The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Why Gen X Is the Trumpiest Generation
As the midterm elections near, polling prognostication takes the fore. One attention-grabbing poll shows that most age brackets are either split or favor Democrats. The one exception is Generation X — or at least a big chunk of it. Voters between 45 and 64 favor Republicans by a 21-point margin, 59-38.
Paul du Quenoy then has an awful lot of fun explaining why:
What makes X-ers like me (born in 1977) so damn conservative? In the context of 2022, there is no great mystery. We grew up in the 1980s, a blessedly simpler time when life was fun and carefree, when the USA was cruising toward Cold War triumph, and when truth, justice, and the American way were both time-tested certainties and the unstoppable wave of the future. As far as we knew, we were living in the best of all possible worlds, riding our bikes without helmets, going to raves without social media tracking our every move and pill, knowing our moms and dads couldn’t be helicopter parents if they had the whole Army Air Cavalry Brigade at their disposal. Every problem had a solution. Every feeling found a form. Every dream became a reality.
Moronic boomers took our complacency for laziness. We were derided as “slackers,” dismissed as the first generation who would live worse than our parents. We were chided for our cynicism toward the Sixties ideals that our elders still mouthed but had abandoned so hypocritically that for us they were little more than a good laugh when the adults left the room.
As the first generation to really grow up with both parents working outside the home, he says, “we found our own solutions.” He adds, “We became self-reliant, self-directed, and self-assured. Our medium was sarcasm because nothing left to us was sacred or even authentic.”
Then he directs his ire from the Boomers to the Millennials:
We watched with bemusement as the younger generation born after 1980 — the millennials now poised to vote Democratic despite it all — grew up coddled and medicated, enslaved by technology, unable to solve basic problems without turning to parental helicopters. Their entitled ways became even less intelligible as they spouted identity politics and grievance tropes gleaned from our failing schools and universities, using them to whine, shame, and scold their way into the lower echelons of the workplace while taking gruesome bites of avocado toast to help the overprescribed Xanax and Adderall go down. The irony with which they expressed their discontent seemed pointless and sad.
To our immense frustration, the boomers cultivated millennial dependency and helplessness, all while keeping real power, success, and independence out of their emotionally impaired reach. … For both sides of this codependent intergenerational alliance, the ideology of the left offers to provide for their ever greater needs while absolving them of all responsibility.
Du Quenoy concludes:
Generation X-ers are caught in the precarious middle. Our financial fortunes have been broadly held back by Boomers unwilling to pass the torch, and are coveted by millennials. The freedoms we knew and cherished through our young adulthoods are now ever more forfeit to the nihilistic abstractions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which are demanded by our insecure juniors and mandated by our browbeaten seniors. …
For the X-er, the choice is clear. One party, whatever its faults, vibes morally and ethically with the spreading of human happiness and success tempered by traditional values. The other party tries to enforce alien moral and ethical vibes as a precondition of human happiness and success at the expense of traditional values, especially if they get in the way of its peculiar vision of “social justice.” Nearly six out of ten X-ers are drawing on their halcyon childhoods to find the right way forward.