Bob
11-12-2015, 05:14 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/opinion/campaign-stops/a-lost-generation-of-democrats.html
snip
But there’s more to it than that. Politically active Democrats of this post-boomer generation (my own) should admit that our experience is a bit out of step with the tone and demands of current politics. Unlike baby boomers, we weren’t brought up on the campus activism of the late 1960s, and we didn’t describe ourselves as “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” as Mrs. Clinton did in her Wellesley commencement speech in 1969. The formative experiences of older Generation Xers were in the quiescent Reagan years, when civic life offered neither the sense of affirmative mission of the civil rights era nor the intense protests and passions of the late 1960s.
As a few members of this generation found their way into politics and government, it was usually not through the voluntarism and culture of service that emerged in the late 1990s, exemplified by Teach for America, nor the intense progressive — and unapologetically partisan — organizing of the 2000s, in vehicles like MoveOn.org or campaigns like the Vermont governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid.
snip
snip
But there’s more to it than that. Politically active Democrats of this post-boomer generation (my own) should admit that our experience is a bit out of step with the tone and demands of current politics. Unlike baby boomers, we weren’t brought up on the campus activism of the late 1960s, and we didn’t describe ourselves as “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” as Mrs. Clinton did in her Wellesley commencement speech in 1969. The formative experiences of older Generation Xers were in the quiescent Reagan years, when civic life offered neither the sense of affirmative mission of the civil rights era nor the intense protests and passions of the late 1960s.
As a few members of this generation found their way into politics and government, it was usually not through the voluntarism and culture of service that emerged in the late 1990s, exemplified by Teach for America, nor the intense progressive — and unapologetically partisan — organizing of the 2000s, in vehicles like MoveOn.org or campaigns like the Vermont governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid.
snip