First Train Out of Nixonland: What Divides the Democrats Now

It's over, at long last. The Democrats have a nominee.

And now the other hard part begins—the part where Democrats try to patch up the party and try to keep a lot of disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters on board.

It's worthwhile to take a moment here and look at the ways we were seduced into this split by our own most cherished ideals. For the past six months, Democratic spirits have been rising high on the historic updraft of nominating either the First Black Candidate or the First Female Candidate. Whichever candidate won, it would be a vindication of 40 years of feminism and 50 years of civil rights; a sign that the world we've been working for was one step closer to reality.

Watching history being made is heady stuff. So it's forgivable that, in all the excitement, we forgot one crucial thing: That triumphal blacks-or-women narrative created a vicious trap for the party as a whole, a trap that is now yawning wide open under our very feet. The hard fact was: One of those sides was going to lose. And, as the months wore on and the primary battles got uglier, the more humiliating that loss was going to be—with the inevitable result that one or the other of the party's two most important constituencies was going to end up nursing massive grudges and hard feelings, and might even stomp off in a snit and withhold their support in the general election as a result.

And the worst part of all is: Thrilling as it all seemed at the time, this wasn't even the core choice that defines the real transformation that's occurring in this election. It never was. What's really happening in 2008 isn't about race or gender—it's about a generational shift that's finally, at long last, about bring an end to our 40 years in Nixonland.

A week ago Saturday, I hosted a Firedoglake book salon [1] featuring Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, authors of Millennial Makeover [2], which Jerome Armstrong at MyDD [3] has hailed as the best book on elections since The Coming Democratic Majority. The authors—a market researcher and a political scientist, respectively—argue that transformational elections, like the 1932 election that brought in FDR and the New Deal, or the 1968 election that ushered in Nixonland, can be fairly accurately predicted by simply looking at the demographic trends of emerging generations.

1968, say Winograd and Hais, was transformational because that's the year that the Baby Boomers (who started being born around 1944, give or take a year) finally formed a big enough voting bloc to have a real effect on American politics. And, as our own Rick Perlstein documented in Nixonland [4], the incendiary conflicts both touched off by that generation and taking place within it have defined American politics ever since. The arc of history that connects the radicalism of the 1960s with the radicalism of the Bush Administration runs right through the heart of the Boomer generation.

The primary season's relentless focus on race and gender has distracted us from a far more important fact, which is: Most of America under 50 is sick to tears of the way Boomers (both left and right, but especially right) do politics. The common thread that ties the '60s radicals to the Bushites is the soul-deep conviction that political confrontation is the only way to create any kind of social change. This leads to a political style that is relentlessly ideological and implacably hostile to negotiation, diplomacy, or compromise. Their vision of the future is Utopian (though the utopias vary); but the desire to achieve that all-important glorious end too often justifies means that betray the very principles the group is trying to promote.

To be fair, most liberal Boomers seem to have gotten this out of their systems early, and moved on to find far more wise and nuanced ways of managing power as they aged. But, as they mellowed out and retreated into private life through the 1970s, a second wave of True Believers—the Boomer conservatives—gathered strength for a reactionary ideological showdown of their own. And through the decades that followed, they proved to be far more vicious, more persistent, more organized, and more effective than the Dirty Fucking Hippie stereotype they held up in effigy as their all-purpose excuse for everything they did.

The result, of course, was a culture war that got played out on a battleground that hardly changed between 1968 and 2004. For 10 straight elections, we re-fought the Vietnam War, re-debated women's reproductive rights, and rehashed the meaning of "family," as if these were the most galvanizing problems confronting the nation. While we were wrangling over matters that should have never been politicized in the first place, we never quite got around to discussing why our manufacturing base was going overseas, our debt load was eating the heart out of our common wealth, the environment we depend on was falling into crisis, and our middle class was simply evaporating. America has been run this way for so long now that most of us can't imagine that politics can be done any other way; and the country is suffering mightily under the resulting misrule.

But Winograd and Hais have looked at the demographic data, and they think 2008 will be the turning point where 40 years of Boomer dominance finally begins to fade—the first train out of Nixonland. As of this election year, the vast and rising tide of Millennials (born 1980-2001, give or take a couple years) is arriving in numbers big enough to swamp the Boomers and set the whole American conversation on a whole new heading. The yearning for change is so strong that even the GOP is reaching back to field a pre-Boomer Silent generation candidate, rather than put up another Boomer.

And it is this, it can be argued, is what the Barack-versus-Hillary showdown was really all about. It's not about melanin content or X chromosome status; it's about whether or not we're going to finally get past that eat-shit Nixonland political style that's defined everything for the past 40 years.

