In Britain, liberalism was architected primarily by people who were part of our very old establishment. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was achieved largely by the work of Lord Wolfenden, Lord Pakenham and Arthur Gore (8th Earl of Arran). The same goes for most of the political changes we associate with modernity and progress - with the notable exception of Bevan and his peers, the people turning the wheels were mainly minor aristocrats in dusty tweed. A great many of the most significant changes were made contrary to public opinion, the most obvious being the abolition of the death penalty - a policy which most Britons still oppose.
The boomers credit themselves with having changed the world when they were young, broke and essentially powerless, but deny any credit to the generation that constituted the establishment at the time. Conversely, now that they control the majority of capital, make up the biggest electoral demographic and holds most of the elected offices, they deny responsibility.
The most destructive act of the baby boomers was creating a culture in which the individual is seen as having supremacy over the institution. The consequences are obvious and stark - a political system with single-digit approval ratings, where nobody feels represented and nobody feels responsible. A political culture defined not by fundamental ideological allegiance and difference, but by special pleading. There's no such thing as a socialist anymore, no such thing as a conservative or a trade unionist, just people with opinions. America always pretended to be classless but Britain has gone the same way, preferring the egoistic fantasy of an egalitarian society over the reality of one where power and wealth and privilege are still very much in force.
We're trapped in a solipsistic nightmare, where conspiracy theories have replaced an understanding of social power. Until the people who are in charge actually admit that they are in charge, we're fucked.
The boomers have also presided over a period of unparalleled monetary inflation. They chose not to take hard decisions. Being an xer, I can totally relate to the concept of being trapped. The boomers are sitting on gazzilions of dollars of inflated wealth and god knows how much power that goes with it. It is not so much the lack of power that bothers me, but the conflict between playing by the rules defined by the boomers and the new hope of post materialism.
I think the xers and yers will remain conflicted generations.
The previous paragraph covers the issue of conflict between boomers and young generations, touching on the controlling forces of boomers conflicting with newer ideologies. So I think they meant to say that the x and y generations will remain in conflict with the boomers until the boomers grow too old to hold their power.
The problem I have with the invocation of post-materialism specifically to support this argument is that if post-materialism were manifest in the youngest generations, we'd have a lot of empowered voting and office-running youth overthrowing the boomer establishment. Post-materialists value freedom of speech and people collectively having power in political decisions more than they value material goods and even national order. Post-materialists would be fighting tooth and nail and leveraging every advantage they have against a corrupt, centralized material-obsessed authority.
A powerful post-materialist youth would leverage technology to empower their voices directly through the voting system and the lawmaking process. They would enable an open-source voting system with access to vote online and with publicly published by-vote data that associates votes to a generated unique key. When you voted, you would be given that key and then your association to that key would be destroyed. Thus, you'd be able to verify your vote was cast correctly and we could all verify voting data validity. The open-source voting system would ensure that there were no holes in this process.
A powerful post-materialist youth would reform lawmaking such that all bills had a single specific agenda with no riders (i.e., hidden pieces covering separate topics not covered in the abstract). They would ensure that every person could easily search for all the bills in consideration that covered topics they cared about and that the government actively marketed this data to the public.
A powerful post-materialist youth would have a crowd-sourced information platform for politics that tightly integrated with the searchable, taggable data. Think Reddit+Wikipedia for politics. With this there could be a wiki page for every issue and bill in discussion and a "subreddit" for every party and political action group to organize through.
A powerful post-materialist youth would develop these solutions and steamroll them into the status quo long before the boomers retired.
Maddox is highlighting that youth have not been exerting strong post-materialist influence in politics and joining a growing quorum of people saying, "Do more, care more, and you can actually shift ideologies and power structures to better align with your ideals."
The missing element to making this mainstream is a technology-focused social approach to reforming the voting system such that it is possible for the average working and school-going youth to develop and grow their understanding of the issues affecting all those that they care about by connecting them to those same people.
I think mainstream culture is a bigger impediment to the changes you describe than voting system reform. But I certainly would like to see the kind of changes you describe.
The boomers credit themselves with having changed the world when they were young, broke and essentially powerless, but deny any credit to the generation that constituted the establishment at the time.
In the U.S. at least, I don't think anything would have changed with regards to civil rights for a while if it had been left to the establishment. Without the protests, boycotts, and other direct action of the Civil Rights Movement, I doubt that the white Northern establishment would've gotten the guts to move against the white Southern establishment: the fact that the white Southern establishment reacted so violently and lawlessly to the civil-rights protests was one of the factors that forced the timid establishment to act, lest they allow in effect another open southern rebellion. Up until the moment they were forced to act, the establishment generally thought the protestors were hotheads who should've stopped rocking the boat so dangerously. (The presence of even more "dangerous" hotheads was also useful for that; e.g. the existence of Malcolm X made it easier for MLK to position himself as a moderate partner offering a way out, whereas his demands were themselves initially seen as extreme.)
There was some spread in generations in the civil rights movement, especially among black southerners; famously Rosa Parks was born in 1913. But among whites, the participants in the protests were almost exclusively under 40.
I do agree that they've mostly grown up to be a disappointing establishment, though.
Also, it's easy to go out and protest and be unwashed when you have absolutely nothing to lose. The unfortunate youth of today are not as unfortunate as in 1968.
1. There's no longer any military conscription, which in the 60s forced even the most temperamentally apolitical under-26-year-olds to pay attention at least somewhat, since it was (legally) impossible to just ignore the war and go about one's life.
2. While many black youth are still disaffected, there's no longer any de jure segregation, so what remains is a more amorphous disaffection lacking the sort of clear spark/goal that the civil rights movement had. Overall material conditions are also somewhat better, for at least some proportion.
In Britain, liberalism was architected primarily by people who were part of our very old establishment. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was achieved largely by the work of Lord Wolfenden, Lord Pakenham and Arthur Gore (8th Earl of Arran). The same goes for most of the political changes we associate with modernity and progress - with the notable exception of Bevan and his peers, the people turning the wheels were mainly minor aristocrats in dusty tweed. A great many of the most significant changes were made contrary to public opinion, the most obvious being the abolition of the death penalty - a policy which most Britons still oppose.
The boomers credit themselves with having changed the world when they were young, broke and essentially powerless, but deny any credit to the generation that constituted the establishment at the time. Conversely, now that they control the majority of capital, make up the biggest electoral demographic and holds most of the elected offices, they deny responsibility.
The most destructive act of the baby boomers was creating a culture in which the individual is seen as having supremacy over the institution. The consequences are obvious and stark - a political system with single-digit approval ratings, where nobody feels represented and nobody feels responsible. A political culture defined not by fundamental ideological allegiance and difference, but by special pleading. There's no such thing as a socialist anymore, no such thing as a conservative or a trade unionist, just people with opinions. America always pretended to be classless but Britain has gone the same way, preferring the egoistic fantasy of an egalitarian society over the reality of one where power and wealth and privilege are still very much in force.
We're trapped in a solipsistic nightmare, where conspiracy theories have replaced an understanding of social power. Until the people who are in charge actually admit that they are in charge, we're fucked.