@edg

Mollie

#3.2.1.1

By WW2 generation, I mean those born between 1925 and 1945. They grew up or came of age during WW2 and about 30 million of them are still alive and many are still voting.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
I agree with you about his policies. However, I think he's trying to burn karmic ribbons with his Habitat for Humanity and actually, physically laboring on site.

I learned, just last week, about his deregulation of the airline industry. Being a kid at the time, I didn't know about any of that stuff. Now look at the state of the industry today. Squeezing people in like sardines, over booking, extra charges for every single thing, beating the shit out of people, either forcing them off or holding them prisoner on the tarmac for hours without a/c, and that's not even the half of it. Sigh . . .

#3.2.2.1 Did she want Jerry Brown or Frank Church to win? Or was she a Gerald Ford fan?

I wish we could have had President Frank Church. Not that I have too many objections to Jimmy Carter: his El Salvador policy, his beginning the deregulation of business, his letting the Shah come here (on the advice of Kissinger) and his breaking up asylums and turning them into halfway houses, and, well, nothing, which I believe is one of the great undiscussed sources of the abrupt spike in homelessness in the 1980s--those are the things I don't like about him. There are many things I do like, especially his preference for peace over war and his wish to get off the petroleum economy. Also his emphasis on human rights, but I sure wish he had been more consistent about that.

He was also the last kind president we had--the last one that you could imagine driving a neighbor to the hospital or even lending them a cup of sugar. (At first we thought Bill was like that, but we were oh so wrong).

@thanatokephaloides I remember the 70s with great fondness.
Too much cocaine around back then, and things were going badly economically, but the culture was still alive.

#3.2.2.2

The '70s sucked.

Not all of it. Generally, non-debt vectors were still available for fresh high-school grads to adult-wage jobs. Consumer electronics were still repairable with reasonable skill and without advanced chemistry and quantum mechanics.

And much flatly awesome music, too!

On the other hand, there were some things about the '70s which really did suck big green weenies. The deprecation of the Hippie movement was the onset of the neoconservative disease which now threatens to kill us all......

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

I could be a Boomer. I could be 100. Or I could be 40 or 16. My official positions on personal info and message boards are:

(1) It's irrelevant. The contents of a post are either right or wrong. Telling me you're a professional in the field or whatever doesn't change that. I wish I had a dime for every time someone who had no idea of my age to begin with tried to shut me up by saying they knew better than I because they had lived through the event or era being discussed. Talk about logical fallacy! As if everyone on the planet at that time had the identical view of the event in question!

(2) In my experience, posting personal info is almost always a mistake. If nothing else, someone likely will use it to insult you when they disagree with you or you with them. It happened even on this relatively collegial board. Even funnier--it wasn't even my personal info that got thrown in my face, but info another poster had posted about her own career!

(3) Regardless of what the truth IRL may be, on a message board, I am officially (and perennially) 22, very healthy, wealthy and wise and drop dead gorgeous. Because why not? It's not even lying since I say up front that it's, um, "fake news."

#3.2.2.3 Before I get to anything else: I'm sorry I assumed you were my parents' age. Don't know why I did!

Also, one of my bad habits is to vent my frustration with an inaccurate idea at a person who just reminded me of it, but isn't responsible for it. So, apologies for that too.

Now, back to reading the rest of your comment...

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

I had come to the board feeling uncharacteristically pessimistic about politics and political posters in general. I probably just should have taken a break from posting anything but maybe purely social stuff on open threads. Having an over-developed sense of duty, plus a soupçon of OCD, I nonetheless unwisely began that session by replying to those who had posted to me. I mentioned my mood in the first paragraph of this reply: https://caucus99percent.com/comment/285265#comment-285265 I apologize for not having forewarned you, too. In any case, whatever you irritation you may have picked up on was not directed toward you or any individual.

As my prior reply to you said, I didn't claim all Boomers were hippies, only that the rightist establishment will be happy to be shut of the hippies of the Boomer generation. I've seen a lot of hippie bashing on Democratic political message boards, all part of relentless punching left by Dembots. Ditto generational warfare against Boomers, which I see as both created and stoked by those who want to do away with OASDI, also part of the austerity contingent's punching left--and part of their "divide and rule" tactics. (I know those are not your motives.) BTW, Boomers are also often described as selfish because they allegedly polluted the planet, did not rise up against Reagan, inflicted Bush and Bubba on the world and are forcing everyone who will never benefit from Social Security to contribute to Boomers' Medicare and fat, lazy retirement.

