Baby boomers comprised a larger share of voters in 2024, accounting for 32%, but they are trending lower after hitting a peak of 36% in 2016.
Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial herself, expects the younger generation will soon tip the scales in American politics.
“Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids,” she said. “And we—that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us on everything from the economy to climate. And we’re taking the reins.”
From global warming to debt crisis to lack of affordable health insurance (all intentional), Boomers have definitely overstayed their welcome.
They never were, that’s a stereotype that let boomers silence an entire generation.
Just like the death of the Republican party, we’ve been hearing this too for a decade now.
Millennials will be the next biggest voting block! Gen Y is pissed and going to change everything in the voting landscape!
So far, not a god damn thing. I mean, we’re not seeing record turn out outside of one single election and in the last election we even saw that millennials increased their voting share to Republicans.
They may be mad but they’re the exact same morons as the rest of America.
So far, not a god damn thing.
It’s starting just now, like this year. Millenials had the numbers for at least 8 years, but not the turnout. Well, Cheeto man finally made them mad enough to get out there and vote and we’re seeing quite a few upsets even within the Dem establishment party itself.
Better late than never.
One thing to remember is that, even now, we live in a gerontocracy. The wave of younger candidates winning in primaries is a sign of things to come, but more than the voting population shifting to younger people, we’re still waiting for the candidates and politicians themselves to be younger on average. Still so many very old people in the US senate/house.
And a kakistocracy to boot!
Plutotheokleptokakistocracy, to be fully accurate.
The momentum was never there because we were all busy following the boomer path of trying to go to college to make aoemthing of ourselves and ended up in college debt for life and then got shat on, by the very people who raised us to take that path in good faith hoping it would work out the same for us as it did them but it fucking didn’t.
It’s 50/50 here ya know. Like we all had the chance to not do what they said to do or go against the paths we were raised to follow and do our own thing. They also failed to see the absolute state of the changing world and only focused on what benefits them.
The Student Loan Crisis is quickly becoming an increasongly unsustainable drag on the economy, and will eventually become a true National Security Threat. When everyone is enslaved to their student loans for decades, there will be many opportunities for nefarious types to leverage those desperate loan holders, in an infinite number of ways.
Student Loan Reform is becoming an issue nearly as important as Health Care.
Boomers control the Democratic primaries which is the only opportunity for real change. COVID upset that stranglehold which is why the Democratic party was happy to let Biden prevent a primary in 2024.
False. Ken Martin is 52.
The neolibs lost control of the party in 2024.
EDIT: I don’t care about your opinion, I just want people to see through your ridiculous statement.
Lol “Nu-uh they lost control in the last major election” isn’t the point you think it is.
This is not old versus young, plenty of old heads want what the younger gen wants.
This is class warfare. The Epstein class has been attacking the rest of us for ages with impunity. The first strike came from Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
I appreciate what AOC does in most respects, but this is a miss for her. We can’t afford this divisive messaging and she needs to be told this.
Accountability to the people for ALL politicians.
There is no war but the Class War.
Except in a way it is old vs young. The old will need more and more care, and that ends up coming from the youth. The same youth that were promised a future that doesn’t exist, and now have little desire to give giving what they cannot afford. Many countries are going to have to have a real reckoning with aging populations, and few have even started the conversation.
Young people would not mind providing that care if they were paid for it.
If we soaked the rich to fund the welfare state there wouldn’t be so much simmering anger.
Not doctors and lawyers, the billionaires and decimillionaires. The epstein class.
Tax wealth not work.
If we soaked the rich to fund the welfare state there wouldn’t be so much simmering anger.
Not doctors and lawyers, the billionaires and decimillionaires. The epstein class.
If you taxed 100% of the 0.01% wealthiest, took every drop and redistributed it, each person in the world would get $5k USD.
When you get to that 1%, you are already talking about the doctors and lawyers and people you don’t want to target, and compared to many parts of the world, you may already be in the 1 or top 5% of wealth. Should your money be taken as well, so those in Afica with nothing get something more?
Maybe that would certainly change things for some, but wouldn’t have the effect you want, and would also collapse the world economy and put all of us back in the stone age. Certainly I think when you hit a billion of net worth you get a nice little trophy and have 99% of it redistributed, but just ‘taxing’ wealth isn’t going to do a damn thing about fixing societal issues that cost far far more than $5k a person.
I live in the US. I’m assuming each nation deals with its superwealthy internally.
