"... for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect.... The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable. There are some politicians of that middle generation... They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination. A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn’t the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?"
Writes Yuval Levin, in "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?" (NYT).
This gets my "gerontocracy" tag, which you can click to read what I've said about it. Hint: I don't like it. But Levin is making the additional point: It's not just that the old Boomers are clinging to power. It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty: "The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."
I was sad but also amused by the notion of a palpable vacuum. Can you palpate a vacuum? It reminds me of the old childhood revelation: Nothing... is... something.
"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves" (1931).
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৬৬টি মন্তব্য:
The young want to open the borders, abolish the police and censor political speech. Maybe we can blame boomers for not teaching them the basic civics. But, I don’t want them anywhere near the levers of power until they renounce their civilization threatening ideas.
So, this is all GenX's fault now? Whatever. The article can't even name them, which is so so typical. Boomers just won't let go. Maybe someone like DeSantis can break that fever.
Gen X and younger are resting on their laurels. And by laurels, I mean their participation trophies.
I would say the middle generation is tied down keeping society running while the older and younger generations keep trying to sort themselves out.
That might not be the kind of leadership the author wants from them, but is is far more important.
What is Gen X doing these days?
Keeping the lights on.
The unintended consequences of making life so passively comfortable--including on-demand viewing and listening, as opposed to the pleasure of surprise--have been grotesque. How does one develop any imagination or tolerance if there's always an antidote for boredom...that ironically breeds ennui?
Boomers thought the technological sin of the modern age was the bomb. That may yet prove to be true, but it's not now; not yet.
Palpatin' can get you in trouble now. Gone are the days when you could palpate willy nilly.
So be careful. Think before you palpate.
Similar to the "Silent Generation" who could only throw up politicians like Mondale and Dukakis and Gary Hart when the WWII generation ruled the roost for decades, and now the decrepit and disastrous Biden is (depending on how you separate the generations) their one elected president. The Lost Generation that come of age in the 1910s and 1920s likewise produced only one president: Eisenhower.
There are dominant generations and recessive ones, generations that cast a shadow over the next one and generations that have to live in that shadow. The Losts, the Silents, and the Xers all had problems "finding themselves" and asserting themselves.
•
Virginia's problems got worse when she tried to palpate snow.
who IS a young political leader?
AOC?
Madison Cawthorn?
Eric Swalwell?
Marjorie Taylor Greene?
yuk!
Gerontocracy complements planned parent/hood or selective-parent. Political cynicism is a progressive condition.
"It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty"
He means, the generation that built an entire new tech economy?
Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Jobs vs. Joe and DJT: who's weak and empty?
And Barry was in power for 8 years: that's gerontocracy?
The GOP has a pretty good bench. I'll take DeSantis or Cotton over Trump or Mitch.
"Can you palpate a vacuum?"
Yes. They tried it on Grandpa Felonyfinger's skull but it didn't work. And that, as they say, is history...
I grew up being led by men (and some women, my mom was a WWII, 1st Lt) World War II Veterans. The were the mayor and police chief. Ran the water and sewer plants, populated the entire County board of Supervisors for decades, Ran the Banks and Feed Store, the towns lawyers, and truck drivers, (the man that hauled our cattle was a POW in Germany).
The point is, these men were leaders forged on the battle field, gaining rank as officers above them were killed in battle. They became focused, and learned to lead a disparate group.
Todays 50 somethings grow up earning participation trophies and adhering to strict politically correct positions.
It is impossible to draw future leaders from college graduates that demanded safe spaces from some speaker that offered a different view than what they held, and invented the term micro aggression.
What a load of crap. THe NYT has an agenda and pushes it constantly. Its VERY Tiresome. The past wa BAD. White Supremacy dontcha know. Don't be "Nostaglic", Its a brave new world, and the "current year" is better than ever.
The specific question of why Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden dominate the Democrat party will have to answered by the D's who love and keep them in power. My own opinion, is that D voters just don't give a damn who their leaders are, or even what they do. They vote based on their own selfish interested or their indentity politics. Oh, and the fact they hate those Goddamn Republicans.
As for the R's. You'll have to ask the Senate Republicans. No average person outside of Kentucky likes Mitch mcConnell. His nationwide ratings are in the toilet, and like Miss Lindsey he'd get 1% if he ran for POTUS.
"The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."
That someone can look at Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, and America's Ex-Wife (aka Hillary), and say that with a straight face, should tell you everything you need to know.
