A lot of hard work and solid analysis went into Peter Beinart’s piece in The Daily Beast. We should discuss it. Let me open the floor to the readers. What do you think?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Not sure I can get through it after the opening paragraph:
Clinton destroyed more fundamental components of the New Deal than Reagan ever even attempted to do. Not to understand that is to live in some artificial political sphere of Reagan bad and Clinton good.
Then there is the small issue of Beirnart’s “hard work” on Iraq. Prefer to spend my time hearing from voices that get major issues right instead of completely wrong.
Correct. It’s all wrong from the moment it starts, because Beirnart just assumes by fiat that the only way to discuss Left/Right oppositions is by means of the “big government”“spending” vs. “small government”“freedom” metric (which, of course, is nothing but a facile, superficial conservative talking point).
There is so much more to American politics — particularly along the grand, decade-by-decade axis Beirnart’s shooting for here — but movement conservatives can’t see anything beyond their myopic “spending” anxieties.
I’d like to see this substantiated. Yeah, there’s TANF — but there was a massive EITC expansion.
Hyperbolic at best.
Off the top of my head there’s welfare reform, capital gains tax cuts and the repeal of Glass Steagall. Hard also to see much effort by the Clinton SEC or antitrust boyz. How one characterizes deregulation of telecom and refusal to allow regulation of commodity derivatives is up to them…
Glass-Steagal and capital gains taxation don’t qualify as fundamental components of the New Deal.
Unemployment insurance, Social Security, the alphabet agencies like SEC, etc. yes.
Tendentious…
NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall did more, in practical terms, than Reagan ever did to erode this country’s middle class. And the Communications Act of 1996 – which went much, much farther in advancing Reagan’s deregulation of broadcast media, erosion of local media, and concentration of most major US media in a few corporate hands, has been critical in ensuring that people didn’t understand it.
In other words, the moderate Republican was actually worse than the extremist Republican.
OK…..
IMO Beinart’s claim that Reagan focused on reducing government’s role in the economy wrong-foots this entire discussion. Clinton calmed the racial backlash to a certain extent but facilitated the Reagan economic agenda in many ways.
Though Beinart would be loath to admit it, Reagan broke the New Deal coalition by race-baiting and fear-mongering against urban elites and eggheads. If he’s not discussing Reagan, the Southern Strategy, and the backlash against racial and feminist progress, I’ll take a pass on Beinart’s article too.
It is completely apparent you didn’t get through the rest of the article because it is not remotely like Clinton Good, Reagan Bad.
He spends a lot of time talking about how Clinton/Reagan debate was right/more right and how even Obama has put forth conservative solutions (single payer, nationalization of banks is simply not on the table for discussion among the elite). The thrust of the article is the millenials coming of age might actually make it left/right in a number of ways.
He also says Elizabeth Warren is emblematic of the changing climate and how she might be a threat to Clinton because of it, while neutralizing her allure as first woman president since she is more in tune with where the new generation is.
It was actually an interesting article with some good points. I’m not sure about Clinton as the left measuring stick, but I think it’s correct about him changing the nature of the party. As for Warren, I would love for her to run but I’d fear for her well-being – she appears to me to be the real deal, and as such she should avoid any grassy knolls if she actually runs for president.
How is Clinton the measuring stick when Obama spent most of his first term cleaning up shyt that originated with Bill Clinton and his ‘ triangulation’?
I’m wondering about the “liberal media” that Bienert mentions in his closing. I can’t believe anyone can still talk about the liberal media with a straight face.
Oy! Is it irony?
Interesting article. I’ll have to find a moment to really digest it, but the author does grasp that the Millennials are going in a much different direction – albeit a work in progress. As for the Reagan-Clinton era in US politics, it can’t end soon enough.
The Daily Breast.
A font of liberal bullshit at best. It even makes Huff ‘n Puff Post look good.
Clinton and Reagan.
Two faces of the sane damned PermaGov coin.
And worse? Even that coin is counterfeit!!!
Peter Beinart?
Just another Pekinese of the Press. He supported the Iraq War from a “liberal” point of view until it began to stink of American exceptionalist rot and then he turned around…who knows how many hundreds of thousands of deaths and maimings later…and “opposed” it.
“Mea culpa” my royal Irish ass!!!
More like “Me a survivor!!!”
WTFU
AG
I think it’s a worthy attempt to make sense of the political world as it now stands. It’s incomplete for many reasons, but it would be hard for anyone to do better.
