Over the course of the last 50 years, we've seen some remarkable generational shifts that ushered in dramatic political change. From Kevin Phillips' Emerging Republican Majority, to Ruy Teixera's Emerging Democratic Majority, much time and ink (and pixels) have been expended detailing how shifts in America's demographics auger shifts in our political system as well.
We are at the tail end (last throes?) of Phillips' era, as boomers age up and die off. We Generation X members came of age in a political era dominated by Republicans, from Nixon to Reagan to Limbaugh, so even our generation of supposedly cynical, societal dropouts are more likely to skew a little more conservative in our old age.
The next generation, however, looks like it will be far different and will lead to a completely new era of American government. If we can hang on a little bit longer, the cavalry is coming. (more below the fold)
Millennials are quite often derided in pop culture and the media. They are portrayed as the trophies for all, pampered and with the worst taste in music generation.
It's all bollocks. Well, maybe not the music part, but i am an "old" who still prefers a Gilmour guitar solo or Tumbling Dice or Blur or Nirvana or a Joe Strummer screed to anything coming out today.
I digress.
Millennials are the generation that will save America and restore it's promise. Rather than yell at them to get off my lawn, I want to welcome them and beg them to do even more.
Obviously it would be easy to over-simplify Millennials (the boomers were not all hippy flower children, we Generation Xers were not all cynical assholes, yet those were the media messages for years and years), but the percentages on some issues are striking nonetheless. This generation really is markedly different and is the generation that looks most like what America will be over the course of the next 10 years. Still far more Anglo than what the U.S. will be in 25 years, but very, very different than even my generation.
Now, most of us have seen this data here and there, but putting it into one document really changed my perspective. Here are some general stats:
• Millennials account for 1 in every 5 same-sex couples;
• Only 21% of Millennials are married, while 42% of Boomers were married at their age;
• Almost 1 in 4 (23% to be exact) have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, making them the most educated generation;
• Millennials are the most ethnically and racially diverse generation, with 19% being Hispanic, 14% African-American and 5% Asian;
• As for those Millennial mothers, some 36% of Millennial women have had children;
• About 2 in 3 Millennials are US-born;
• An impressive 38% of Millennials are bilingual, up from 22% in 2003.
• Millennials will comprise 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025.
But it is the below that hits me the most. We have been seen a lot of stories about social issues, the millennials and how the GOP is turning them off with their anti-gay and anti-choice agenda. But it may be bigger than that. Millennials believe in much more expansive government and a much different business ethos.
If the below numbers hold for a couple of decades, then the next generation of political leaders and voters see a much larger role for government and a much different role for how corporations should be run. Perhaps even a slight change in the “maximize all profits, I get mine, you get yours” mentality in big business that could yield much different results for the country.
“Millennials are even more positive about the promise of government, with roughly three quarters or more saying it has the potential to address today’s challenges…They not only believe government has the potential to address societal issues such as education, skills and training, and climate change/protecting the environment, but more than 80 percent also see an important role for government in economic issues such as unemployment and inequality of incomes and wealth. ”
• 56% of millennials believe business should do more to address resource scarcity.
• 55% believe business should do more to address climate change.
• 49% believe business should do more to address income inequality.
• 47% believe the government should do more to address unemployment.
• 43% believe the government should do more to address climate change.
• 56% believe the government should do more to address income inequality.
• 63% of millennials had given to charities.
• 43% actively volunteer
• 52% sign petitions
As this demographic becomes a greater force in political and economic life, they are likely to reverse the decades long "government is the problem" mentality and look for a more active and expansive government to solve problems. They are going to be less old white boy Christians who only speak English. They are going to be, just, different.
In addition, as the incomparable Digby noted in today's Salon piece, even the Hispanic voters who are most likely to be GOP converts also have a far different perspective on the role of government.
Unfortunately, they have a big problem. Hispanic evangelicals interpret their traditional family values a little bit differently than other evangelicals:
By all measures, Hispanic Evangelicals embrace a much more expansive view of government than do whites, especially white Evangelicals. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic Evangelicals said in a May 2014 Pew survey that they supported “a bigger government with more services”; only 25 percent said they wanted “smaller government with fewer services.” This preference for larger government in the abstract is longstanding: A 2007 Pew poll found that 66 percent of Hispanic Evangelicals would rather pay higher taxes for more government services. They were only slightly more conservative on this score than Hispanics overall in the 2014 poll, who supported bigger government by a 67–21 margin, and they were slightly more supportive of big government than Hispanics overall in the 2007 survey. According to the Pew survey, America as a whole in 2014 supports smaller government by a 51–40 margin, and white Evangelicals support smaller government by margins close to 2–1.
Hispanic Evangelicals’ disagreement with conservative domestic-policy orthodoxy extends to many important issues. Fifty percent of them believe that government should guarantee health care for all Americans, and 57 percent prefer life without parole to the death penalty for convicted murderers. But the starkest differences come on the very sort of core economic questions that animate many conservative activists.
Data from the 2013 Hispanic Values Survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, bear this out. Eighty-two percent of Hispanic Evangelicals supported raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, and 69 percent supported raising tax rates on Americans earning over $250,000 a year. Perhaps most disturbingly, 60 percent believed that the best way to promote economic growth was to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses to pay for more government spending on education and infrastructure; only 37 percent believed that lowering taxes and cutting spending on government programs was the best way to go.
Republicans simply can't help themselves. When the chips are down, they will always go Cracker. They will continue to appeal to their narrow, old, white, regressive conservative base. For them, it is like Bart and rock, paper, scissors: good old rock; nothing beats rock.
Progressives have to keep fighting hard on these issues, win or lose, and just keep the worst shit from happening until the cavalry arrives. Over the course of the next four to six years, the Republicans are going to continue to push away the bulk of the next generation of voters. Then we are going to see some serious change.