Separately, I think the US should dismantle its empire, which would redistribute wealth to the rest of the world.
So because you are in the US, only the US deserves all of the wealth? That doesn’t sound very fair when you think about it. Sorry Canada, sorry Mexico, you deserve nothing. Seems like all your idea would do is just make every person over ‘X’ wealth move to a different country, which has happened everytime high welath taxes have been implemented.
To your first sentence, that’s the opposite of what I said.
I don’t think wealth taxes should be limited to citizens. If billionaires own wealth here they can pay taxes here. If they don’t like it they can sell their assets in the US.
If billionaires want to move they can obviously do so, but they can keep paying the wealth tax or they can sell their assets in the US. If enough billionaires sell their assets then eventually non billionaires will be able to afford assets. That’s a win for Non billionaires either way.
If billionaires own wealth here they can pay taxes here.
Soooo property taxes? They already pay those.
It’s almost like you haven’t really thought about the proposal or even if it’s going to generate the revenue for the services you are demanding.
Know what’s a quicker path? End wars around the world, invest in local economies, and elect leaders that will do so.
We’re going to be old one day and need care. Society as a whole takes responsibility for this.
The young need to support the old and in turn, we will be supported when the time comes.
Socialist mentality is about benefit to all, including the elderly. The rich also have it in for the elderly. To them, the death of the boomer generation profits them, because they can come up with more excuses to eliminate social security, thereby screwing us all. They want to saddle us with a privatized retirement system that they control for their own profits.
We also need to fight for ourselves and our own interests.
We can fight for the interests of all, not just our select group.
Society as a whole takes responsibility for this.
No it really doesn’t, and never has. Families and communities have taken care of that. Not entire societies. It shouldn’t be the youth’s burden to work their entire life just to ensure the old have a comfortable 20+ years to live while owning everything and giving little back.
Socialist mentality is about benefit to all, including the elderly.
Really really depends what you mean by socialism. By owning the means of production? Umm, that’s all people, instead of you guessed it, mostly the elderly.
We also need to fight for ourselves and our own interests. We can fight for the interests of all, not just our select group.
Those two statements directly contradict each other. So what is it, do you want to have a good life for yourself, the family you raise, or the person down the street who will ask each year that more is taken away so they can live comfortably? In previous ‘generations’ the family either did well and took care of each other, or the family suffered, rather than everyone in the next town over, the next city, state and county over suffering because everyone wants to live in a home by themselves and have an acre of land.
Thanks for your input, Elon
I am not sure 100,000 years of how humanity handled things is suddenly ‘Elon’ but you go on queen. Perhaps we as a society should be working on our communities and helping each other out rather than thinking isolation and rugged independence is the way to survive life. But hey, you can only tell people to touch grass so much.
Unfettered exploitative capitalism hasn’t existed for 100,000 years either, the pre-agricultural blueprint was communism. Blame capitalism for rugged individualism and isolation, it’s what it does best: Alienation. So yes, you lick Elon’s boots and apologize for terrible people. That makes you one of them.
the pre-agricultural blueprint was communism.
Umm, it was hunter gatherer where most people has very short brutal lives and had small communities.
Blame capitalism for rugged individualism and isolation, it’s what it does best: Alienation.
Most of the world has capitalism (the entire world to a large degree), and individual individualism is a very very American thing not seen in most other countries around the world.
I am sorry though, it seems your public school systems haven’t been getting the funding the desperately need to teach history for you. Luckily if you spend enough time online, there are a lot of resources that can help you.
This is not old versus young, plenty of old heads want what the younger gen wants.
She said millennials are getting more politically active…
And you’re attacking her because she’s divise?
By any chance do you consider the phrase “Black lives matter” divisive and think “all live matter” is better?
Logically that’s what you’re saying, I just would prefer not to make that assumption, so just trying to clarify.
Edit:
And in the spirit of clarity, this is her quote that you said is divisive:
“Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids,” she said. “And we—that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us on everything from the economy to climate. And we’re taking the reins.”
She didn’t say “boomers”, fucking Fortune added that. And they reported this specifically to stir the bogus generational conflict.
AOC should not have mentioned generations at all, she’s supposed to be uniting us against the billionaire class, and here she is quoted in a billionaire rag about this. I hope she does better, and soon.
That khumbaya idealist world is not happening. The other side actively weaponizes these conflicts successfully, if you keep pretending they don’t exist you alienate everyone.
