Opinion | Gen X, Right-Wing Bastion? - The New York Times - 0 views
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my generation, so often passed over, merits some ideological analysis. And Noah Smith, the economics writer for Bloomberg and an edge-of-Generation-Xer (born in 1980), offered the beginnings of one last week on Twitter.
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The formative world of Gen X, he pointed out, was one of Republican dominance in presidential politics, evangelical revival in American religion and diminishing social conflict overall.
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“Xers grew up in a nation that was rapidly stabilizing under conservative rule,” he writes, suggesting that many Americans now in midlife associate the G.O.P. with that stability and the subsequent trends pushing the country leftward with disorder and decline.
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the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years
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By virtue of having “adulted” more successfully than millennials — marrying, homebuying and having kids earlier and in larger numbers — Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young
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and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials
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On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced
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Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that’s lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age.
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the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton-to-Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them
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There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions.
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The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.
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To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.