Protests then and now

We're still here.

April 5th was a blast! Nationwide, estimators said the rallies drew three million marchers from every state in the union, and a few from overseas. Old school protesters were out in force. People noticed the relative under-participation of young people. Next March is set for April 19. Let us discuss what’s happening here.

Mine is the generation that made protest and civil disobedience cool. The reasons so many of us flock to rallies today is because:

• We’ve been chafing at social injustice for most of our lives, and

• Boomers rally at protests. It’s just what we do.

Our view of the 1950’s and 1960’s may be skewed by the simple fact that there were so damn many of us. This, if nothing else, is why we captured so much attention: we were too big to ignore. We were dismissed by parents and sundry other grownups as kids without a clue. We dismissed them right back and said “Don’t trust anybody over 30” We rattled a lot of peoples’ sensibilities by declaring ourselves “anti-Establishment” (yes, with a capital E).

Who were we? We were mostly college kids, white, and from middle-to-upper class families. Our lives were comparably privileged. Our parents were reaping the benefits of the post WWII new global order. Unlike their parents before them, they saw the likelihood that we could do better and have much easier lives than they had.

Those of us who weren’t dying in Viet Nam or getting murdered in the Jim Crow south had the world by the tail. Although our ranks are thinning, we still do. We look at “the kids today” with older, wiser eyes, but still don’t quite grasp how different their world is from the one that was our oyster.

Where are the young people now?

As you can see by the photos above, we’re still here. Only difference is that “here” is different now than it was then.

Ever wonder what would it would be like to be born smack in the middle of trickle-down economics? By the time the Millennials came along, it was no longer a foregone conclusion that their lives would be better, more secure and prosperous, than their parents. Public funding once spent on education and infrastructure was being redirected to the pockets of the very rich in the form of tax breaks. Public school curricula got trimmed right down to the bone, so they didn’t have a lot of the “enrichments” we had when I attended public schools. (For example, my public elementary school taught us all how to play violin.) Without a good experience of public school, interest in college began to wane. The emphasis shifted from getting a liberal arts education to preparing to get a job. Many of the kids that did go to college could only do so by incurring significant student debt. For young adults in the world, the grown-up world the boomers enjoy is largely out of reach. Housing is scarce and over the moon expensive. Jobs, even the good ones, don’t raise their wages proportionate to the rise in costs.

So. Long story short, there are lots of those folks virtually stuck in their parents’ basement with no end of debt and no clear path toward accruing wealth of their own. They may not relate to the esoteric fights for democracy in which we boomers are now embroiled. It may be the least of their problems.

Does that make these marches little but vanity events for comfortable, white, old people (reliving their youth by protesting once again)?

No. It does not.

As long as this is only the “land of the free” to varying degrees, our energy ought not be preoccupied with performative representation. It should be focused on reforming the system that creates the grossly differential treatment of people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks through disenfranchisement and cultural erasure.

Uneven demographic representation doesn’t signal a problem with our protests. It signals a problem with America. How many times do I say this? The problem is a country basing itself on equality for all, then structures its constitution and laws on inequality.

Talkin’ ‘bout my generation

In a podcast interview with Michael Steele, CNN’s Jim Acosta lamented at the shamefulness of our abandonment of Ukraine and the cruelty of our ongoing deportations. In closing, he said,

“We’ve got to hand off to the next generation some semblance of the America that we grew up with, or we’re just utter failures as a generation.”

I feel called to service by that statement — but I wonder if any of it is relevant to younger generations OR people of color OR anyone who can’t be at marches because they’re a single parent working two jobs and can’t afford the child care. Young people are increasingly turning to far-right ideologies and political parties due to a combination of social, economic, cultural, and political factors. When asked why by researchers, young people tell them that democracy simply does not work.

Unlike them, we older, white, financially secure people do not experience the brunt of trickle-down economics in the same way. Our economy mirrors our national self — inequitable. Social theorists and economists describe our economy as “late-stage capitalism” because, through trickle-down economics, we’ve taken capitalism about as far as it will go without society starting to break down. The characteristics of late-stage capitalism are experienced differently by different Americans depending on who they are relative to the dominant groups. These include:

• Extreme wealth concentration: Growing inequality where capital accumulation outpaces wage growth, as noted by economists like Piketty.

• Corporate dominance: Governments increasingly favoring large corporations through subsidies, tax policies, and regulatory capture.

