WEST BRATTLEBORO — I will get to why I might support Christine Hallquist in her run for governor, and also a read on why politics in the United States seem so confusing right now, with everything going on. But I need to start with some background.
About a generation ago, Neil Howe and William Strauss put out a theory of generations in the United States that has had great force in public discourse ever since. Their theory has been subjected to fine-grained critiques for its lack of a hard research basis, but it made intuitive sense to a lot of people, which is why we often now talk about “boomers” and “Generation Xers” and “millennials,” or why Tom Brokaw could use the title of The Greatest Generation for his book about those who were adults during World War II.
Howe and Strauss claim that U.S. generations have come in cycles with recurring themes, so that the “lost generation” of those born in the early 1900s is paralleled by the “silent generation,” which was too young to fight in World War II and came of age in the 1950s, and the “Gen X” generation that missed Vietnam and came of age in the Reagan years as technology changed the way we live.
In their theory, the “boomer generation” that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s was paralleled by the generation that brought us “the gilded age” of the period in the 1880s and 1890s, after Reconstruction ended and the last massacre of Native Americans took place at Wounded Knee, and the U.S. shifted fully to industrialization and international power.
In their theory, the current “millennial generation,” the cohort born roughly between 1985 and 2005, echoes the “greatest generation,” which produced leaders like John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
This theory of deep generational cycles is the most challenged dimension of Howe's and Strauss's work, and I won't get into it here. Instead, I will suggest that the authors' insight that generational cohorts cluster around certain seminal events and periods of history is a useful tool for analysis.
They suggest points in history that mark a moment of crisis and a shift from one generation to the next, and they write that some generations have a much more profound influence on cultural evolution than others.
I think it may be a useful lens to look at what is happening right now.
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Since the 1960s, the boomer generation, born roughly between 1944 and 1963, has been in steady ascendance.
First, they changed culture with the civil rights movement, with Vietnam war protests, and with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll - a total shift in social mores. Then, they took control of the nation's economic wealth and the last four presidencies, including Donald Trump.
The world we have today is a world created by the baby-boom generation. It is in the process of ending, to be taken over by the rising generations, of which the millennial generation is far away the largest and most powerful in our current social and economic reality.
In the same way that Ronald Reagan was the last significant president from the World War II generation, Trump will be the last significant president from the 1960s generation.
We boomers are bequeathing a world in hard trouble and potential disaster to our children, who still are in their early years of adulthood, that period of the 20s and 30s when one makes a life before you start to actually live it.
Taken as a whole, my generation has done many good things, but the mess it is leaving behind is reaching its peak right now, and it will be hard for the new crew to clean up.
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There is a reason that many of our young people are either so driven by ambition that they suffer from anxiety and depression, or they have mainly given up, lapsing into the abyss of dead-end jobs and substance abuse. If this is a moment of generational crisis, we should look closely at how it is making our children so sick.
Part of the current madness in our politics stems from how hard it seems to be for journalists to get a clear fix on what is happening.
How is it possible that Trump won and that he is, so far, getting away with the crazed dysfunction and naked vanity and venality of his presidency? How is it possible that an avowed democratic socialist senator from Vermont could have given the anointed candidate of the Democratic establishment a run for her money in 2016?
How could a young Latina mom beat the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House in a New York primary election? How is it possible that a transgender woman could win a plurality in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Vermont, when just a decade or so ago the very concept of being transgender was largely hidden and taboo?
There has been a lot of good, fine-grained analysis in news sources like The Washington Post and The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR. But sometimes I wonder if we're missing the forest for the trees right now.
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The simple answer, for me, is that the world has changed, in just as deep and pervasive ways the world changed in the 1960s and 1970s, and that in essence now we are witnessing the last gasps of a dying generation and the new sprouts of the rising one.
Technology rules our world now. Barack Obama, who straddles the boomer and Gen X generations, won because his people were far more skilled at using it than his opponents were.
Trump may have won in part because of the clandestine assistance his campaign received from the Kremlin through Facebook and other social media. He also won because the press covered him through the lens of the old world and never caught on to what he was really about. The press's coverage of Bernie Sanders reflected the same myopia.
Demographic analysis of Trump's core supporters indicates that they are largely white men and women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when racism was still sanctioned by some states, gay men and lesbians were persecuted, women knew their place in the home, and you could get good-paying work with just a high-school diploma and some aptitude for working with your hands.
It is a disappearing demographic, and its continued power reflects a political framework, defined in the Constitution, which is fundamentally regressive when it comes to representation by the people.