That’s some big “all
livesgenerations matter” energy you got there…Generational warfare is counterproductive. I have much more in common with a working class boomer, than I do with a rich person who is my same age.
I have much more in common with a working class boomer, than I do with a rich person who is my same age.
Probably. But what did that working class Boomer (who at best, is a few years from retirement) voting for? Probably closer in line to what the young rich person says.
We have more in common, but they still vote against their (and by extension, my) best interests. Unless it’s housing of course. Their best interests conflict with mine and align with the rich young guy.
Ok…
So complain about Fortune magazine…
Or at least click the link to see which part of the headline AOC actually said before blaming her for the entire headline.
Like, it’s just such a weird line to care enough to read the headline and write a comment…
But not take the two seconds to see what her actual quote says.
“Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids,” she said. “And we—that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us on everything from the economy to climate. And we’re taking the reins.”
What about that is “generational warfare” that upset you so much?
Do you disagree with the reality of what she’s saying?
Or do you acknowledge it’s true, and are just upset someone said it? Because saying it is what wins elections.
100% this. So sick of this shit.
This framing gets it wrong. It isn’t boomers vs. millennials. It isn’t immigrants vs. citizens. It’s ordinary people fighting over a shrinking share while an extraordinarily wealthy few accumulate more money, assets and political power than they could ever need. Stop turning class problems into generational wars. Tax extreme wealth.
I agree that is class war but boomers are enabling the wealthy.
Boomers would rather punish millennials for our avocado toast than see billionaires taxed.
I think it’s no surprise boomers though who struggle to learn new tricks and are more susceptible to snake-oil scams and fear mongering. That’s not inherently unique to one generation, for we’ll be there one day too.
Though I’ll say they and GenX may standout a bit more, having grown up in an era so far removed from the modern tech world.
I’m early GenX. Me and my friend embraced the new tech. We were 10 years old and hammering out Basic on a little computer attached to my TV. Typing in code from a magazine so we can play a game. Saving it to tape and trading with another kid who typed out some other game.
Later, when the internet came out, the guy who could connect at the highest baud rate was the coolest. Winsock and Mosaic baby.
Baby Boomers have voted more Republican than both the generation that came before them and the generation that came after them.
Not all boomers.
There is a story for everyone. For you it’s Boomer for others expats and yet for others men. (Or Flanders)
Everyone gets his story so a small portion can fly private!
Exactly right. They manufacture enemies out of us and enjoy their yachts while we squabble and miss the point.
Divide and conquer is the way the right defeats the left in this country.
Put the minor conflicts aside and walk in lock step. A United front is the only way we can resist. 💪
Meanwhile I made the comment you’re replying to, and yet I’ve been unnecessarily aggro elsewhere in this very thread, cuz damn is this tactic effective and requiring constant vigilance to counteract.
I think you and I used to fight. But with this statement I am on your side.
As it’s a class war, we’re all on the same side, opposite the billionaires. We just need to recognize that simple fact.
Cheers, and I love that about this place. Thanks for making Lemmy worthwhile.
Hahaha - I mean. You called me a misogynist rape apologize and followed my comments in other threads. But my trolling eventually wore you down I think. But yes - fun - glad we can be pals now ;)
For what it’s worth, “followed [your] comments in other threads” is not a thing I do, I haven’t bothered to go review our interactions, and I’m not curious enough to do so now, lol. I’m not that type of user.
This is a small place, and if I was commenting on more than one place you were, it’s because I kept running into your comments while I was reading other things.
I speak my mind here, and the heavier the topic, the less concerned I am with politeness and civility. But I don’t go in for “drama” usually, I wouldn’t have recognized your name here had you not recognized mine.
I’m usually just interested in the strength of arguments, or I hold that as an ideal I strive towards, anyway. I sometimes fly off the rails, and I apologize when I feel that I’ve been unfair. I don’t when I don’t.
It’s a little bit boomers vs. millennials, based on the boomers and the millennials I have encountered
… Let’s unpack this.
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Person points out this is just another case of wealthy and powerful people stirring up trouble between two groups of people. This is easy because people are easy to trick. If the headline is to be believed, even AOC, who isn’t stupid, believes boomers are the source of the problem.
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You point out that, based on the people you know, there’s a conflict between boomers and millennials.
but… that’s not proof that the source of the problem actually IS either group. It’s still the case that this conflict is caused by a third group of people who have a vested interest in making sure the poors fight each other.