• Commodification of everything: Social media influencers, digital identities, and even basic human needs becoming monetized.

• Systemic contradictions: Examples include artificial scarcity (vacant housing alongside homelessness) and profit-driven waste (food destruction while hunger persists)

After forty-five years of this, kids growing up today cannot expect to do better than their parents.

The conversation we need

The theory that “democracy is obsolete” is credited to Curtis Yarvin, a blogger and self-proclaimed “monarchist.” Yarvin’s thinking began gaining traction in Silicon Valley and, through politicians’ connections to tech billionaires, found its way into our halls of government. Citing issues like advances in technology and climate change, followers of this theory say that in today’s world, democracy cannot respond quickly enough to changing conditions. Yarvin’s acolytes include Peter Theil, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and numerous officials in the administration and congress. Yarvin’s philosophy, “Dark Enlightenment," is the near inverse of the world order we Boomers are accustomed to: liberalism (small l).

The uncomfortable question yet to be asked is: is Curtis Yarvin a little bit right?

White Boomers may be over-represented at today’s protest rallies, but that doesn’t mean we’re the only ones resisting Trump and his chaos and corruption. I don’t think telling those coming behind us about the “America we grew up in” is the talk we need to have. Hopefully you can see why this would likely be meaningless.

The conversation we need is about democracy. It’s needs to be a sustained conversation among all of us who live in a different America than others do.

I maintain that democracy “doesn’t work” to the extent that America creates inequality under the law. On the other hand, democracy may very well not be working for anyone who is on the wrong end of trickle-down economics. During our salad days, we conditioned ourselves to treat government as a service rather than a social covenant. When someone is stymied by the byzantine procedures and geological time frames of the federal government, it’s easy to see why it looks like democracy has broken down.

Democracy is not obsolete. It is, however, maddeningly inefficient. Decisions take longer when everyone gets a vote than it would if they were simply delivered by fiat. The so-called inefficiency of the federal government is actually a feature rather than a bug. There are redundancies built into the system and bureaucratic rules created to ensure that everyone has equal access to their government and their own inalienable rights.

Curtis Yarvin thinks we’d all be better served if we were simply ruled by a monarch or a CEO. But monarchs and CEOs are not in the business of being a beacon of freedom. America IS in the business of freedom and equality. We will always be a land of kaleidoscopic diversity. We will not always be the most powerful nation on earth. Our hegemony is waning even as we speak. We may not continue much longer as an empire.

So, Boomers, before we leave the stage completely, taking all of our institutional memory with us, we should think about and discuss with other cohorts the question of whether democracy’s benefits outweigh its costs.

Furthermore, if democracy IS broken, then we need to lead the charge in making the tweaks and reforms that enable it function as it is intended in perpetuity.

We have to think hard and outside the box, since for most of us, democracy is just a given. For a lot of other people, it doesn’t feel like a given at all. Despite our youthful radicalness and political activism, we’ve responded to our inequalities — not with something to reform inequality, but rather a bromide to mitigate the worst of inequality’s consequences. Some examples of what I’m talking about include:

• Social programs aimed at an underclass,

• Identity politics and DEI programs,

• “Empowerment” trainings

To the extent that these efforts succeed, they make America a little more tolerable for the ones on the wrong side of racism, sexism, and trickle-down economics. What they do NOT do is change the structure or the system that caused the problems in the first place.

Let us assume for the moment that we will (eventually) make American plurality and equality real and functional. This means our country is hospitable to everyone who resides here and our earth is hospitable for the lot of us. Implicit in this is an assumption that we will afford more responsibility to citizens for making democracy work and keep working.

First we fix the problem with democracy. Then we create a meaningful, if not transformative, exchange with the generations behind us about why something as lumbering and inefficient as democracy is preferable to the tidy, rapid way things get done by dictators.

Our parting gift to our children and their children should a democracy that works for everyone in the twenty-first century with all its technology and speed of change. Our government should keep its gaze on maintaining that equality through the bumps and grinds of everyday life.

The more I ponder these thoughts, the more ridiculous our current politics appear. We remember the day Martin Luther King died and what it was like when soldiers fired on the students at Kent State. Eventually, we did bend the arc of history toward justice, at least for a minute.

We are marching again because MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump are bending it back.

Song of the Day

“My Generation” - The Who

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Keep on keepin’ on,

Cindy

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