@igloo:
While I agree, I would think that the economic power of the 1950’s would tend to be a force to be reactive, rather than progressive. The 1950’s was the age of the company man, where Charlie Wilson could proudly proclaim what was good for GM was good for the country, and where so much of the culture of the times semed to be conformity to create good little cogs for that machine. There were societal forces at work that stemmed from economics, I think the women’s rights movement stemmed from women going into the work force in large numbers to replace the men fighting in WWII, then being forced back into being happy homemakers, likewise I think Blacks and their allies, who had fought the racism of the Nazis, came back home saying you can’t fight Nazis overseas and have a society that has Jim Crow and the KKK running around. One of the things that 60’s people revolted against the was man in the gray flannel suit and the big corporations, IBM and GM and the like were all part of what they were fighting against.
And now the college generation is desperate to get jobs with Microsoft, Google, Goldman Sachs…and often have to settle for Starbucks.
I fell in love with a woman who will never come on this website. She may never be a boomer but she has taught me how to love.
Hm. Interestingly [the data doesn’t bear out your mature reasoning](https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster).
Economists do not have a good track record of predicting reality. Also at $15/hour some workers will lose various public assistance benefits including subsidized day care. Saves the taxpayer money but net effect for the employee may be zero.
I would like to know what happens with the wages of the current $15 earners when the lowest level employees get their salary bumped to $15? Will everyone get their wages adjusted? Are we just causing inflation and punishing savers?
I am not sure what Department of Labor does in a capitalist economy. If they set up wages then maybe they should also decide how many Big Macs to produce?
I’ll still go with them over the opinions of random internet commentators.
I’m 20. This is my first presidential election. Pity me.
My unenlightened opinion is that the minimum wage needs to go up according to living expenses per county (as someone else on this thread mentioned). I’m in retail and I’m the youngest associate in the store. Everyone else is 30+. Let’s face it, I have a job because I’m less expensive than a robot. Humans will be needed in customer service for a long, long time. I’m of the belief that anyone who graduates high school and is puts in their 40 hours a week shouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet. Granted, I have no idea how to accomplish that, but you can’t make progress without ideals.
@TomSrOfBoston oh yes, the threat of armageddon. All I hear about these days is another civil war or revolution. I think it’s gonna get scary come November.
musicprnt’s point was that NOT EVERYONE in the boomer generation “revolted”.
There were many boomers who supported maintaining the establishment such as Dan Quayle or GWB back in the '60s…and one uncle who overlapped with GWB at Yale can confirm that from the few times he’s observed him on campus.
There were also boomers who supported segregation and against Civil Rights…and had critical enough numbers that Nixon effectively used them to win his first election by appealing to them in his “Southern Strategy”* election campaign…and it wouldn’t surprise me the ones who remained unreconstructed since then are now staunch supporters of a “YUGE” presidential candidate.
Also, I’d like to add that it’s not always a given a younger generation is always “more progressive/liberal” than the older generations. For instance, many teens/young adults of the 1920s and 30s were just as taken in by the anti-progressive Fascism not only in Italy/Western Europe…but also in the US as shown in movements ranging from the American Nazi Party to the homegrown “Silver Shirts”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Legion_of_America
More recently, Gen Xers…especially the older ones were considered by many to be more conservative as a group than the boomer or older generations.
One reflection of this was how many older Gen Xers were staunch supporters of Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism and their antipathy towards the liberal/progressivism of the '60s and ‘70s as underscored by Family Ties’ conservative Gen X character Alex P. Keaton played by Michael J Fox.
And I got to see some of this firsthand during my HS years as most HS classmates who were vocally political preferred the views of right-libertarians such as Ayn Rand and deliberately “pulled Alex P. Keatons” on their parents by doing things like applying to the FSAs or military themed colleges like VMI or Citadel knowing their parents were not fans of the Vietnam War or the military or aspiring to ibanking/finance careers when their parents would have preferred them going into academia, K-12 teaching, or science/technology.
- Sentiments which weren't limited to the south but extended to many other areas of the country with a dominant White...ranging from parts of the rural midwest popular with White supremacist groups to the NYC borough of Staten Island or neighborhoods like Howard Beach/Bensonhurst up until the late '90s and sometimes beyond.