Okay yes let’s unpack it, please
What percentage of “the people who have a vested interest in making sure the poor fight each other” do you think are boomers, and what percentage are millennials? And of those millennials, what percentage of them are acting on behalf of, and/or dependent on a mega powerful boomer?
And to be fair I said a little bit.
There are millennials in this US administration. The fuck are you talking about?
It’s class. Not age.
Does “on behalf of a powerful boomer” include…ya know…having an inheritance from them and working in the family business?
There are millennials in this US administration.
What pathetic percentage do they take up in your gerontocracy?
I don’t have the first clue how I’d determine something like that. Do you? I’m talking about the US Presidential administration.
Maybe you’re talking about Congress + the actual presidents we always get? The elected officials themselves are all old as fuck.
Wonder how many of those congressional staffers are millennials? And the executive cabinet, etc., all the many many unelected creatures.
Your take is shallow and bad and betrays a poor understanding of our government and who actually does the “work” in it.
[Edit - I didn’t say anything here I disagree with, but I’m bringing an unnecessary tone to discussions in this thread where I’m not even adequately reading the stuff I’m replying to, so apologies on the hostility at the end, I’ma chill out]
Uhh, yeah. Look at how many senators and Congress people there are, then see how many of them are over the age of 50, then divide that number by the total and multiply by 100. Are you 12?
Okay dude, Millennials are no better than boomers, got it. Everyone is the same in every generation…only once you achieve $500k per year do you become hateful and evil
Money is the only thing that corrupts, and the evidence I see of younger people voting differently than older people, and younger people next to me in the protests means nothing. The kind loving boomer neighbors of mine are probably also in that crowd of protestors somewhere, I just missed every single one of them when I looked…
You’re not wrong that it’s rich vs poor first and foremost. But you’re lying to yourself if you think boomers aren’t actively harming younger generations, and that younger generations are totally fine with it.
Cool, thanks for the utterly useless straw man reply where you reduce my own more nuanced take into this idiotic “oh okay so then it must be this cartoon version of what you said”.
I’m not taking the side of boomers at all. They’re uniquely deranged and damaging to us all, and have been that way for decades.
Take whatever you want from my POV, not a lot of point in discussing with you further.
I mean all I literally tried to say was “it’s a little bit millennials vs. boomers”, which you seemed to take as a direct challenge, and had to “well acccccctually” argue against, for some reason. I actually never disagreed with your overall point, I only “straw manned” when it was clear you’d dug your heels in and weren’t reading the actual point of my comments and needed everything in black and white. You really weren’t presenting your argument with much wiggle room at all.
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AOC is a tool like the rest of them. Her messaging is out there to hold millennial women to the Dems.
Every single generation in the past 100 years has said the same thing. “My generation will fix it when we’re in charge”.
The God Damn boomers were the hippies from the 60s. What the fuck happened to peace and love?
My generation (Gen X), my goodness, we could see through all the bullshit. We’re the original centrists.
Every single one of my children’s Gen Z friends are all so woke they never sleep.
Turns out every generation is full of selfish shortsighted dumbasses just like the one before it. Just like “The Greatest Generation”. Just like the boomers. Just like Gen X.
Faith in humanity…fading
What you describe goes way back further than 100 years.
The hippies never disappeared, they were marginalized, ostracized, and excised by a fascist system. The War on Drugs was one of many tools the oppressive government used. Some hippies did in fact become yuppies but I don’t blame them, the system was simply stronger than their ideals.
GenX aren’t what I would call centrists. That implies they try to balance or can see the value in both sides of the political spectrum. They are not leftists by any means as multiple fascist purges of the left in US history has ensured they don’t exist in any appreciable numbers. I could agree they are centrists between the right and the far right.
GenZ are not woke, they are malleable. They don’t have strong ideals, values, or a Zeitgeist if you will. I think you confuse woke with just not caring and accepting reality as it is. This is not really conviction though, it is sinply resignation.
You are absolutely correct every generation is selfish. Also, the generation before will always complain about the later generation. This theme has existed throughout all recorded human history.
Most the people I meet are generally good and will make positive decisions given the time, resources, and opportunity. This is regardless of generation.
The problem clearly lies with a minority of wealthy individuals who have disproportionate level of power and representation. This is also nothing new. This same issue existed when the country was founded.
Nah its just that nice progressive people are also not ruthless murderous cunts, and thus bad at sezing power which then just ends up in the new generation of ruthless murderous cunts. Most people are pretty great which is sadly not a good trait for enacting change.