I don’t agree with his thesis that we’re shaped exclusively by our late teen to early adult years. We’re also powerfully shaped by our childhoods and by the views of our caretakers.
But there appears to be a generational shift happening and with it an impending political realignment. Young people have moved further left than they’ve been in a long time. They carry cynicism about government down from their parents but are more open to government solutions.
Dean rode this wave for a time. Obama rode it all the way to the White House but then disappointed those who placed so much hope and so many expectations upon him. Warren is a legitimate candidate to carry that mantle moving forward. I think he’s correct that Hillary remains vulnerable.
It’s a worthwhile article. I think he’s on to something. Maybe not spot on but zeroing in.
I’ll admit that I’m inclined to judge Beinart’s work extremely harshly. Mainly because of Iraq, but he also represents many non-military “liberal” positions very poorly. So, I’m wishing to view BooMan’s post as extremely sarcastic, and his invitation to comment as an invitation to tee off.
Let us count some of the ways Beinart misinforms and irritates:
I poked through a bit of the rest, and it’s not all awful. I just wish he’d dispense, or his publishers would dispense, with his labeling as a liberal. I’m imagining an Ideological Draft. Beinart: Given Away By Liberals.
I won’t comment on Beinert’s piece in particular, and just comment on our politics as a whole.
I was born in 1988, so I’m pretty much the definition of this generation, and in many ways some of the people Beinert talks about in the article. I’m 25 years old and I’m slated to make $90,000 this year; I expect this to perhaps double next year when I am rid of the $61,000 in college debt I accumulated and can put the money I don’t spend into assorted assets (I have $12,000 in debt left). I’m educated, straight, white, and came from an Evangelical home. I should by all VSP analysis be a model Republican voter.
But I’m not. I’m the opposite of that. I want that white supremacist piece of shit party to burn, and then trample on its ashes. I agree that people’s views are molded when they’re my age, I know mine have. I’ve only gotten farther and further to the left, and perhaps they’re still evolving and changing. I know I’ve grown more and more anti-war, so there’s that.
The defining moments for me were the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and Barack Obama.
It disgusted me.
3. Barack Obama. I came of political age during his ascension, and I’ll never forget when I switched to support him, which was when he spoke on MLK, Jr. Day in 2008. Something there resonated with me, and I still don’t know what. Either way, even if I grew to disagree with much of his politics and seeing him as “more of the same” around March, he was still a very important factor in inspiring me to go into public service. I thought of being a teacher, despite looking to do engineering; then I wanted to do humanitarian work around the globe. None of that materialized for reasons I can’t discuss here, but I still needed to dream and yes, hope, that a better day approached. So I worked my ass off, 40 hours per week on top of full load of college, to turn my district blue (and we did, by about a thousand votes). That experience was necessary and shaped a lot of who I became to be; whether it’s talking with strangers (which I was afraid to do before), or organize an event (which I did with a Take Back the Night Rally and March in college, something I never imagined myself doing), or learning how to articulate an idea on the go from the many debates I had with idiot right wingers in parking lots at the football games.
Anyway, all of this culminated together to form who I am, politically, and what I believe. Taking a few Women’s Studies courses (enough for a minor) was also warranted.
So what do we care about?
You have a wonderful story. I suspect our stories parallel to a certain degree – although I am quite ancient compared to you. And yes, Women’s Studies courses definitely had an impact on me back in my day too.
You hit on some critical issues – ones that I have noticed my young ones are passionate about. Wow, the environment in particular is going to loom large for the long haul, given how much damage has been done to the atmosphere, water supply, etc.
My children, 26 and 22, seem focused on those same issues. Both earn good money. My son, a computer guy, earns just north of $100k. My daughter just graduated from a top-5 law school and will start work with a huge Wall Street law firm in October. Neither would participate in something like the Occupy Movement but they both consider themselves liberal and see an important role for government. Both dislike the right-wing crazy.
These kids have grown up seeing the excesses of the right but they have no memory of the corruption that was endemic in the Democratic party of the 1970s. I think it was that corruption that turned many off to liberal politics. There was a real sense of hypocrisy. Politicians who voted for busing would send their kids to private school. Now we see more of that sort of hypocrisy from the right. Chicken hawks who vote for war but make sure their kids don’t serve — that sort of thing.
