why are there no Gen X candidates in the democratic party primary for the presidency?
I know the primaries are a ways out and anyone can jump in at this point and declare their candidacy but it's not that far out so with the field taking shape I had an insane realization yesterday that there are no young candidates running for President in the Democratic Party! How could this be, they were the party of youth, the party that brought you the 18 year old vote, the party that supported the Kennedy's, and the party that courted the youth to launch Obama, a much younger candidate than any they have now, but even he isn't quite Gen X, being born before the assassination of J.F.K., and on the thin wispy line between generations. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Bernie Sanders fan, and maybe he's just the kind of socialist Grandfather the U.S. needs, but I'd be remiss to not say that the party representing the youth has no young candidates running, while their stodgy conservative counterparts, the republicans, have a plethora. Sure, the Repugs (ha!), have 16 or 17 candidates running, a fact that illustrates how philosophically confused the party is, but two or three of the most promising are from Gen X (Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul), not to mention Paul Ryan who is not running but was Mitt's choice for VP.
I can imagine all of my liberal fun loving friends fighting with me about this but it's an objective non-partisan truth. I know there are reasons for it and the first that comes to mind is that Gen X came to age in a conservative Reagan era time where Bush/Reagan/Clinton ruled, and though Clinton was a Democrat, he was to the right of Nixon on many issues, and in my opinion did all he could to gut the F.D.R. New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, at least on economic issues, so it would be very hard to call "Bubba' a traditional liberal. In the primaries the 'left wing' nominees like to say "I'm from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party," as an attack on the Clintonistas. Bernie Sanders carries that mantle now with Hillary trying to steal it from him, but no candidate spoke like that when I was in my twenties or thirties coming of age and would've been groomed as a politician, or at least a politico working on a campaign. I was taught I was living in a conservative backlash against the Sixties, and there was no room for me.
If all I had were political ambitions I would've joined the Republican Party in a New (Jew) York second (ha!), because that's where you could be successful. Clinton was the only one who figured out how to win as a Democrat and be popular, and I didn't even vote for him, the first black President according to Toni Morrison, or anyone. I was classic Gen X in that way, the same as the coke can they wanted to make of my generation, with a young dude in a lawn chair, drinking a coke, smoking a cig, and looking at a Nuclear power plant across the street. I was an apathetic archetype, but my apathy was born of a real loss that I fear infected many idealists born in the Sixties who were taught that it was their duty to bring the races together and save the world, but saw an incipient dream fall apart by the time we turned 12 when Reagan became President in 1980, and freed the Iranian hostages (ha!). The free flowing way we were taught to look at the world disappeared very fast, and the rest has been an afterthought, so we're a generation of afterthoughts, or little caught breaths, suspended in space.
The only candidates who represent us in the 2016 race for the President of the United States, the leader of the free world (remember that one?), are Republicans. All the pundits acknowledge that Rubio, Walker, and Paul are legitimate voices in the party, something the democrats, the party of the left, the young, don't have. Now don't get me wrong, I know Jimmy Carter was a great liberal but an older guy, and L.B.J., no spring chicken, basically pushed through J.F.K.'s agenda, but weren't the Boomers the generation that famously said, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Hillary and Bernie Sanders are well into their Sixties, and I want to say Jim Webb fought in Vietnam (the other two don't count). I'd also argue, that I'm not expecting a young(ish) candidate to be the nominee, but I'd expect one to throw his hat into the race, even on a whim, but there's no such daring. The dark pessimistic side in me would like to say that NPR has made modern day liberalism so boring that no one in their right mind under the age of sixty could even imagine caring about it, but that's the pessimistic side. I tend to believe this side especially since my rather scientific political observation hasn't been echoed in the mainstream/NPR media, and I'm not so pompous as to think I'm the first person the in the United States of America to figure it out, maybe in the State of Washington, but not in D.C., the real Washington.
