More straw men from the almost comically wrong Brooks. No, progressives are not pessimists. We have not given up on inter-racial understanding. We do not believe in burning down the structures of our society.
We believe in diversity, in community, in mutual understanding, and in the rule of law. We would like America to become a place where those ideals can be realized.
776
I believe you may have misunderstood that paragraph. I’m pretty sure he was talking about the current conservative approach as opposed to the progressive approach.
75
A Gallop poll shows that about 40% of American citizens believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old. I can't help thinking that most of them are Republicans...
104
As the voters stop selecting Republicans, the Republicans deselect voters. If black voters chose Republicans, the party would put more polling places (with working machines!) in black neighborhoods, and keep the polls open longer.
Because they lose on the issues with a majority of voters, voter selection to ensure victory is now the Republican mantra.
120
Brooks’ prediction of a Democratic wave ignores the fact that the GOP relies on gerrymandering, voter suppression, dark money, and the assistance of foreign actors to acquire and retain power, regardless of the will of the majority. These attacks on democracy, coupled with the distortions of the Electoral College and the structure of the Senate mean that democracy is suppressed.
Then, the appointment of highly ideological federal judges to lifetime seats cement the spoils they have stolen.
It is long past time for Brooks to publicly renounce the GOP and call it what it is: an anti-democratic insurgency hell bent on destroying the fabric of our society.
228
I have a 19-year old son and the environment is the singular issue for his cohort, period. Yes, all the other inclusion and pluralistic issues count, but THE issue is the environment and they are very, very pessimistic about what we, their elders are gifting them.
@Hideo Gump Fair enough, but in the end, what counts is how our young voters perceive the outcome. Frankly, as far as they are concerned, even the effects you bring up will effectively ruin their lives and the world as they can see it at this very moment. The world will be ended for them and they are going to vote accordingly. I hope they get to it soon enough.
51
Pessimistic progressive multicultarism is a pragmatic response to the lived reality. Optimism will reign once the boomers and silent majority die off.
28
Republicans have never cared about the future. It has always been about selfishness - how to put more money in their pockets and the pockets of their immediate peers. This is why they don't care about the national debt, the environment, CEO pay, putting guard rails on Wall Street, or those who work for a living. In order to make the system work form themselves, they simply blind their constituents with abortion, gun rights, racism, and the 'drill baby drill.' Millennials and Gen Z are the first two generations to not blindly fall for all of this en masse. Under Trump, William F. Buckley's narratives have won out over Gore Vidal's. Tragic for all.
87
The conservatives have two goals, conserve their money, conserve their power! They do not care anout anyone else except their shrinking tribe. Everything is rationalized to serve their idols. They hate any sense of responsibility or compassion, especially the poor or suffering. Woe to them!
61
David: Here's a subject for a future column: What would William F. Buckley Jr. say about Donald Trump?
52
"The Coming G.O.P Apocalypse" cannot happen soon enough.
To all you Millennials and Gen Z'ers out there, please get out and vote your convictions, en masse.
We oldster liberal, progressives, and recovering conservatives need your help to get rid of this Trump scourge on our Nation!
MB
101
May having prostituted themselves to the christianist right lead them to the way of the Whigs.
When Barbara, and then George Bush Sr., died, I remembered what Republicans used to be: employers, patrons of the arts, endowing charities, respectful of privacy, financially prudent (balanced budgets, anyone?).
George Bush Jr. mused that he might be the last Republic [sic] president.
May that honor befall the current WH occupant.
In the meantime, there is hope: www.newwayca.org
26
Well, I'm a 75 year-old white guy, and all my feelings and beliefs are exactly the same as those under 40. Of course, I got a proper liberal arts education (civics, art, literature, math, science, etc.) and get my news and political information from a variety of sources from the NYT, PBS, and major networks. Also I have learned how to reason and draw reasonable conclusions. - all things that anyone can do if they are actually looking for facts instead of validation.
102
Full of Brook's generalizations about age. I am 65 and can count on my one hand I have voted republican. And that was decades ago. My mother is 84 and NEVER votes Republican.
39
Love David Brooks. In this case, he underestimates the impact on our democracy (and the GOP) of our outdated educational systems (that we need to support solid critical thinking, etc) and the extent to which our media, vulnerable electoral systems and amygdalas have rewarded - and will continue to - this toxic populism and the toxic impact of the current GOP on our nation.