Obama won because he looked at those same numbers, and tailored his message to the worldview of the vastly larger X and Millennial generations. These pragmatic voters aren't impressed by high-flying ideology; they just expect their government to work, and are willing to do what it takes to make it work right. Furthermore, they don't have a lot of patience with anyone who lets their personal pursuit of power get in the way of getting the country back on track. The kids don't remember the 1960s and aren't scared by DFH boogeymen. They do know that they're done with Nixon, Reagan, Bushes, and yes, both Clintons, too. They know what we've been doing—confrontation, triangulation, manipulation—isn't getting the real problems solved, and it's time to try something else.

Hillary, on the other hand, was simply perceived by younger voters as the continuation of All That—and the level of support for All That is fading fast as the Boomers age. She staked her campaign on her appeal to a generation that, for the first time in its living memory, is no longer the egg in the demographic snake; and on her experience with a political style that's in very bad odor with younger voters.

As we look across this generational chasm, I have particular sympathy for the over-50 women who have been Hillary's most passionate supporters. You can't blame them for being pissed about her loss. They've been down 40 years of hard road, breaking the first trails of the modern feminist movement. Pioneer life is hard, and you don't always find the paradise you set out for when you were young and full of energy. I've walked enough of this trail myself to be hauling a big handcart of my own baggage, so I viscerally understand the feeling that we're owed some last piece of validation before we exit stage left. (Personally, I console myself with the thought that from abolition forward, important African-American gains were always followed within a decade or two by significant women's rights gains — and often seem to pave the way for them. If that pattern holds, and Obama wins in November, then our turn will come soon enough — as it usually has.)

But, even as we acknowledge these feelings, it's critical to realize that kind of identity (or victim, as you will) politics is a huge part of what the younger voters are trying to move past. They're not only the most racially diverse generation in American history; they were raised to think that gender equality was something much closer to the natural order of things. Beyond that, they're consummate team players, trained from the sandbox onward to focus on what they share rather than what divides them. Arguments that "it's our turn" simply don't make a lot of sense to them: in their world, everybody gets a turn, because that's what's fair. And the girls seem rather confident that their turn will come, so what's the fuss?

Back last fall, Winograd and Hais wrote that the fate of both parties over the next 40 years depends largely on how well the Boomer leadership navigates the generational transition that's coming up in 2008 and 2012 as these younger voters come to dominate American elections. As Democrats, their biggest worry is that the older generation won't yield power gracefully. That concern appears prescient, as we look at the demographics of both candidates' supporters. If Hillary's Boomer core succeeds in making their disappointment the whole party's problem, at least three bad things will come of it.

First: it could leave a very sour taste in the mouths of these new young voters who are coming out in droves. This enormous generation is overwhelmingly progressive in its bones, and should by rights become lifelong Democrats. But, since people's political habits are often formed in early adulthood, alienating them now could push them away from the party, and thus damage progressive prospects for decades to come.

Second: it undermines whatever moral authority the Boomers have accrued within the party over the past 40 years. If Democratic elders want to retain any influence over the younger generation, going back to into confrontation mode and pitching large public fits is going to have the exact opposite of the desired effect. While Boomers consider righteously angry protest as a sort of generational art form, Millennials see it as a tantrum — an attempt to bully your way into something you can't win fair and square according to the rules. They don't understand or respect it.

Third: The Boomers could hold on so tightly that the party will split apart, and thus be in no position to capitalize on the best opportunity for real change we've had since 1968 or will likely have again until 2050. The grueling process of working through this shift could weaken the party to the point where it loses its one shot at the most important political moment in 40 years. We blow this one, we don't get another chance.

We have a stark choice: either empower these kids as smoothly and quickly as possible, and keep the Democrats in power for a long time to come; or thwart them for as long as we can, and in the process also lose our last best shot at the kind of cultural dominance our New Deal grandparents enjoyed for so long. To that end, Hillary and the old girls (and yes, that includes me) need to move over and make way for the new young things.

We need to do this because this moment belongs to them. There are things they get about it that we don't, possibilities that they can seize that are simply beyond us to imagine. As the Prophet said: their souls belong to the house of the future, which we cannot visit, even in our dreams.

We'd do well to listen now, and begin to yield — not least because they're our kids. We raised them to be these amazing activists, to face the future fearlessly, and to look outside the box for better solutions. From here on, our job is to help them grow quickly into leadership, and trust their new and unfamiliar ways of doing things. It will be hard to see it sometimes, but they're out there doing their damnedest to move us out of Nixonland, and on to a place where our fondest Boomer dreams—including presidents, senators, and judges of every color and gender—finally start to come true.