The people who were hippies in the 60s are mostly still hippies today. Well, the ones who subscribed to the peace and love philosophy at least. Despite the media attention the hippies were never large enough to be a politically influential group in that generation. Most of the boomers grew up bullying the hippies.
Both my boomer parents were hippies. My Mom literally lived in a commune for some time in her early 20s. She voted for the T-Dog in 2016 because she wanted to see real change.
I used to chuckle when I was a kid the way my Dad would look at me and roll his eyes when my grandparents would talk about politics and religion. My Dad loves his MAGA hats now. And wonders why his grandchildren don’t want to be around him.
My sample size of 2 says otherwise!
Counter anecdote: my parents are still far left. My mom was a local union rep, still attends protests, and is volunteering today.
My wife and I are old, and we’ve moved more and more left as life has go on, so now we’re strongly Progressive, and our son is so far left, he thinks we’re fairly conservative. He knows we’d never vote MAGA, though.
My folks were hippies and my dad joined the service with long hair and retired 20 years later with less hair, fewer drugs and still farther to the left of his gay son (and I’m pretty much ‘capitalism bad’ at this point).
I’m a little jealous to be honest. I can barely talk to my dad anymore. He swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Everything he says is word for word from cable news or facebook.
I got lucky. My Dad was a hard-core Republican, and we battled often during the Bush administration, but he drew a solid line at Trump.
We grew up in NY state, and we KNEW who Trump really was from the very beginning, decades ago, long before The Apprentice re-branding, and my Dad refused to support him in even the most casual way. He even quit the neighborhood Republican Club that he’d been in for YEARS, because they all joined the MAGA Cult. He was always a very logical guy, with a Mathematics degree, so he had excellent Critical Thinking Skills, and he wasn’t going to abandon them for the likes of Donald Trump. He could barely stand GW Bush, he really despised Trump.
My mom also despised Trump from the get-go, but when the Pussy Grabber tape came out, she lost her mind. For years, whenever anyone brought up his name, she’d go on a rant, starting with “I don’t understand how ANY woman could vote for that man…” I’ve told her I write about this, and she’s proud of it. He is fully irredeemable in her eyes. Unforgivable.
In my Dad’s last election, in 2018, he voted a straight Democratic Ticket, for the first and only time in his life. He was still a Republican, but never a MAGA.
I got lucky.
The God Damn boomers were the hippies from the 60s. What the fuck happened to peace and love?
LOL, Hippies were maybe 2% of American society in the 60’s and a lot of those Hippies didn’t fucking make it to adulthood between the drugs, wars & hard living.
Humanity is doing good in many places. Its just Americans who are the absolute worst
Yes agreed, please don’t let Americans ruin the “human” name.
Gen X got skipped in politics. The boomers refused to cede power, and it’s like the Xers largely aged out of entering the political space.
Gen X chose to be the “I’m not really into politics” generation. As if electing our leaders was a spectator sport we could just not participate in. And then we all claimed to be too cool for political parties when we started noticing the world was really going to shit. Which is how we got centrists.
I know because that was me.
I’m GenX and have voted since I could. By the time I was in my early 30s I liked by politics like my music - independent. I don’t usually vote by party but by candidate history and ideals.
I’m way the fuck left though. I support left parties like the NDP, but I’m not registered with them. I recently voted for the Liberal dude over NDP because I thought the NDP running was a serious twit.
I don’t think I’d ever voted conservative.
"My generation will fix it when we’re in charge”.
Except my generation hasn’t had a chance yet to prove that they will. My generation is fucked.
I hope I’m wrong but it seems like the ratio of selfish stupid people is constant across generations.
Just like the correlation between disease and war being basically timed out perfectly.
It seems most people like ignorance when it’s convenient to confirming their worldview.
We’re also mad about the corruption, industrial scale pedophilia, and the land theft and genocide. Thats not going away. There needs to be paybacks. The guillotines arent for show. We have criminals to round up.
You mean Nuremberg style trials and hangings? Pretty much every American above the level of mayor going back about 80 years should be put up on trial for crimes against humanity.
Probably a whole lot of companies, and executives that directly supported this as well.
Here here
Capitalism baby!
Capitalism isn’t the problem, it’s wealth inequality. Do you think things were better back under the Manorialism system? No capitalism there, but the rich owned vast manors and the poor who worked their lands were born there and had to work that land for their entire lives.
