Generation Trump

– for somebody who is ‘hedonistic, totally self-centred, has a short attention span, being prone to mood swings, and completely aware of the world beyond our own immediate concerns and being loving and affectionate, and totally family-oriented – means NOT to be in Trump’s image at all.

So if it’s only – being entirely ignorant of the world beyond their own immediate concerns – which characterizes a ‘Trump Generation’ there is no ‘Trump Generation’.

John: as an older person I have the advantage of observation over the last decades – from post war to post Trump.

I agree with you basic thesis. People borne in the 1990s are much the same as those borne in the 1950s.

However, we are influenced by our society; particularly during our age 0-21.

Here in England we have experienced dramatic change in the structure of our society. 1983 to date is very different from 1945-80. One example: I was a child of the welfare state where I received a free education up to post graduate level. The deal was fair and sensible: it enabled me to obtain better paid work, and I contributed back via higher taxes.

The other aspect is that we had full employment.

Today it is very different. Young people are encouraged to do further education – but some courses are worthless; some students not up to it (15% went to university in my era; 50% now – are they that much more intelligent over 50 years?). They leave with $50,000 + of debt and often no job. Those who obtain employment have far less security; and live under more pressure.

My point is that the human beings as such are no different; but the different society has influences which cause different behaviour and different attitudes.

Of course Britain in 2017 is vastly more affluent than in 1947; but – despite the modern idols – money is not the ultimate good.

When I started work at GE in 1968, most of the engineering offices had managers who were WWII veterans (with some amazing stories). They did not take kindly to Jack Welch’s policies, when Welch became the GE CEO circa 1980. One of them told me (referring to an actual case which he had fought), when a guy has worked hard for GE for 20 years, has a mortgage and kids in school, and the business is making a profit, GE owes that guy a job – you don’t just lay him off to increase your profits!

Most of them were gone, one way or another, by 1985 – people who left knowing ten times as much about turbine engineering as I did. From then on, I had managers who knew ten times less than I did. As I understand it, Welch’s policies (e.g., the infamous “stack-ranking”) were copied at Ford and some other large companies.

I agree that people start out with the same potential from generation to generation, but as the twig is bent, so the tree inclines, as one of those old bosses used to say, and the bending conditions may vary over time, producing apparent changes which correlate with generations. Such as the pre- and post-Welch management philosophy.

Happy April 1–this is tremendous!

I’ve long held the same opinion about generational labels, Time Magazine demography.

90% of media opinion about ‘millennials’ is BS but it seems hard to deny that there are valid generalisations to be made about variations in psychological characteristics and economic circumstances between generation, just as there are with nations.

Why, it’s as if Generation Trump is all infants and toddlers!

Yep, age effects are far more significant than cohort effects. The attitudes and social behaviours of Millenials are very like those of baby boomers 40 years ago, and in 40 years time they will behave just like baby boomers do now. The young are always optimistic and feckless, the old always pessimistic and rigid.

Given how much of their life they have yet to live, and how much time or lack thereof they have had to accumulate things (including power) it is rational for both age groups. But the incidence of some individual characteristics (such as selfishness or empathy) doesn’t seem to vary much with either age or cohort – once a Trumpian narcissist always a narcissist, and once a giver always a giver.

People literally born in the Baby Boom are distinctive – they’ve been the biggest target for marketers their entire lives. The other generations, eh. As for GE:

“One of them told me (referring to an actual case which he had fought), when a guy has worked hard for GE for 20 years, has a mortgage and kids in school, and the business is making a profit, GE owes that guy a job – you don’t just lay him off to increase your profits!”

I suspect guy is the important word here.

There is one big difference among generations. Boomers loathed and misunderstood the music of their parents. It was, to them, an obnoxious alien culture. Jazz–because it was coded black–got a distant respect, much like classical music. But they harshly rejected everything else. Or at least they thought they did.
Nowadays, things are better. Kids these days are steeped in their parents’ music, and respect it. And conversely, to some extent.

Gareth Wilson: I don’t recall if guy was the exact word, but as the referent was a factory foreman, I guessed that might have been it. As for it being important, the engineering manager involved personally hired five female technicians or engineers for his office of about a dozen people between 1970 and 1980.

Yes, it was a bad time for civil rights, but there were also good people – much like today. (I hope your grandchildren will not sneer at you for allowing people like Sessions to be in charge of civil-rights enforcement.)

Handel’s Messiah was popular entertainment.
“Beer here! Getcha cold beer!”

The following is a quote from David Graeber’s “The Democracy Project”.

N.B. the final sentence where Graeber predicts the populist reaction.

