The confusion among the lovable Gen X bug men over at the Z Blog as to Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s generation is typical of blind men groping the tame elephant that is Gen Y.
Pete Buttigieg is the millennial candidate in every way. Most likely his support came from his age cohort. Further, it was heavily female, with the male portion being the sorts, who support the case against consuming soy products. On the other hand, Klobuchar is picking up the old Hillary vote. These are the old hens, who think having a female president is the only thing that matters. Her bitchy obnoxiousness reminds them of every fight they won with their ex-husband.
That is the democratic coalition right now. On the one hand it is spoiled, entitled millennial voters. On the other it is their divorced mothers. Sure, blacks, Hispanics, legacy whites and bronze age communists are there, but the people who run the party are of the two groups rallying to Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Those other groups are just accessories. They always have been, but now it is becoming explicit. None of the top-tier candidates have any appeal outside honkyville.
The image of the spoiled rotten, self-entitled Millennial soyboy skulking around the quad is now a fixture of intergenerational discourse. Like all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth to it. The error lies in trying to stick this label on Pete Buttigieg, who at 38 is closer to AARP membership than to college age.
Here’s the Z Man from an older post on student debt relief ca. the 2016 election:
My bet is the Liberal Democrats are going to be testing a bunch of these ideas for the 2016 election. The idea is to promise the young free money so they will be vote for the Cult. Inevitably, the other side will offer up their own basket of goodies to the millennials.
Z had it right there. Democrat student loan schemes designed to bribe college-age kids into voting for Hillary would indeed have been aimed at Millennials. They weren’t primarily targeting voters of Buttigieg’s age. Unless you include 33-year-olds in your definition of “the young”.
This is a prime example of the nonsensical stretching the Millennial label has been subjected to since Madison Avenue’s memory holing of Generation Y.
The Millennium did indeed lends its name to the Millennial Generation, but the hermeneutic key the Z Man is missing is that Millennials’ formative years occurred around the turn of the millennium. The generation that came of age around then–with 9/11 as the demarcation line–is Generation Y.
Lumping people who grew up pre-smartphone and pre-9/11 into the same cohort with people who don’t remember a time before the internet and endless war gives you a category of no descriptive or predictive use.
And just so Jonesers don’t feel left out again, here’s Generation Jones getting left out … again.
The value of a model is determined by its predictive utility. Mayor Pete, AKA Candidate Y, will not be elected President of the United States. Neither Generation X nor Generation Y will be allowed to produce a President. Instead, the Boomers will cling to power until the last possible second before handing the reins to their Millennial clones.
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Another dividing line was Columbine, an event that changed everyone who went to public school after 1999.
Mills grew up post-9/11 and Columbine, stuck in endless wars, awash in social media, the internet, and phones. Their entire outlook was shaped by cultural shifts that those of us in Gen Y did not experience until we were already formed.
If you were 10 when Columbine and 9/11 happened you already knew a world different than the one that was being shaped before you.
That, and Madison Avenue admitting they decided to stop advertising to Gen Y for Millennials (which they admitted at the time), should put this debate to rest.
We have more in common with Baby Boomers than we do with Millennials, and that's not a brag.
It's bizarre how defensive self-described Gen Xers can be of generational categories imposed by Boomers.
The burgeoning trash heap of Wikipedia (lowest common denominator of information sources) has a better handle on generational cohorts than Z-Man. An Internet search is much less trouble than looking this stupid because someone tripped your arrogance breaker. This is apparently one of his bizarre tics that he has chosen to lock in his head and dig in his heels.
The question that everyone should be asking is whether we will continue to tolerate this Ponzi scheme (among others) and be driven into debt slavery.
Like everybody, Z Man has his strong and weak subjects. He's excellent on demographics and exploding conventional Conservative wisdom on how the Left thinks. Z opened my eyes to the Death Cult, for instance.
You have the question right, though. Isn't it interesting how "Everyone younger than me is a Millennial. Suck it, snowflake!" always pops up to muddy discussion of the student debt crisis?
Like everything else that the toxic fraction of the Boomers has attempted, however, this cling-and-hand-off will not work. Moreover, each generation is smaller than the one before, within any given ethnic group. Less pronounced with Euro-descent, but still present. The Boomers are dying, and the reins will be picked up by the next in seniority and majority.
Being Gen-X I am not entirely sure that we're going to be much of an improvement, but we are going to get our turn. In the end, the brute forces of history do not respond much to human manipulation – not least because the manipulators do not understand the forces at play.
You may be right about other countries, but the Boomer-Millennial hand off is proceeding according to plan in the US.
>Clinton: Boomer
>W: Boomer
>Obama: Joneser
>Trump: Boomer, and he looks poised to win again.
After that, my crystal ball gets murky, but if Trump does deliver on his promises in his 2nd term like many MAGApedes predict, in 2024 we'll probably get Pence (Joneser).
Then TX, GA, & FL turn blue, the Millennials become the biggest voting bloc, and the Coalition of the Fringes get their thousand-year reign.
Not Pence. Pay attention to Don Jr. He's been setting up for succeeding his father since the G-E ran in 2016; the Twitter game is the tell. Pence is best right where he is, and I expect Jr.'s VP to be just like Pence (but not BE Pence).
There's a reason for this. I don't believe Trump believes he'll get it all done in two terms, and that means passing things off to someone he can trust to push things forward. He has no one but his sons to do that.
We memed, but I expect this too to become reality, and we'll know by about this time next year if I'm on to something.
Brian, you're assuming that politics overall remains static, and identity politics remains the strict property of the COTF. My question is, why would that hold? Particularly, why would both hold simultaneously? There will be no thousand year reich. Schism, on the other hand…
Remember the context. If we're talking schism, we're not talking a President of the United States.
The meteor of Akita will hopefully save us from said thousand year reign. But yeah, really doubt the gun owners of America will stick their neck outs to prevent the Neo-Commie takeover and subsequent murderous purge. Too much soft living has destroyed us.