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As they should be. I'd rather see a Dem fill the seat but they were letting the existing problems before Trump Electric Boogaloo fester and now are either not doing much or are not revealing much and need to really start to take actual action as opposition
Would love to see a replacement party emerge that actually tries to meet what non-republican society is looking for and isn't just "not the awful ones".
Because they're underwhelming, on the whole.
The Dems won't win anything again until the party is massively restructured. Moving to the center has failed again and again and again.
You know what the other side is also doing? Moving rightward.
Just GenZ huh? Not say Millenials or Gen X? The rest of us don't hate the bullshit? K...
Yeah exactly. As a GenX’r I’m so fricking tired of the current Democratic bs. We need to stop considering doing something and finally do it. Trump got in because the lead democrats were too afraid of change. I for one welcome fresh and young minds so my kids don’t have to grow up in an apocalyptic oil drenched wasteland.
No one said that. No one implied that. That's not what this team happens to focus on.
"I was talking to my parents, and they said they really liked the movie"
"Oh yeah? Well, what about MY parents? Does it not matter whether they like it? What about other people's parents? Wtf??"
The title says that. The title implies that. It literally says GenZ as if no one else is tired of the bullshit. GenZ may be the focus of the groups studying, but it is painted as if it's just a bunch of kids whining. They could have painted this many other ways, such as saying, "like other generations above them" or "when compared to generational cohorts" there are ways it isn't isolating and requires no major extra effort on the researchers part other than looking at the same data but a few years removed.
They did the same to Millenials and Gen X in years past and I'm sure other generations at various times as well. It's not a new issue to act like the youngest generation is the one with all the complaints and simultaneously belittle them and downplay their issues. It's a prevalent and annoying tactic used to discredit and ostracize.
No it doesn't
Mmkay.
Millennials are called the forgotten generation for a reason.
I thought that was Gen X.
It's the point of the damn name, in fact. Well, that and not WANTING to be labelled.
Underwhelmed is an understatement
I think that's exactly what David Hogg is doing with his primary challenges to moderate Democrats in safe blue seats. It makes no sense for one party to be moderately left when the other party is hard right, regardless of how toxic the political environment is going to be. If you only really have two parties, they have to both occupy the center (pre-1970) or both be somewhat ideological.
You make the choice based on the cards you're dealt, not the ones you wished you have. Beyond the election though, because you have more time, you try to change the game. People have it ass backwards - trying to change the game during the election, then sit out the tenure whining about the raw deal they have.
Some people did try to change the game; anti-genocide protests had been going on since October and Uncommitted got going nine months before the election. Both were dismissed by basically the whole country.
Dems fought harder against those protesting a genocide than trump
You think nine months before an election is enough time to change a massive establishment like the DNC? Presidential campaigns take years of planning before candidates even announce their running.
You think a small percentage of voters in a few states whose only message is "Don't vote for Biden" is the kind of action we need to "change the game"? If this is the kind of action lemmy progressives expect to take and make meaningful strides towards progress it's absolutely no surprise nothing actually gets done. Maybe do something useful besides spreading fasicts voter suppression talking points and maybe start now instead of February 2028.
You think nine months before an election is enough time to change a massive establishment like the DNC?
No, but it's certainly enough time to force their hand. They kept saying it was too late for Biden to step down and then, surprise surprise, he fucking stepped down four months before the election.
You think a small percentage of voters in a few states whose only message is "Don't vote for Biden" is the kind of action we need to "change the game"?
Setting aside your obvious misrepresentation of the Uncommitted Movement, yeah so what the fuck did you want them to do? The genocide certainly didn't care about the American electoral cycle. Maybe if people like you supported them they wouldn't be a small percentage of voters in a few states and would have been able to actually get things done. Uncommitted was an opportunity for the wider progressive community to force the DNC to give them something better, and what did they do instead? "It's too late" and "hold your nose and vote for her". God maybe wake up before you get thrown into a concentration camp?
As the economy burns, your rights are stripped away, and Palestine is bulldozed to the ground to make room for Trump resorts, I'm sure you'll be able to sleep soundly while feeling like you kept your moral high-ground.
I... Literally never said anything about a moral high ground. The fuck, at least read what I said before responding.
You make the choice based on the cards you’re dealt, not the ones you wished you have.
You appeal to the electorate you have, not the electorate you think should exist.
Beyond the election though, because you have more time, you try to change the game.
Yeah, we saw how that worked with Biden.
"But it's borrrrrrring when it's not an election! What, you want me to show up to vote in the primaries too? What are you, some kinda fascist make me vote guy?"
Primaries. Where party leadership fought tooth and nail to keep challengers off the ballot and eventually just said "fuck it" and gave us who they wanted anyway.
And now they're whining about neutrality because David Hogg wants to primary republican-lite incumbents in deep blue seats. "Vote in the primaries! Not like that!"
Everyone under 50 is very underwhelmed
As someone over 50 I understand that I am not marrying these people.
I want someone to stop Trump and Putin from destroying America.
Given the choice between Biden and Trump, the choice was Biden.
Harris and Trump = Harris
It is now pre primary season so now is the time to find someone who can approximate your views and get enough support to get elected.
If your favorite candidate doesn’t win the primary, don’t be a little bitch and stay at home.
If you don’t spend your free time and money supporting someone in the primaries, then you choose from what you get like the rest of us.
Every poll I have seen recently shows Boomers being more progressive than the next younger groups.
Edit: yeah this is misinformation
———
Wait, are you serious? It would shock the hell out of me, but it would be so encouraging to learn that boomers were changing their minds.
