Elon Musk as an example of the kind of people from my generation
Elon’s an Afrikkkaner fratbro social media junky with $200B to his name. That’s just not the lived experience of most Americans.
Most GenX are the product of the Neoliberal era
They’re nostalgic for the 90s, because it was a time of relative abundance. They’re not all Chicago Economics School trade globalists with a hard on for abolishing the minimum wage and privatizing social security, because none of them stand to benefit from any of that shit.
they’re usually unwilling to inconvenience themselves for the sake of fighting against it
You’ve got a selection bias. The GenXers who fought the fiercest got crushed the hardest. Prisons are choke full of social revolutionaries who got swept up in the 90s/00s Law and Order era. Hospital wards are full of GenXers pumped full of opioids to treat work-injuries and heavy metal poisoning. Morgues are full of GenXers who died in the service sector job filling lunch orders during COVID or were wiped out in the AIDS epidemic before it was treatable.
Losing doesn’t mean you weren’t fighting. It just means you were outnumbered, outspent, and outmaneuvered. For every Kamala Harris or Ron DeSantis who climbed up through the bowels of the system to live in its head, there are thousands who got crushed under its feet.
Gen X generally are more well informed than Boomers but even less principled
The folks you’re seeing are simply the ones that made themselves useful to the ruling class. One thing the GenX crowd was right about - the Revolution wasn’t televised. It was a war fought and lost in the back alleys and the boiler rooms and the darkest cells of solitary confinement. If the GenX capitalist class is looking extra cynical, that may be thanks to all of their relatives and neighbors they had to stack up like cordwood to reach these heights.
Whilst I did not live in the US, I did live in 4 countries in Europe (having got involved in politics in 2 of them) and from what I’ve seen those GenXers who fought for a better World are not the majority, not even close.
As somebody in that cohort and hence having moved along with it over the years through school and work, the general impression I got over time is one of political apathy and consumerist self indulgence.
(Certainly I was generally the odd one out in having strong political beliefs and it’s funny that even now in the political party I’m involved in, in my local area only a handful of active members are from my generation, whilst most are from the older generation and the second largest group are from the younger generation)
It really wasn’t much of a fighting generation to begin with back at their teenage and young adult years (just compare it to the much more recent Climate movements of the young) and there was a lot of apathy towards the ones amongst them who were (the pinnacle in the US was maybe Occupy Wall Street, which was violently suppressed by Obama - the very same who did the shoving of trillions towards Finance in the first place - and notice how still today so many of my generation think he was a great President).
I agree with you on the outmanouvered point, though that was a lot easier to do because the will was there for a few, not for the many, so when the few got suppressed the many wouldn’t lift a finger and often even agreed that those “making waves” should be stopped.
Elon’s an Afrikkkaner fratbro social media junky with $200B to his name. That’s just not the lived experience of most Americans.
They’re nostalgic for the 90s, because it was a time of relative abundance. They’re not all Chicago Economics School trade globalists with a hard on for abolishing the minimum wage and privatizing social security, because none of them stand to benefit from any of that shit.
You’ve got a selection bias. The GenXers who fought the fiercest got crushed the hardest. Prisons are choke full of social revolutionaries who got swept up in the 90s/00s Law and Order era. Hospital wards are full of GenXers pumped full of opioids to treat work-injuries and heavy metal poisoning. Morgues are full of GenXers who died in the service sector job filling lunch orders during COVID or were wiped out in the AIDS epidemic before it was treatable.
Losing doesn’t mean you weren’t fighting. It just means you were outnumbered, outspent, and outmaneuvered. For every Kamala Harris or Ron DeSantis who climbed up through the bowels of the system to live in its head, there are thousands who got crushed under its feet.
The folks you’re seeing are simply the ones that made themselves useful to the ruling class. One thing the GenX crowd was right about - the Revolution wasn’t televised. It was a war fought and lost in the back alleys and the boiler rooms and the darkest cells of solitary confinement. If the GenX capitalist class is looking extra cynical, that may be thanks to all of their relatives and neighbors they had to stack up like cordwood to reach these heights.
Whilst I did not live in the US, I did live in 4 countries in Europe (having got involved in politics in 2 of them) and from what I’ve seen those GenXers who fought for a better World are not the majority, not even close.
As somebody in that cohort and hence having moved along with it over the years through school and work, the general impression I got over time is one of political apathy and consumerist self indulgence.
(Certainly I was generally the odd one out in having strong political beliefs and it’s funny that even now in the political party I’m involved in, in my local area only a handful of active members are from my generation, whilst most are from the older generation and the second largest group are from the younger generation)
It really wasn’t much of a fighting generation to begin with back at their teenage and young adult years (just compare it to the much more recent Climate movements of the young) and there was a lot of apathy towards the ones amongst them who were (the pinnacle in the US was maybe Occupy Wall Street, which was violently suppressed by Obama - the very same who did the shoving of trillions towards Finance in the first place - and notice how still today so many of my generation think he was a great President).
I agree with you on the outmanouvered point, though that was a lot easier to do because the will was there for a few, not for the many, so when the few got suppressed the many wouldn’t lift a finger and often even agreed that those “making waves” should be stopped.