The Mindset of My Schizoid Generation

Update: Well now, Tengrain has linked this article to another Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just a reminder to PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET THE VOTE OUT AND EVERYONE VOTE DEMOCRAT! #BlueWave2022 !!! 

There's been a bit of discussion in the media about the role Generation X - my generation, the generation of Slackers and Grunge and mullets and Gangsta Rap and crazy hair and MTV and Star Wars and neon fashion and (skip a bit, brother) - is playing in modern politics, especially when a recent poll came out suggesting the current set of 50-somethings (NO WE'RE NOT OLD, WE'RE NOT OLD, WE STILL WANT OUR MTV) could arguably be more conservatively radical than even the Nixon-age Boomers.

Well, it may be worse than that: My fellow Gen Xers may be more conspiracy-addled and wingnut-driven than all the other generational groups in America. All the MAGA and QAnon craziness in one easily packaged demographic.

We turn to Shirin Ali at Slate (paywalled) to see how bad the post-punk, post-modern, post-sanity mindset of the Slacker Generation has gotten: 

The Gen X cohort, born between 1965 and 1980, certainly did experience one specific set of significant events that could have defined their politics: They grew into adulthood while Republicans held the White House for 12 years, as Politico points out... They also became the first generation to grow up with personal computers while also experiencing shaky economic times as children and young adults in the 1980s and ’90s.

But it’s not just about what they’ve lived through—it’s also about what they’re approaching. Retirement is an area of concern for Gen X, with the demographic expected to retire in the early and mid-2030s. It’s something they are seriously concerned about, showcased in a study from Transamercia Center for Retirement Studies that found only 22 percent of Gen X were “very” confident they would be able to fully retire with a comfortable lifestyle and 78 percent said they were concerned Social Security would not be there for them when they did decide to retire. This could explain the rightward bend...

I don't know how that could happen: If Gen X is worried about Social Security not being there, you'd think they would avoid the Republicans who are openly planning to gut Social Security if the Republicans retake Congress next year. Back to Ali:

But a closer look doesn’t paint such a simple, red picture for Xers. A Gallup poll conducted from January to July 2022 found that 30 percent of Gen X identified as Republican while 44 percent were independent—the highest proportion of independent voters in any generational block. And Gen X doesn’t actually seem to be aging into conservatism either, in fact, it’s the opposite: In 1992, Gallup found that adult members of Gen X were even more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats, 32 percent to 24 percent. So really, Gen Xers have swung a little more toward the Democratic party over time (now 27 percent identify as Dems)...

Whew. So if there's any good news, it's that my generation has stuck to the habit of not joining up for shit. Still, where's our collective head at?

Currently, the oldest Gen Xers are 57 years old, and along with every other generation, they likely formed their partisan presidential voting patterns when they were around the ages of 14 to 24, according to a working paper by Columbia University’s Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman from 2014. They attempted to debunk the idea that as people age they inevitably become more conservative by arguing that most people’s political orientations in early adulthood carryover at least until late middle age. The theory wasn’t assigned to a specific political ideology, but instead whatever political views people developed through adulthood tend to stick throughout life, whether it’s Democratic-leaning or Republican...

It seems that, yes, our childhoods and college years - the years we form our world-views - do radicalize us for the rest of our lives. Growing up under Reagan and the Bush the Elder term that extended into the early 90s - and then under the Clinton years that stuck to a pro-Capitalist, centrist political policy - made it so that a majority of us Xers - even Indy and Democratic voters - are still affected by the Rightward world-view that instructed us as teens:

Reagan captivated the country and was reelected for a second term in a landslide, followed by Bush I. By the time Bill Clinton landed in the White House, Reagan Conservatives were roughly 30 years old, well past the peak of political socialization.

In other words, Gen X isn’t a political novelty, it’s a cohort that came into adulthood when Republicans dominated the White House, and that likely influenced their voting patterns as they aged. Like Gelman’s research found, white voters born in 1952 and socialized during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were 5-10 percentage points more likely to support Democratic presidential candidates than those born in 1968 who went on to become Reagan conservatives...

Ali also points out something else: About 61 percent of Generation X is White. Of the post-Boomer generations aging into political power, we're the least ethnically diverse... and as such not as affected by social justice issues that the Millennials and Gen Z groups are. While Gen Xers are still informed by some of the racism and sexism they witnessed - Rodney King, the awareness of workplace sexual harassment, et al. - they are not directly affected by those external issues.

