North of Forty- What the 2012 elections means for Generation
X and beyond
When there is talk of the election much is made of the
senior and Baby Boomer vote with little attention paid to Generation X or the Millennials
that will eventually have to deal with the frightening reality that is the
Romney/Rand ( I mean Ryan. Freudian slip) ticket. Again this isn’t a matter of red and blue. It’s a matter of
the wealthy who don’t want to pay more for their lavish lifestyles but have no
problem heaping the burden on the middle class.
I’m quite sure Mr. Ryan and Governor Romney studied the
Enlightenment but I get the distinct feeling that they’ve forgotten the lessons
learned from the American Revolution when the colonies took issue with the
monarchy. Moreover, they haven’t learned the lessons from the French Revolution
when after years of rule by a monarchy that favored the aristocracy a seething
hatred bred throughout France.
Once ruled by The Sun King, who was an absolute despot who built Versailles on the back of
the peasants set in motion a blood soaked revolution where even the king and
queen lost their heads…literally.
I found an article to
share that I found spoke to me. I hope you give it some thought too.
7
Ways Paul Ryan Wants to Betray His Fellow Generation X-ers
The Peter Pan of American conservatism is bursting with
immature, half-baked ideas for the country. By Lynn Stuart Parramore http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/7-ways-paul-ryan-wants-betray-his-fellow-generation-x-ers?page=0%2C2&paging=off
August 30, 2012
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Last Wednesday in Tampa, Paul Ryan launched himself as the youthful face of
his party, and much as been made of what he means to that ship of restless, and
by now, somewhat battered, souls that sailed forth onto the American scene
between the mid-'60s and mid-'70s. Is he truly a Gen Xer or not? His
risk-taking, nose-thumbing at authority and taste for AC/DC and Led Zeppelin
fit the image, but in many ways, he bears scant resemblance to his generational
compatriots. His rigid political stance, for example, is atypical of a
generation famous for its skepticism of institutions and party lines. And his
white-bread-dipped-in-mayonnaise style is at odds with many of today’s
multiculturally hip late 30- and 40-somethings.
But there’s one key way that Ryan fits a common negative image of Gen X: His
is a case of seriously arrested development.
Ryan and I are exactly the same age. I attended the University of Georgia
from 1988-'92, when young people were leaning toward the GOP. The political
message of unapologetic self-interest was happy news to young folks, dudes in
particular, who rejected the Baby Boomers’ collective ethos and really didn’t
want to share their toys.
Most of my classmates were decidedly apolitical. Weaned on Watergate, Gen X
had seen one disappointing charade in Washington
after another, and largely concluded that politics was the realm of snake oil
and empty spectacle. Alternative music, technology, entrepreneurial projects,
and travel, particularly to post-Communist Europe,
were the hot topics. Nearly anything but politics, which seemed unworthy of
anyone’s time.
The first Gulf War got a minority of Gen Xers energized – a fact that has largely
disappeared from memory. In 1991, a small group of UGA students pitched tents
amid the stately neoclassical buildings of north campus to protest. Michael
Kirven, co-founder of Bluewolf, a global technology consulting firm, was among
them. I spoke to him about what motivated him at the time:
“This was the first issue where I felt like I could do something to make an
impact,” Kirven recalls. “You had a clear sense that you could make your case:
you were either in favor of the conflict, or against it.” He recalls the
hostile environment, the round-the-clock police presence necessary to protect
the protesters from angry hecklers. “From 5pm until midnight there was a
non-stop parade of people not just disagreeing with us, but angry,” Kirven
says. “A few wanted to have meaningful dialogue, but most of them just shouted.
They threw things.”
At UGA, the war protesters were outnumbered by the Paul Ryan types, who
welcomed the Gulf War as a chance to show off their muscular view of America, forged
in the crucible of the Reagan Revolution. They were the Alex Keatons who
worshipped wealth and conservative economics, the chicken hawk brigade that
loudly supported a war they would never have signed up to fight themselves.
Later represented in the punditocracy by the bow-tied Tucker Carlson and his
ilk, they favored the novels of Ayn Rand, in which they saw themselves
vindicated as misunderstood geniuses surrounded by mediocrity.
Paul Ryan, voted “Biggest Brown-Noser” in high school and born with enough
money for Colorado ski trips and a surefire
job at his family’s construction company, embraced libertarianism in college,
where he interned with Wisconsin senator Bob
Kasten and volunteered on the congressional campaign of John Boehner. Clutching
his copy of
The Fountainhead or driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile
for a summer job, Ryan’s High Dork partly explains why so many of today’s
pundits either give him a pass or pretend that he is a guy with serious ideas.
Many of them are also dorks, harboring adolescent fantasies of their own
misunderstood genius, hoping that no one will notice the superficiality of
their thinking. Paul Ryan is their man – an intellectual slacker whose musings
would not hold up for five minutes in a graduate seminar.
Paul Ryan’s politics have long since diverged from those of his generation,
which gradually shifted toward the Democratic Party over the last two decades
and manifests values that are left of most of what Paul Ryan stands for. (Gen
X-ers leaned Republican by 5 percentage points in 1990, but in 2008 they
favored the Democratic Party by 7 percentage points.) Ryan, however, seems to
be stuck in the Reagan era, his jingoism and simplistic economic ideas amped up
with an infusion of Tea Party fanaticism.