Because of the narratives being pushed against Boomers in general and hippie Boomers in particular, I may have been skeptical when I saw the statistic in gjohnsit's post about the votes of Gen X and Gen M mattering more than the votes of Boomers, especially when the percentage was so slim. (Boomers and older, as edg correctly pointed out, but Boomers likely make up the biggest part of the "Boomers and older" demographic.) At the same time, I've seen you post often about belonging to Gen X and gjohnsit's post called that generation (also his), useless. So, you may have been reacting to that, though that bit had nothing to do with anything I posted.

As far as Sanders appealing to hippies: Of course, Sanders appealed to many hippies, but not necessarily because he is a "peacenik," or an advocate for the rights of women and minorities. IIRC, Sanders voted for bombing poor people in Afghanistan, as retaliation for what Ben Laden, a bunch of other well-funded Saudis and one Egyptian did. Supposedly, that was justified because "Afghanistan" had "harbored" Ben Laden, but bullshit. Afghani peasants hadn't harbored him or refused to hand him over to us--as if farmers could; and we didn't bomb Pakistan, where he was actually "harbored."(Because I am a pacifist, I am not particularly picky about which wars I deem horrific, senseless and also counter-productive to US national security.)

As far as that picture of Sanders being chained to black women: In general, I think those of us who are looking at political news and message boards almost daily can tend to assume that most American voters are far better informed than they are. I can almost guarantee that far fewer hippies heard of Killer Mike, even today, than heard of Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright, Krugman, etc., almost every local, state and national Democratic officeholder in the country who endorsed Hillary and trashed Sanders and the alleged "Bernie bros."

Those hippie voters who did see the pic of Sanders chained to black women may probably also saw or heard the bots' uni-narrative about Sanders, which was spread widely on boards, twitter, facebook, MSNBC and everywhere else: "Sure, he may have done some stuff for African Americans when he was a college kid (if that was even really him). "But then, he moved to Vermont, wrote creepy stuff about women fantasizing (positively) about being raped and totally forgot about black people for the rest of his entire life. Oh, and, btw, his only supporters are white people, and mostly racist, sexist white males at that. #Berniesoblack." Could that riff been convincing to a feminist, equal rights activist from the Sixties? Especially with pics of the mostly white audiences at Sanders' rallies? Possibly. Anyway, my only original point was that the Boomer voting demographic cannot be dismissed.

More importantly (from my POV) is whether I hurt your feelings. I did not post (or mean to imply) that your interpretations of numbers are suspect, or any more or less suspect than mine. I said and meant only that we have to be careful of the interpretations of political data that appear in the msm and elsewhere, especially the ones that I see as pointing rightward (much like Hillary's corporate campaign logo). My secondary point was that while numbers are objective many interpretations of the meaning of numbers are subjective. We all need to be careful not to get locked into any particular interpretations or conclusions (even our own). I did not try to push any interpretation on you, only to point out the existence of possibilities other than the ones you mentioned.

In general, it does not matter to me whether posters agree with me or disagree. It matters to me that I get to say most of what I want and that discussion is civil and issue-besed and seems sincere. Those basic criteria have been met by every post of yours that I've ever seen. As a big bonus, you're posts are also always thoughtful, informative, intelligent, etc. FWIW, you're among my personal favorite posters.

With that, I think I've said as much as I have in me to say about this. In fact, parts of this post may be repeating what I said in my prior reply to you. If so, I apologize.

#3.2.2.3 #3.2.2.3 #3.2.2.3 Ahead of time, let me apologize for the length of this comment--and I'm not even done responding to your points! And let me assert right up front that most of what I'm responding to isn't you. I disagree with you on a couple of points, but it's not a large disagreement, nor is it what I'm really on about--as you'll see. So apologies for venting this stuff in response to your comment.

I agree with you on your personal theory about why people oppose taxes. When government is as obviously and disgustingly corrupt as it is, AND is operating pretty much constantly against your best interests, why would you want to give your money to it? It's untrustworthy. I'm a big government gal myself (as long as we have to exist in a non-anarchist framework), and at this point, the only reason I'm paying my taxes is that I would be jailed and my family economically ruined if I stopped. If I were willing to take that hit, I'd stop paying taxes in a hot second.

However, I think we have to be very careful about which forest level conclusions we draw from the tree, even leaf, level slicing and dicing of voter demographics. That is especially true of a one of a kind (so far) election like the primary of 2016 and the general of 2016.

