On the latest episode of the Why Is This Happening podcast, host Chris Hayes chats with McKay Coppins about the incoherence in the Trump Republicans. It’s a great listen in general, but I took particular note of their suggestion of how Reagan’s three-legged stool has been roundly rejected by US voters. It made my ears perk up because it fed into a line of thought I’ve been stuck in for a while about Generation X, my generation, and the failure of everything we tried to do. Maybe it’s come around a bit more than I realised?
Hayes and Coppins suggest that stool is wobbly these days. The Iraq War took out voter support for the foreign intervention leg, and the GFC wrecked voter support for fiscal hawks, and I can’t help but notice that those are two things Gen X resistance had at its heart. So I dare to wonder, maybe, in a roundabout sort of way, without even trying in the end, Gen X politics won after all?
As much as we had politics! Late Gen X like me came up in a strange moment, as Anil Dash noted resonantly the other day. We had the Battle of Seattle, yes, but mostly we just floated around feeling excluded from power and influence, while quietly waiting for bigotry to die out with the old people who held those views (because, of course, bigotry was something old people did, and would go away by itself).
And this is what I’ve been stuck on, for ages now: just how much we failed. Everything I associate with the political concerns of my cohort just had zero impact. No Logo and Manufacturing Consent and indymedia and One No Many Yeses and the biggest global protest in history and none of it did shit. Every bad thing came true anyway.
(And then it got worse from there.)
The analysis in this podcast (and I am of course predisposed to believe it but also I think it’s evident in the public rhetoric of Trumpist politics) suggests that, as much as it’s hard to perceive, the big picture is that those Gen X politics, my politics, have actually become widespread. Sure, it’s because the world got completely broken twice over, and it doesn’t reflect a principled engagement with the values espoused on the Lilith Fair stage, and it has nothing to do with how persuasive those issues of Adbusters were, but I reckon we can safely put all that under the generationally appropriate headline “ironic”. Despite everything we tried to push the world there, it ended up heading so far in the other direction it looped around to the right sort of place anyway.
The sad thing of course is what has happened to the third leg. Social conservatism has grown huge and vigorous in ways unthinkable to younger me, and even with two stool legs gone, the Republicans remain robust enough to win a popular majority of US voters. Fascism is no longer a weird rump belief system akin to Flat Earth (which, not coincidentally, is also back). Cruelty is in.
I think my point, if I have one, is that maybe I don’t need to feel too despairing about the Gen X project, and all the stuff I cared about, and how I listened so carefully to the lyrics of those Rage Against The Machine songs and pretended not to notice that most people weren’t doing the same as they jumped up and down. Because (munters aside) we were right, and we were proven right, and maybe there are now a lot of people out there who basically agree with what we were trying to say.
And maybe that means that the political conversation can, possibly, move forward?
Maybe… there is a good bit of hope to be had?
I can’t believe that fascism and fear-driven hatred are a sustainable basis for a political project. And without the other legs, the US right wing is surely going to break over it. I hope it happens sooner than later, because while it stands it can and will do tremendous harm.
I hope there are good folks ready to take advantage of that moment, when it comes.
Anyway I went back to this the other day, the 2020 re-up of Fight The Power, and though it already seems like it comes from a million years ago, it felt good. Check it.