Naomi Klein is a great radical Gen X voice who wrote a book about disaster capitalism and she warned that the vulture capitalists were circling when Obama became President, and that he had a chance to clamp down on them, or set them free, and his Justice Department, headed by the cowardly Eric Holder, Obama's other black man, who I really think the President appointed because he was more of an Oreo than Obama, never brought any of the major banks responsible for one of the greatest crashes in the history of Wall St. to trial. To me, this is the real scar on the Obama administration, along with how they treated the Gulf Oil spill barely better than the W. administration would have. Anyway, Naomi Klein veered from her radical left wing idealism to the saddened defeatism of a liberal with a baby, and she read about how scared she was to bring her newborn into a world that would certainly see the end of the world through global warming, and how the human race was going to have to practice greater sensitivity and spiritual compassion to get through it. Naomi Klein literally read from her book and I was a little disappointed by it at the time because I wanted a more rigorous intellectually stimulating presentation from a brilliant woman who struck me as the last great revolutionary, but I'm haunted by the reading almost a year later and its prescience and necessity are becoming clearer. I laugh at the critic in me that thought Klein was taking the easy way out because what she wrote and envisioned for the future of the world, not just the U.S., was nothing short of what aestheticians call dystopia, and make small. The truth is the world is getting hotter and I'd say global warming is kicking in on the primal level, though it's far accelerated scientifically, and we're going to Mars!
It all reminds me of a movie I saw in 1983 called "Testament" about a Marin family that survives a nuclear war, and the sadness of their life. I'd say there was a genre in the early Reagan years, and maybe even the later ones, of a new kind of cold war movie, whether it be "Red Dawn," where the U.S.S.R. takeover a small Nebraskan town, via vis the McDonald's, or "Testament," a straight out drama of what it would feel like to survive a nuclear holocaust. Thankfully, the nuclear holocaust hasn't come yet, but tonight I'm seeing that movie set in the Redwoods at the height of the Reagan era, when preppy ruled, as a premonition for the crisis we are now facing, because in some ways Gen X has become Jane Alexander, William Devane, and the other actors who made up the cast of "Testament." I intuitively think that we're being faced with global warming sooner than we thought, and OUR generation will be the elders who guide the youth, and I wonder if we'll do a good job? We've mostly been interested in looking to the past, because it was a time we thought the world was going to a better place, but we're going to have to look to the future. We're the metaphor for all the nuclear holocaust Reagan era Fifties revivalist cinema we watched, but instead of a nuclear war we're going to be wiped out by global warming but maybe that will lead to nuclear war, considering the global desperation. The difference between the two catastrophic disasters is that we were taught nuclear war was an existentialist choice in the moment, or an accident that came the way of existential choice. Global warming implies that the existential choice was global rather than individual and wasn't the sovereignty of one state but the colluding of the world to bring itself down so that not one Country was responsible but all the Countries envying the greatest perpetrator, the U.S.
Sure, the WORLD made an existential choice, but that's like every character in a play deciding on the same thing, so that the viewer can't blame anyone, and that's no fun. I miss the existential chaos of a nuclear war, but I'm afraid Naomi Klein was right and the vulture capitalists took over long ago. Gen X may have started idealistic, and then gone cynical, but we're going to end spiritual, like everyone alive, wondering what the fuck the human race did to the planet, like Jane Alexander in "Testament," or Charleton Heston in the "Planet of the Apes," the great NRA leader in real life, when he sees the Statue of Liberty submerged in the ocean.
8/18 I saw the Black Lives Matter/Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle, and can only say that this begs the question more than ever 'why aren't any Gen X age politicians running for the Presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket. The democrats are famous for their youth, and yet they are an old party, full of Sixties has-beens. Don't get me wrong, I wear a 'feel the bern' button that I bought at the rally where Sanders spoke no more than a salutation, until he was pulled off the stage, in a compromised stance towards the black community, even though the raw facts of his voting record would indubitably disprove it. Make no bones about it, Black Lives Matter is a Black Nationalist movement, and who can blame them, but those bitches who took the mic in Seattle didn't want to listen to anyone, and that's unconstitutional. The boomer, Bernie Sanders, was crippled by them, and maybe a Gen X candidate would've been too, or maybe not. Maybe he/she would've been free of the civil rights wars of the '60's to be free enough to call out an idiot, but not Sanders, who probably hadn't even read the literature on Black Lives Matter. After the rally, and what I read online, I found out they are like the occupy movement and free of organizational/hierarchical structure, a political strategy I question. The only thing the black girls at the rally had was chutzpah, but that's a powerful force. It's like the military nationalist who will die on the front lines for his Country, and start a debate, whatever his intelligence.
