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.