Generation X, We Have To Do Better Than Trump

As Steve M. points out, Gen X is firmly the Trump Generation.

 

 

Every other age group favors Biden, but 45-to-64-year-olds favor Trump by 9 points. I'm 64, so I'm at the upper bound of this age range, but I don't think of this group as my people. They're largely Reagan youth. They grew up during the presidency of a controversial former media star who persuaded much of the country that he was just a harmless patriot who loved regular American folks. And now nearly half of them are eager to vote for Donald Trump.

I'm oversimplifying, obviously, but this isn't the first poll I've seen with this skew. It may be more about the life stages these voters are in -- mid- to late career, with an awareness that a comfortable retirement won't be as easy to attain as it was for their elders. (But the generations who are even younger have it worse, and they're mildly or significantly pro-Biden.) It may be that these respondents are old enough to be alienated by race and gender changes in American society that younger people approve of. (But you'd expect senior citizens to be more put off, yet they have a slight preference for the Democrat.)

If these poll numbers suggest enduring Reaganism, it's a mix of economic anxiety and hate for people seen as "others" -- and there's some irony to that, because much of the Reagan generation's economic anxiety is the direct result of the way Reaganism funneled (and still funnels) cash from the poor and middle class to the rich. "Othering" was a Reagan skill, although he substituted a smile and a wink for the scowls of George Wallace and Richard Nixon. (Trump often seems to be having a good time when he's othering people, too.) And Reagan specifically othered Democrats, in a way that GOP politicians and right-wing media outlets have done ever since.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama embodied at least part of subsequent eras, and their message was inclusive. Reagan's wasn't. So it doesn't surprise me if many of the children of his era are Trumpers now.

 

Folks age 45-60 are pretty much all of Generation X, and 60-65 like Steve are the youngest Boomers. I'd ask what happened to us, but we've always been nihilists. We grew up seeing Saint Ronnie and Poppy Bush turn our world to ash and we said "We can do better!"

 

Then the last 30 years happened and "doing better" got beaten out of us with a sledgehammer by AIDS, the Challenger explosion, DARE, two Gulf Wars, 9/11, the dot-com bust, global warming. the Great Recession and hey, now COVID and AI.  The good times in our lives were running around the neighborhood playing Nintendo, watching actual music videos on MTV, crashing R-Rated movies like Platoon and drinking Hi-C Octo Cooler. Gen X wants that shit back, and that means most of us equated the 80's and Reaganism with "the way things should be".

We gotta do better now. Trump's gonna kill us all if we don't.