Fair point, but I was looking at a trajectory. And when I went further back, I discovered that in 1992, Boomers actually went for George H.W. Bush. Not that voting for Bill Clinton was a great thing, but choosing Bush after twelve years of Reagan/Bush is pretty conservative. You're right that how generations vote for the President shouldn't be taken alone, and also, obviously, people can change over time. A true analysis of these matters would have to be done scientifically, as in an actual social scientist doing a study, or maybe more than one.

So I'm not doing a full analysis, because I'm not a social scientist and I don't have the resources to do a study---if I only did! There are countless studies I wish I could do, to reach actual conclusions based on reason.

I'm taking these data points as indicators. I'm aware they don't constitute scientific proof of the nature of the Boomer generation. I'm trying to trouble an entrenched narrative with data that doesn't fit into it, and these data don't. I'm pushing back against a reductive and oversimplified narrative of last fifty or sixty years of history. There's a tendency, not in you but pretty prevalent, which puts all the lefty and counterculture things from the 60s into the "Baby Boom generation (aka those crazy kids)" basket and ignores all data that contradicts that reduction. So everybody who was of that generation who wasn't a lefty or a hippie gets ignored, and--and this one really irritates me--the heroes of that generation are talked of as if they were members of that generation when they weren't. JFK isn't discussed as a member of the Greatest Generation. It took me decades to find out he was a WWII hero. Robert Kennedy isn't discussed as a member of the Silent Generation. MLK isn't discussed as a member of the Silent Generation. Rosa Parks was Greatest Generation. Even John Lewis is a member of the Silent Generation, not the Boomers. Hell, even Timothy Leary was Greatest Generation.

The reason this is important to me is that seeing these data changes our view of history which has all been funneled through the "those lefty counterculture kids in the 60s rose up against their stodgy conservative WWII Archie Bunker parents" narrative, and over time has been cooked down into stereotypes of the various generations:

WWII generation: Conservative and racist, but also war heroes who fought Hitler.
Boomers: Lefty hippies, turned into liberal hippies in the 80s when everything left of liberal was erased
GenXers: Selfish little shits. Some like Reagan, some just like money.
Millenials: Idiot children who think it's the sixties and whose blundering will ruin everything if they don't listen to their elders.

Underneath all this is the notion that what drives history is the essential character of both individuals and generations. People, both individually and en masse, decide to be Good or Bad, to embrace certain ideas or others, and that's what makes history go the way it does. Consequences leap out of the essential characters of both individuals and groups (and I know those two things don't always work the same way, but this narrative treats them as basically the same: generations are discussed as if each generation was one big superperson with an Identity, just as races and genders are, and to a lesser extent, city people vs country people.) What's left out is considerations of power, most considerations of money, and what I might call groups of affiliation rather than demographic groups. In fact, a lot of what I would call history gets left out.

You're not doing this, and you have every reason to be irritated at me for having this spew out because you briefly mentioned Boomers and hippies in the same sentence. But this is what was seething beneath my comment. The assumptions that are frequently made, perhaps even generally made, about the generations, their identities, and their relationship to one another and to history, drive me freaking crazy.

I can think of many reasons a flower child, female or male, who was liberal when bras were being burned and remained so, might vote for the first female to be nominated for the Presidency. There was also the hype about Sanders being a whites only candidate. If a hippie from the Civil Rights sit in era bought that hype, that would have been the kiss of death.

Yes, but that flower child also protested against war. If you went back to the 60s in a time machine, and confronted the flower child with a choice between a rampant sexist and a warmongerer who appeared avid to start World War III, wouldn't that flower child reject both, and, well, drop out? Isn't that why hippies dropped out--because the entire system was corrupt? They're lucky enough to have survived long enough that the majority of America now agrees with them, and would like to drop out, if there were anywhere to drop out to. And now they are apparently loathe to accept that agreement--either that, or the Boomers on Hillary's side were never hippies to begin with. I suspect it's a little from column A and a little from column B. For instance my mom, who was a hippie, supports Hillary, but so did Dick Cheney.

