This week the Republican Congress blocked votes to protect future elections and to subpoena the notes of a translator in order to find out what a reckless or criminal president and a predatory adversary agreed in a private tete a tete.
On “Morning Joe,” the title blowhard bemoans the capture of a once great institution by know-nothings. What has become of his party, he cries. He is not alone. Eminent Democrats ponderously consider how to return their party to preeminence. Pundits in the newspapers compare Helsinki to Munich and Yalta. Yet no one cares. Why?
Possibly because the majority of he electorate has no idea what any of them are talking about. The parties, the world, the issues, the history they are all talking about might as well be the Dark Ages as far as most of the electorate is concerned.
As of 2018, 59% of eligible voters are GenXers, Millennials, and Post-Millennials. That is, they are under 50, many a decade or two or three under 50. Whereas, Scarborough is 55, Chuck Schumer is 67, Bill Maher is 62, George Will is 77, and I’m not feeling all that spry myself.
The oldsters grew up with fathers who served in World War II and relied on the G.I Bill. We spent our formative years in the Cold War with its mutual assured destruction. We remember the assassinations, the Great Society, Vietnam, Watergate, Reagan, The Berlin Wall going up and coming down. And some of us remember the importance of NATO and free trade among capitalist democracies. Our idea of disruptive media were color TV and transistor radios.
The formative experiences for a lot of the under 50 majority are the Twin Towers falling, the folly of Iraq, ten years of recession, China rising, social media, tweets, YouTube, selfies. A 40-year-old GenXer was ten when Reagan left office, twenty when Clinton was impeached, 23 on 9/11, and 30 when the Great Recession stunted his or her economic future.
When Trump says, “America First,” my generation thinks — Lindbergh, isolationism, American fascism. The under 30s think – happy face emoji or Fourth of July GIF. When Trump says he and Putin are going to deliver “peace in our time,” we think– Chamberlain, appeasement, Blitzkrieg. They think, “Good, we’re tired of hearing about Syria, or wherever it is that Putin is from.”
When oldsters say, what happened to my Republican or Democratic Party, the answer is, “Like you, they got old and while they were napping got hijacked.” And along the way, to our shame we let two generations, on whom we would be destined to depend onin the future, grow up ignorant of history.
Thirty-seven percent of Americans can’t name one right enumerated in the Frist Amendment. Only 20 percent can name all three branches of government. Hardly surprising since less than 25 percent of High School seniors can pass a basic proficiency test in Civics. Only 18% of 1,000 liberal-arts colleges require a U.S. History of Government course. The result? If most of our fellow Americans were forced to take the test required of foreigners seeking to become citizens, they’d fail.
When Pundits liken Trump to Quisling, Millennials suspect that’s some character from Harry Potter they’ve lost track of, rather than a famous Scandinavian traitor who collaborated with a hostile power. But they actually think nothing because they don’t read newspapers or watch The PBS NewsHour or MSNBC or Fox News, all of whose demographics skew ancient. They get their disinformation online. American oligarchs or Putin’s GRU, Wikileaks, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter and Facebook are feeding it to them.
It isn’t fair to blame the 59% of voters under 50 for Trump, entirely. He won because he got a majority of the votes of conservatives, of white men, of those over 40, of those with less than a college degree, of those who live in rural counties or cities of 50,000 people or less.
But younger voters are at fault for not taking their civic responsibility seriously in 2016. Only 17% of those 30 to 40 bothered to vote, and only 10 percent of those 18 to 30. If they don’t like the hash the old fools have made of the world, or the absurd president they elected, they need to turn out in large numbers, and take charge. Otherwise, another helping of hash is in their future. Clearly if the people at the helm are left in control they will steer the ship of state onto the rocks