Personally, I happen to think that bashing this or that generation is misguided. Whether it’s older people bashing millennials as lazy and entitled, or younger people bashing boomers as selfish and entitled, I think these kind of generalizations and stereotypes are unproductive.
Having said that, I think I know where some of the anger at older progressives, and particularly the affluent ones, comes from. For one, there’s this commonly held notion among older folks that millennials are lazy and entitled, that many are still living at home in their adulthood because they lack ambition and initiative, and it really grates on young folks who are actually still living at home because they are more debt-ridden and have worse economic prospects than previous generations.
When researchers compared the spending habits of Millennials with those of young people from past years, such as the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, they concluded that “Millennials do not appear to have preferences for consumption that differ significantly from those of earlier generations.” They also found that “Millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.”
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For years, various outlets, including The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center, continued reporting that young people were buying fewer cars and houses than those in previous generations at a similar point in their life. In 2016, about 34 percent of Americans under 35 owned a house; when Boomers and Gen Xers were under 35, about half of them did.
But the fact that young people are buying fewer houses and cars doesn’t prove that they want fewer houses and cars. It might mean they simply can’t afford them. That latter conclusion is now supported by research from the Federal Reserve.
It’s no secret that the income and wealth distribution mechanism in our economy has completely broken down since about 1973, and naturally the Millennials are really feeling of the fallout from that.
They’ve seen the federal government become a basket case, where instead of investing in our future we’ve run up debt to fund massive tax breaks that mostly benefit those who have already accrued wealth — namely, those from older generations, particularly the Baby Boomers, who benefited from an era when government did actually invest heavily in its people.
Millennials look at how things have gone so awry in the last 45 years or so, they look at who has been running the show for the last 45 years, and they see it’s the Boomers and younger members of the Silent Generation who’ve been running things. So that’s a sore spot for Millennials considering the fix they’re currently in.
But what upsets young people even more is when they call for some of the kind of investment that their Boomer elders received, in response they get scolded for being entitled and spoiled, or for asking for unicorns and ponies. Instead, their Boomer elders often call for cutting investments in the form of federal spending on things like education, child care, and housing assistance, citing the national debt which skyrocketed on the Boomers’ watch due to irresponsible policies enacted by politicians who were mainly Boomers.
Now, the response from Boomers here on Daily Kos is that it’s all the fault of conservative Boomers, so that’s who we should be directing our ire toward. But the problem with that is it’s not just conservative Boomers who are at fault here. As much as I have contempt for greedy, affluent, “I got mine” old conservatives, I have as much contempt for greedy, affluent, “I got mine” old self-proclaimed progressives.
As this HuffPo piece earlier this year, titled “Progressive Boomers Are Making It Impossible For Cities To Fix The Housing Crisis”, highlighted:
In May 2018, a public meeting in a wealthy enclave of one of America’s most progressive cities devolved into a two-hour temper tantrum as longtime residents incensed about a proposed tax to fund homeless services shouted down its proponents.
“Lies!” the crowd bellowed as an attendee explained that the tax would be levied on corporations, not citizens. “Shill!” “Plant!” “Phony!” they shouted as another supporter spoke. “Coward!” a man yelled at a homeless woman as she took the microphone.
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Last September, a community hearing over a proposed homeless shelter in Los Angeles had to be cut short after boos and jeering repeatedly interrupted speakers. Throughout 2018, public meetings in Minneapolis to discuss changing the city’s residential zoning code erupted into shouts and insults from audience members. At a public meeting last August on homelessness in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, audience members chanted, “Lock her up!” at a female representative of the mayor’s office.
And yes, as housing program organizer Alex Baca, who has been involved in efforts to create more affordable housing in Seattle noted, there is a generational component to all this:
“It’s like playing Whac-a-Mole,” (housing program organizer Alex Baca) said. “No matter what you propose, they’ll tell you that if it was just a little bit different, they could support it. But then you come back with the changes they asked for and they find a new reason to fight it.”
Baca sees the increasing ugliness of public forums as a manifestation of the widening generation gap among progressives.
“The boomer generation came of age at a time when neighborhoods were fighting back against highway expansions and power plants,” Baca said. “To them, preserving their neighborhood is progressive.”
I know these types quite well since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and work in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. San Francisco has long been a boom (and bust) town, starting with the Gold Rush, to the Dotcom boom, and now with the current tech boom. There is so much wealth flowing through the City that there’s 1 billionaire here for every 11,000 residents.
Yet for all that wealth, San Francisco teachers cannot afford to live in the city they teach in. Growing up here during the 1980s and 1990s, working class people were once able to afford housing in San Francisco, but no more as housing costs have skyrocketed in the wake of the flood of newly minted millionaires and billionaires. And as housing becomes scarcer in the City itself, people have been fanning out into other Bay Area communities, which has created even more scarcity and thus ever higher housing prices. Thus, working people are finding it hard to find affordable housing anywhere in the Bay Area.
