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!!! 

Anniversary: End of the Soviet Union

It's an event from 30 years ago that signaled a major tidal shift in the long river of history. On this Christmas Day back in 1991, the leader of the Soviet Union - ye olde USSR, the stronghold of Communism since World War I, the scourge of Capitalist Western Values, shaky ally against the Nazis in World War II, the superpower rival to the United States since 1945 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from his office as President and ended the Soviet Union once and for all.

Via Vladimir Isachenkov at AP News:

People strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25, 1991 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor.

Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now 90, bitterly lamented his failure to prevent the USSR’s demise, an event that upset the world’s balance of power and sowed the seeds of an ongoing tug-of-war between Russia and neighboring Ukraine.

“I still regret that I failed to bring the ship under my command to calm waters, failed to complete reforming the country,” Gorbachev wrote.

Political experts argue to this day whether he could have held onto his position and saved the USSR. Some charge that Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, could have prevented the Soviet breakup if he had moved more resolutely to modernize the anemic state-controlled economy while keeping tighter controls on the political system...

Thing was, Gorbachev really couldn't: No one outside of a full-on autocrat could have forced through the economic reforms because the political corruption and economic corruption were too intertwined. Just look at today: Putin has the political power but does so through economic corruption which is sapping at modern Russia's strength. An autocrat in Gorbachev's situation wouldn't have made any attempts at reform in the first place, he'd have kept the stagnant system chugging along.

It would take a book - no, a library full of books - to go into how the Communist Utopian ideals of the 19th Century gave way to the revolutionary violence of Lenin's overthrow of Tsarist Russia, and the steps towards corruption - the rise of Party elites, the rise of Stalin to place all power into autocratic rule, the buildup of party bureaucracy that calcified Soviet society, the Greed of elites that always threatens every economic system we know, and everyday state-sanctioned brutality that dulled the Russian population into despair - that created by the 1980s a Soviet empire incapable of maintaining itself without serious reforms.

With respect to Gorbachev, it was that need for reform that led to his rise to high office in the first place. Problem was, the reforms that were needed most - honesty from leadership, cracking down on party corruption, curtailing the high costs of maintaining a war footing in a 40-year-long Cold War that included policing their own Eastern European "allies" (occupied territories, really) - were reforms that Gorbachev's own party couldn't abide.

During all of Gorbachev's early steps to fix a broken empire, the Soviet Union was hit hard by the reality of their own corruption causing for example the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, exposing not only their engineering failures but their political failures to respond effectively to crises. The empire itself came to an end when Gorbachev freed the Eastern European nations to decide their own policies to enact local reforms: Instead, nearly every nation from Poland to Bulgaria to Czechoslovakia to Hungary to East Germany broke off from Soviet influence as their Communist regimes collapsed with mass uprisings and protests overthrowing them (Only Romania fell through mass violence and bloodshed, alas). By November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and Communism as an economic utopian ideal fell with it.

Whatever ideology Gorbachev was trying to use to keep the Soviet Union itself intact wasn't sticking. The push for Glasnost - open transparency of the political bureaucracy - and Perestroika - economic reforms to shift away from Communism to a more Socialist model - met with pushback by lower rungs of the system that preferred the corrupt status quo. Any economic reforms implemented failed with supply shortages and mismanagement.

By 1991, resistance to reform led to rebellion by a faction of Community Party leaders who wanted to go back to the way things were under Stalin Khrushchev Brezhnev. In August - responding to Gorbachev's plan to decentralize power to the 15 Soviet states that made up the USSR - that faction staged a coup attempt by "arresting Gorbachev" and passing power to Gorbachev's VP Gennady Yanayev, with the faction becoming a "Committee" overseeing the "state of emergency" they themselves were staging.

In the bleak style of Russian humor, they failed. Nothing they did went right. It was like the coup plotters believed that all they had to do was capture Gorbachev, go on state television to announce a calm transfer of power, and the majority of the population would just roll over like always.

Except too much had changed by then. In the Machiavellian measurement of "being Loved or Feared," the old Soviet hacks thought they were still Feared. But decades of party corruption had turned much of that fear into Hatred, and the Russian population - along with the other ethnicities that made up the USSR - had seen enough out of the Soviets to rise up in protests against the coup.