“Obama has turned out to be an implacable conservative, seemingly devoting all his efforts to placating the GOP and spending all his time talking to the GOP. And completely cold shouldering the popular constituency that voted for him. Almost all Obama’s greatest political efforts have been aimed at preserving some institutional structure under threat: the banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry. Obama’s main argument in calling for health care reform was that the existing system, based on for-profit private insurers, was not economically viable over the long term, and that some kind of change was going to be necessary.

What was his solution? Instead of pushing a genuinely radical—or even liberal—restructuring of the system toward fairness and sustainability, he instead revived a Republican model first proposed in the 1990s as the conservative alternative to the Clintons’ universal health plan. That model’s details were hammered out in right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and initially put into practice by a Republican governor of Massachusetts. Its appeal was essentially conservative: it didn’t solve the problem of how to create a fair and sensible health care system; it solved the problem of how to preserve the existing unfair and unsustainable for-profit system in a form that might allow it to endure for at least another generation.
Considering the state of crisis the U.S. economy was in when Obama took over in 2008, it required perversely heroic efforts to respond to a historic catastrophe by keeping everything more or less exactly as it was. Yet Obama did expend those heroic efforts, and the result was that, in every dimension, the status quo did indeed remain intact. No part of the system was shaken up. There were no bank nationalizations, no breakups of “too big to fail” institutions, no major changes in finance laws, no change in the structure of the auto industry, or of any other industry, no change in labour laws, drug laws, surveillance laws, monetary policy, education policy, transportation policy, energy policy, military policy, or—most crucially of all, despite campaign pledges—the role of money in the political system. In exchange for massive infusions of money from the country’s Treasury to rescue them from ruin, industries from finance to manufacturing to health care were required to make only marginal changes to their practices.

Obama’s position turned out to be actually more conservative than George W. Bush’s. The outgoing Bush administration did agree, under pressure from Democrat Barney Frank, to include mortgage write-downs in the TARP program, but only if Obama approved. He chose not to. The Republican Party was a spent and humiliated force in 2008, and only managed to revive itself because the Obama administration refused to provide an ideological alternative and instead adopted most of the Republicans’ economic positions.

No change was enacted; Wall Street gained even greater control over the political process, the “progressive” brand was tainted becoming identified with what were inherently conservative, corporate-friendly positions, and since Republicans proved the only party willing to take radical positions of any kind, the political center swung even further to the right. Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to be possible at all.”

Umm, that’s the sign of a culture in its death throes. Just so you know.

If a culture dies, is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

We’ve just passed the 100th anniversary of the first jazz record and we’re coming up to the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

I suppose I’m not really a typical Boomer, because I didn’t rebel against my parents’ music when I was a teenager. My father liked folk music like the Kingston Trio, and classical. I didn’t really like the Dean Martin-Al Martino kind of music, although in my late teens I came to realize that Sinatra was really good. But I liked music from the 1920s and 1930s, not only jazz but also Hollywood musicals. And I also liked the music of my time.

Nowadays you see teenagers wearing Beatles T-shirts, but in the 1960s you wouldn’t have seen teenagers in a Cab Calloway T-shirt. (The Blues Brothers movie deserves some credit for introducing Cab Calloway to a young audience.) There was a big shift in popular music, and now we are living after the divide. Music hasn’t changed as much as it did in the first half of the 20th century, when every decade was radically different than the one before. Rap is the newest thing, and it’s 30 years old.

Another difference though is that music is not the defining element of a generation any more. Young people today have a lot more things to get involved in, and music is just one of them.

I don’t think that it’s the sign of a culture in its death throes. Popular music changed very gradually throughout the 19th century. (I have just been listening to Charles Chilton’s Victorian Top of the Pops, so that century is fresh in my mind.) Yet the 19th century was a century of invention and expansion. What caused the death of that society was the unbelievable idiocy of WWI, not “Shine On Harvest Moon” or “Who’s Your Lady Friend?”.

The new society post-WWI had new music, also new literature, new art and a new medium, film. Those were days of great change, but we haven’t seen such changes in more recent times.

Kids these days are steeped in their parents’ music, and respect it

Umm, that’s the sign of a culture in its death throes. Just so you know.

You have no idea, because there isn’t any real historical precedent for popular music as it has been produced and consumed since the ’60s. People pulling factoids out of their arses, well, I’d agree that that is a sign of some kind of decline.

To those who insist that there is “something” meaningful about generational characteristics (or national ones, for that matter) … well, sure, but only statistically speaking.

Don’t let me catch you trying to use that BS on any particular individuals.