Considering this matter as an Xer myself, I have to look back at how I perceived my own demographic and how short-sighted I was. When Obama won the Presidency in 2009, I was under the impression that my generation - which was coming to that moment that the Boomers were starting to age out of power allowing Xers to fill the gaps - would be more Left-leaning than how we turned out. I knew me and mine grew up under Reagan and were influenced by his role, but I had hoped we were also too jaded and cynical to buy into the Far Right Ayn Randian fantasies that had been in vogue during the 80s. 

I know we grew up to "Red Dawn" and "Rocky IV" and "Top Gun," reading "Atlas Shrugged" instead of "Great Gatsby," all of that. But I know that also we grew up to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism as a political-economic global threat. I would have figured a majority of my fellow Xers would have turned away from the "socialism"-baiting of the Far Right: Where "socialism" was Dog-Whistle code for the anti-Semitism and racism that still informs much of the hatred and extremism of the modern Conservative movement. 

I had hopes that my generation - which brought us Grunge and the Internet and a Slacker mentality - would have been too split, too schizoid to cause any damage to the nation and world. It seems I was wrong. Too many of the kids from the 1980s grew up to be the QAnon conspiracy nuts of the 2020s.

What has happened is that the large plurality of Generation X has tuned out, given the high percentage of non-party affiliation my generation has today. But it's left my era a bit over-represented by the Reagan-spawn who are leading the rabid mobs of the modern GOP voting base, which is a shame. It'd be nice if more of the independent-minded Gen X voters reappraised their place on the political battlefield and realize the Far Right Fantasy is a nightmarish realm of racism, poverty, and pain.

It's not too late, Xers. You can still vote Blue this midterms and save the next generations from wingnut doom. GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR DEMOCRATS THIS 2022!!! 

The Nasty Public Secret of trump's Failures

It's been something I've harped on a long time: how trump's reputation as a savvy businessman was all a lie when you look at his long history of bankruptcies, failed projects, and the honest-to-god killing of an entire sports league.

And now his tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s re-affirmed all of that, pointing out how trump lost more money than any other American taxpayer - even actual billionaires  - on a scale that suggests either sheer incompetence on trump's part... or blatant acts of fraud.

Consider this little tidbit about what trump did to play the Stock Markets (from Matthew Yglesias at Vox.com):

...He would secretly buy shares of stock in a company, publicly suggest he was planning to make a bid to buy the whole company, watch the share price rise in response to the Trump takeover rumors, and then sell his shares at a profit without actually doing anything.

He did this successfully with United Airlines in 1987, which led him to try it again with Hilton Hotels, Gillette, and Federated Department Stores in 1988. This was apparently a “fool me five times, shame on you” situation, however; investors caught on to the fact that Trump was running a scam, and it didn’t work anymore...

And yet from the reports we're getting, people on Wall Street figured out trump was pulling these Pump And Dumps. WHICH ARE AGAINST THE LAW. And yet... nobody charged him with sh-t while the statue of limitations were in effect. Unless the SOB has been doing it recently based on the latest tax returns trump still refuses to release, he can't be touched on the matter. Which sucks.

This is from a specific blog rant I wrote back during the 2016 campaign, about how trump developed this not-so-secret track record of screwing over his own employees and contractors to where someone, ANYONE, should have gone public with his deal-breaking and get his ass thrown in jail for it or something:

It's good that the stories are getting out there now, during a period that our voters can realize that Trump isn't a successful businessman, he's a successful thief. But it bothers me that someone like Trump was allowed to operate like this for over 40 years and got away with it. Shouldn't some requirement of business ethics DEMAND that a crook of Trump's venality be hauled into the spotlight for his sins long ago? Before it got worse?

Which all leads to this sad open secret about the law in the United States:

The law is entirely geared to favor the wealthy.

I mean, that's the whole point of the law when you think about it. Read up on the Code of Hammurabi. One of the earliest forms of codified law in Western civilization, it may have set down punishments for criminal acts but it also spelled out who owned what, the fair rate of exchange for goods and services, and other things people tended to argue over.

Every legal system is a reflection of that, and ultimately focused on one thing: How to do business. Look at your city and county ordinances. A lot of local laws focus on zoning and property rights (who owns what). Your state laws and statutes, there's a lot in there about property rights, theft protections, wages, money, regulations for business (who owns what). The US Code covers that stuff at the federal level.

When the Founders created the federal system under the Constitution, they did so because their original model of government under the Articles of Confederation did a lousy job of spelling out who owned what... and they feared the rise of mobs who would take from the rich - the Revolutionary Founders themselves - if they didn't set up a stronger system to enforce who owns what.