12
This is why they're panicking and rigging the system now. I might add that people economically, educationally, professionally and overall crippled by responsibility for children they can't afford and don't want are far less likely to pose a threat to the old white men who see themselves continuing at the top.
Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant.
38
The things that we have supposedly lost in this country have little to do with Republicans or Democrats. We've lost things because collectively, we've forgotten how to win. There are ~ 200 countries in the world...do you think they haven't wanted to win? Or are trying to win? Do you think that their people don't want to feed their own families? Those countries want everything that we have and they will fight, cheat, steal, study, work, and connive to get it. Do you think the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, or others are wringing their hands over our loss of manufacturing jobs or the theft of our intellectual property?
Our young generations have vim and vigor but lack wisdom. Our young fail to realize the lessons of history. The good guys didn't win wars, stop plagues, and innovate because they were good. They won wars because they would do what was necessary to win. They stopped plagues and innovated because there was an incentive to do so.
You can call me a crazy individualist but I didn't go to and graduate from college in order to work ten hours a day to help society. I did it and do it so that my life is better. Levite wants to win. There used to be hundreds of millions of Americans who thought like me...now it's hundreds of millions of Chinese Nationals.
3
Those who ignore Mother Nature are doomed to be destroyed by her wrath. So goes the Grifter Obsessed Party...
12
"America will be a majority-minority country."
Is this good? If yes, why?
I am good if it comes to that, of course, but I would like to know why is this such a delightful target in liberal press.
By the way, hinting that the older white folks who do not vote as the younger generations are some sort of morons from another era is outright insulting, obviously.
8
William F. Buckley is his mentor? Well that explains a lot.
23
Every true American patriot should be thoroughly disgusted with the GOP by now. It's the party of treason, backwardness, bigotry, racism, failure, hatred, endless war, deficits, recession, sclerosis, breakdown, and ultimately, death. Republicans are literally killing our Republic, inch by inch. It's time for them to go.
57
“...We can communicate across difference...
Not just literally or metaphorically – genomically...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/us/50-years-after-loving-v-virginia.html
Since right around the time the integrated circuit was invented...
.....
The only scalable and sustainable way to fend off the coming agopalypse...
1
The corporate owners of the Republican party can read the demographics as well as anybody. They know they're doomed unless they impose a single-party, authoritarian regime asap. No more Obamas, no more Hillary's. From now on the President will be what God intended: a white male Republican. Hence the voting restrictions, imposition of mentally light-weight, ideologically right-wing judges, curtailment of immigration, etc.
Brooks cites William F. Buckley as his mentor. Some mentor: Buckley was a die-hard segregationist, who defended the police brutality at Selma, and declared that "Negroes" were "the less-developed race," and were therefore "not ready" for the civil rights they justly demanded. No wonder Brooks can't let go of his Republican party fetish, no matter what he says. Buckley is still running around inside his head.
36
Wow, welcome to reality (for the most part), Mr. Brooks. Now, where's your solutions to fix your broken and corrupt party?
12
Only white people in the crowd. Trump is all about white people and their complaints. This country has changed and it will take 20 years for angry old whites (Like Trump) to disappear. America did this 80 years ago with Irish, German and Jewish immigrants. This country is changing and for the better. Angry old whites like Trump are a drag on humanity. They (he) needs to step aside.
22
Bring it on . . . good riddance.
9
So, why are House Dems blocking primary challengers to incumbents? See, excellent NYT Sunday, June 2, article by Jennifer Steinhauer.
4
Parties evolve or fade from the scene (any WHIGS around here?). 25 years ago, both major parties had liberal, moderate and conservative factions. Both parties have moved towards their extremes, which feeds the media beast looking for controversy but leaves people with balanced points of view homeless. This suites the parties fine because the party that better motivates its base wins 51/49 with a 40% turnout. Much easier than trying to appeal to a broader slice of the populace, who don't turn out to vote anyway!
Mr. Brooks analysis is faulty because he assumes the Republican (or Democratic for that matter) of today is necessarily the party of 10 years from now. Evidence to the contrary - 10 years ago, who would have thought that Trump would lead the Republicans and Sanders would have any traction as a Democrat. I seem to remember pundits predicting a Republican demise following the 2008 election. Nobody took the Tea Party or its Trump spawn seriously.