Helped by the fact that Gorbachev's decentralization plan would have empowered them, the regional leadership - especially Boris Yeltsin, a political rival of Gorbachev - called for the protests and avoided arrest. Attempts by the coup to shut down radio stations failed. When they called in troops to establish control of Moscow, the brief skirmish left three protestors dead and only enraged the mobs more. There was this quiet realization that the plotters hadn't thought this through, and hadn't counted on escalating any crackdowns.

Whereas Stalin wouldn't have hesitated to send in tanks and let his secret police round up everyone for executions, Yanayev and his bunch couldn't work up the nerve. Which was a good thing for the protestors and for history in general. Without that threat of violence to back them, the plotters turned on each other (several committed suicide) and were arrested themselves.

It was Soviet Communism's last dying gasp.

From then on, Yeltsin held the upper hand over Gorbachev, who no longer had a Soviet state or Communist party he could control. The decentralization plan went through, creating a Commonwealth of Independent States by early December with Russia itself a federation. By then, Gorbachev's departure wasn't a matter of If it was a matter of When, and Christmas seemed like the best time to do it.

Thirty years later, we're still dealing with the ramifications.

Russia as its own state is still a major global player: A permanent stock of nuclear weapons will do that for a nation. In terms of economic power, it's actually slid out of the top bracket - nations like Brazil and India generate more GNP - and they're still struggling to regain any foothold there. 

The corruption that led to the end of the Soviet Union never went away. The kleptocracy that defined the Communist Party re-emerged with the oligarchy - and organized crime - that controls Russia today. Putin's authoritarian power flows from the greed of the national elites, each side feeding off the other to keep Russia broke, stagnant, and hungry to steal from every other nation around them.

In some respects, the threat was never Communism, nor was it Capitalism. It's Greed. A universally recognized human sin that caused the collapse of one empire (USSR), consumed its remnants (Russia), and threatens our American empire here.

I'd wish that was the lesson from history the rest of us could have learned.

It was Twenty Years Ago Today, David Hasselhoff Told His Band to Play...

Okay, so a riff on Sgt. Peppers segueing into the Fall of the Berlin Wall doesn't work so well...

November 9th. It was indeed 20 years ago, this day when the East German government made the announcement that they would be easing travel restrictions between East and West. Try to remember, but after 1945 when the Allies crushed Hitler's evil we had divided control of Germany into four parts: American, British, French, and Russian (the Poles should have been included but thanks to Stalin they got squat, actually worse than squat over the next 40 years). By 1947 it became clear Stalin and the Soviets weren't going to honor agreements about freeing Eastern Europe and the dividing lines formed in Germany. In 1948, the Berlin Blockade and the subsequent Airlift essentially solidified West Germany and East Germany. Well into the early 1960s, West Berlin was like a funnel out of the Soviet-controlled Eastern Block, thousands of people fleeing the oppression, but outside of military invasion there was little the Soviets could do.

So they built a Wall. They said it was to keep us out of Eastern Europe but in truth it was to keep the rest of their people in. And ironically the Berlin Wall helped keep the peace, although it came at the cost of tens of people dying while trying to cross over (and under, and around) it.

For 20-plus years the Wall stood. When I was born in 1970 the Wall was 9 years old and already covered on the Western side with legal graffiti. There had also been numerous escape attempts across it, even with the East German guards ordered to shoot. By the 1980s, the we'd gotten used to the Wall. Even as Reagan became the first President to openly call on the Soviet leadership to "Tear Down This Wall," it seemed like a permanent feature on the political landscape.

But by the 1980s, the Soviets were flailing. As utopian ideals Communism and Socialism looked nice on paper, but in real-world application those -isms fell apart real effing quick. The paradoxes of one-party rule (a 'pure' party is still corrupted from within by greed, paranoia, obsession with bureaucratic power and calcification) was finally taking its toll. The Soviet leader of the day, Gorbachev, was doing what he could to 'open up' the Soviet system, to bring about market reforms and also freedom of thought reforms. But in truth the system - calcified during the 1970s during the Breshnev years - was dying...

The Polish Solidarity movement had, from the 1980s on, given the Eastern European nations the tools needed to begin causing rifts within the control structure of the Soviet hegemone. By 1989, Gorbachev tried giving the satellite states more local autonomy, perhaps as part of a process of 'demilitarizing' the East so he could cut back on Soviet military expenses, or on the bureaucracy consuming so many resources. For whatever reason, the Russian Soviets would no longer directly intervene in their puppet regimes the way they did in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Domino Effect quickly took action. Poland quickly legalized the Solidarity party by April 1989. Hungary began tearing down their border fence with Austria by May, and by October, Hungarian Communists changed labels to Socialists (as a way of presenting themselves as 'less evil'). And with East Germany... well, with that Hungary/Austria border now open, thousands began fleeing into the West through Hungary, forcing the East German government to begin restricting their peoples' travels to other Eastern states. By October, the issue had come to a boiling point, with refugees camped out in West German embassies in Prague.