"Falling feels like flying til you hit the ground."
-Chris Stapleton.
Western society has been "flying" for the past half century.
We are in the process of hitting the ground, due to our trust in these people as pilots.
The Boomers were both a huge generation and a hegemonic generation. Woodstock or die. They came of age in the "eat, drink, and be merry" optimistic Space Age 1960s. You wanna car that's 20 feet long and gets 10 mpg? Sure! You wanna live 30 miles from the city and commute in on these newfangled freeways? Sure? They made big decisions and cast economic dies impossible to undo. And their swinging Playboy reading Rat Pack parents said, "Whatever makes you (and me) happy."
It probably didn't help that the Boomers were heavily exposed to lead paint and leaded gasoline, with a resultant loss of impulse control. Woodstock and free love forever.
Generation X is called "X" because they lacked the size or economic standing to overturn the hegemony. Working around Boomers, they created the underground: punk rock, college rock, alternative rock. Generation X got the short end of globalization, with many jobs moved to Asia, Latin America, etc. Without cable TV they may have had more of a cultural impact, but attention started to fragment and then the Internet made it much worse.
Power corrupts, and having a lot of corrupt boomers in power equates to a lot of unmovable corruption.
I admire Yuval Levin. I consider him to be a wise man.
Palpate water hammer using a shop vac to suck up liquid waste. You can also palpitate vacuum by covering a shop vac hose with a body part. See Cohaagen (Ronnie Cox) palpate the Martian vacuum at the end of Total Recall.
>"I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf<
Did Virginia not know that rain is every bit as palpable as snow?
I am one of the older members of Generation X, and I will be only 56 next month. There are actually a lot of people in their late 40s to 60 who are leaders in the world if you look around anywhere other than the White House and US Congress.
"Can you palpate a vacuum?"
In the figurative sense, agoraphobics would answer in the affirmative.
There is a disorienting quality to large enclosed spaces that gives me a feeling of being pulled in all directions, as if in a vacuum. That feeling is usually just ignored, but by paying particular attention to it, it is palpable, even mildly intoxicating.
Politicians are harder to defeat and dislodge now (though it wasn't that easy even 50 years ago). It has to do with money and gerrymandering. Also, rhe gerontocracy in your parents' day tended to be Southern segregationist Democrats who were effectively barred from the jobs at the very top. Now there's nothing to stop Nancy Pelosi from ruling over her party's representatives forever. Looking at the brood of young Democrats elected in 2018, though, I doubt any of them would be much of an improvement.
It probably was easier to buy a house back then, but also people were more single-minded. They wanted what they wanted and went after it and weren't deterred by doubts or insecurity or rumination.
At last. An intelligent commentary and in the NYT too. He is spot on. My guess is that only the past retirement age group has freedom from fear of being fired/cancelled. We will ride it down like Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove. What do we have to lose?
And then there is Vladimir Putin.
The decommissioning of the Boomers is a good and necessary thing. They did a lot of damage clinging to Woodstock Nation fantasies, imo. A result of learning "concepts" in the public schools rather than facts? In part!
Yuval Levin is 45, so his column is probably self-serving; that doesn't make him wrong. But it's behind the Berlin PayWall for this reader.
Let's see, Ron DeSantis is 43. Spencer Cox is 46. Nikki Haley and Kristi Noem are both 50. Marco Rubio is 51. Glenn Youngkin is 55.
Unless you can take Pete Buttigieg seriously, the Democrats have almost nobody of younger generations on their bench who aren't from either California or Hawaii -- liberal ghettos with little to no national appeal. They need to clear the decks of their gerontocracy. I would like to see Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren compete to represent Guantanamo as its non-voting representative to Congress.
If it's true that "we are still governed by Baby Boomers and the remarkably old," it is because the Marxists and their useful idiots in the media and teaching profession have rendered the younger, in general, remarkably ignorant and slothful.
At my age of 67, 3 of my 5 children are living in houses they have purchased. A 4th is now in the process of buying one. The 5th just started his career, is unmarried, and currently in Poland... Most 24 year olds aren't and likely never have been homeowners. That would be by the way, 4 homes is 4 different states.
Is it more or less difficult for young persons to own homes now? The answer is yes. When minimum house prices are in the several hundred thousands of dollars, quite a challenge. Estimated home value in the town I graduated HS from: $638,000. Houses there sell almost as soon as they're on the market. (note: I lived in one of the few apartment complexes in that town...) That's in suburban NJ.