When you were in college in those days, if you were left-leaning and sought
enlightenment, you read the mystic novels of Herman Hesse and Fritjof Capra’s
The
Tao of Physics (my own copy is floating around out there somewhere in a
second-hand bookstore, complete with giddy marginalia). If you were
right-leaning and sought self-gratification, you read
Atlas Shrugged
and talked about the sublimity of selfishness. In either case, you grew up
.
You began to separate the wise from the wacky, and you gradually understood
what was original and what was merely derivative. You tested your ideas on the
stage of tough experience. You evolved.
But Paul Ryan, until very, very recently, was
still
clutching his copies of Ayn Rand, making his staff read them and giving
them away as presents. Rand's philosophy, a
justification for continuing adolescent selfishness into adulthood, seldom
sounds reasonable to people over 25. But Ryan was singing its praises at 40.
A successful businessman today, Michael Kirven admits that he has changed a
lot since college, but wonders about Ryan. “I don’t feel like a guy like Ryan
has had any evolution of ideas since his youth,” says Kirven. “My political
views are inconsistent. I agree with Obama on some things, Romney on others. I
could even find something to agree with in Herman Cain. But Ryan is just
dogmatic. Maybe he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity for more complex
thought. He really turns me off.”
Ryan has exhibited a disdain for Gen X, and the feeling is often mutual.
In a recent
New York Times piece, 42-year-old Shane Smith, a
founder of Vice,
summed
up a prevailing feeling of embarrassment at Mitt Romney’s choice of
running mate among Xers: “I just wish that a
Reaganite-friend-of-the-Tea-Party-frat-boy-jock was not our first poster boy.”
Even Ryan’s music heroes, like Tom Morello, guitarist from Rage Against the Machine,
have
rejected him. (Jimmy Page, where are you?)
Instead of learning from the financial crash of 2008, Ryan is doubling down
on the failed economic strategies of deregulation, budget cutting, and
trickle-down that have sent inequality soaring and crushed the middle class. He
is still talking about “makers v. takers,” the classic Ayn Rand formulation
that presents the world as a black-and-white stage of good businessmen and bad
everybody else.
Ryan’s discomfort with Gen X may spring from a very deep reason: He has big
plans to sell us out. X has already suffered expectations of downward mobility,
horrific recessions, job insecurity and the capture of government by corporate
interests. Ryan seems to be a guy who plans to add insult to injury and deliver
his generation an extra sharp kick in the teeth as we face the daunting
challenges of middle age in a crappy economy.
On almost any topic you can name, Paul Ryan has a plan to betray the values
and beliefs of his age group. Most alarmingly, he is bent on stealing our
future. Let us count the ways that Paul Ryan is out to screw Gen X.
1. Who, Me Retire?
When you hit 40, you tend to start thinking about your retirement.
Currently, the lack of job security, pensions, union-crushing and decent
retirement plans make this sort of thinking panic-inducing for Gen X.
Paul Ryan’s economic plans would shift the burden of Medicare to Gen X in
the future by turning the program into a voucher plan. And if he has anything
to do with it, we can kiss any safety net in our golden years goodbye. Gen X
has long been suspicious that they will never receive Social Security. But it’s
not because the program is in fiscal trouble (contrary to popular belief, it
isn’t). It’s because sneaky politicians like Ryan would dismantle the program
under the pretense of crisis so that the bankers can skim fees off of private
accounts. He has advocated the partial privatization of Social Security – an
idea which ought to have been swept away in the massive stock market crash of
2008. But Ryan, his star permanently in retrograde, was advocating handing our retirement
to Wall Street in 2010. He dropped that exceedingly dumb idea in his current
budget for the sake of political expediency, but his consistent worship of the
so-called free market suggests that he hasn’t really changed his mind.
2. She-Orientation
The women of Gen X have made tremendous economic strides, and these
tech-savvy, entrepreneurial and often exhausted ladies have been at the
forefront of the work/life balance movement, seeking a decent existence for
their families and reasonable returns on hard work. Is that too much to ask?
Apparently.
Paul Ryan lingers in the Stone Age. He has consistently
voted
against workplace equity for women, opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay
Act, which makes it easier for women to file wage-discrimination lawsuits. Ryan
is vehemently against a woman’s right to decide whether or not to terminate a
pregnancy – oblivious to the fact that control over reproduction is a key element
in women’s economic well-being and fair participation in the workforce. “I’m as
pro-life as a person gets,” he boasted in 2012.
Ryan has tried to block access to abortion even in the case of rape. Along
with swamp creature Todd Akin, he co-sponsored a bill that would have narrowed
the definition of rape to restrict the number of poor women who can terminate a
pregnancy through Medicaid. All told, he has co-sponsored more than three dozen
anti-choice bills, and his budget would end all government financing for
Planned Parenthood while throwing prenatal care and infant nutrition under the
bus.