All capitalism did was to give a shred of social mobility where none existed before.
I think we’re both saying the same thing. I don’t have the answer, but I sure as shit know what the problem is.
The answer is guillotines. Make the rich scared enough about losing their lives and they’ll voluntarily surrender some of their power. The trick is to scare the rich without the rest of the death and chaos that were part of the French Revolution.
some good things happened as a result of the french revolution. Sometimes a revolution NEEDs to happen in order for a slower but persistent and endless level of oppression and rampant structural abuse to be fixed. The revolution produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, setting a wbenchmark for civil liberties that we still go by. It abolished the feudal system and the social injustices, starvation, and brutalities that persisted. It erased forced labor practices of the corvee-- where peasants had to spend a portion of their time laboring for their lord-- essentially a period of hard labor slavery. Lords could force peasants to do extra labor at their whim, and the peasants were bound to drop everything and do as they were told, without pay. It enabled equal representation under the law, where before the revolution birth and wealth were the measure of the availability of justice. It also pulled back the power of the church in France, which was full to bursting with rampant corruption, decadence, and brutal abuse.
The heads of the elite were well worth the trouble, it was the death of the starving and oppressed peasants that was the real cost. Those rich fucks and corrupt rapist priests had it coming and then some. The vast majority of the deaths were due to the elite and their forces attacking peasants and employing scorched earth tactics in fear, around famine and bankruptcies, and the loss of feudal authority. If the people had been more savage in coming after the elite, some of the needless deaths could have been avoided. The years of famine, ill treatment by government and bankruptcies made “the Great Fear” that started it unavoidable and inevitable. Lots of interesting parallels to the US now eh? Although we’re pretty far from being gangs of starving rabble yet. Still a ways to go but we’re on our way.
I hope so.
True to form - Gen X getting skipped over in the discussion again.
Make no mistake, Gen-X is part of the problem.
~And I fully expect to be downvoted for my unpopular opinion.~
In my experience, the older Gen X are not distinguishable from boomers while the younger Gen X are not distinguishable from millenials.
There is a small overlap between (iirc) 1977-1982 (maybe 76-81) where they are called Xennials.
That’s where I fall. My life was a Millennial life, not a Gen X life. All the stuff Millennials complain about happened to me first!
I managed to catch the dot com bubble within a year of getting a steady job, got laid off, worked overseas because there was no work where I lived, finally decided to move back and took the mortgage crisis straight in the nads. That was nearly a decade of my employment life that was interrupted/nerfed.
Make no mistake, Gen X has not been well served by the boomers. I’m sure there are greedy fucks in every generation, and the greedy Gen Xers probably got rich earlier and faster than Y and Z, but the systemic shit is a boomer badge to wear.
Yeah, the boomers (most, anyway, though there are always allies in every generation) spent their whole life pulling up the ladder. Gen X was the last generation that had people who could grab on before it got out of reach, and certainly a few with enough grip caught the same lack of empathy that boomers cultivated (like Musk).
I think that even the youngest boomers got shafted but didn’t realize it.
Yeah, 79 here. I kind of used to think Inwas Gen X but I am way way more millenial aligned in almost every view and way.
What about us mid-Gen X, that were excluded by the Boomers and are very much not millennials?
Sadly not a large group, not enough to make an impact.
Same as it always was.
Same as it ever was…
Fortunately, we’re not alone. We’re all in this together, it’s a class war. We need to stop framing it as a generational war, and build bridges between the generations not shore up the walls the billionaires have built.
There are two of us?
Young x and elder millennials overlap but I think thats more young millenials resembling genx than the other way around
In my experience, it’s a class war, not a generational war.
We’re all the problem, which is why generational blaming is just pointing fingers to make oneself feel less accountable.
Sure doesn’t look like we’re all the problem equally…
And, yet we’re all in the same shit. Stop pointing fingers at your class, and focus on the true enemy in our midst. Tear down the walls the billionaires have erected among us.
It always surprised me how many women voted for Trump. Two of the blue boxes are only 4% away from voting for him.
That seems to be a male problem, and doesn’t even touch on all the other reasons those who would have voted for Harris (or any other blue) didn’t. But sure, let’s use a gender chart to make a generation point. Everything is correlated if you squint enough.
Yes, but it’s the only generation I have any right to point fingers at.