The Constitution gives a level of power to the states, with the result that a plurality of more than two million votes at the national level is irrelevant when it comes to 70,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in the most recent cycle, or a handful of votes in Florida in 2000.
A demographic analysis recently looked at how the 2016 presidential election would have come out if only people under the age of 25 voted. This exercise shows a map that is almost entirely blue, except for a thin scrap of red in rural Idaho. Most of these voters get their news from social media and from their friends.
A powerful slogan of the 1960s was “Don't trust anyone over 30.” Sometimes in recent years I have heard organizational managers, maybe with good reason, mutter, “Don't trust anyone under 30.”
A moment of generational change is a crisis, in the root sense of the word. For people like me, it represents a giving away of power and control, because our age is coming to an end.
We can either fight it - as Trump and his minions and supporters do - or embrace it and seek to find ways in which we may marshal whatever wisdom we have gathered in our years and open-handedly share it - a gift without a price-tag or any expectation of return.
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Tip O'Neill, as a Democrat and as speaker of the House, was Reagan's great combatant and interlocutor, and he often said that “all politics is local.” I'm not sure that's still true, in our era of existential threat from climate change and global interconnectedness within a rudderless system. But let's say it is - that it's what we've got.
So I think of Christine Hallquist's nomination, and how in the old-world view she never would have had a chance because of her gender-identity status, and also how this cycle's Democratic primary for governor in Vermont did not attract anyone within the Democratic party establishment to run.
Hallquist probably had the best managerial credentials of anyone in the Democrat primary, and maybe that's why she won by such a large margin. Maybe she won because Vermont is a genuinely progressive state when it comes to questions of gender identity and sexual orientation.
One can argue that her two main challengers split the progressive vote, and that a chunk of the vote went to a young symbolic candidate with good ideas. Obviously, Hallquist also won because most people who voted thought she was the strongest candidate in a race to which most folks paid little attention or dissed in some way.
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Truth in advertising: I didn't vote. It didn't seem to matter so much, and I didn't know the candidates or the issues very well, since I was traveling before the election. Abstention is a legitimate position when one doesn't have skin in the game.
But I do usually vote, and in the 30 years I have voted in Vermont, I've learned that our political ethos is an open and collaborative one, for the most part, and also that most governors, from either party, are given some time in office rather than being immediately challenged.
Governorship of Vermont is both a political role and a managerial position, and as one columnist pointed out, the candidates in the Democrat primary did not have particularly strong resumes - the cast of characters included a young man who exemplifies the best hope of our political system, but who is only 14 years old.
It was an easy election to make fun of on podcasts and in opinion pieces. And it was an election that no one, using the old-world lens, took very seriously.
In the old-world view, governors in Vermont get at least a few terms to show the worth of their programs and management. According to The New York Times, Vermonters have not unseated a sitting governor since 1962. Maybe that's one reason the state is in as good shape as it is, despite its troubles.
In the new-world view, anyone with any tie to the party of Trump should either disavow that connection or else be subject to new-world rules, in which you don't get to stay governor, even if your opponent was a Democratic outsider in a weak cast of candidates.
I want to blend the old-world and new-world lenses for a moment here, to make a statement: I like Phil Scott. He's clearly a decent man, and while I have a different view of policy from his in many areas, he usually has seemed like someone one could work with - apart from the budget fiasco last spring, which is a black mark, in my book.
Scott's public stance on gun control, while relatively mild, almost rivals for political courage Peter Shumlin's devotion of an entire State of the State address to Vermont's opiate addiction problem.
Vermont has little practical influence at the national level, but it does have a symbolic power, exemplified in events like Howard Dean's and Bernie Sanders' respective runs for the presidency and Jim Jeffords' shift across the aisle when the second Bush beat Gore in a tainted election. Our state's early openness to civil unions made us a go-to destination for gay and lesbian unions long before the laws changed at the national level.
The reasons that no significant Democrat came forward to challenge Scott are embedded partly in how things run in Vermont, and partly in the fact that he is a reasonable man who reflects Vermont values.
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My take is this. If Phil Scott disavows any connection with the Trump version of the Republican Party in a way that is clear and forceful enough to make headlines in the national press and re-establish Vermont's Republican Party as something that might be a guidepost for other principled Republicans in other states, he has my vote.
I'm willing to go along with how things have worked in the past, to that extent, but Scott has to enter the new world if I'm going to vote for him.
If Scott does not take that action, then I am going to devote my energies to electing the nation's first transgender governor in the fall, and I suggest that you do the same, and embrace the new world, too.
It doesn't take a weather forecaster to know which way the wind's blowing.