Downsizing, right-sizing, fast-tracking, offshoring, “shareholder value,” and just-in-time everything took a toll on teams I worked with for years. My father had a series of companies (and jobs) bought out from under him in the 1970s and 1980s while he still had younger siblings in the house. It taught me not to trust corporations farther than I could throw them.
This economy’s trajectory wrung out any pride of accomplishment years ago. I bailed out officially in 2019, although an economic downturn meant mid-2018 was pretty much the end. There had been 10 years to recover from the financial collapse of 2008. I am a Boomer.
The Week’s Zoe Fenson assesses her place in an economy she serves but does not serve her. The path her parents followed into adulthood has all but vanished. Her millennial cohort is “squeezed by a machinery that was set in motion long before we were born.” The Washington Post dubbed hers “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history.”
Fenson writes:
When my peers and I began taking our first steps into a quaking workforce, we were told that the recession into which we’d just launched would be the defining economic experience of our lives. Only now, more than a decade into our independent adult lives, are many of us even beginning to achieve some semblance of job security or financial independence. And just a few months into a global pandemic, we are right back where we started. Many of my peers are losing jobs or having our savings depleted. Once in a generation has come around for us twice.
Add the demands of children, concerns for the health of aging parents, and their own bodily wear and tear to economic shutdown and unparalleled U.S. leadership failure in response to the pandemic. Pax Americana has become “Rest in Peace” for 130,000 Americans. And we’re not even through the first viral wave. Fenson’s generation faces a future nothing like the America they were sold.
We are grappling with the enormous urgency to act — to protect ourselves and each other, to hold our country accountable for the blood on its hands — while also picking ourselves back up from repeated economic and political body blows. We are simultaneously too young to give up, and too old to start fresh. So where do we go from here?
Capitalism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, Karl Marx believed. But a worker-planned, self-managed economy is not coming to replace it. The connected world is too noisy and unruly for the orderly collective action Marx imagined. What, then?
E.J. Dionne wonders if predictions that Barack Obama’s election was a harbinger of a generational torch being passed were not wrong, but merely premature. Change is still coming, just delayed by the backlash of an older generation:
But there is another way to look at those 2008 predictions: They were not wrong, they were just premature. As a result, a 77-year-old Democratic presidential nominee may be the unlikely instrument of a new generational alignment.
Why now and not in 2008? The most important reason is the obvious one: The backlash against Trump is the driving factor in this election so far — and there could be no better representative of the politics of the past than the current occupant in the White House. He is stubbornly out of touch with the country’s attitudes on many questions, and especially so on racial justice.
The generational cohort celebrated in Obama’s victory is now more dominant in the electorate. More than 6 in 10 eligible voters this year will be under 55 years-old. This is not the America of 2008:
Three things are true: (1.) The post-boomer generations are more diverse than the rest of the electorate. (2.) Younger whites are more liberal than their elders on matters of racial justice — as a Washington Post-Schar School poll showed this month — and on social issues. (3.) The share of millennials who vote will be higher than in Obama’s elections simply because they are older than they were in 2008 or 2012.
But demographics are not destiny. Post-Boomers still need to vote to grasp the power that is theirs for the taking. Trump’s weakness does not make Biden an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Generational realignment alone does not remake a dysfunctional economy. Biden shows no signs of having the vision for that even if he wins the presidency. But winning the White House in a pandemic-driven, economic and social crisis, he might listen to those who do if he has the political space to act.
Hope for that lies in increasing the influence of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive women elected with her, especially at the state level. It lies in growing the influence of system critics such as Rutger Bregman and Anand Giridharadas. And perhaps in Biden giving Warren the backing to enact the plans she ran on for bringing accountability back to Washington, D.C. and to a modern form of capitalism that has metastasized since Marx critiqued it. There have been capitalist acts committed between consenting adults since before Hammurabi. Perhaps the fault lies not in the system but in ourselves.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.