That seems to be a propaganda page filled mostly with anecdotes. There is someone who keeps repeating that the plural of anecdotes is not data…
Anyway, the non-partisan CBO believes that higher minimum wage helps those that remain employed but leads to job cuts for others:
Some of what we call “progress” is actually not progress.
Every generation thinks the ones ahead are old fogies who don’t understand anything. They understand a lot of things, often far better than you.
@cobrat:
One of the problems with labels like “baby boomers” is that it disregards things like race, class and where someone is from. For example, you mentioned gen-x’ers, and it depended on where they grew up, their parents attitudes, and so forth. A Gen X-er whose parents were let’s say evangelical Christians would have a different viewpoint then a kid who grew up with let’s say progressive minded parents. You mentioned guys from Bensonhurst or Staten Island, I went to school with kids like that and they were pretty conservative (this was at NYU before it decided to become “elite”)…many of them were blue collar white working class, often the first in their family to be going to college (you should have seen my class on power and politics, the teacher was a kind of 60’s liberal in views, was interesting:). On the other hand, I don’t think the Gen X’ers (which I might belong to, or I am the tail end of the baby boom, take your pick) as a whole were more conservative than their parents generation, I think it really depends on who you are talking about, and the number of Gen X’ers going to college was a lot higher than their parents generation, and education levels play into this.
And yeah, in the 1930’s there were a lot of young people (and older people) who were caught up in fascist movements, people like Charles Coughlan and his followers, and there was a significant population of Nazi supporters in groups like America First. In NJ, the Nazi Bund had a lot of members in Northwest NJ, there were Bund camps up there (one of those camps is now a town park in Andover, NJ). A while ago two teenagers found another such camp in the rugged terrain above Riverdale, NJ, and found all kinds of things like membership records, films of the camp and so forth. The information is in a museum in Newark, but can only be released to researchers who have to promise not to reveal names of people involved because family still lives in the region. William Manchester wrote a great social history of the US and he basically documented that in the 1930’s the US had large contingents both on the very left end of the spectrum (socialist/communist) and on the other end…not to mention that groups like the KKK also had a resurgence there…yet many of the people you were talking about are what are now called the ‘greatest generation’ who are portrayed as all being stalwart anti fascist fighting to save democracy (and in my own ethnic group in the 1930’s, ie Italian descent, there were a lot of supporters of Mussolini, they used to hold rallies at Madison Square garden to celebrate Mussolini’s ‘triumphs’ in Libya and Ethiopia…).
The other question that gets difficult is what do we define as conservative? Is it the Alex B Keaton economic conservatism (would Alex B Keaton be anti gay rights, anti sex ed and so forth? ) or the conservatism that is very reactionary when it comes to social issues/sexuality? It is why labels are difficult…
While the Family Ties portrayal of Alex P. Keaton’s conservatism was focused on economic conservatism, there was also a lot of reactionary attitudes regarding social issues/sexuality among many Gen Xers.
Homophobia was still very much alive and well during my childhood well into my HS years…and folks my age and slightly older/younger fully participated in it. There were also many GenXers even tail-end ones who were* against sex ed and had reactionary social issues/sexuality.
Also, unlike a critical mass of the boomers who became anti-military or apathetic about it…many in my generation were enthusiastic about joining up…either enlisting out of HS or affirmatively going to FSAs/Military Themed Colleges like VMI and Citadel.
This was one of the reasons why older HS alums who graduated in the early '80s and before were surprised folks graduating HS in the late '80s/90s regarded FSAs as competitive/prestigious as the Ivy/elite colleges as back when they were in HS, the negative feelings from the Vietnam War, protests, and the aftermath was such…the military path in general wasn’t a very popular choice in their time period and FSAs weren’t nearly as hard to get into regarding GPA/SAT requirements if that was what one wanted.
This was one reason why in may ways…my undergrad experience was nearly a complete contrast to the one at my high school and many neighbors of the same/similar ages beyond mere academics.
- While some have since come to regret the passionate conservatism of their youth, others are now active within the reactionary right.