As for Sanders, yes, there was hype about him being a racist. There was also a picture of him being dragged off with a black woman because he protested segregation in Chicago. There was also hard evidence that he was the only white politician to show up in 2004 when the CBC gathered to discuss voter suppression of Blacks in Ohio. Whereas Hillary Clinton worked on Goldwater's campaign and is now being touted as a Civil Rights champion, despite the fact that she had a young Black civil rights protester taken out of her fundraiser by security so she could get back to talking to her rich white donors. The only reason that the "Sanders is a racist" thing stuck is that a bunch of famous Black people refused to support him, and, thus, there must be something racist about him--which is why I get upset about the idea of reading history through the lens of stereotyped notions of the characters of individuals and groups. If a bunch of prominent Black people occupy the airwaves and don't support you, then you must be racist, because

Group A: Black people=good people who fight racism
Group B: White people=bad racist people who hurt everyone not white
Group C: Hillary Clinton and her white supporters=white people who might as well be Black because they feel sorry for Group A and excoriate Group B (any times they might have hurt group A or worked with Group B are wiped off the slate)

Of course, the unacknowledged elephant in the room of my discussion here is the abandonment of reason, logic, standards of evidence, standards of proof--and their replacement with stereotypes, team allegiances, and ill-defined moral appeals which, upon examination, don't even manage to support the morality they advocate. At least the Religious Right actually believed the (IMO pretty crappy) morality they advocated.

So, the numbers are suspect, but the interpretations of the numbers, being far more subjective, is even more suspect.

I think that the numbers since the 2000 election fraud and the 2001 takeover of our country by the security state might be lies. Election fraud and propaganda have become more and more dominant forces in this country in the 21st century. But I don't believe that all numbers ever posted in our history have necessarily always been propaganda. That's why I went back in time, to see if I could see a trajectory. (In response to your response, heh, I went back even further and discovered that Boomers, in the 80s, supported Reagan, Reagan, and Bush). There's reason to believe that numbers since 2000 could be suspect, which is why I put a caveat there--however, there's also reason to believe that, even up till last year's election, the propagandists didn't have complete control over those numbers and those who discover and present them to the public, namely that they had to cancel exit polls last year, instead of having the exit polls obediently report exactly what they wanted.

As for my interpretations being even more suspect, my hypothesis was not all Boomers are/were hippies or leftists, and that there's a significant minority, at least, of the Boomer generation that is as far from being hippies or leftists as you can get. Not surprising, when you consider how large the generation is, and it seems to me that it was a fairly evident fact even back in the sixties. One estimate, from a social scientist working in the sixties, was that hippies constituted fewer than a half a million people in a generation of 34 million people. Of course, that doesn't include all leftists, but the existence of groups like Young Americans for Freedom suggests that the Boomers were not monolithically left-wing any more than they were all hippies. And of course, we all know that there were Boomers who chose to cut their professional teeth in the administrations of Richard Nixon. Many of them turned up later in the administrations of George W. Bush. To me, that hypothesis doesn't seem suspect so much as so obvious it shouldn't even need to be mentioned.

@gulfgal98

I have not been becoming more conservative over time, either, though some do. In fact, I'm about ready to go full anarchist. (I'm not about to bomb anything, though.)

I trust that you replied to me with your personal experience because it is relevant to the discussion that CStMS and I have been having and not because you misread my post to mean that I am eager for the demise of anyone, much less of an entire generation. If not, please read the portion of my two replies to CStMS that explain the meaning of my comment on the graph gjohnsit posted.

And, since I skipped down the thread a bit, I agree with you that native's post was very well put, though I disagree with you that native put anything better than you did. You always put things very well indeed, wording softly while posting big stuff. On this thread, you and native made valuable, though different kinds of contributions, one personal and one general, both enlightening and, as always, both very well put.

#3.2.2.3 and I am probably replying to the wrong comment here. Further, what I am about to write is probably too much personal information. So here goes. I am a Boomer, from the front end of that generation. I was not a hippie, but I did do more than my share of illegal substances in my younger years. I realized that I had to make a living in order not to end up on the streets, so I cleaned up my act and got away from the people immersed in that culture. Looking back, that decision probably saved my life.

Back then in my twenties, I was totally and completely apolitical. It was through my job working in local government, that I became more politically aware and voted Democrat even though I held no strong ideology. I just believed in fairness and the Democrats appeared to represent fairness back then.

Unlike the stereotypes often portrayed here and elsewhere on line, as I have gotten older, I have moved further and further left. I am much farther left than I was even ten years ago.

What I really dislike seeing is my entire generation as being portrayed the villains in our society. Yes, the majority of people of all generations become more politically conservative as they grow older, but not all of us. When I participated in Occupy Tallahassee, some of the strongest supporters of the local Occupy movement were those of us over 60. When I joined our local Peace vigil, I was the youngest member by at least ten years and I was in my early 60's at the time.

Because the Boomer generation was so large, it is easy to paint us all with a broad brush and wish for our demise. But I am a firm believer that we need to continue to find common ground, even with those whose politics are to the right of our own and that include the Boomer gneration.