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Regressives at the New Republic and the imaginary generation gap.

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An American who is age 60 in 2020 entered the workforce  in 1980 after the OPEC oil embargo during the Reagan recession where unemployment went up to 10.8%,  an era the regressives (who call themselves progressives) consider utopian.
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
3. Here is the reality of the generational divide: Americans over 45 or 50 grew up in a country that had many flaws but basically worked. The racism, misogyny, homophobia were there and had to be fought but on a basic economic level the country provided jobs & pensions.
This is the classical progressive “yes but” – yes for millions of people there was racism, misogyny and homophobia, but there was a peachy new deal egalitarian system for the people who really mattered.  It’s improved by adding a stunning level of historical revision. Not only was unemployment at nearly 11% midway through Reagans first term, but what percentage of the workforce had defined benefit pensions in this utopia? About 35% in 1990 and rapidly dropping (BLS ).
And then the 80s started the era of private equity looting which emptied many of these pension plans. On the other hand.
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
5. If you are under 45, your adult experience of the United States consists of Bush/Gore, 9/11, Iraq & Afghanistan fiasco, Katrina meltdown, 2008 meltdown, slow and partial recovery, Trump, and now COVID-19 fuck ups & new depression.12:50 PM · Apr 8, 2020Twitter Web Client
So for a 40 year old, you turn 20 during the Supreme-Court theft of an election and just before 9/11  while for a 60 year old person you turn 20 during the wonderful Ronald Reagan’s term and 11% unemployment with people like  Rhenquist and then Scalia landing on the Supreme court, the Savings and Loan debacle, the butchery in El Salvador, the first invasion of Iraq, and, if lucky. you  live through to the Golden Age of Democracy during the Lewinsky and Whitewater “scandals”.
Then for many people, there was the minor inconvenience of the AIDS epidemic
HIV/AIDS in the United States - Wikipedia
And the crack cocaine epidemic (remember the Crime Bill we had to hear about so many times during the primary election?)
In 1988, the American cocaine market was valued at almost $140 billion dollars, over 2 percent of U.S. GDP. The violence that surrounded its distribution and sale pushed the murder rate to its highest point in America’s history (between 8-10 per 100,000 residents from 1981-1991), turned economically impoverished cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton and Gary, Indiana, into international murder capitals, and made America the most violent industrialized nation in the world.https://www.citylab.com/life/2011/11/cocaine-plummeting-price-nationwide-drop-violent-crime/474/
But the people who suffered most through the cocaine fueled crime epidemic were “yes but” people   who bore the brunt of the “racism, misogyny, homophobia” that Jeet brushed off to start. For example, while the unemployment rate was 10% under Reagan it was a lot higher for black people.  The country “basically worked”, but look at this graph of unemployment for black men (note what happened under Clinton and then Obama, as a contrast).
Screenshot from 2020-04-11 08-43-09As Jeet points, out, things basically worked for some people.

Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
4. Democrats over 45 buy into the Clinton-Obama-Biden worldview (that America is fundamentally a functioning society which needs fixing) because that’s their experience of life. The under 45 set have had a very different experience of an American that on basic level doesn’t work
The difference is not between people under 45 and those over 45, the difference is between Democrats and Regressives . The best economic period before 2000 was the 8 years of Bill Clinton and the best one after 2000 was the 8 years of Barack Obama. In both eras, there was also significant progress on those “yes but” issues.   Neither era was anything close to perfect, but things moved forward – progress was made. So Democrats, of all ages, buy into the Clinton-Obama-Biden worldview that things can be made to improve, that progress is possible – although not to some utopian stage very soon. But the regressives have nostalgia for what never was: the good old days of the White Guy Working Class when the country “basically worked” (except for the people it didn’t work for)  and they can’t stand anyone who interferes with that dream even though it’s ever more clear that their picture of the world is wrong. Consider the remarkably incorrect predictions that Mr. Heer made back before the election.

As president, Trump—a con man who traffics in dark fantasy—would quickly find himself constrained by the realities of actual government. The Constitution makes it difficult to pull off the kind of Putinesque strong-arming that Trump admires. Instead, he would be forced to try, and ultimately fail, to be what he is not: a capable and measured leader, his power subject to the checks and balances of a democracy. Congress has its own political stories to tell. Supreme Court justices, unlike reality-show apprentices, can’t be fired.

President Trump would face, for perhaps the first time in his life, an environment in which the law—not his word—is the law. Top military and intelligence officials have already vowed to disobey Trump if he ordered them to commit war crimes, as he has promised to do. Try to imagine Trump negotiating the finer points of public policy, even with a Republican-dominated Congress or Senate. His loyal followers will become disillusioned because he will be unable to deliver on his promises to build a wall and deport everyone without documentation and make the rest of the world bow before America’s might. Or they will become disillusioned because he won’t even try to deliver on his promises, which were nothing but lies in the first place. Or they will become disillusioned because their entire political philosophy requires them to reject the very existence of government, and Trump will be the CEO of the world’s most powerful government. (The Worst Case)

One response to “Regressives at the New Republic and the imaginary generation gap.”

  1. Gerontocracy and gullible liberals – krebscycle

    […] See also Regressives at the New Republic and Jeet Heer […]

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