As a result, you ever take a good long look our legal system, you'll see there are two different rules for the poor and the rich. A lot of laws are set up to punish the poor - high bails, prison time for most low-income crimes, legal fees that a public defense can never cover - and protect the rich - lawyers on retainer to argue probation, harder standards of proof for financial fraud, etc.

Click on the link to the US Code covering Securities Fraud: it spells out penalties covering "fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 25 years, or both." Yet in practice the fines tend to be maybe ten thousands or hundred thousands of dollars, but never the amount that the fraudsters committed, meaning a lot of them can pay off fines with their equivalent of pocket change. And jail time? Usually measured by months instead of years. If you compared a guy who stole $10 million from an investment firm who pays a $50,000 fine and spends three months in jail to a guy who stole a flatscreen TV from WalMart who has no money to pay and spends three years in jail, you see all the rewards go to the white-collar crook while the low-income crook suffers more.

You might retort "Well we're arrested fraudsters before," and yes we've seen the likes of Boesky and Madoff and Milken head to court and even some jail time, but those are the painful exceptions to the hundreds pulling lower-scale scams. They were so brazen and reckless that they were easy to catch... and in most of their cases they ripped off fellow rich folk, which is the big no-no within their circles. And even then, it took years before anyone listened to the one investigator warning the financial world about Madoff. Even then, it takes years for white collar crooks to see the inside of a courtroom.

trump should have been one of those fraudsters who crossed those lines. he lied and cheated to a lot of fellow millionaires to pretend to be one of them... and yet he was routinely let off the hook. All because we as a nation do not take financial fraud crimes serious enough.

Let's admit it. Compared to all the sins we already know trump committed. We jailed Martha Stewart for less.

No one had the balls or decency to go after trump. Until it was too late.

Ferris Bueller Movie is 30 Years Old This Weekend

Esquire magazine just reminded me Ferris Bueller's Day Off is 30 years old this weekend.

To all my fellow Gen-Xers (those born between 1965 and 1977) lemme just say this:

AHHHHHHHHHH WE'RE OLD WE'RE OLD WHERE THE HELL DID OUR HIGH SCHOOL YEARS OF WACKY HIJINKS GO?!?!?!?!?!

At some point nostalgia gets horrifying.

I can only hope that we're ready now - with our collective disdain for Isms that Ferris taught us - that my generation can become leaders on the global stage and save you all from evil Boomer plans.

At least we know our culture has left a lasting impact on future generations.

Chicka-chicka.

Presidential Character: Week Forty, The Dawn of the Pax Reaganicus

Or is that Pax Reagana?  Damn it, I've lost my Latin skills!  I told you I'm bad with languages... got a hard enough time keeping up with Anglish...

Basically I'm talking about the Reagan Era, the moment when Ronald Reagan became President.

There are moments in American history where the flow of history - much like a mighty river - shifts direction and the whole landscape changes.  Usually wars - the American Revolution, Mexican-American, Civil War, World War II (but not necessarily the first one), Vietnam, the War on Terror - and sometimes economic disasters - the Great Depression, the Great Recession - but rarely an election of a political leader.  Oh, Lincoln's election was pivotal, but that was part of the Civil War, sort of co-sponsoring the national shift from slavery to emancipation and states' rights to federalism.  No, I'm talking about election of the likes of Andrew Jackson, a forceful personality who basically willed an entire nation's political and economic structure to his whims.  There's a reason the 1830s-1840s is called the Age of Jackson (or Jacksonian Democracy).

Another such election was Reagan's.  Which is slightly ironic in that Reagan's personality was not forceful like Jackson's, nor was he Active like Lincoln.  In his Presidential Character book, James David Barber designated Reagan as a Passive-Positive, and for good reasons.  Pass-Pos Presidents don't tend to leave a major impact on history, and yet pretty much the Eighties and even the Nineties could be considered the Reagan Era.  We're still living (2013) in the aftermath of that era, so much that the Republican Party still pursues the policies of that era out of some fevered nostalgic hope to reclaim the past.

What Reagan brought to his tenure as President was an affable charm.  It was that part of him that made him a relatively successful movie actor of the Thirties and Forties.  This made him as a political figure more an entertainer than enlightener, but for him it worked.  To quote Barber:

By the time Reagan reached the stage of the White House, he had more experience pleasing audiences than any American politician since William Jennings Bryan... And not since Harding had a happy-talk President's character and style fit together so nicely with the public's yearning for positive thinking in politics.  The President had a terrific sense of humor, which he exercised regularly in what started out to be formal prep sessions by his staff... (p.256)

Reagan's nickname became The Great Communicator.  No other President could pull off a bon mot, a one-liner, a poetic reading, a shaggy dog tale, and a comeback like he could.