@Rhaedas@fedia.io saying nothing with gusto lol
“We’re all the problem” is some “both sides” level victim blaming and erasure of intrinsic context.
If everyone was “the problem” — There would be no problem.
Everyone isn’t the problem, just the billionaires.
It’s not a both sides but more a larger scale comment on society as a whole. But fit it however you want to fit it. I could have gone into detail on how not everyone can control the damage they do. Some can absolutely make a large difference by their actions. But as for generations, which is what this thread is mostly about, we all have been a problem during the times when we could have done better. The ones with real power want the infighting among us because it’s a distraction, and again, it is our fault if we fall for that again and again.
As are millennials and Gen Z
There’s dumb asses in each generation
Gen X voted for Trump at a higher rate than Boomers.
they voted for krasnov the hardest of all the generations
Seems to go that way Greatest was big, silent was small, boomer was big, X is small, millennials big, Z small, not sure where that leaves Alpha and Beta though, given the birth rates…
The smaller generations tend to be transitional between the larger ones around it. They are also a shorter period of time. Gen Alpha will be a sharp decrease due to population decline and will be the most economically split generation. Gen Alpha is still in process and may need to be a longer period of time to accommodate the longer overall transitions occuring economically, socially, and politically.
I don’t think they are as badly positioned as the millennials.
True to form, people still framing the class war as a generational war.
Entire generations are not in power, only a few corrupt examples of them. All we’ve done, all we’ve ever done, is vote for the “lesser of two evils”. That’s how we got here. We were all duped, and are still being duped, as the voting record will show.
gen X takes a step backward into the bushes
We may not be punk kids anymore but we’re definitely still punk.
Sure you are, dad, sure you are.
Heart says pit, knees say balcony
I think the big difference between boomers and gen X/Millennial isn’t so much “aging gracefully” it’s “aging realistically”.
Like, there wasn’t as much pressure to “grow up” most of us saw all this shit coming and just knew we didn’t have the numbers, but still kept trying.
So we avoided midlife crisis (mostly) and just maintained the same personality and interests the whole time.
So now, were still relatively the same mentally, so acknowledging that our bodies are obviously not the same as 20 years ago isn’t something to freak out about and but a Corvette.
Like, getting old sucks, but it’s better than the alternative…
Just because I’ve had to go from getting hammered and committing petty crimes to having about 2 beers and being in bed before too late…
I’d say I miss watching the sunrise, but I wake up in time to see it. It was always more beautiful when you’re still up for it…
For real - tell me you lack self awareness without saying you lack self awareness.
I’m 48. I play in punk bands and just hosted an anti-profit folkpunk festival in the woods where 20 bands played. Am I also not punk because of some arbitrary line you have drawn?
When did I stop being punk? I’m dying to know.
Getting old sucks, but dont let folks rile you up so much that punk starts being a label rather than a movement. Punk is as punk does. Nobody needs credentials.
Seems like some comments got deleted somewhere. But AOC didn’t mean Punk Kids as a movement, genre, or theme. It was simply the derogative punk. She could have said whiny, or drooling, quiet.
And your festival sounds cool. I stumbled across Defiance OH in Columbus a couple of years go. Been a fan ever since.
I was not replying to AOC’s comment but the ones in here that seemed to intimate that you can’t be old and still be punk.
If I read that wrong, that is on me.
I admire that. Good in you.
But yes punk spans boomers, X, and mil. Part of me wonders if it has a place in Z. It is sort of there - but my friends kids who present Punk are rather authoritarian on social issues and policy. On my side of the aisle - but their application is different.
I’m Xillenial. There is NO part of my life that has not been dominated by boomers. Even now, it’s still the boomers running things. There Gen X didn’t exist. Millennials only exist because they complained after being denied the dream.
…driven by anger over economic futures…
Sounds pretty punk rock to me.
Yeah we’re middle aged punks now!
I’m 43 and have been married for nearly 20 years. We are the old people now
AOC says millennials aren’t punk kids anymore? No shit. I haven’t been a punk kid for 20 years. Even Gen Z aren’t kids anymore. There are a few of them that are already managers at my workplace. Insane how US mainstream culture has held space for boomers for so long. So frustrating how unserious we’re considered to be when we’ve been the ones on the ground making shit happen for the last decade or more. Shout out to Gen X for never having been taken seriously.
As a long time Gen X hater, I can confirm that they’re essentially responsible for boomers being seen as the only adults in the country for the past 50-whatever years.