As millennials mature (and I think they are about 10 years behind prior generations in child bearing and home ownership), their views will moderate). The party that is able to align messaging with their needs will survive and win its share of elections.
7
Mr. Brooks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but conservatism is pounding nails in its own coffin. It’s playing out its final death throes as an empty shell of nihilism called the Republican Party which has transformed conservatism’s pillar of individualism into greed and self-interest.
Conservatism has simply outlived its usefulness. In order to function, governments must change with the times, or they begin to suffocate with rigidity. Conservatism is shackled to the past. You would have us return to the glory days of the “American Creed” in an attempt to revive “Main Street” once again. And if not go back you at least want us in Buckley’s words to “Stop!” history, to embrace oh-so-careful prudence and the glacial advance of the status quo.
But if you haven’t noticed the glaciers are melting; we can’t wait.
You mistakenly think it is Republicans who are getting run over, but it is conservatism itself that is chained in the name of tradition to the tracks.
11
I've said this a million times to older GOP friends and family. As a millennial, if there was a fiscally conservative, low tax, small government party in this country I would vote for that party from time to time (depending on what else was going on in the economy).
Instead, we have a low tax, small government, anti-gay, climate-denial, evangelical, anti-free speech, anti-black, authoritarian, extreme-gun, pro-petroleum party convservative party. I would never vote for a party that held religious beliefs (which are mythological and not true) ahead of science (which is proven and tested). If the GOP thinks the average millennial will ever, under any circumstances see eye to eye with them on that, they are truly blind.
26
"...there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
Straw man! Progressives do not say anything of the sort. We say it this way: blacks and whites will understand each other when this systemic racial system changes; the American ideals of egalitarian liberalism are words that rarely correlate with actual, on-the-ground events, especially in impoverished neighborhoods; for those without money and for those of color, the American system is oppressive and it must be changed. We also say something else, which Brooks didn't hit on. Our country was founded by elite land owners who set up a system of governance that serves them and their progeny. In other words, our problems have been systemic from the beginning.
Joseph in Missoula
12
"Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over"
Is that the same ephemeral train of 2016?
2
For a long time now, I’ve despaired of the political scene here in Alabama. It was a time in Massachusetts that showed me I fit in with liberal progressive Democrats....no wonder conservative reactionary GOP politics in Alabama offends me. And, since the Trump era, I’ve been bullied into keeping quiet, even by folks I felt were my friends. They allow no polite discussion, but shout down, interrupt, and generally behave as Trolls. This opinion by Brooks gives me some hope for the demise of the Trump Bully Party.
I grieve for the America I felt could be a bright champion for democracy. As someone indicated, Trump has no patriotism. He has no “depth” in being an American. His family came here to make their fortune plain and simple, by gouging it from other Americans without giving anything back to the culture. Where do the folks come from who support him? Do they not realize he is anti-American? He is the pimple on top of the swelling boil of GOP corruption.....it is heart-breaking to see the American dream so compromised. The GOPs elected/appointed are me-too after what they can get personally. What a travesty.
13
In this column, David Brooks has merely scratched the surface of today’s Republican Party animus. GOP Apocalypse? Indeed. That, and more.
Thank you, David.
Where does the term 'majority-minority' come from? So even if you're in the majority number wise, you're still minor???
3
The reason young people loathe Republicans is exactly why older people loathe them. My dad, who at 96 had been a Republican for over 70 years, found nothing in the party's platform he could even stomach, let alone support. My siblings have quietly dropped their party affiliation.
Young people - like this 66 year old independent - find the Republicans of today lack any integrity. Calling themselves "Christians" they behave in a manner no person of any faith would countenance. They support a blatant liar, whose incompetence would be laughable if it weren't so tragic for our country.
We watch our children and grandchildren traumatized by active shooter drills, and wonder when we will be gunned down by a white nationalist. The Republicans mouth "thoughts and prayers' and do nothing to protect us. Our tax bills soar, while our roads and bridges crumble.
We remember when the Hudson River was a polluted sinkhole - and the Republicans want to repeal the laws that cleaned it up!.
Who wouldn't hate the Republicans? Even Trump does!
31
Obama provided a glimpse of the future. Could it be too much too soon or too little too late? The country has backslided into the Dark Ages. The young ones have also now gotten a taste of the worst possible America with a stolen presidency and its cult following. This should be a lesson learned together with the realization that change doesn't happen the next minute. The order of the day is to throw the bums out permanently and take it from there.
