[jmyeet]

I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.

In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.

Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.

So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.

Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.

It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?

[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian...

[2]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[sanguinesphinx]

> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.

This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.

[swed420]

> This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about.

Democrats are half of the uniparty of capital interests. They only exist to prop up the illusion of a functioning democracy.

"Look guys, the election was so close! Democracy is still alive! We just need to vote harder [for the lesser of two evils] next time!"

[wwweston]

The insane thing is that nobody listens when they do talk about it.

A huge thing in the Harris campaign was that her policies polled much better than Trump's (including housing accessibility by increasing construction, regulations for a fairer rental market, downpayment support for firstime buyers). Nobody knew the policies were hers, though, just like awareness of the accomplishments of the Biden admin seem to be shockingly rare.

You can put part of that on the Democratic party, which could clearly up their media game.

But especially in the algorithm age, a lot of what you see is based off your preferences. This makes people who think their main leverage is their resentments really easy pickings. Someone posts content about how the housing market is unfair and politicians aren't doing enough and everyone who agrees teaches their algorithm that's what they find engaging and important -- not that housing policy and who is doing what is important.

So who hears about this?

https://newdemocratcoalition.house.gov/media-center/press-re...

The people who tell their algorithms that's what they want or are more deliberate about their communication channels and what they go looking for.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.

Instead they're taking the opportunity to be insane. But the faithful are not allowed to admit that.

[Spooky23]

Personally, I think GenX are the lost. (I'm a late GenX) Our colleages took the brunt of the global war on terror, and because we entered the workforce at the peak boomer pivot away from the pre-Internet era of business those of us that were in the corporate/government workforce were basically stuck waiting for people to die to move up. We're the people who got computers and internet in a way that neither our elders or children understand.

The millennials are the recipients of the great dumbing down. They get the inherit the wealth of their parents and grandparents, just in time for it to be inflated away to nothing.

[lovich]

I don’t know any millennials who are inheriting anything. Everyone’s boomer parents who inherited family wealth are either losing it to healthcare costs extracting everything at their end of life or (literally in at least one friends case) saying “you can’t take it with you” and burning the family wealth on luxuries while their kids struggle.

Maybe there’s a handful of ultra wealthy families tending the family wealth well but most of the middle class boomers don’t even have a concept of leaving something for future generations.

[giardini]

Why leave wealth to generations that joblessly leech off their parents for decades and then refuse to reproduce?

[gopher_space]

Because you love your children.

[jmyeet]

Fellow GenXer here and no, the millenials have it way worse. We paid a pittance for college and had to buy literally any house in the 1990s and we're fine. Now if you didn't buy a house in the 1990s, yes, you're screwed.

We have our own problems, namely that we were raised by boomers who went from Flower Power in the 1960s to voting for Reagan in the 1980s. We were the last free range generation but that wasn't freedom. It was neglect. Many of us also grew up with things like ADHD and Type 1 Autism long before anyone knew what those things were so that, too, was fun for us.

Baby boomers as a whole seem terrified of dying. So they don't retire but also they don't leave anything for their children. Tehy can't take it with them but by God they're going to spend it before they go. Or it'll just get eaten up on end-of-life care.

I can barely contain my rage at the baby boomer generation who took the fruits of prosperity from FDR in the post-war era and pissed it all away voting for Reagan while bringing people into the world then making sure to pass absolutely nothing onto them in a world they can scarcely afford.

Given all that I still say millenials got shafted way worse.