3. Reverse Robin Hood
At a time of the worst income inequality since the Gilded Age, Paul Ryan
wants to give more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. If he had his way,
the U.S.
would eliminate all taxes on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends. He
rejected a White House proposal for a minimum tax on millionaires, calling it
“class warfare.”
Ryan claims that he would cut tax rates for all families, but that’s cold
comfort for Gen Xers trying to secure or maintain their position in the middle
class. Even after the Bush tax cuts, Ryan's reductions would only amount to
about $1,000 a year for families with annual incomes between $50,000 and
$75,000. And for rich people with incomes above $1 million? They get a windfall
of $250,000 a year. Ryan says he would pay for these cuts by scaling back tax
breaks. But he is also committed to maintaining low taxes on capital gains, a
big source of income for the wealthy. Most of the other big tax breaks — like
the mortgage interest deduction and pension and health tax benefits — help the
middle class. Rest assured that any attempt to broaden the tax base without
raising taxes on capital income would almost inevitably sock it to middle-class
families. And if those middle-class tax breaks were not slashed to pay for
Ryan's high-income tax cuts, other spending would have to be reduced
further — which would also screw the middle class.
4. Out of Sync on Gay Rights
Paul Ryan is very much
at odds
with his age group on gay issues. He's against same-sex marriage, despite
the fact that a recent
Pew Research Poll found that support for allowing same-sex
marriage has increased among Gen X from 44 percent in 2008 to 52 percent in
2012.
Ryan supports a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and voted
against the repeal of the military’s unfair don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. In
2009, he voted against expanding the federal hate crimes act to include
brutality based on sexual orientation.
Ryan believes that gay Americans are unfit to adopt children, and in 2007 he
broke with his party to support a bill outlawing job discrimination based on
sexual orientation.
5. Enjoy Your McJob
Gen Xers are often viewed as unmotivated slackers with McJobs. In reality,
they have faced extreme job insecurity caused by trickle-down economic
theories, offshoring, union-busting, a corporate-friendly political climate,
and the pervasive myth of shareholder value, which falsely holds that a
corporation's only duty is to shareholders, rather than to workers or to
society.
Amazingly, the Ryan budget does not include any provisions to create jobs
immediately. And he wants to throw fire on the insecure employment trend of his
generation and turn us into helpless wage slaves as fast as he can. He wants
the Federal Reserve to focus solely on inflation (that’s conservative code for
“keeping down wages”) and to abandon its mandate to bolster employment.
Despite the hardship in his own congressional district, Ryan voted against
extending unemployment benefits on the pretext that it would add more than “one
dime to the deficit,” when in fact, those benefits actually help reduce the
deficit by providing income and tax revenues to the economy.
6. Environmental Laggard
A 2011 Pew poll showed that while not quite as enthusiastic as Gen Y, Gen X
is more likely than older generations (particularly the so-called Silent
Generation) to support clean energy and environmental protection and to believe
climate change is occurring and is the result of human activity. Sixty-nine
percent of Gen Xers advocate concentrating on developing alternative energy
sources rather than expanding oil, coal and natural gas exploration. And they
believe in tough rules and regulations.
But Paul Ryan is an environmental dinosaur. His lack of support for clean energy
and climate change programs is well known, and has angered environmentalists.
He has been in favor of cutting the budgets of conservation programs and
eliminating White House climate advisers. Ryan receives big donations from the
oil and gas industries and gets major support from the Koch brothers – two of
the nation’s biggest polluters. The League of Conservation Voters gave him a
dreadful 3 percent rating on its 2011 National Environmental Scorecard.
7. Old-Time Religion
Gen Xers were born in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which
transformed the Catholic Church for the modern world. They started out as the
most Catholic generational group in American history, with one-third
identifying as Catholics in 1990. But by 2010, about one in five had turned
from the faith. It was only because one million Latino Catholics was added to
the Gen X roster that 26 percent of Gen Xer are Catholics today.
Even though they reached adulthood as the Christian Right was asserting
influence on the national stage, polls show that Gen X has become less
Christian as they have grown up. But not Paul Ryan. He bills himself as a
staunchly conservative Catholic, and would very much like to foist his beliefs
on the rest of us. And yet even Catholics have trouble with him: The U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has denounced him for aiming
to cut programs that help the poor and shovel money toward the rich.
***
In reviewing Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged in the
National Review
in 1957, the famed conservative writer Whitaker Chambers decried the book’s
stridency and ludicrously simplistic notions: “It is when a system of
materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our
real life that mischief starts.”
Paul Ryan is nothing more than a smirky, overwrought boy full of mischief,
who never wants to grow up and face the realities and complexities of life.
Unfortunately, the shallow mental waters in which he swims have bred dangerous
sharks that will feed on the achievements and security of his own generation.
The college dork has evolved into an arrogant, screw-you-over-with-a-smile jerk
who peddles piggishness and calls it “prosperity.”
And you wonder why Gen X never really trusted politicians.
About the author: Dr. Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is
cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of
'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She
received her
Ph.D in English and
Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics.
Parramore is a frequent commenter on political, economic and cultural topics on
television, radio, and web outlets. She is the Director of AlterNet's New
Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