So, by November 9th, the East German government relented, deciding to allow some (not open) movement between East and West Germany. Especially at checkpoints along the Berlin Wall.

But, in football parlance, the East Germans proceeded to muff the snap, the punt, the punt recovery and even the whole fourth quarter offense.

The announcement came quick and unexpected. The government's intent was to have their travel program begin the next day, when they would be prepared for the overflow. However, their spokesman didn't get clear instructions on that, and when asked for when the program would start, he assumed it was immediate.

The media, mostly the West German media (which the Eastern Block could still see and hear), jumped on this as meaning the East German borders were 'open to everyone'.

Checkpoints were quickly swamped with mobs chanting for their freedom. The guards were completely unprepared. After an hour or three of frantic phone calls where no one wanted the horrible responsbility of using lethal force, the guards relented and let people pass even without papers or procedure.

It was akin to opening the floodgates for both sides. The biggest party in human history just began as East and West Berliners joined up at the Wall to hug, dance, drink, dance, drink, and drink some more. This was at the early beginnings of global cable news: CNN began showing nonstop images of Germans getting up on the Wall itself to celebrate. Pickaxes and shovels suddenly appeared as people began hacking away at the symbol of the Iron Curtain.

And oh yeah, David Hasselhoff played at the remains of the Berlin Wall on New Years' Eve. By then nearly every Eastern European nation once over Soviet rule had fallen (Czechslovakia by peaceful means, Romania by violent overthrow, and the Balkan states beginning their rumblings to break free of the Soviet Union itself) and the Cold War nearly done (in two years the Soviet Union would suffer a failed coup against Gorbachev and that would be that).

And now, it's twenty years later, celebrations afoot across Germany and in some respects around the world. For a good while you couldn't imagine the Wall gone. Now, you can't imagine a Wall had ever gone up. Except for the memorials for those who died trying to cross it...

Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Hoff will show up and lip-sync some more. :)

Because the Insanity Won't Ever End: Hypothesis Proven

I posted a good while back about my Obama Shoelace Hypothesis: that sooner or later the Republican Far Right wingnuts will get so obsessed with stopping Obama - no matter what topic and no matter how minor an issue - that they will criticize the way Obama ties his shoelaces.

While this isn't about his shoelaces, this is definitely a tipping point that proves my hypothesis: the Far Right has gone batsh-t insane over Obama's planned video speech nationwide to schools promoting a message to work hard and stay in school.

From this article by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly:

This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.

That's right. The wingnuts don't even want those kids whose parents actually think Obama is, you know, the lawfully elected President of these United States, listening to Obama speak on education.

From that Washington Monthly link, a link to TNR's Michelle Cottle:

This is disgraceful. For starters, Obama's message, as described in a press release from Ed Sec Arne Duncan, will stick to anodyne topics like the need to work hard and take responsibility for one's own success (which once upon a time were values Republicans could cheer.) Admittedly, I don't have an advance text, but I'll bet a year's supply of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey that Obama will not be lecturing America's youth about the joys of bank bailouts, universal health care, or cash-for-clunkers--just as I am confident George W. Bush would never have used school children to hawk the Iraq war, the Medicare drug program, or "enhanced interrogation" techniques...

More broadly, Obama is the leader of this entire nation. It doesn't matter if you voted for him--or even if your head threatens to explode every time you think about him. He is the president, and, as such, it's a big deal that he's speaking directly to students about the importance of education. (Not teachers unions, you hysterics.) And, whatever one's party registration, the idea that any child should be kept home from class purely so their parents can make a political statement about an apolitical speech is appalling.

But this is where we're at. The Far Right is so obsessed with refusing to recognize Obama is President - that he won a fair election, that he's got a birth certificate and was born in the State of Hawaii - that they've taken to denying him the right and responsibility no matter how trivial to do his damn job.

