General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm an example of what's gone wrong with America in the last 40 years. [View all]Warpy
(111,254 posts)When Reagan came in as the great American savior, Boomers were just like Gen X, Y, and Z were in their 20s. Get it? They didn't vote, most of them, many working 2 jobs because they'd been hammered hard by the OPEC oil shocks, which our elders and betters allowed right wing mouthpieces to blame on greedy workers because hey, they'd already made their piles and didn't want inflationary pressure from living wages diminishing them.
It was the Greatest Generation and the Silent Majority types that pushed Reagan into office. The dumb Boomers who voted for him did so because they believed those 10% income tax cuts would help---unless they did the math. Others were religious nuts working into Millennial Fever, thinking their only hope lay in Jebus and pushing women out of work via forced childbirth, and a few were young enough to vote the way Mom and Dad told them to. He represented equal opportunity sucker bait and sensible people were simply outvoted by people who bought the glamor and the lies, especially those who had scrambled up the New Deal ladder and wanted to pull it up after them.
That is who elected Reagan, so can the intergenerational self righteousness. Younger generations were no better. They had other things to do in your 20s, most of them. So did we. So did most people before us who hadn't settled down and had kids yet. Younger generations are always outvoted, and the shit sandwiches get stinkier every year.
I sincerely hope that is changing. There is nothing like a half witted, personality disordered, bloated plutocrat who wants to be a despot to wake young folks up that voting is kind of a necessary thing. I hope it lasts but I don't expect it to. Younger people tend to vote in far lower numbers than other age groups. That means my age group and that means the next ones in turn.
Playing the blame game against other people is not helpful, it is not ever helpful. Reagan got elected, just like Nixon before him, on a bunch of hate and lies. The Reagan Revolution has culminated in Dumdum*. The question is what we are prepared to do about that now, and that means getting along with each other and accepting that yes, some people made mistakes and nobody's all that pious.
And if you want a laugh, try looking at a series about what Boomers got handed, start here.
*Dumdum, like the bullets, hollow and do a disproportionate amount of serious damage.
(and before you try to bag me, personally, I was a voter, my grandmother and great grandmother had been Suffragettes and if I hadn't I'd have been haunted)