I mean, the US is still dealing with the silent generation running the country. It’s going to be a long time before the ‘youngest’ baby boomers are gone, like 20+ years still.
Still dealing with? Former President Biden was the first and only silent generation president.
I mean, you’d probably include Trump, Bush Senior and Clinton in there as well.
You wouldn’t, because they aren’t.
They are, but try again.
They very literally are not. Trump barely doesn’t make the cutoff and Clinton is younger than both of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation
1945 is the last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
Donald Trump was born in 1946. No need for me to “try again” when I’m right the first time.
Shout out to Gen X for never having been taken seriously.
Mostly because we didn’t really have the numbers, I think. Also, by the time we hit adolescence we had a lot to be jaded about and boomers, silent generation and greatest generation still held the bullhorn, for the most part.
By the time we were in the workforce, advertisers and the moneyed interests in general were already eyeing up and targeting Gen Y to cater to…
So, she didn’t say “boomer”. But she did frame it as a generational issue.
It really has nothing to do with age. In fact that’s backwards. It’s about people who have been in power too long, and are coincidentally old. They aren’t corrupt because they’re old, they’re corrupt because they’re in power, and they’re old because they’ve been in power a long time. Too long. Bernie is rare because he’s avoided becoming corrupt, his age is coincidental.
We need term limits for Congress. That won’t stop the corruption but it will mitigate the damage they can do, and help prevent them from becoming entrenched and forming damaging long-term alliances with other corrupt politicians and billionaires.
You might say, “voting is the term limit”, but voters are notoriously terrible at spotting corruption, and of course, the politicians do everything they can to hide it.
It’s a generational issue…
For the entirety of America’s recent decline, Boomers have been the largest voting demographic.
They were the ones active in primaries dragging both parties parties right and fucking up almost every aspect of American society.
No one is saying the problem is every single person in that demographic.
But it is 100% that demographics fault. Because they’re the ones that spent a literal lifetime voting for it.
The problem isn’t just the boomer politicians, it’s all the boomer voters who see voting for anyone younger than themselves as a personal insult.
They’re openly age discriminating against anyone younger than them, but anytime you get generations attempt to discuss it, boomers crawl out of the fucking woodwork saying “this” is why they can’t do the thing we were just saying you can’t do
Unfortunately decades of far right am talk radio pipeline adapted very well to gel with online platforms. Then they were able to cleverly take advantage of algorithms to "red pill " people. Younger generations are generally more liberal than their parents but far Right strategies have made a big dent in that.
Plenty of boomers who actually marched for civil rights out there, and plenty of young people stanning turning point usa and mourning charlie Kirk
Younger generations are generally more liberal than their parents
That’s because the American education didn’t even really exist till the 1970s…
That’s when school buses to every student became a thing, and we stopped having one room school houses and started sending everyone to real schools.
From then till GW’s “no child left behind” we taught every American critical thinking and empathy.
Republicans recognized that was a bad thing for them, and changed our education system to rote memorization and the lowest denominator…
The numbers in a year don’t automatically make people more progressive, it’s not an innate thing that happens naturally.
It was happening for a couple decades because we put the work in as a society. We stopped doing that decades ago.
And it would be shocking to find out the people who can’t see that, got a public education within that brief window where critical thinking was actually taught.
Like, the reason Gen Z is the first generation to have lower IQs than their parents isn’t that Gen Z is stupid, they’re just the first full generation to all get “no child’d” some parts of older generations got it, but for Gen Z they all got it, so theres no one to bring the average up.
It’s important to talk about this stuff, because we’re still failing the kids in school today, and if people don’t understand what’s happening, we’ll never get it fixed.
Term limits will not do what you want.
It will just shift the corruption to an unelected support structure of beaurocrats and party suits that have no elections to even theoretically hold them accountable.
Look at the term limit we have: the 23 amendment was a mistake. The country and the world would be objectively better off if it had not been passed.
I think the bigger problem with corruption in government starts with the public service to private industry lobbyist pipeline. There needs to be a full 25 year prohibition on anyone leaving the government and becoming a lobbyist for any industry they had a hand in regulating while they were publicly employed. There are wayyy too many people in agencies that soft-ball the application of the rules they oversee with the aim of getting hired by those firms when they retire. Got that one straight from an inspector who came to the ATFE from the IRS and saw tons of that behavior from their co-workers. Called it out on several occasions and found millions in unpaid corporate taxes. Those laws need to be enforced with teeth.
