Wednesday, June 12, 2019

View from another country

      "We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent--and young. 

                            Jefferson Airplane, 1969


Change agent

Generation Gap.


"Who is he?"

A houseguest this week, age 26, politically active and liberal, asked who was that guy in the framed campaign poster in my living room. It was George McGovern. She had never heard of him.

That is anecdote, not data.

I used to sing along with Jefferson Airplane in my dorm room. That, too, is anecdote.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair is running an article on discontent from the her progressive supporters over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has been in Congress for over five months.  "What has she brought to the floor of Congress? What has she brought for a vote? What has she really gone to war with Leader Pelosi to get on the floor?"

They are impatient for change. They feel what Martin Luther King called that "fierce urgency of now."

Click: Vanity Fair
Nancy Pelosi is in a tough position. There is a division not just between progressives and moderates but between young and old--a generation gap in urgency and timing.

Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives, not because Democrats won urban districts like that of the Bronx, but because they flipped swing and Republican-leaning districts in places like Orange County, California. 

That is the reality of votes, but the reality of energy is different. It comes from the young and restless. The others may remain dormant. Only 31% of young people voted in 2018--and that was considered a huge gain. In 2016 only 21% voted. 

The youth vote is a sleeping giant. A Quinnipiac poll shows only 18% of voters age 18-34 say they are paying "a lot" of attention to politics, compared with 56% of voters over 50. Click: Quinnipiac

Paris, 1968. Cobblestones and General Strike.

Early Warning. Heads up to American readers. Student uprisings in the US in the late 1960s were presaged by earlier ones in Paris. Europe was the canary in the coal mine. 

So, too, again in the past five years. Immigration became visible as an issue in Europe well before it was understood as such in the US. Europe saw the rise of nativist populism, then Britain with Brexit, and then Trump in the U.S. 

We have an up close guest post observation from Europe.


Michael Drayton is a former client and says he can be described as a "registered Democrat, part-year resident of Berlin, a part-time teacher of English as a second language, knee-jerk liberal, and a resident of Northern California. 

Drayton

Guest Post by Michael Drayton



Writing from Berlin, I thought I’d weigh in on a similar generational conflict playing out in politics here in reaction to your blog entry from Monday. 

The election for EU Parliament reflected a larger-than-previous turnout of young voters, and a consequent increase in the success of the Green Parties in various of the EU countries. 

I looked most closely at the results in Germany, where Merkel’s coalition partners, SPD (Social Democratic Party), CDU (Christian Democratic Union, and CSU (Christian Socialist Union, the Bavarian equivalent of CDU) lost the numbers needed to form a governing coalition. The Greens and Die Linke (the Left party) will be big players, though they’ll need another block or two to form the new coalition. Now, this is projecting from the EU elections to expectations about upcoming German Bundestag elections, so a lot remains to be seen.

The biggest issue: the relaxed pace that the current coalition has taken toward climate change, with goals like 2038 and intermediate goals that have already been missed. Your observation that the younger people are seeing this as more immediate and threatening is also a driver here.

In German, viewed 14 million times.
Some of this sentiment was catalyzed into action by a video from a 26-year-old YouTuber called Rezo, whose 55-minute offering, “The Destruction of the CDU” was viewed about 2 million times by election day. I watched the video and found it well constructed, well supported via charts and quotations, with documentation of the sources via links on the YouTube page. No surprise that CDU and SPD spokespeople reacted negatively and unfortunately somewhat irrelevantly to the content.

I filled out an on line questionnaire from the federal government run Center for Political Education (Zentrum für Politische Bildung) and found myself aligning best with the Green Party, to my surprise.

Of course, in the U.S.’s winner-take-all system, I would never vote a 3rd party in 2020.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Young people like AOC don't know what they don't know. They may be idealistic, but they don't understand the entire picture. AOC says that she wants to go "green". It will cost more than 90 TRILLION dollars to do that. Young people don't understand what 90 trillion dollars is, or how you'd get it, or how it would impact the rest of the economy. Being older, and having life experiences, and "seasoning" counts. It means that you've been through "the wringer" a few times, and you know how to respond to the uncertainties and complexities of life. Peter Sage has worked through numerous stock market turbulences. He's seen it all. Would you rather trust his investment judgement over that of a brand new college graduate (like AOC)? I would.

Peter Sage's house guest didn't know who George McGovern is. An older person would know. They would know that George McGovern was very liberal for his time, and he espoused the same politics as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and a new generation of progressives do now. George McGovern is the Godfather of the current group of progressives. Peter's young house guest exhibited ignorance, due to a lack of life experience. Young people are idealistic, but due to their inexperience, they're not ready to run the show. They need to sit back, and watch, and learn, and become seasoned. They are not ready to lead now.

As a side note, in the past week, there have been rumors that AOC may be challenging either Gillibrand or Schumer for their NY senate seats. I think that's ludicrous. AOC has been in congress for only six months, and she has no accomplishments. She's just a celebrity. She's polling at about 40% of the NY senate primary vote against Schumer and Gillibrand, which clearly illustrates that voters are low information voters, as are particularly the younger ones. They are ignorant of the bigger picture.

Rick Millward said...

I predict younger voters will be energized as they were with Obama, perhaps even more. Popular culture portrays them as clueless and superficial but it couldn't be more wrong. Each generation is more ambitious and energetic than the one preceding it. It might be comforting to dismiss them, but without their idealism, and that of the young at heart, we would be worse off, if you can imagine. It's not an accident they gravitated to Bernie.

It's a simple fact many overlook that politics, like tax policy, is incidental to a young person immersed in their goals and struggles. It's only when someone has achieved some success, and children of their own, and perhaps some breathing room that they look up and see the bigger picture which includes politics, which in part is a consideration of a future that seems quite far off to a 20 something. In that context AOC is representative of a generation for whom climate change and income inequality are real and present dangers that have cut short what should be a carefree youth and unlimited future.

Anonymous said...

Bernie Sanders is starting to fade in the polls. Liz Warren is overtaking Bernie. If Bernie's support base is young people, then it appears that they are abandoning him.

https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2019/06/12/2020-democrat-poll-warren-overtakes-sanders-second-place-behind-biden/

Art Baden said...

In 2016, the most progressive candidate running a statewide race in bluer than blue Oregon was Brad Avakian, the Democratic candidate for Oregon Secy of State. He had been an activist and progressive Secy of Labor and was the only candidate for any statewide race that year who came out in favor of ballot measure 97 which mandated an additional tax on corporations doing over $25 million in sales - funds to be used for education. The ballot measure failed, and so did Brad Avakian, the only Democrat losing a statewide that year (to an unabashed rural conservative Republican, Dennis Richardson).
The next time someone says that Democrats need to nominate unabashed progressives who will mobilize young leftist voters, rather than tacking to the center and attracting moderates, tell them about Brad Avakian