Bill Clinton Tells Millennials They’re What’s Wrong With America, Only Hillary Can Fix It (inquisitr.com)
The 2016 enthusiasm gap (politico.com)

As the presidential primaries wind down here, a lot of pixels are being spilled over the similarities between the 2008 and 2016 Democratic nomination contests. A lot of Bernie Sanders supporters are complaining about the role that superdelegates play in the Democratic primary, and how the primary calendar being front-loaded with southern states makes it easy for more conservative Democrats like Hillary Clinton to take an early lead and project an aura of inevitability. On a structural level these are valid concerns to have over how Democrats pick a presidential candidate, but too many Sanders supporters are trying to compare Sanders’ fate this year with what could have happened to Barack Obama in 2008. Unlike in 2008, Clinton is the one in the lead this year, and so issues like the role of superdelegates are basically moot for now. I’m no Hillary Clinton fan (far from it), and I vastly prefer Sanders over her, but that doesn’t change the fact that Clinton is leading right now and it may be impossible at this point for Sanders to catch up to her.

A lot is being made in this primary cycle about the enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, how GOP primaries and caucuses are almost always setting record turnouts while Democratic Party turnout is lower than it was in 2008. Most of the Republican enthusiasm is likely due to the Donald Trump effect and how he’s energized his base — it’s hard to imagine that any of the other Republican candidates would have generated much excitement if it weren’t for their ability to be an alternative to Trump — but enthusiasm for Trump doesn’t do much to explain lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic candidates, unless you believe that the media can only cover one “it candidate,” which I think was disproved when they were able to devote equal attention to Obama and Sarah Palin back in 2008.

What isn’t being talked about enough is the various forces lined up against not just Democrats, but (American) liberalism in general, and how much that differs today from eight years ago. Republicans practically made “liberal” a dirty word in the eighties, so there’s always been a pretty significant baseline of opposition towards the American left, but it was at a real nadir heading into the 2008 election. Between the beating that the Bush Administration took for its response to Hurricane Katrina, then losing both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterms, and the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq, 2008 just wasn’t a very good year to be a Republican. It took further electoral defeat in that November’s elections to get Republicans to the point where they could rally themselves again as they rose from their ashes, as seen by the Tea Party movement and the success it’s had these past seven years.

Republicans aren’t at a low point this year, though. A good deal of that is because there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office this time around, so Republicans have the built-in advantage of riding anti-incumbent sentiment. No matter how radical a Democratic candidate’s policies may be, they just won’t be able to convince voters that they’ll be a “change from the status quo” in the same way that a Republican candidate can. More than that, though, I can’t recall a greater effort in my life to dismiss and denigrate a generation than I’ve seen conservatives try to do with millennials these past five years, and even if I wasn’t in close contact with millennials in my teaching career, I’d still be completely disgusted by how they’re being mischaracterized and outright mistreated by so much of America.

I’ve always identified with the ethos of Generation X, even if some definitions of modern epochs would place me in the early years of Generation Y. (Don’t get me started on the grey areas surrounding defining generations.) We got stereotyped as “slackers” by many hoity-toity types (you know, even as we were risking our lives in extreme sports, building the Internet into a necessity and laying a lot of important political groundwork for the post-Reagan era), but most of the criticism we got was of a more dismissive air, saying that we weren’t going to amount to anything and so we could be safely ignored and left to our Nirvana CDs and whatnot. The attacks that the millennial generation have been getting these past few years have been nothing short of vicious, echoing how nasty right-wing media has gotten over the past decade, to the point where many critics of millennials sound (and probably are) positively unhinged.

Every generation has its complaints about the generations that follow them; as much as I try to avoid doing that sort of thing, I’ve been guilty on more than a few occasions of talking too long about the superiority of nineties music. As much as each generation loves its media, though, the most common complaint that older generations have to younger ones is how “easy they have it,” the old joke about walking fourteen miles to school uphill both ways and all of that. On a superficial level it’s easy to see the allure of being able to go around with a smartphone, especially when encyclopedias on CD-ROM were state-of-the-art for my generation and we still had to call our friends on landlines, one at a time, if we wanted to get together for a pizza that night.

Scratch the surface of modern technology and Manic Panic, though, and you see a totally different picture. I, for one, wouldn’t want to be a teenager growing up in this era, because I seriously doubt that I’d survive my teenage years. I was bullied and abused so much before I became a teenager that I attempted suicide when I was thirteen, and this was in an era before social media and the ease of anonymous personal attacks. I hear from my students all the time about the kind of stuff that goes on in the modern junior high and high school, and I can say with near-complete certainty that I would have killed myself if those things had been around when I was that young.