7
Your mentor Bill Buckley had some pretty awful opinions on race and diversity -- really awful. Only when it became clear that holding those views made him a pariah in educated America did he drop them.
Not a good example.
22
my child was born in 1998- the GOP has no idea how to connect with him and his cohort- they are doomed.
11
republicans and conservatives would enslave anyone who is not a wealthy white man. Case closed.
7
Over time humans have become more enlightened and attitudes become more liberal. No matter how they fight it conservatives can't win. Their only weapon is to keep people ignorant.
12
I certainly hope your prognostication proves itself out, sir. Those who stand in the way of change stand the best chance of extinction.
2
As a baby boomer who has witnessed the excesses and corruption of Richard Nixon, the dismantling of unions and the working class under Reagan, the bumbling idiocracy of George W. Bush that led to the Iraq disaster and the destabilization of the entire Middle East, and finally the vile, wretched anti-Democratic, racist, bigoted, and gross incompetence that is the Trump administration, I only hope I live long enough to see the last shovel full of dirt thrown on the grave of the GOP.
39
older voters want a return to the safety of the comprehensible past which they understand through the golden haze of nostalgia. plus, it's easier than coming to terms with a constantly-changing world. younger voters are simpler and at the same time more sophisticated. and they know they will be living in the future made by today's events. plus, living in the real world is easier than living some geezer fantasy. why the Republicans should have such a lock on the past is understandable. but they're headed vor the ash heap of history and they want to die with the most toys. let them hurry up.
10
I know you're busy, so I'll keep this short and sweet.
Here's the short part: Trump brings out the worst in the Republican party, and what's wrong with America.
Here's the sweet part: We can elect a leader who can bring out the best in all of us; one who can stop the decline that's taking place, and one who can restore the United States to a position of strength and respect across the country, and around the world.
I'll vote for that!
19
While reading this, the brief period of Camelot, January 20, 1961, to November 22, 1963, came to mind, when the political world seemed young and fresh. Since then, with a couple of all-too-brief respites, it's been mostly Republican reactionaries talking about returning to the golden years of the 1950's and earlier. You know, all of the good stuff like polio outbreaks, lynchings, restricted country clubs and luncheon clubs, segregated bus and restaurant seating, Father Coughlin talk radio, and all the rest.
And so, who is going to be the next John F. Kennedy to lead us out of this current mess? Someone who's not too young yet not too old, a fine mind combined with brilliant political skills, an excellent strategist and tactician, and generally likable. Hopefully, he or she is out there somewhere, willing to serve and lead.
17
First the Tea Party and then, with a vengeance, the Trumpists are destroying our government, our institutions, our tradition of civil democracy and "pessimistic" progressives are the ones who want to burn down the system?
The only honest word in Brooks' description of the opposing sides was the "thick" he included in the description of Republicans.
10
I quite agree, as I can see even in my own tastes and appreciations a shift toward being more liberal, becoming more tolerant of others, and other views.
I also have more education now. More wealth too, so I am not lacking in confidence. Maybe that's it. A lot of what the GOP is standing for is based in nervous lack of confidence, scared that they will lose their share, when in fact, the share is supposed to be there for all of us. I don't see the GOP changing either.
10
False conclusion. You're equating age with maturity. Age is constant as we revolve around the sun, but today's 30 year old has the maturity of 20 year old from the 1990's. A good portion of the liberals under 30 will be conservatives soon enough...assuming they get off parent's payroll.
2
Mr. Brooks pointed out that doesn’t happen. People don’t get more conservative with age.
I was a lifelong Republican until the repellent policies of W.
And with Trump, Mitch, Graham, et al., I am never returning. There is nothing redeeming with conservatism.
20
Brooks didn't didn't mention one word about the economics. Some part of the beliefs on the younger demographic groups is tied to economic failings of the predatory capitalism of the leadership of conservatives. The vast level of income equality that has grown since Reagan cut the taxes on the wealthiest top %5 by more than half. So there is less money in the economy that goes to lower earners and this is become obvious in day to day life. The wealth of this country is being systematically skimmed off by a tiny group that are mostly conservative republicans that group has manipulated every facet of society to enrich themselves and it's noticeable now to almost every one. Most republicans have left their principles behind in attempts to maintain political power in the face of the demographic tide.