Clinton, to me, was cut from that old Democratic cloth. I never liked or trusted him. In my opinion, Obama has way more integrity.
There was not a lot to like about the Dems back in those days. Didn’t help that during my formative years a lot of Dem candidates tended to run to the right of their GOP competitors on anti-drug laws, among other sorts of “law and order” nonsense. The Peace and Freedom Party (in my state of residence at the time) began to look real good, real fast. The issues seabe mentions were generally ones that ended up mattering a lot to me back then (along with economic inequality, which in hindsight wasn’t nearly so bad as it seemed then). Given where most of my peers’ heads were at, I often felt like I was out of sync with my age group – and those whom I might call my comrades at the time felt very similarly. To be on the right side of a lot of these issues and actually be in sync with one’s peers must feel comforting.
I don’t really get how you can say that without including jobs and economy especially in regards to school debt and financial security.
I’m a few years older than you but I still land in the millennials (barely!) and this was and still is a huge thing.
I figured that’s a given as any generation values that.
In my experience the cost of college for my parents in the 1970s was insanely low. I can barely even wrap my head around it. I’d say that it has an entirely different level of salience to someone today than it did 40 years ago.
I can’t believe that I waded through all of those references to Karl Mannheim to arrive at an essentially ABH article. It reminds me why I generally don’t scan the Beast.
It is so preciously conventional wisdom, down to why Dean flamed out and Occupy collapsed. In both cases pretty much lies that ignore the effect of the Wall Street media. In the case of Occupy Wall Street, the effects of continuing brutal arrests and innuendo about terrorism that got parents calling their kids like they did after Kent State and warning them against participating in that movement.
As good as Todd Gitlin is on documenting the Occupy movement, it is much better to go to David Graeber’s The Democracy Project for a view of what happened in New York City.
As for his generational analysis, it is much to broad-brush unless he is going to focus only on Millennials in New York City or the common experiences of Millennials in upper-middle-class families who have a college education and face poor prospects.
Both Republicans and Democrats have the difficulty of explaining the continuing failure of both government and corporations to serve the interests of ordinary citizens. Neither can bring forward an honest and critical analysis of how it came to be, why it persists, and what it would take to make it different. In both cases, it is the failure to address the fact that corporations are government-privileged entities, enjoying many privileges unavailable to ordinary human beings. Those privileges are why there are books entitled Inc. Yourself.
I don’t see the fault lines in the intragenerational Millennial arguments yet–at least not within the context that a political party could market to. What I see is the “I’m on my own” libertarian individualists on one edge of the argument and the “let’s talk this through, figure it out, and do what needs to be done” mutual aid anarchists on the other. But both of those are small minorities of all Millennials.
Some other positions are emerging, some similar to European Pirate Parties, whose primary issue is intellectual property rights and internet freedom. There is still a lot of militant environmentalism that the staid US Green Party has not captured. And the neo-Nazi groups have not been idle, especially since the arrival of the internet. Millennials in small communities in which there is a lot of anti-foreigner nativism are seeing these as ways of being more militant. And there are beginning to be religious Millennials, especially young veterans, who are pursuing the infiltration of the armed forces and police forces with a message that erases the separation of church and state. Hidden agendas dominate in political movements on the right.
We are in a moment of political ferment for the next four to five years. The political battles for the moment are going to be on the local and state level. It could be that New York City is a bellwether of the possible. Rahm Emmanuel’s re-election campaign (unless he does not run again) is going to be another. But so are the many elections in rural counties and states and rural legislative districts that today are the base of the Republican Party. And the suburban rings that currently are strangling every city in the country.
The biggest problem of all with Beinart’s article. De Blasio must win the general election for the putative political shift to take place. I guess we will have a measure of the degree to which Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg have succeeded in gentrifying New York City.
Worth reading against the backdrop of a pair of similarly intentioned articles that Mark Lilla published fifteen years ago, “A Tale of Two Reactions” and “Still Living with ’68”:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/may/14/a-tale-of-two-reactions/?pagination=false
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/magazine/lilla_1998StillLiving.pdf
It’s as coherent a story about our current state of political flux as any I’ve seen, althoughI have my doubts about some of the assertions in it.
For one, the Mannheim analysis seems too pat in an era where many young adults stay in flux without a stable home for a long time. Do their political opinions calcify at the same time as in previous decades?