One of the most insipid memes I see about millennials is the one attempting to compare the Greatest Generation’s fighting in World War II to millennials’ attempts to build safe spaces on college campuses and elsewhere (even though it’s more than millennials who are working on those efforts). The comparison isn’t a valid one on its surface because there is no threat to the modern world requiring the use of wide-scale physical warfare that even remotely compares to the Axis powers. (You know, unless you’re one of those rabid Islamophobes who think that the American military should be killing every Muslim on the face of the planet, in which case you can fuck the fuck off.) More to the point, this meme feeds into the false idea that the safe spaces movement is about “hurt feelings” when, like the warfare of ages past, it’s about saving lives.

We can talk about acceptance as much as we want, but teen suicide rates have actually been on the rise for a long time now. There are lots of factors at work when it comes to a broad number like that, but even if I weren’t living proof of how negative messages received at home and school can lead young people to attempt suicide, I’ve heard it time and time again from my own students. I’m planning more material about the safe spaces issue for later this year, but for now it’s important to recognize that those of us who are fighting for safe spaces are doing so because we want to stop people — not just our friends — from getting bullied to the point where they feel that there’s no way to make things better except to kill themselves.

These issues were around back during World War II, and even before that; the only difference is that now we’re actually talking about them. LGBT/SAGA suicide rates were probably much higher than those of the general public fifty or seventy years ago, but there wasn’t real public awareness of that because you just didn’t talk about LGBT/SAGA people then. (I’m not even sure how reliable any data on LGBT/SAGA suicide from there would be because of underreporting of non-heterosexual identity.) Homosexuality was still defined as a mental illness in the United States just three years before I was born, and all the stereotypes that pervaded television shows and movies back then are still held as gospel truth by more than a few Americans these days. I have nothing but admiration for the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation — both of my grandfathers were in the Air Force during World War II — but to demean the struggles of millennials to create a fairer world as “whiny” is patently false and deeply disrespectful.

This doesn’t even get into how the only two post-recession recoveries that millennials have lived through haven’t improved the middle and working classes like they have the well-off. The much-ballyhooed unemployment rate goes down, and if you’ve got a good job and you’re hearing this on television then you may think that everything’s peachy keen, but that rate doesn’t take into account the long-term unemployed and underemployed, how people are having to work multiple part-time jobs just to make a fraction of what comparable workers were making twenty years ago. If you’re not receiving government assistance just to be able to have a roof over your head or food on your plate, then you probably aren’t aware of how budget cuts at all levels of government have left millions of families more and more destitute because the upper classes are getting so much more money. The media-reported averages are as distorted as a fun house mirror. Millennials may not have the vocabulary or economic knowledge to explain these things — thanks largely to older people fucking up the American educational system — but they still know these things through their lived experiences, and if you spend any time actually talking with millennials (and not just dumping on them) then you’ll quickly realize this.

People want to improve their lot in life, and perhaps that holds true for each generation as well, although probably to a less coherent extent. The efforts of millennials to close income gaps and reduce suicide rates are no different than my generation’s attempt to counteract the hypocritical cultural conservatism we grew up under, or the previous generation’s attempts to shove that cultural conservatism down everyone’s throats. All of us who are actively political beings are engaged in the same thing, no matter what labels are put on us, no matter what labels we put on ourselves, no matter how old we are or where we came from or any of that stuff.

To accuse millennials of being “whiny,” or anything like that, smacks not only of the lack of basic respect required to have a coherent debate, but also of the kind of authoritarian right-wing pigheadedness that created the problems that millennials (and some of us older people) are trying to fix, whether by promoting safe spaces or working to elect Bernie Sanders. I have to wonder how much of the vicious onslaught against millennials is responsible for the lack of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders compared to what Barack Obama was getting eight years ago, especially when it comes to the all-important task of getting voters to the polls. It’s hard not to believe that all these millennials being constantly told that they’re “worthless” isn’t discouraging a lot of them from casting their votes for Sanders.

If you want to argue that wealth is best left in the hands of big business, or that cultural conservatism is the best fix for what ails American society, then make those arguments, but when you try to virtually erase millennials from public discourse, whether through vicious personal attacks or making it harder for college students to vote (by verbal attacks or screwing up voting laws for no good reason), you expose what a thin-skinned coward you are for not believing that the strength of your arguments will win the day. Someone needs to provide a forceful counter-narrative to the attacks on millennials, and as my generation learned, if the system isn’t giving you what you need, then you need to Do It Yourself.