Unless we’re talking about a specific national progressive policy that benefits them directly, like improving social security, or local progressive policies they rely on, like increasing agricultural subsidies, in my life I’ve only ever seen that cohort grow more conservative.
Or are you saying that gen xyz are rapidly becoming more conservative, such that they’ve surpassed the boomers?
I’m not disbelieving you, just trying to make this make sense since it defies the trend. I’ll look for these polls but if there are specific ones you mean, I would be interested to know which.
Update: so far I’m finding the complete opposite to be true (at least from anything close to a reputable source, which doesn’t include opt-in online polls). It appears the generational group often referred to as boomers is now polling more conservative than ever before. Part of this trend might be explained by the fact that we are losing the oldest boomers first, and these were the ones who had the chance to identify with the countercultural movements of the 60s and 70s, whereas most of the younger boomers, who were famously outspoken fans of the Vietnam war and Reagan, are still present.
Younger generations are more exposed to social media and disinformation that the older generations dismissed decades ago. Boomers also had the experience of fighting for and gaining rights during their lifetime that are now being taken away again. Unfortunately, they largely failed to teach younger generations the value of those fights or the tactics by which they were fought, so many young people don't understand the implications behind a lot of these cultural shifts. Time is a flat circle.
While this is all plausible, may describe your personal experience fully, and may to some extent be true for a subset of the population, it appears that the notion of the baby boomer generation being, or ever having been, more progressive than the generations that followed is unequivocally false, according to any high quality polling data I’ve yet found. If this is something you are reading somewhere, I would be curious to know where so I can discover how they arrive at that conclusion.
I’m certainly not saying there aren’t progressive boomers or conservative younger people. There’s always a spectrum for every group, no matter how you define the cohorts. The baby boomers on the whole just happen to skew more conservative than the younger generations, and it is an especially strong correlation at that.
My comment wasn't based on a body of research other than high school us history and some political science classes in college. Agree completely that modern day boomers are not progressives, I was thinking more specifically about the social progress of the mid-late 20th century and how many more people we've agreed to include in the conversation than ever before. Hell, women couldn't vote 106+ years ago. Now we have gay and trans people in Congress, we've had a black president, women mostly have rights to their own bodies, etc etc etc. The boomers were, broadly, part of those social changes, though clearly they didn't all agree, just as they don't now.
A lot of those wins are getting erased now, by DOGE and others, and there are way more old people at protests than I would expect to see. I'm simply suggesting that the older generations remember the feeling of making progress in a way that younger generations haven't. It's probably hyperbolic but it feels like we've been slowly regressing, on balance, since Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida and fixed the 2000 election results for his brother George Dubya.
Tl:Dr you don't know the value of what you have now until it is gone, unless you've gone without before.
That’s fair. It certainly does feel like regression. There are all kinds of social values gen x and y remember being taught that somehow were forgotten by the very people who taught them.
“Somehow” is not terribly difficult to work out once we start pulling threads. This well-oiled machine of right-wing propaganda we have today took decades to evolve. Right-wing narrative framing grew in popularity during the mccarthy era, and expanded continually after Raegan’s repeal of fairness doctrine with the rise of [neo]conservative AM talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of Murdoch-style tabloid journalism, digital platforms, the algorithmic feeds, tea party, brexit, etc. The onslaught of reality denial and fear is breathtaking.
The post-truth, “alternative facts” era we’re in now is so chaotic that even the educated who should be well-equipped to tell fact from fiction often find it hard to recognize satire, of all things. Conservative boomers, however, most of whom lived in rural areas and didn’t continue education past high school if they graduated at all, have been heavily indoctrinated. And once they started joining the global forum en masse in the 90s and 00s, their indoctrination was inadvertently converted to radicalism by engagement-oriented media saturation.
This subset of boomers is mostly to blame for the generation’s poor reputation, I suspect. They had already been on a steady diet of right-wing propaganda for decades, even if they weren’t yet fully radicalized. But their salient characteristic was how easy they were to manipulate, since they would tolerate and even dutifully spread any lie that affirmed their existing opinions. They could be motivated by prejudice due to their isolation, fear due to their lack of knowledge, and tribalism due to their economic struggles. Above all they were reliable voters, donators, and consumers, making them the perfect marks for populists, demagogues, oligopolists, and hostile foreign powers.
Sometimes I feel like this group really didn’t stand a chance in the face of protracted psychological manipulation from so many groups. I’ve wanted to see the good in them and somehow bring them back to the light. But increasingly I fear that their radicalization is intractable, and there simply isn’t the time left for the journey back. Regardless, the damage is done, if not yet fully realized, and all we can do is stop the poison and rebuild from whatever is salvageable.
The poison is capital. In spite of the systematic brainwashing of the populous, one of the last moorings to fidelity and truth in US politics were the public servants themselves, many of whom pursued politics as a vocation or calling and believed in the mission of a government for the people, even a few republicans. But we let money into politics by degrees, then all at once with citizens united. With that case, corruption of the government was legalized and representation was officially bound to capital. Until that is struck down, and strict regulation of money in politics is enforced, any and all political progress will be thwarted. Capital will continue poisoning our government until there’s nothing left to save. It has to be removed.
I think I more or less fully agree with everything you're saying here. We're seeing the same trends and outcomes. Getting money out of politics should be one of the foundational steps we take to rebuild, agreed.
I think its never been more possible to get a real third party started, but I still don't think it would actually work yet. Like we're so close though.
There have been third parties forever. Till we reform our current election system, no third party could make a difference. It was designed this way to keep power in the hands of the capital class.
You'll never get there until you actually do something to get there. The perfect situation you're waiting for won't come unless you work for it.