What I posted on the Balloon Juice comments:

Remember Newton’s Third Law of Motion that states “for every action there is an equal opposite reaction”? It’s different in politics: “For every Democratic action there is a monstrously disproportionate Republican reaction”... (snippage)

The Republicans are complaining about Obama doing a perfectly normal function of the Presidency: speaking to the youth of our nation as part of his duty as Chief of State. Bush the Lesser did it, Clinton did it, Bush the Elder did it, Reagan did it, Carter did it, Ford did it, Nixon tried it, LBJ did it, Kennedy did it… anyone notice a pattern? Every President is supposed to speak to this nation, to provide leadership and motivation and morale, and the Republicans are throwing a goddamn hissy fit about it.

This is almost the same reaction they threw when Obama was invited to speak at Notre Dame. Only this time it’s worse: whereas the Far Right was outraged a pro-choice President was speaking to pro-life Catholics, this time the Far Right IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED Obama is gonna turn all our kids into GODLESS SOCIALISTS! Based on absolutely no evidence but their own built up animosities towards him.

And the crazier they get, the more they get their damn faces plastered all over the plasma screens. Attention whores, the lot of them. Can’t wait for the moment in the movie when the wingnuts shoot us in the back, leave our collective corpse floating in the pool, and finish the evening with a grand flourish down the staircase for the cameras and lights…

The Wingnut acts insane. The Media provides them air time to spew their bullsh-t. The American people glance about wondering what the hell happened to this country.

Thoughts on Health Care reform

Things to consider during this current tumult over Obama and the Dems' push for Health Care reform:

1) The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation (think France, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, anyone else in the G-8 group I missed) without universal health care. India has universal health care. Israel has it. Brazil has it. Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert probably have it. In fact the question is which country DOESN'T have universal health care... and the U.S.A. tops that list.

1a) Which makes the argument about "Universal Health Care" = "SOCIALISM ZOMG!!1!1" rather specious: you can't accuse some of the most prominent Capitalist nations on the planet (England, for God's Sake! Thatcher is living on universal health care!) of being Socialists for having universal health care. This isn't the Cold War era anymore: why use labels to oppose something that, you know, works in every other pro-business nation?

2) The two biggest problems with health care in the United States are:

2a) Not everyone is covered: the number bandied about is 47 million uninsured (roughly 15 percent of the nation), although critics point out that includes illegal immigrants... so the real number would be really around 32-37 million. WHICH IS STILL TOO MANY. And I'm not sure if this includes children and college-age teens. The problem is these uninsured people still require health care, and the costs of treating the uninsured gets shifted over to those who are insured.
2b) Rising costs: partly from the fact the insured are paying for the uninsured, but mostly from the fact that the managed-care system that came about in the 1990s (the HMOs) basically have monopolies in each of the states. Ezra Klien's op-ed in the Washington Post (highlights mine):

In the modern health-care system, there is no higher power than the insurance market. And the insurers who populate that market have grown all the stronger. The Justice Department judges an industry "highly concentrated" if a single company controls more than 42 percent of the market. By that definition, 94 percent of statewide insurance markets are highly concentrated. A recent study by the advocacy organization Health Care for America Now showed that in Indiana, WellPoint controls 60 percent of the insurance market; in Iowa, Wellmark accounts for 71 percent; and in Alabama, Blue Cross/Blue Shield holds 83 percent. In the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers.

Economics textbooks tell us that concentrated markets reduce the competitive behavior that benefits consumers and lead to outsize profits for the dominant firms. Predictably, health-care premiums shot up more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2007, while the profits of the 10 largest insurers increased 428 percent over the same period.

Without government regs encouraging competition, companies can basically charge what they want, deny coverage to those they deem at-risk to their profit margin, and pass the savings on to the Senators and Congresspersons they 'bribe' with massive campaign contributions. But that's just me being cynical I suppose...

3) A solid majority of Americans - 76 percent - want a public option as part of the health care reform. Problem is, Obama has only 33 percent or so of those polled actively supporting his reform plan.

4) Another problem is that he doesn't have the full support of his own party: nimrods like Max Baucus seem obsessed with the idea of bipartisanship by dealing with a Republican Party that's gonna want health care reform nuked now and forever. Instead of legislation covering things the people want, Baucus' committee is trying to offer this up. Also consider Baucus receives HOW MUCH?! in campaign funding from the Health Care industry and you have a hypocrite reeking of Quid Pro Quo. I will always think of campaign funding as legalized bribery and it sickens me we can't do anything to stop it ('cause the bastards who profit from it are the damn politicians who like it this way and won't vote away their deep-pocket advantages).

5) This reminds me, I gotta see about my COBRA coverage payments. I think I gotta start paying them again this August. Maybe September, I hope.