I now live in ruralville NY. According to city-data median home price 80,000 or so. They're exaggerating. One house for sale at realtordotcom, $59,900, one 3 acre lot, $54.900. They've both been listed for a while.
From what I see from my Facebook friends, none of my fellow HS graduates are living in any of the 4 towns that comprised the school district I graduated from. Of the friends my age here, all of them grew up here, except, obviously, me and my wife. And we're from different states... And most of their grown children, if not living in the same town, are living within 20 miles.
I don't think it's actually harder to buy homes, I think it's a psychological barrier to many. If the parents are like me, the first home they owned was modest- mine was about 1,200 sq ft. My current home is over 3.000 sq ft. If they're looking at buying that last house the parents bought- there's a disconnect between expectations and reality. If they live in ruralville, like here, there's a good chance their parents are living in a house that was in their family for more than one generation. One of my friends never moved away from home. When his mother died, he was already the owner, free and clear. Took me 25 years to get that way.
The main reason for the gerontocracy is that we are currently ruled by Democrats who have no young "bench" since they were wiped out in Congress during the Clinton and Obama administrations. The reason Trump was elected was the disgust with the same old Democrat faces. The oligarchy turned out hundreds of millions of dollars to drive him from office. They succeeded but then all they had were the same old grifters.
I’m reading-and highly recommend!- Erika Bachiochi’s critique of the modern feminist movement, The Rights of Women. She opens by contrasting an early suffragette demonstration on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration with the march that took place after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The former featured women in costumes representing Charity, Liberty, Justice, Peace, and Hope, and was hailed by the NYT as “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.” Nearly 100 years later the women who marched chose to wear facsimiles of their vulvas on their heads.
Progress!?!
It made me think in a broader context the extent to which political demonstrations, like many aspects of our culture, have devolved. Is there anyone out there who can recapture the art of protest and take it back from vulgarians?
Biden: Not a Boomer
Pelosi: Not a Boomer
McConnell: Not a Boomer
AOC and Squad: Not Boomers
Trump: Not a Boomer
I could go on...
Strauss and Howe for the win. They may not have been right about everything but they've been right about a lot of things.
I've been trying to construct a Strauss-Howe narrative of the last few years, taking off from their 4th Turning book. Their key failing, I think, was not recognizing what the Civil War Crisis predicted about the (at that point, coming) Crisis Turning of roughly 2008-2026. They desperately wanted the Boomers to be the small-H heroes of the Crisis, providing enlightened leadership in the mold of the Missionary Generation (FDR, et al) that lead the nation through the Depression and World War II. After the end of the Cold War, they should have examined their theory in light of the possibility that the lack of a significant external threat would turn the Crisis inward, and the moral crusade that animated the Prophets of the Boomer generation would find its foes among its own countrymen in the same way the Transcendentalists who lead the Civil War did, being deprived of an external foe of the caliber of Hitler and Tojo that animated the Missionary Generation, and focused the GI Generation Heroes.
I've been looking for the negative version of the Gen X Nomad/Reactive response to Crisis of being pragmatic middle-managers, as the Lost Generation was during the previous Saeculum, guiding the implementation of the Prophet vision by the energy of the Heroes per S-H predictions. Levin really nails the lack of urgency and immunity to both hope and fear that comes from watching the struggle between competing teams of Boomers and Millenials.
We secretly hope you both lose.
Sounds like Gertrude Stein.
Yeah, I tried that Nothing is something phase on one of my philosophy professors in college. He didn't think much of it, or the essay he was grading. Childish notions, I guess.
Anyway...Yuval Levin is a very brilliant man. And though (obligatory disclaimer coming) I don't agree with everything he says or writes, I find him to always have something for me to bite onto. Something new, or a better way of saying something I may have already thought. I think he's onto something about the vacuum of middle aged leadership. One would think it's not that hard to show leadership in a clone-like society, where the masses seem to yearn to think alike, act alike, applaud or scold alike. You would think it would be easy for one person- just one person with a solid philosophical base, to show some courage and say, "No". And shake people out of their numbness into moving forward in a positive way.
Well...hello Elon Musk.
"Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect."
Is he this out of touch? The college administrators are scared to death of the protesting students and bend to their will on a regular basis.
"Our politics should prioritize planning for greater national strength in the medium term, but we can hardly expect quarreling octogenarians to have that future clearly in mind."