I see the millenial worldview more as a continuation of a trend that’s been going on for many years than as a sudden break. My Gen-Xer worldview was shaped by experiences that are similar but less intense – the recession of the early 90s, the first Gulf War, Iran-Contra, the Clinton impeachment, and a world more multiracial and diverse and less economically secure than that of our parents.
I do think the political current is moving past Hillary and have a feeling this could be 2005 all over again where she is concerned… but much as I admire Elizabeth Warren I’m not yet convinced she has the charisma to be the next standard bearer for the left. I was surprised by how much trouble she had in her Massachusetts senate election. I do hope she gives it a chance and runs.
I have concerns about Warren’s charisma, too.
For that matter, just just got elected senator. She can do a lot of good in that role.
As for Hilary, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her tack more left if that’s what the tea leaves are saying.
Can we convince Hillary to tack back to what she believed in 1970? That’s what I would love to see.
Very interesting piece. I’ve got to agree that millenials seem ready to follow a more left-leaning path. (My own son seems in accord.) Breaking with our recent past, if this is as it is asserted to be, would be a very good thing.
In fifty years they‘ll be yelling about keeping the government out of Medicare.
They make new old people every day. The new old people may not be tea-party crazy, but they’ll skew conservative, and vote more conservatively, than the electorate as a whole. Happens everywhere, not just here…. The Tory vote skews old, e.g.
Research has proven that older people do not always become more conservative. It’s that way now because that generation was always more conservative. At other times, the older generation has been more liberal than their children. Generations tend to choose a side young and stick with it.
I agree that it is important to try to examine the experiences that young citizens have been presented with if one is to try to gauge them politically.
America’s young people have been presented with an unmatched record of abject failure by their society and nation, failure which began with a stolen election in 2000, followed by a spectacular act of Islamic terrorism in 2001, bungled by their gub’mint, a resulting significant recession, an illegal war of aggression accompanied by so many lies, falsehoods and so much incompetence that it can never be adequately documented, topped by a Wall Street-led, fraud-based Great Recession that wrecked the economy, doomed gub’mint finances and has probably made long term economic prosperity for them impossible. They have callously been thrown into long term debt servitude if they went to college. They now watch the spectacle of a completely paralyzed national gub’mint and state gub’mints perpetually scrambling for funds while cutting the most basic services, with no possible solutions to anything in sight.
On top of that, informed millenials (mostly all of them) know that the grownups have hopelessly dropped the ball on the most important issue of the day, the preservation of the planet’s 11,000 year old stable climate, while drunkenly engaging in a new, untested form of massive destruction for the last drabs of fossil fuel, hydraulic fracking.
Overall, kind of a raw deal compared with those who grew up under Reagan-Clinton.
So what are the two political parties complicit in this colossal failure to do? Especially as their chief concern for 30 years or so has been the economic health of already well off plutocrats? What is a useless corporate apologist media to tell them?
Millenials and their co-generations gaze out at a failed culture and a government that can’t reform itself. And this will be a very large boat, as things are not going to get better for each succeeding class of graduates. This is the recipe for revolution, not mild political “evolution” adroitly managed by all-knowing political parties and their creatures. Bad news for the equity and debt markets, plutocrat masters. And cash won’t be king!
It’s also important that most of these young adults remember the Clinton years not for the politics, but for the years when the economy was good and children were well cared for. They remember how things CAN be, and they are idealistic enough to believe that we can return to that. They’re not nearly as cynical as the X-ers. They intend to fix things, and I suspect they will.
I might quibble with a few things, but I think he’s right that the under 30’s represent a massive change in american culture and politics.
If you’ve seen some of the talk about how little they drive cars – even when they have money – that’s another symptom of it, something radically different than their parents that represents a fundamental component of daily life. They seem comfortable with togetherness, too, living in cities, and they are used to ethnic diversity. They ARE ethnic diversity.
They will probably see my generation (x) and the baby boomers as aliens, if they don’t already. I look forward to them taking the reins.
I agree with most of what you say here. But one of the interesting things I have seen with the Millennials is a lack of interest is ageism. I think it’s because they spend so much time on the internet, where you can’t judge someone by their statistics. They don’t buy that you can’t trust anyone over thirty. They judge people as individuals and they trust those who have proven themselves trustworthy. It’s one of their most endearing qualities.
That’s encouraging because the one thing I did get from this article is that they seem to have a lot in common with MANY boomers, for whom JFK was still the greatest president, were shaped by opposition to the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle, who have been fairly disgusted with the direction politics has taken in this country since Reagan, and who support President Obama.