I can imagine all of my liberal fun loving friends fighting with me about this but it's an objective non-partisan truth. I know there are reasons for it and the first that comes to mind is that Gen X came to age in a conservative Reagan era time where Bush/Reagan/Clinton ruled, and though Clinton was a Democrat, he was to the right of Nixon on many issues, and in my opinion did all he could to gut the F.D.R. New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, at least on economic issues, so it would be very hard to call "Bubba' a traditional liberal. In the primaries the 'left wing' nominees like to say "I'm from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party," as an attack on the Clintonistas. Bernie Sanders carries that mantle now with Hillary trying to steal it from him, but no candidate spoke like that when I was in my twenties or thirties coming of age and would've been groomed as a politician, or at least a politico working on a campaign. I was taught I was living in a conservative backlash against the Sixties, and there was no room for me.
If all I had were political ambitions I would've joined the Republican Party in a New (Jew) York second (ha!), because that's where you could be successful. Clinton was the only one who figured out how to win as a Democrat and be popular, and I didn't even vote for him, the first black President according to Toni Morrison, or anyone. I was classic Gen X in that way, the same as the coke can they wanted to make of my generation, with a young dude in a lawn chair, drinking a coke, smoking a cig, and looking at a Nuclear power plant across the street. I was an apathetic archetype, but my apathy was born of a real loss that I fear infected many idealists born in the Sixties who were taught that it was their duty to bring the races together and save the world, but saw an incipient dream fall apart by the time we turned 12 when Reagan became President in 1980, and freed the Iranian hostages (ha!). The free flowing way we were taught to look at the world disappeared very fast, and the rest has been an afterthought, so we're a generation of afterthoughts, or little caught breaths, suspended in space.
The only candidates who represent us in the 2016 race for the President of the United States, the leader of the free world (remember that one?), are Republicans. All the pundits acknowledge that Rubio, Walker, and Paul are legitimate voices in the party, something the democrats, the party of the left, the young, don't have. Now don't get me wrong, I know Jimmy Carter was a great liberal but an older guy, and L.B.J., no spring chicken, basically pushed through J.F.K.'s agenda, but weren't the Boomers the generation that famously said, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Hillary and Bernie Sanders are well into their Sixties, and I want to say Jim Webb fought in Vietnam (the other two don't count). I'd also argue, that I'm not expecting a young(ish) candidate to be the nominee, but I'd expect one to throw his hat into the race, even on a whim, but there's no such daring. The dark pessimistic side in me would like to say that NPR has made modern day liberalism so boring that no one in their right mind under the age of sixty could even imagine caring about it, but that's the pessimistic side. I tend to believe this side especially since my rather scientific political observation hasn't been echoed in the mainstream/NPR media, and I'm not so pompous as to think I'm the first person the in the United States of America to figure it out, maybe in the State of Washington, but not in D.C., the real Washington.