Yes, he is this much out of touch. Has he not seen the Democrats in action the last generation or so? Who is "our," who is "we," Yuval.
You and yours are not in charge and haven't been for years.
Also, take the "Boomer" crap and stick it up your ass. Thanks.
"Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect...."
I've been calling this kind of thing "cargo cult activism" for a while now. People going through the motions of making a big show of demanding change, and then congratulating themselves for actually causing change when they haven't.
Greta Thunberg is an excellent example of this in action. Hailed as a world-changing activist, when none of her demands for change have actually been met, or even taken seriously by the people she's addressing.
In addition to raising a family, paying off student debt and taking care of aging parents, Gen X has more trouble falling and staying asleep. We are exhausted, especially women.
I have a theory as to why baby boomers persist in their cultural and political centrality. My hypothesis is that the continued popularity of music that was popular in the 60's 70's and 80's, and the procrustean structuring of all political disputes into redux versions of the civil rights crusade, Vietnam, or Watergate, have helped the boomers avoid the appearance of old fogey-hood.
Gung ho ex-ranger on the Clay and Buck show (Limbaugh replacement), questioned on how woke is the military these days: "When I was trained, guys were a little rough around the edges and engaged in hazing in the barracks, but those are the guys [pause] and gals that you want with you in a foxhole.
It's dangerous to be traditional if you're military-associated.
Clay and Buck is tedious, all masks and vaccines all the time all year, but the radio turns itself on for them and records it to the HD, under filename rush.20220603.mp3, automatically.
A good quote from somebody, "I was a liberal until I started associating with liberals, then I was a conservative until I started associating with conservatives, and now I'm a libertarian." Which is going to change as well, see Jerome Tucille's book "It Usually Starts with Ayn Rand."
Due to Althouse's recent posts, I've been cogitating on the consequences of cultural changes engendered by the boomers. Just now I'm blaming all this disintegration on the lack of butt whipping.
"Rt41Rebel said...
Trump: Not a Boomer"
Not that I want to claim him, but he was born June 14, 1946, which puts him right on the leading edge
"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves"
How about hailstones the size of Valencia oranges? Still like 'sm, Miss Woolf? They're very palpable.
Bob Boyd said...
Palpatin' can get you in trouble now. Gone are the days when you could palpate willy nilly.
So be careful. Think before you palpate.
**************
Palpate responsibly.
“Is he this out of touch? The college administrators are scared to death of the protesting students and bend to their will on a regular basis.”
Coming up on my 50th college reunion this fall, and they are already hitting us hard for donations. Nope. Not going to happen, until they get rid of their FIRE (the fire.org) red and yellow ratings (for free speech, etc restrictions). Surprisingly, the only rated college or university in CO with a Green rating last year was CU.
"The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."
Barack Obama b. 1961
Greg Abbott b. 1957
Ron DeSantis b. 1978
Nikki Haley b. 1972
Ted Cruz b. 1970
Middle-aged leaders are out there (contrary to Levin's sweeping statement), but admittedly the top spots are held by the very old.
The dynamic is essentially that the Boomer "grandparents" desperately wanted to be loved by their spoiled millennial "grandchildren" and so blocked every effort of the GenX "parents" because they were "too insensitive."
Every single GenX professor at my college has had the same experience: When we were hired we got the traditional good advice "the new guy should be the first one in, the last to go home, do much more than minimum, etc." It worked out. Then, when we began to move into leadership positions, we gave that same advice to the millennial new hires, and they IMMEDIATELY ran screaming to the Boomer upper leadership "They're being too mean. I have to have work/life balance! You can't expect the new person to do as much as the people who have experience! Why should the most junior person get the least desirable schedule?" And the effing Boomers, often the same exact individuals who had given us the old-fashioned advice we were now passing on, turned around and said "You can't be so tough with these new faculty. They're far more diverse than previous faculty and you can't be too critical of them. It's a different world now." But the thing was, the new faculty being whiny and entitled were the WHITE faculty, not the "diverse" ones. It didn't matter. After enough of this, and a few mobbing actions directed at faculty who were actually trying to help junior people be more productive so as to earn tenure but who were portrayed as being too "insensitive," nearly every GenX professor said "Well, screw this" and declined leadership roles to focus on individual scholarship or teaching, and decrepit Boomers seemed happy about this, as they continued to cling to leadership and enacted every stupid woke policy that popped up on Administrators' Tumblr or whatever it is they all read for their groupthink each day. Now the decrepit Boomers are retiring and dying off, and they're passing on leadership to their millennial proteges and, surprise! the millennials are utterly incompetent because they never learned how to actually DO anything but make noble-sounding pronouncements like "We have to do better!" Right now organizations are being held together by a tiny cadre of middle-aged people who aren't in official leadership roles but, out of a misplaced sense of duty towards the organization (misplace because not reciprocated) they keep bailing out the failures of management.
