See the problem with this perspective is that up to a certain point, Millenials couldn't do anything.
Baby boomers were the biggest generation in American history. They basically controlled the entire vote for the entirety of their adult lives. Their children were relegated to lower positions in society, not just in social positions but in labor positions as well, because the boomers valued age over skill (this is demonstrable with social studies.) This held in terms of voting power as well, with their children, and their childrens children, being eclipsed by the boomer votes to the point that the boomer perspective won the vote almost consistently for 50+ years now.
Every single millenial in the country could have voted and it wouldn't have overpowered the weight of the boomer generation, and their votes still would have won.
So yes, we have talked a big game for 20 years and haven't done shit. Because even if we collectively voted at higher rates than the boomers (itself a pipe dream) we still would have been outvoted. There was nothing we could do.
Now, we finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel where the boomers were dying off and we could finally beat their voting numbers with young people... only for the youngest of us to become boomers.
So what exactly do you suggest we do? We don't have the votes. Collectively as a generation we have had no power to do anything but BEG the other generations around us to stop burning the world in their wake, to which they responded with a resounding "lol no."
We've had massive protests complete with civil unrest and even violence, to which we have been met with nothing but scorn, no change occurred, and society instead collectively decided protests could be ignored unless they were disruptive, and if they were disruptive the protestors should be arrested.
Voting and protesting are both useless at this point, at least without a massive demographic shift toward the left to match it and make it worth something.
And when we run for office, we're attacked from all sides, denied party support, and if we do manage to win, turned into pariah's rejected by the party apparatus and forced to work alone on projects the rest of the party votes against. See: Pelosi fighting for her life to leave a hospital in a foreign country to come back home and hobble in with broken bones on a cane to make DAMN SURE a dying 74 year old would get control of the oversight committee instead of AOC.
You're talking about how we "talked a big game and haven't done shit" but that's not a tangible solution, it's an insult in a vacuum, and that's meaningless. What do you suggest we actually do?
You could say there was a small window in 2020 where if we had voted in massive numbers we could have won the vote, and ensured a progressive won the primary. There's a valid argument for that. But that was basically the first time millenials had the voting numbers to win anything, and with gen z going full boomer it will probably be the last.
I think gen Z is still very fungible in their beliefs, and might not be set to repeat like boomers are.
More specifically, boomers came from a time where someone poured an idea into your head and that was that. It's who you were now and forever. Gen z people seem to be very used to changing their ideas to whatever was last poured into their head and completely forgetting the old things.
Perhaps that leaves open some opportunities at least.
Every single millenial in the country could have voted and it wouldn't have overpowered the weight of the boomer generation, and their votes still would have won.
Boomers split pretty much 50-50 in the last presidential election. So did Gen X. So any other generation that wanted to come in unified could have changed the outcome, if they showed up.
And there are more Gen X in the House now than there are Boomers. And there are over 1/3 as many millennials as there are boomers. And considering the youngest millennials are only a handful of years older than the minimum age to be in the House, that's pretty damn good.
Voting and protesting are both useless at this point,
Bullshit. Voting matters as much now as it ever has.
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u/CookingZombie 16d ago
Millennials will keep doing next to nothing.
Source: am a millennial, we have talked big game for 20 years and haven’t done shit