By Fester:
Publius at Obsidian Wings has an outstanding post on the generation gap that has been exposed during the Democratic primary. The younger coalition of Obama versus the gray-power coalition of Clinton is a reprise of the battles of the 60s and 70s. I am tired of fighting over 1968. My parents had just finished up their sophomore years in high school then, and I am tired of fighting about 1972 as my dad was unloading box cars, and my mom was writing term papers at a local state college. I'm not even sure if they had met at this point in 1972 and my siblings and I were not even on their horizons for a couple more elections anyways.
the burn of Nixon and early Reagan left scars that simply aren�t on my (at 31) radar screen. But that said, there�s a downside to being post-Cold War too. Specifically, "newer" liberals have a lot of blind spots for the dog-whistle politics associated with these old scars.
Two of the recent Obama controversies illustrate the point well. Personally, I think younger people were a bit baffled about why the Jeremiah Wright controversy had such strong legs. I mean, they knew what the newspapers said, but they couldn�t feel the controversy in their bones the way Baby Boomers probably could.
That�s because Jeremiah Wright brings out old scars from battles we never fought. While it�s hard today to truly understand the intoxicating idealism of the civil rights era, it�s also hard to truly understand just how bitterly venomous the white backlash to these developments was.
Wright, then, isn�t a controversy because of what he said about 9/11 (though it�s tempting to think so). He�s a controversy because he represents in older white people�s eyes everything from busing to urban riots to black nationalism. If anything, Wright�s 9/11 comments give license to air what is essentially race-based animus lying beneath. For me, though, these issues have less resonance because I wasn�t around fighting them.
It is also this reason why I severely discount the reports that Hillary Clinton is waging this campaign in this manner to prepare for a 2012 party savior run. Her coalition is maxed out and the politics that she represents is maxed out and on the decline. In four years these dog-whistles will appeal to a smaller pool of voters as the people whose formative political experiences were in the late '60s to the mid '70s will be dieing off at an accelerated rate. And the opposite pool of voters and potential voters whose biggest thought about '68 was that some of the music was really good will continue to grow. Furthermore the voters who are not AARP qualified today but will be in four years will be no more likely to vote for someone based on cultural/symbolic battles of forty years ago than they were today. Tommorrow's old people will vote slightly differently than today's old people.
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