Q's afraid of Virginia Woof
Strauss and Howe seemed to be on target earlier. 9/11 could be seen as the beginning of unifying national crisis. The 2008 burst economic bubble also seemed to be part of that scenario -- our century's Great Depression. But the country has been too divided for anything useful and unifying and lasting to come from those crisis.
The millennials, who I believe were cast in the role of heroes, are too fragmented by ethnicity, identity and ideology to bring us together. It looks to me like somebody -- the right or the left -- is going to get rolled over, and make a lot of noise about getting steamrollered. It doesn't seem likely that the country will be able to agree on much.
Strauss and Howe weren't the prophets they thought they were, but they were certainly a wonderful source of insights and interpretations. I'd want to know what they think about what's going on now, but Strauss passed away in 2007, and Howe hasn't had that much to say since then.
"palpate willy"?
Us GenX’ers are doing our best to hold this entire mess together. But with the massive amount of debt the country has, the disaster the greatest generation and Boomers left us, Millennials who to expect everything to be fixed for them, and GenY’ers who can’t figure out what they are as they remain adolescent until their mid 30s - frankly, it’s kinda hard. We’re exhausted because we’ve been fixing messes since we were latchkey kids in the 70s and 80s and we’re the only working age generation who have any problem solving skills (because we played outside unsupervised until streetlights came on.). Our parents all got divorced and left us to fix that mess. The younger boomers who waited to have kids raised a bunch kids to have fragile artificial self esteem. And what the fuck is non-binary.
I’m going to work til I’m 90 and this mess still won’t be cleaned up.
In the 90s, we listens to grunge music because we knew this bullshit was coming.
Well...hello Elon Musk.
This is the real response, not those noting other politicians. I think GenX'rs are not as interested in politics. They became leaders in industry, much like those that gave birth to the Baby Boomers yet raised the GenX'rs. This is partly why so many of them got behind Trump, rather than support yet another Baby Boomer politician. Trump was becoming a politician, but he was coming from business and didn't spend his life as a politician.
"Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier for previous generations than it really was"
And for proof of this claim, the oauthor offers...? nothing?
Coming up on my 50th college reunion this fall, and they are already hitting us hard for donations.
My 56th medical school reunion was this April. The university put on a nice program (which we all paid for) and the donation train was chugging away. Unfortunately, USC has become one of the most "Woke" institutions on earth, including the medical school. I hate to disappoint the alumni office but I 4xpect they will be disappointed.
Yancey Ward said, "There are actually a lot of people in their late 40s to 60 who are leaders in the world if you look around anywhere other than the White House and US Congress."
Perhaps the issues are both numbers and career paths. Boomers were a huge generation, especially relative to the total US population. Gen X is smaller both in absolute numbers and relative size. Boomers in politics may simply have crowded out the younger folks. Government may grow, but the number of elected officials remains the same.
Barry Goldwater near the end of his life complained that too many people were in politics because they found it "a good way to make a living". This also might explain the gerontocracy in politics. The oldsters, long drunk on career and power, may only be willing to relinquish the reins when they're laid to rest.
Levin is a Washington insider seeing a very different bench than citizens do living outside Washington. At the end of the Obama administration, Democrats were down more than a 1,000 state and federal elected positions. By pursuing policies amenable to the progressive left, Obama more than decimated the Democratic Party talent pipeline.
Republicans gained a bench at the expense of Democrats. They have young governors with something of a national reputation (Abbott, DeSantis, Youngkin, etc.) who have experience and deep resumes (whether you like their policies or not.) They are serious prospects. There are just not that many corresponding individuals on the Democratic Party side.
Levin is telling a Washington story that probably looks and feels right inside the beltway. It just isn't a story which matches the reality on the ground. Americans have a lot of young political talent to choose from, it just isn't equally distributed between the parties.
And this is likely to be exacerbated by the midterms. Obama was at least suave and charming while pursuing progressive policies the rest of the nation aren't wild about. Biden doesn't have those advantages. I suspect the Democratic Party talent pipeline is about to take another hard hit.
