There’s a not quite explicit generational struggle at play in this election. The older generations, trying to bide just a little more time for that winning lottery ticket of conservative policy–it will be the next one surely–don’t want to relinquish decision-making. In fact, this year will feature the oldest combined age of the two major party candidates ever.
The younger generation raised in an environment of failed conservative policies that have ballooned the cost of colleges, exacerbated the wealth gap between the richest and the rest of the country, and pretended climate change isn’t real, have an opportunity for change.
The struggle is taking place as Baby Boomers have recently been surpassed as the largest voting-eligible generation by millennials and the Boomers’ political clout recedes. Their history is boxed in by more progressive generations, the Greatest and millennials, that moved America forward and will once again.
But being largest voting-eligible generation doesn’t mean that millennials will be the largest voting generation and in all likelihood, that distinction will reside with Boomers still. It may be the last such time we say such a thing. And with that as a distinct possibility in this election or the next, a portion of those older generations have cast their lot with Donald Trump–a man that each day appears so less willing to be presidential that it makes you wonder if he doesn’t want to be a dictator instead.
The older generations have in Donald Trump the raging against their own dying light. And it appears they chose 80’s nostalgia–mall escalators, Gordon Gekko greed, and over-the-top TV characters.
Some things are better left in the past.