I would say that "the coming GOP apocalypse" is here. It has been dampened by the 2010 conservative anti Obama wave that set the stage for extreme partisan gerrymandering and systematic efforts of voter suppression over the last decade. The wave shows up in Trumps approval rating just over 40% while the economy is doing better that it has in more than 20 years. The lowest unemployment in 50 years and the inflation rate so low the FED isn't needing to raise interest rates and the president only has a 40% approval rating, the Apocalypse is here and the Republican's answer is more dirty voting tricks by adding a citizenship question to the census.
14
Voter suppression and gerrymandering are the most powerful tools for the Republican party. We have multiple examples of State elections where Democrats receive the majority of votes yet receive fewer than 50% of the representation. Not to mention all of the restrictive voter legislation passed in the past 10 years that have significantly kept Republicans in power. Until Democrats stop accepting these results, Republicans will continue to stay in power.
18
And the senate majority - which is tipped in favor of small red states - will continue to appoint conservatives to uphold their bigotry and gerrymandering.
10
My guess is; only liberals/progressives understand David's message. Conservatives have become so tribal these days they appear to either not hear, or not understand, today's reality. It will be doomsday, and they won't have seen it coming.
11
Mr Brooks, from your mouth to God's ear. However, unless gerrymandering is curtailed and electoral boundaries are defined by non-partisan electoral commissions Republicans will still have the edge and they will still be able to choose their voters instead of the voters choosing them.
16
The biggest problem with politics in the USA is the rigid unshakable two-party system. In Europe, even nowadays in the UK, we are used to multiparty parliaments, with an electorate that has an opportunity to select from a number of parties. That, for instance, results in a situation that, in the EU elections, in France the Greens won the majority of the votes in the age group 18-24, and in Germany the Greens became the second largest party. The multiparty systems guarantee a far more open and real debate between the parties, and it forces the parties to transparently compromise in forming a government.
A party with the ideas/ideology of the Republicans in the USA would be without a chance in all of Western Europe, most certainly amongst the young.
10
Agreed.
If the US were a parliamentary system, Trump’s government would have been dissolved long ago. The GOP would have had to abide his lunacy.
6
My mentor William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
And, apparently, you have not surpassed the ridiculous notion of stopping history. I am a Baby Boomer born of professional parents who came of age in the late 1920's and 1930's. I listened to everything they would tell me about the times they grew up in. I've been reading the newspaper since about 1958. I majored in history in undergraduate school, and was not a student who kept his eyes closed and learned only enough to pass the test. I have been what you might call a "raving liberal" my entire life. It has been a long time since any republican has done anything I agree with. Ronald Reagan is the next worse thing to happen to the United States of America after Trump. Something really needs to be done about the people who want pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy.
27
Maybe it's poor writing, but how is it evidence that Biden does poorly with younger voters when he finishes behind Sanders and Warren?
2
this divide between older and younger voters means that the young, mostly ignorant of history, are going to repeat the mistakes of the past.
3
@allen
And, sadly, they lack the education to even realize it when it happens.
2
Look for republicans to find a way to prevent people under 35 from voting.
16
What do conservatives have to say to younger, more enlightened and tolerant generations? Nothing.
Mr. Brooks, you conveniently side-step any mention of gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and consistent GOP efforts at voter registration in your piece. One would think that if the GOP had any 'answers' to provide, that is where the energy would be expended: not on below-the-belt tom-foolery, which is par for the course for the party following Trump, right over the cliff like a bunch of lemmings.
14
The most important thing that conservatives fail to conserve is the planet we call home. The word becomes ridiculous when you see nothing but policies that destroy and pollute the natural habitat. Their symbol should be the Ostrich, not the Elephant but that would be doing a disservice to Ostriches. Weasels? Sloths? Snakes? I have pledged to give $1000 to the first candidate who comes up with a comprehensive plan for the environment and has a chance to win. So far Sen. Warren is in the lead.
12
Who are the spokespeople for the "progressive multiculturalists" embracing the views cited by Mr. Brooks? A few outspoken, angry undergraduates in some of his classes? You don't have to be a former subscribier to National Review to sappreciate Mr. Brooks's attempts to maintain an intellectually responsible version of conservatism. Truth, checking whether the evidence warrants your claims, and logic, following rules of inference that preserve the truth of your claims: these are conservative values. Perhaps ask one of your colleagues to recommend an Introductory Logic textbook? Doing your homework is also a conservative value.