This isn't an age issue. This is a talent pipeline issue.
“Yeah, I tried that Nothing is something phase on one of my philosophy professors in college.”
Nothing is something? Yes, it is the null set. That’s not childish, it’s a definition.
The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable.
The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable on the American Left where you have Bernie, Pelosi, Warren and Schumer (he's the youngest at age 72) then a plunge straight down down to the wannabe leaders; AOC and the Squad along with Fuckface Swalwell. Their middle-aged prospects were the moderates that Obama and the young'uns like Favreau and Rhodes ran out of the party during his administration.
It's not a thing on the American Right; viz. DeSantis, Cotton, Cruz.
Yuval Levin is what they call a "big-government conservative," which should be a contradiction in terms, but with all the contradictions we deal with these days, well, why not.
I'm sure his wrists are still sore from the four years of pearl-clutching he did while Donald Trump was president, but I do recall listening to him on a podcast a few years ago (it may have been during those benighted days when I still thought the Weekly Standard was a conservative organization), where he said something I've never forgotten, and that was:
there is no plan.
All the machinations of our elites, all the ideological clashes, they're not in service to any articulated, thought out plan. It's all being done by the seat of the pants.
In some ways, I buy that. The only real plan is power, getting it and keeping it. But on the other hand, sometimes it seems like there's a design to the heedless, feckless incompetence, and that's to destroy everything, just to watch it burn, because those doing the burning don't think they'll be singed.
I don't think Yuval Levin thinks he'll be singed, either. He's gotten close enough to those doing the destroying to just switch sides when the time comes, claiming he always knew Eastasia was the enemy.
"Midcentury Cliches" would be a good name for a band. A Boomer cover band.
Didn't the Soviet Union go through a similar phase? Khrushchev and Brezhnev were both in their late fifties, Andropov was in his late sixties, and Chernenko in his seventies. Yeltsin was 60 when he came to power. Were there no younger, more dynamic leaders? Apparently there was no path to leadership and no way to move the elders out of the way. That probably traces back to Lenin and Stalin, neither of whom managed to pick successors or put in place a mechanism to do so. The Communist Party also had a monopoly on politics, which made the path of succession very narrow.
It is somewhat different here. The Democrats may be a gerontology, but there are certainly many younger Republicans. And Trump is a phenomenon that could never have happened in Russia, he came up outside of the established party structures.
Now all they have to do is wait, and the Progressives will feel for them and pay off everybody's morgages.
It probably was easier to buy a house back then, but also people were more single-minded. They wanted what they wanted and went after it and weren't deterred by doubts or insecurity or rumination.
========
how do we factor in that DJTrump and his father built houses for their generation?
also does owning house make anyone 'Master of the Domain'
To iowan2 @ 8:53am:
You really hAve no idea what you’re talking about so maybe keep your mouth shut. I’m 48 and there were no participation trophies or safe spaces. All that crap started in the last 20 years.
“The specific question of why Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden dominate the Democrat party will have to answered by the D's who love and keep them in power. My own opinion, is that D voters just don't give a damn who their leaders are, or even what they do. They vote based on their own selfish interested or their indentity politics. Oh, and the fact they hate those Goddamn Republicans.”
I think that is correct. Plus, their leaders tend to be the long term survivors, who are very often the most vicious. They get in line, sitting in their very secure Senate or House seats, and slowly rise through the ranks, decade by decade. Those standing right behind Pelosi are little different from her, except that she, having been Speaker or Minority Leader so long, has had additional avenues for graft - notably exemption from insider trading laws, while having access to significant inside information, running the House.
Prof. M. Drout puts his finger on what's wrong in academia which is the same as the problem on the Democrat side of the aisle. The Republicans are doing just fine in middle aged leadership with a lot of outstanding governors and senators and some younger folks nipping at their heels to keep them honest. I don't think the problem is the same in the corporate world - I think that's an information problem where they rely too heavily on the academically trained. I expect the coming recession will sort that out. If we are lucky it may sort out our government problems too and give the non-corporate businesses a chance to recover. People who are working hard for their money are a lot less tolerant of crime and property damage than folks who are as overpaid and under worked as our current management class.
The D model of politics is to get on the escalator and never let go. Biden and Pelosi are the poster pair for that dynamic.
The R's aren't immune, but Trump is so dominant for now that isn't an option--without even considering the sorry old bull R's like McConman, Mizz Lindsey, and Walter Mittens as individuals.
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