With this persona in play, Reagan could be on the one hand ruthlessly micromanaged by his own staff - like an actor with an entourage handling all the chores, with a chief of staff doubling as publicity agent and gatekeeper to the media - and on the other perform flawlessly at staged photo-ops and televised national addresses.  With control of the persona, there was control of the message.

It is through that manipulation of Reagan's image that an ambitious political agenda could be unleashed.  Reagan's rise to power - from actor to governor of California to President - came through his association to social and economic conservatism, as part of the Goldwater movement of limited federalism.  He challenged Ford for the 1976 primaries coming from the Far Right vs. Ford's pragmatic moderate platform, and was the bannerman for the conservatives once more in 1980.  Reagan's victory, along with Republicans winning control of the Senate, was viewed as a shift in the national mood away from the FDR-to-LBJ liberalism.

Yet appearances were modestly deceiving.  For all of the conservatives' hopes of pushing massive legislative changes, very little went in the Far Right's favor.  The massive tax cut Reagan achieved in 1981 proved disastrous and Reagan quickly switched gears on that, raising taxes by 1983 to help pay off the increased deficits those cuts created.  During his second term, Reagan pushed for and got an Income Tax reform bill in an attempt to straighten out and simplify a bloated tax code. Social welfare programs saw some cuts but for the most part remained intact, due to a Democratic House unwilling to bend on those programs.  As a Passive-Positive, Reagan was amenable to compromise and working with Democratic leadership (Tip O'Neill especially) to get deals done.

The biggest difference between rhetoric and reality for the Reagan administration was the Cold War.  Reagan came into office in 1980 as a kind of "cowboy", presenting himself as a Cold War Warrior standing up against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union: yes, this is an actor relying on movies like Star Wars to help explain his world-view.  It was this persona that pursued a massive arms build-up that forced the Soviets to spend beyond their own means.  Yet it was another movie The Day After, about a nuclear holocaust, that woke Reagan up to the fact that a nuclear war was unwinnable, and he seriously began pursuing an arms limitation treaty with the Soviets after having spent the 1980 campaign decrying such negotiations during the Carter years.  As a result, Reagan is the President who achieved getting a massive arms reduction treaty passed.  Both the massive defense spending and the nuclear arms reductions - a one-two punch - began the late Eighties dominoes of events leading to the end of the Cold War in 1991.

Reagan received a lot of criticism from the Far Right for failing to pursue their objectives - an end of the New Deal policies, pursuing an honest-to-God war against Communism - and yet today he's still the patron saint of the Far Right, of the Republican Party as a whole.  Because of two things: First, Reagan's administration is the only administration of the last eighty years the Far Right can accept (can't accept Bush the Elder or Ford or Eisenhower as they were too "moderate", can't accept Bush the Lesser considering all the disasters he presided over, and can't accept Nixon's because yeah Watergate); and Second, Reagan did achieve making hard conservative values acceptable to the mainstream consensus.   Such as deregulation of businesses, downsizing of government, limiting abortion access, giving politically-active religious groups more political prestige, and other social conservative issues.

It's that particular agenda that defines the Reagan era.  It's one of the core elements of the modern Republican agenda - to deregulate everything, to privatize everything, to shrink the federal government down to where Grover Norquist can drown it in his bathtub, to insert conservative religious values everywhere - that we live with and fight against to this day.

And as a Third point: Reagan's Affability, his popularity, remains untouched even to this day.  Although like other Passive-Positives he filled his administration with untrustworthy underlings - Reagan presided over a scandal-filled administration that produced a Savings And Loan fiscal crisis when that sector was deregulated; and the Iran-Contra Affair that saw illegal arms deals to Iranians to free Middle East hostages, with the funds illegally going to support Nicaragua Contra rebels - Reagan himself remained untouched by most of the scandals.  And despite the fiscal damage of the S&L crisis, the American economy remained churning and most Americans didn't seem to care.

Reagan's legacy remains: the idea of shrinking the federal government's role in the lives of Americans (and in the deregulation of billion-plus corporate industries) remains potent even as the Reagan era itself has technically ended.  Not many Passive-Positives can claim such a legacy.

Next Up: Bush the Elder.  There's not really anything fancy I can say about that.