Of course homophobia was alive and well when we were growing up, after all we are old farts now lol . Gen-X-ers are no longer particularly young, so if you grew up in the 60’s and 70’s into the 80’s, a lot of the old attitudes were out there. One thng did happen, a lot (not all, but a lot) of the gen-xers grew up around parents who were socially conservative, and later on they moved on. A lot of that was going to college (I am talking a typical college), the biggest factor in a change in attitudes is exposure. If you go to a typical high school of our generation, there were no openly gay kids (or if they seemed to be, they would likely have not had a good experience), and attitudes were pretty bad, but once you got to college kids got that exposure and realized it wasn’t a big deal…and with generations, the Millenials have a far different attitude then we did growing up, because their parents likely had grown up and mellowed. Does that mean that all millenials are all that excepting? nope but if you look at social issues, the Millenials by a large majority are pretty liberal and more importantly, they define it as something important, which a gen-x’er might not (so for example, polls seem to indicate that Millenials, let’s say those 30 and under, are repelled by the social conservative stance taken by politicians and it is important to them, whereas Gen X’ers if polls are to be believed are more inclined to vote for someone who social positions they don’t agree with if there are other things they like about them…).
I always think of a line, I think it was written by the writer Anatole France, he said something like “Every generation sees itself as modern, with all the issues that come about with being modern, and every prior generation is old and therefore backward”.
Agreed. However, there was also the factor that many Gen Xers were sons/Ds of older boomers who were active in the protests/hippie counterculture and quite a few of them “rebelled” by adopting the opposite social/political attitudes.
Saw plenty of those among a few neighbors and many HS classmates growing up.
That’s where I got to see the phenomenon of many latter Gen X children of older hippie boomer parents “pulling Alex P. Keatons” on their parents by doing things like going into ibanking/finance, espousing/supporting conservative/libertarian right talking points(Ayn Rand was very popular with this crowd), or enlisting/applying and enrolling in a FSA or Military themed college.
Disclosure: Am one of the tail-end Gen X-ers so while I am of Gen X and share some of their inclinations, I also can relate to and share some inclinations with older millennials.
Also, the generations as applied within my extended family are not as neatly segmented. My parents/aunts/uncles would fall mainly in the “Silent Generation”(Born in the '30s) and my grandparents/greats ranged from folks born in 1880 to 1917). I personally regard boomers and millennials as part of “my generation” as extended relatives of the same generation as myself range from those born in the late 1950’s to those born in the late '90s.
@cobrat:
Yeah, I hear you with the kids who pulled an “Alex Keaton” on their parents, there were a lot of kids of hippie kind of parents I grew up with who did that, headed for the magic ring of greed is good./corporate raider, investment banking , etc (not as much the military in my school, couple of kids went to service academies, some kids went into the military after high school)…funny part was at later reunions, many of those kids who had embraced Ayn Rand (some politicians never seem to lose the attraction) were pretty bitter at their choices, several of them burned out/had nervous breakdowns, and more than a few others chucked that life to do other things, often in things their parents would approve of:).
My son was at Duke TIP program, and was spouting support of Ayn Rand. His TA, who happened to be a philosophy grad student, made him do a talk, in order to attend the weekend bagels and lox breakfast. This TA nicely tore apart son’s ideas. This episode became a part of college applications. Funny but real.
I only know of one or two of the Ayn Rand fans who had the burnouts. Most either continued on the vein…some are huge supporters of the “Yuge” candidate or are regretful and done a 180.
One slightly younger HS alum who was a staunch conservative activist from HS through law school is now gone so lefty/progressive he’d fit in much better at my radical lefty undergrad when I attended in the mid-late '90s than I did back then or now.
As for the greater popularization of the military either as enlisting or as officer, it was mostly a reaction to the hippie boomer parents who were staunchly anti-Vietnam War/all things military combined with a more neutral/positive perception of the US military as an institution/career choice among HS students…including the top ones than was the case with the classes who graduated in the '70s and early '80s according to HS alums from those years. The Grenada campaign, Panama, and the First Gulf War facilitated quite a bit of this.
haha excellent. Good TA, too!