Naomi Klein is a great radical Gen X voice who wrote a book about disaster capitalism and she warned that the vulture capitalists were circling when Obama became President, and that he had a chance to clamp down on them, or set them free, and his Justice Department, headed by the cowardly Eric Holder, Obama's other black man, who I really think the President appointed because he was more of an Oreo than Obama, never brought any of the major banks responsible for one of the greatest crashes in the history of Wall St. to trial. To me, this is the real scar on the Obama administration, along with how they treated the Gulf Oil spill barely better than the W. administration would have. Anyway, Naomi Klein veered from her radical left wing idealism to the saddened defeatism of a liberal with a baby, and she read about how scared she was to bring her newborn into a world that would certainly see the end of the world through global warming, and how the human race was going to have to practice greater sensitivity and spiritual compassion to get through it. Naomi Klein literally read from her book and I was a little disappointed by it at the time because I wanted a more rigorous intellectually stimulating presentation from a brilliant woman who struck me as the last great revolutionary, but I'm haunted by the reading almost a year later and its prescience and necessity are becoming clearer. I laugh at the critic in me that thought Klein was taking the easy way out because what she wrote and envisioned for the future of the world, not just the U.S., was nothing short of what aestheticians call dystopia, and make small. The truth is the world is getting hotter and I'd say global warming is kicking in on the primal level, though it's far accelerated scientifically, and we're going to Mars!
It all reminds me of a movie I saw in 1983 called "Testament" about a Marin family that survives a nuclear war, and the sadness of their life. I'd say there was a genre in the early Reagan years, and maybe even the later ones, of a new kind of cold war movie, whether it be "Red Dawn," where the U.S.S.R. takeover a small Nebraskan town, via vis the McDonald's, or "Testament," a straight out drama of what it would feel like to survive a nuclear holocaust. Thankfully, the nuclear holocaust hasn't come yet, but tonight I'm seeing that movie set in the Redwoods at the height of the Reagan era, when preppy ruled, as a premonition for the crisis we are now facing, because in some ways Gen X has become Jane Alexander, William Devane, and the other actors who made up the cast of "Testament." I intuitively think that we're being faced with global warming sooner than we thought, and OUR generation will be the elders who guide the youth, and I wonder if we'll do a good job? We've mostly been interested in looking to the past, because it was a time we thought the world was going to a better place, but we're going to have to look to the future. We're the metaphor for all the nuclear holocaust Reagan era Fifties revivalist cinema we watched, but instead of a nuclear war we're going to be wiped out by global warming but maybe that will lead to nuclear war, considering the global desperation. The difference between the two catastrophic disasters is that we were taught nuclear war was an existentialist choice in the moment, or an accident that came the way of existential choice. Global warming implies that the existential choice was global rather than individual and wasn't the sovereignty of one state but the colluding of the world to bring itself down so that not one Country was responsible but all the Countries envying the greatest perpetrator, the U.S.
Sure, the WORLD made an existential choice, but that's like every character in a play deciding on the same thing, so that the viewer can't blame anyone, and that's no fun. I miss the existential chaos of a nuclear war, but I'm afraid Naomi Klein was right and the vulture capitalists took over long ago. Gen X may have started idealistic, and then gone cynical, but we're going to end spiritual, like everyone alive, wondering what the fuck the human race did to the planet, like Jane Alexander in "Testament," or Charleton Heston in the "Planet of the Apes," the great NRA leader in real life, when he sees the Statue of Liberty submerged in the ocean.
8/18 I saw the Black Lives Matter/Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle, and can only say that this begs the question more than ever 'why aren't any Gen X age politicians running for the Presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket. The democrats are famous for their youth, and yet they are an old party, full of Sixties has-beens. Don't get me wrong, I wear a 'feel the bern' button that I bought at the rally where Sanders spoke no more than a salutation, until he was pulled off the stage, in a compromised stance towards the black community, even though the raw facts of his voting record would indubitably disprove it. Make no bones about it, Black Lives Matter is a Black Nationalist movement, and who can blame them, but those bitches who took the mic in Seattle didn't want to listen to anyone, and that's unconstitutional. The boomer, Bernie Sanders, was crippled by them, and maybe a Gen X candidate would've been too, or maybe not. Maybe he/she would've been free of the civil rights wars of the '60's to be free enough to call out an idiot, but not Sanders, who probably hadn't even read the literature on Black Lives Matter. After the rally, and what I read online, I found out they are like the occupy movement and free of organizational/hierarchical structure, a political strategy I question. The only thing the black girls at the rally had was chutzpah, but that's a powerful force. It's like the military nationalist who will die on the front lines for his Country, and start a debate, whatever his intelligence.
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