And by the way, Elizabeth Warren is one of us. Hillary Clinton is a yuppie.
I’m almost 60. The children were going to save us for most of my life. There were a few years when Alex Keaton bid fair to change that, but only a few…
My main concern is that polls show that the generation after millenial is more right wing again (the current teens). That worries me a lot because it means the sociopathic nature of modern capitalism and the right have seeped down to bedrock.
I will say I am broadly sympathetic to leave us alone ethos while seeing why it is often wrong. When you have the GOP always trying to show it’s way into your bedroom you want it to stay the fuck out.
I think there is a big problem with the simple-minded generational model. It matters what generation your parents were in as well. And what their politics were within that generation. And their life experience. Just consider the biography of David Horowitz to see how what were the general experiences attributed by marketers and, in this case Beinart, do not play out universally and are somewhat all over the lot. Demographics is not destiny.
Do you have some links to polls that identify the rough year in which the Millennial trend changed to something else? It would be interesting to see what events clustered around that year.
I think now that “right wing” has become too vague, just like “left wing”. Specifically what attitudes and views are being pointed to as right-wing?
I’ve only seen a few scattered polls over the last few years. Most of the stuff I can find is on privacy or internet use. I’ll go take a look and see if I can dig up something.
My kids are middle and younger Millennials, and this is pretty much what I see in their friends. Their generation grew up with friends on the internet, so gender and race were never that important to them. They grew up being able to share every decision with their whole gang, so democracy is an everyday occurrence. They were well loved as children, so they trust in community and believe in taking care of one another. They are really generous people for the most part, inclined to think about the greater good. And I can’t wait until they have more of a say. The X-ers are not the types to change the world. We will settle for just being able to keep it alive. But as the Boomers give way to the Millennials, everything will be different. It’s going to be fun to watch.
I quit reading at the part that said Millenials favor privatization of Social security, then said that Millenials were Socialists. That’s the most bizarre definition of Socialism that I’ve ever read.
It went on to say that they also believe the government should put more money into Social Security. Social Security is not well understood by many people in this nation, and is virtually a mystery to the young. Especially since they keep being told that it won’t exist by the time they need it. But they believe in taking care of one another, and as they become more educated about it, their views will come more into line with their socialist beliefs.
Is this the end of an era? Possibly. I represent the old end of the “millenial’ generation, as I was born in 1980. There are some things about this article that resonate with me. I think there is a legitimate generational rift that forms somewhere between people who came of age in the 1980s and the 1990s. Culturally, there are some significant differences. Growing up in the personal computer era is a big one. The displacement of white-dominated rock music by minority-dominated hip hop in popular music is another. Not only do you have a generation of people who are less white than the ones who preceded them, but even the white members of that generation are far more likely to have grown up listening to music performed by black, mexican, puerto rican, artists.
Politically, I think the divide is less clear. Pretty much everyone with a fair amount of working time left in their lives is pretty affected by our “new economic realities”. It’s not just the people just entering the job market, a lot of us with “stable” jobs are pretty terrified of what might happen if our situation were to change. The increase of hateful extremism in the oldest amongst us has also galvanized a sort of coalition between liberals and those who are less so. So while I do think there’s a leftward push within the Democratic party, I’m not sure it’s so stark as Beinart presents it. But then again, was Reagan really all that much more of a right-leaning politician than Nixon? Or were the conditions more favorable for his politics?
I like how Beinart introduces Mannheim:
It’ the same kind of idea I was referring to a week ago trying to express something about the factors that build our facilities of judgment:
But Beinart lost me in the 6th paragraph when he starts naming the age cohort not after the events of their formation but the political leaders of the times (eg. “the Reagan-Clinton era”). Then he quickly morphs into language that appears to define the leaders as the key events. Sure a leader can be a transformative event but this is starting to stray a bit from Mannheim’s model.
He also just gets it wrong. People in their late 50s remember The Bomb, Vietnam War, civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement and even the arab oil embargo. THOSE were formative events that defined the generation. Beinhart just skips to the presidential term labels:
So he lost me but I will probably read this later and perhaps write a diary that I think incorporates Mannheims ideas more reliably.
Beinart may have done better after that sixth paragraph, but in case he doesn’t I’m not in the mood to read crap right now.