – as a nod to my generation. Obama was born in 1958 (four years before me) – too young to hippie and too old to be “Hungry Like the Wolf.”
Up until Obama’s run against the Boomer priestess, Hillary Clinton, whose husband became the first of the post-WWII generation to take the White House, it’s been (more or less) 16 years of Boomertown: Bill Clinton followed by George W. Bush and then Donald J. Trump. All Boomers, and each one captured that generation’s strengths and flaws. Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden is an interesting generational cul de sac, as he, like my parents, falls into that category of too young to fight in WWII but not connected to the 1960s counterculture. Biden comes from another netherworld generation – not Greatest and not Boomer, but very much from that period of latter 20th century turmoil.
This could best explain part of his recent rejection as Dem nominee beyond his advanced age: he was too far out of touch with the times.
However, so is the increasingly incoherent Trump, an aging Boomer shouting 1980s non-quitters about “radical lefties” and “commies,” as if the Cold War was still raging and he wasn’t Vladimir Putin’s lapdog. His comfort zone as an anachronistic proxy may well be his and the Boomers’ final stand.
Boomers made up the first generation to create mass youth movements fueled by sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a bombastic mixture of activist meets selfishness that bore the “Me” Decade reflected in the damaged moral construct of Bill Clinton (dope smoker – kind of inhaled – anti-war, draft-dodging philanderer, who also possessed the ability to give himself completely to causes). Bush represented the youth backlash found in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America: the Big Chill death of the utopian dream, traded in for money-makes-the-kids-go-round fury (coke head drunkard, who woke up at 40 and decided to do daddy’s job.) And then there is Trump, who always wanted to be a Clinton, a spoiled, rich, bloated celebrity whore raised and defined by the two-dimensional hype of television. Like Clinton, he was also a draft-dodging philander, but maneuvered with zero care for causes beyond his own greed.
These were our figureheads until Obama came along – skeptical optimism with a tinge of showmanship and a sense that none of that hippie shit was fungible and less so the “greed is good” nonsense that waged war on the middle-ground. He was, like me, a seventies kid who watched Archie Bunker arguing with Meat Head and wondered, “What was the point?” How do we move beyond the gaps of age, race, gender, and those battle lines that were deepened by Bush before him? And as a backlash to his stoic “no drama” stance, Trump’s 24-hour reality show presidency appeared to be a cheap alternative. Nearly nine million people who voted for change-agent Obama voted for Boomer-redux Trump in 2016.
Harris, only a year younger than me, has broken entirely from Obama and the late-aughts sense that the 20th century still had a lean on our ideals. Since the 44th president exited the scene, the rise of isolationist fascism has permeated one party and a rather stringent fight for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights began – marriage equality, Me Too, woke-ism, and, at its opposition, isolationist religiosity. The VP represents a chance to end the incessant fighting over stuff well over a half-century old now – women’s reproductive rights, gay rights, environmental concerns, sane gun laws, and racial equity. I ask: We ran that gauntlet to end up here? And the country sadly answers, “Yes.”
The Harris/Walz ticket is trending towards the country saying “No” to all that. They, by mere generational pull, are the way of the future, or at least out of this quagmire of us v them and not trusting anyone over thirty and then becoming the very thing you fight against. Most of the DNC speeches have been non-partisan calls for unity, decency, tolerance – understanding our differences while counting our shared principles.
This is what Obama tried and won in elections, but failed to turn into governance, because where his cloaked Joe Cool persona provided him cover to soar above the fray as only the first African American candidate and then president can, Kamala Harris is less bogged down. She has Obama’s eight years and Hillary Clinton’s ignominious defeat and all that came with being the first woman to barely survive the gauntlet. There is a freeing quality about Harris that the kids can see; even this old fucker writing this can see it.
If Harris wins, the Boomers will have no one else who can run. Former President Bill Clinton could barely make it through his rambling convention speech at 78 this week. And now it will be my generation, the lost Jones thing, that will turn the page and hand off something we could hardly have fathomed a few weeks ago, a path forward.
That’s how generations should work: Boomer’s out!
