OK, boomer.

"You say you want a revolution, well, you know,

We all want to change the world.

Don't you know it's going to be all right. All right. All right."

     The Beatles, written in the summer of 1968

   

1969

These are the Boomer years. We got the music right, but Bernie Sanders says we screwed up the politics.

The Boomer Era in politics started with Bill Clinton's election in 1992 and it isn't over yet. The political parties are realigning under the Boomer's watch.

Democrats used to be the party of working people, a New Deal coalition of factory workers in the North with Solid South white segregationists. It represented the "little guy" or the "average American" against financial and cultural elites. Factory workers in Michigan voted Democratic; educated, sophisticated, prosperous people in the suburbs voted Republican.

A switch is underway. Now the factory worker and person who identifies as a "little guy" is more likely to vote Republican, or at least on the margin did so in 2016 to give Trump the electoral vote victory. Democrats stopped being a party that identified itself around incomes and job status--the "working class"--and became more identified around identity categories. It became the party that represented ascendent blacks, women, homosexuals, secular humanists, plus a base of white liberals who congregated in college towns and coastal cities. 

The "little guy," the white working class American, was open to the message of George Wallace in the late 1960's, to Pat Buchanan in the 1990's, and finally Trump currently, especially as Democrats focused attention on people who were attempting to join that group of "regular Americans" as opposed to people who were already in it. Right populist messages identified around issues of culture, in large part in opposition to the ascendent groups. Trump added an economic argument that free trader trickle-down Romney had made less well; Trump will bring back their jobs. 

Democrats had a different message; we will bring back social justice.

Trump won that argument and Democrats lost enough of the white working class to lose the 2016 election.

The Bernie Sanders progressive message is that Democrats lost their way by ignoring the economic interests of working people in America, as labor, as working class. He says that black, brown, and white people, women, men, straight, gay, and people of all faiths have a common interest in re-asserting democratic power to shift power and economic rewards back toward labor and away from capital, toward workers and away from top managers and stockholders. The top 1%, and especially the top tenth of 1% have glommed onto nearly all the productivity gains of the Boomer era. He says Democrats reconnect with working people by fighting for economic justice.

Democrats are sorting it out now in their primary. The great trend is toward a party re-alignment built around identity, but nothing works better to reverse such a trend than losing an election to someone like Trump. Vote your identity as workers, Sanders says.

Meanwhile, Trump and Fox and talk radio says the great unifiers for the "average American" are traditional cultural touchstones, and the resentment real Americans feel over the complaints of weirdos, interlopers, agitators, foreigners, and communists. Vote your identity as normal Americans, Trump says.

Boomers like David Brooks of the NY Times, and Jim Stodder, a college classmate and economist, have each tried to make sense of this. Here is David Brooks' take: Click: NY Times   

Jim Stodder teaches international economics and securities regulation at Boston University, with recent research on how carbon taxes and rebates can be both income equalizing and green. He was a college classmate, then received a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. His website: www.jimstodder.com

Guest Post, by Jim Stodder

Jim Stodder

I agree with NY Times Columnist David Brooks that our political impact, as distinguished from our social, has not been so great. I worry about the extent to which our boomer leftist politics fostered the right-populist reaction here and in Europe.  

Of course, some sort of reaction to the social upheaval of the 60s was inevitable, We shouldn't blame ourselves for its very existence.  But I think the degree to which our generation abandoned a class-based politics in favor of one that was cultural and identity-based helped lead to this reaction.  

This left the white working and lower-middle classes, but also many people of color in those classes, with the distinct impression that we didn't care anything about them. How else can we explain the wholesale abandonment by these groups of center-left parties in the West?  The  answer of "racism" is true, but is also too easy. Remember those 6 million Obama-to-Trump voters.

Part of the reason we abandoned "middle America," the culture most of us came from, is that our escape from bourgeois mores reflect a kind of cultural narcissism. We boomers have grown up with a spotlight on our every furrow of the brow, every curl of the lip.  Everywhere we looked we saw ourselves.  

This led to a sense, even among many who might be otherwise inclined, that we were too good for mere politics. We wanted to do bigger and higher things. I've long felt a grim recognition from Todd Gitlin's remark that while the Right was taking over State Legislatures in the '90s, the Left was busy taking over the English Departments.

So yes, I think Brooks' C grade on our Politics is fair.