But wasn’t the music of the boomers’ parents’ generation the Big Band stuff? That stuff is objectively awful. No, the 30s and 40s weren’t hell.

1) 1st of course you have the small combo jazz, from Armstrong’s Hot 5s and 7s in the 20s thru Parker to Miles and Trane.
2) Below that a lot of bigger band leaders also ventured into solo work or small combo:Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Ellington and Basie and their crews (Coleman, Lester)
3) It requires a change of attitude, into accepting a kind of performativity/performance, but I have even developed a taste for big band, with or without singers. 30s Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Dick Powell, of course Billie, early Sinatra, early Garland. And not just as camp.
4) The fifties, especially 55-65 pop music before Beatles, pretty much sucked. Just kidding, every era has great music.

@Lawman

Definitely agree with that premise, that people are the same, but times are different, and we’re all influenced by the particular social/cultural/economic environment of when we’re raised.

As an extension, I’d suggest that a lot of older generations’ complaining about the behavior of younger generations is born out of confusion at the way the world has changed since they were taught to interact with it, and thus a feeling of alienation. Rather than face up to their own failure to acknowledge and keep up with the times, they find it more viscerally satisfying to just attack the people who reflect these changes.

Hidari

@29 ‘If a culture dies, is that a good thing, or a bad thing?’

To whom? I would wager that the death of our culture probably matters to us.

Why does it matter to you?

I have to say that I am (almost) dumbfounded that most of this thread doesn’t recognize the cheekiness–if not also the tongueyness–of John’s original post. I suppose the milieu of Trump has understandably lost all sense of humor. But John–as I said–hat’s off to you.

John’s been making this point for a while, and I think there is a lot of truth to it, but there are still generational and demographic shifts.

For example, other factors being equal, millenials voted for Trump in roughly the same percentages as did Boomers. Its just that millenials are less likely to be white.

In re the perennial complaints of older adults about youth, there is the oft-quoted screed of Plato/ Socrates, a near contemporary of faustusnotes’ Xun Kuang:

“”The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

William Berry

there is the oft-quoted screed of Plato/ Socrates

Oft misattributed. Some time within the last twelve months I searched the Web and found that somebody had investigated the matter and established that the most often quoted version of this complaint comes from a writer some time in the last two centuries who was giving his own modern paraphrase/summary of complaints found in classical sources (the different words of some of which are cited in the modern text).

It’s a parallel to the case of the later writer who paraphrased Voltaire’s view as ‘I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’, although what Voltaire himself actually wrote on the occasion referenced was ‘What a fuss over an omelette’.

Ragweed, No, we (females) weren’t told that. In some sort of subliminal Thorstein Veblenian way, maybe our parents assumed that, but what our parents (“our” = my friends and acquaintances + me in suburban NJ of the 1950’s and ’60’s) told us girl daughters was: study, learn, explore, enjoy. Some of our parents were old WASPs, some the grandchildren or children of more recent immigrants. Most of the parents in my middle/upper middle class experience had arrived at the point where they were finally able to let their children be free to do more than be steam engineers, or whatever. (Yes, there were the “plastics” parents — see The Graduate — but many of their children weren’t listening, and even the “plastics” parents often had other, competing sensitivities.)

Generations are different and do differ, of course, but not by some universal pattern. A lot of historical contingency.

As for music, absurd to claim that the generation that came of age from Pete Seeger to the Beatles and Stones to the Dead rejected jazz or the big bands or Frank Sinatra or the songs we sang in the car growing up. Oh Susannah! for instance, or I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, or Civil War songs, both sides. Not to mention the hymns we sang in church (most of us Christians then still went to church). Bessie Smith, Doris Day. We loved all of it. All of that music made us. Bob Dylan gets this. The Coen brothers get this.

oh yes this is truly awful music.

– but sometimes I had this impression that the elder folks – looked disapprovingly at the younger ‘whippersnappers’ who followed Bernie… ? – and didn’t understand their… irony…?

Hidari @38

‘Pop Will Eat Itself’ was once the name of a band.

Oi, *is* a band, thank you very much. Just like Beethoven *is* a composer. Also, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” (I am an outsider) is a worthy response to Trump as much as it was to the issues it was written about. Trump just embiggenated an existing problem.

They could have gone further and pointed out that Western Culture will Eat Itself.

I think culture either eats itself or dies out. Reinvention, repurposing, outright theft, that’s how culture perpetuates and reproduces itself. Dead culture becomes empty ritual, like latin masses (or the “people’s church” in toto, for those whose historical knowledge goes back before Generation Trump).