On top of all that, in the shadow of the gleaming, metal and glass towers, and trendy, overpriced eateries that have sprouted up all over downtown San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, the homeless population has grown out of control as many residents are unable to find affordable housing. Yet even here in uber liberal San Francisco, when plans were announced for the creation of a homeless navigation center in the City’s Embarcadero District, a coalition of affluent downtown residents, many of whom I’m sure consider themselves woke, pro-Resistance, Trump-hating liberals in good standing, crowdfunded an effort to block the center.
This is why it grated on my nerves very hard to see many progressives — and it’s almost always the affluent progressives — in the wake of Trump’s degrading comments about Baltimore resort to making similarly degrading comments about the state of red state America while then bragging about how much better and wealthier blue states like California are.
Because if they had any clue, they’d realize that California is ground zero for how the economy is broken. Despite being the 5th largest economy in the world, California also has the highest poverty rate in the country. Despite leading the country in job creation and economic growth over the course of this recovery, California has actually been hemorrhaging people instead of attracting them, which is usually what happens when the economy is booming. With all that going on, we in the blue states really do not have much grounds for looking down on our red state neighbors. Because we in the blue states have not exactly covered ourselves in glory either.
While many Americans’ resentment of California is rooted in racial and cultural concerns, for average working folks it’s also driven by economic resentment. Specifically, it’s resentment at seeing the state they grew up in becoming fabulously wealthy, yet they’re not benefiting from it, and in fact as the state grows more wealthy they become less and less able to afford to live in the state. Again, I know this personally — I’ve had a number of close friends move to Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Texas because they simply could not afford to live in California.
Here’s where this gets tied to Boomers, and especially progressive Boomers: California is one of the most liberal, Democratic states in the nation. Democrats have a supermajority in the Assembly and State Senate. The major cities of the state are governed by Democrats. Yet despite all of that, virtually nothing is being done to seriously address the problems I’ve outlined above. Instead we’re too busy passing stupid, gimmicky, and ultimately unconstitutional legislation to make those affluent, wine-drinking Resistance moms happy.
Not that some progressives here haven’t tried. State Senator Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) introduced SB-50, a modest, incremental piece of legislation that is woefully inadequate in terms of solving the housing problem, but it would at least have done something however small to address it. Specifically, the bill would “override local zoning and allow mid-rise apartment buildings near transit and job centers, even in single-family neighborhoods”.
But even in deep blue California, this modest attempt to address housing was defeated. Why? It was killed by state Senator Anthony Portantino, a Democrat and a supposedly “progressive” Boomer, who represents a fairly affluent, suburban Democratic stronghold where the average age is considerably higher than the state average. Instead, Portantino has offered an insulting proposal to deal with the housing shortage, which would use the sale of specialty license plates to fund an already existing program that only helps moderate-income people buy homes. It’s precisely this kind of pitifully weak, overly complicated policy which only a miniscule number of people qualify for that many progressives are sick to death of getting from Democrats.
So when you look at all that, it becomes somewhat understandable why millennials and others would resent progressive Boomers, and really affluent progressives in general. Again, I don’t generally agree with painting all progressive Boomers and affluent progressives with this broad a brush. But this isn’t about agreeing with that viewpoint so much as understanding where it comes from.
The economic troubles that the young generation faces, which have been decades in the making — decades when Boomers, including the progressive ones, were running the place — have generated such resentment on the part of millennials that a disproportionate number are viewing socialism more and more favorably. And when Boomers then make light of their troubles, which they constantly do, it only increases that resentment.
It’s also why there is such resentment and distrust of rich liberals, particularly the ones who make up the sort of big donors that hold such sway among Democratic politicians. It’s why the young are increasingly unimpressed by arguments, often made by older, more affluent liberals, that what we need is to restore the good old Democratic governance of the pre-Trump, Clinton and Obama years and everything will magically return to normal. They simply don’t wax nostalgic for those Democratic administrations since the economic condition of young people continued to worsen largely unabated during those administrations, and despite their policies.
Again, this isn’t to tar all progressive Boomers or affluent liberals as clueless, self-absorbed hypocrites. But when you look at everything I’ve outlined above, it’s not hard to understand where the resentment comes from.
And frankly, it’s not just the young folks who increasingly do not see the Democrats as being in touch with their problems. A recent YouGov poll showed that on the question of which party cares more for American workers, respondents favored Democrats but by just 37-35. There was a time when this question wouldn’t even be close.
Lest you think the closeness of the poll has to do with working class Whites favoring Republicans, guess again. 54% of Blacks chose Democrats, hardly an overwhelming number, and 31% felt both parties were the same on this question. Among Latinos, just 40% chose Democrats with almost as many, 35%, saying both parties, and 25% choosing the Republicans.
As for the youth aged 18-29, they chose Democrats over Republicans 34-28 — but a greater percentage, 38%, said both were the same.