1
Ha. I think the conservative you envision is long since extinct. Witness Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell.
4
This can't happen soon enough. Standing athwart history yelling stop should not the behavior of a mentor. That kind of conservatism to me demonstrates a fear of change, fear of the future and fear of evolving. Caution and skepticism to change are certainly critical but the current path of conservatives to ignore climate change, pretend gun violence is inevitable, and cling to nativist ideologies is so opposite of what is needed now.
In my youth I simply distrusted the Republican party; now in my 50s I loath the current orthodoxy. Be gone, all of it.
12
@Rich
It's amazing that wanting to see our longstanding immigration laws enforced is "nativist". There is nothing noble about illegal "immigration". There is nothing about lawbreaking taking place on a breathtaking scale that makes it more deserving than small scale lawbreaking. The only reason we have an illegal "immigration" issue at all is the failure of a very expensive Federal government to adequately enforce the law for long enough that the size of the problem can no longer be ignored.
2
We know the Republican position on climate change. The one Democratic candidate who has placed addressing climate change at the center of his campaign, Jay Inslee, remains in disappointing single digit-support among primary voters. While I like Brooks and read his column regularly, I agree with those comments which accuse him of, not only omitting climate change from his column, but of creating a straw man among youthful Democratic voters with -- "burn it down." Large climate protests among Millennials and Z generations are, if anything, illustrations of working within the system. Motivating this group to vote out of positive support, not fear of a Trump second term, will be one of the challenges of the Democratic nominee.
1
This swing shouldn’t be hard to understand. People naturally don’t appreciate one group making life better for themselves at the expense of everyone else, including their yet-to-be-born children and grandchildren. By providing tax cuts for the wealthy, rolling back environmental restrictions, and by not just ignoring but denigrating even the idea of climate change, Republicans have shown they could care less about the future these young people will inherit.
At some point every adult thinks about what they can do to make the future for their children better. Even if they don’t have any yet. For the majority of these young people, voting Republican is seen as a sure fire/flood/tornado/hurricane/drought way to ensure it will be worse.
14
I was born in the last year of the Silent Generation, but my politics match Generation Z. As a high school student I was quite conservative and sopped up Ayn Rand's books with relish. As I grew up and faced the realities of life my conservative views went out the window.
I want to see the young ones get more involved. They need to vote and run for office. I have this vision of AOC becoming president when she's old enough. I'm sick and tired of all the old white geezers in government who hang onto their power long after their ideas have lost their relevancy.
My family is very diverse and includes all races. This is today's reality and people need to get their minds right and learn to accept it. You're not in Kansas anymore.
15
climate change is the emerging issue among young people that will in time decimate the republican party if they don't wake up and realize that the death of the earth is an unavoidable existential priority....look at recent european elections to see the trend unfolding.
7
Not the death of the earth, which has survived numerous mass extinctions. Death of humankind at our own hands.
Earth will move it - unrelenting - for billions more years.
3
The G.O.P. Apocalypse has already occurred, if you consider honesty, decency and good policy as the measures (as opposed to clinging to power.) Unfortunately, the G.O.P. has been apocalyptic for 90 percent of Americans as opposed to their well-heeled party members.
11
The choice between electability and progressivism is a false choice. As 2008, 2012, and 2016 showed us, the most electable Democrat is the one who gets poor people, minority people, and young people to the polls.
6
@Jack You're only considering half the pie. In the handful of states that decide U.S. presidential elections it is also vitally important to get older white Americans to vote Democrat. I'm thinking Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. And a Barack Obama only comes around once in a generation. Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are not automatically equal to Obama (although I think Warren would be a very competent President as to domestic affairs.) Bernie got there first with the surprisingly appealing Leftist message but Warren is ten times more knowledgeable as to economic issues. I'd settle for Biden if he's the best hope to defeat Trump.
6
When thoughtful people, of any age or ethnic background, look at the apex of the Republican Party, what do they see? Self-dealing, narcissism, law-breaking, and money laundering. If the party trots out Trump, McConnell, Graham, Cornyn, what do you see? Sneering ideologues who seem hell bent on getting theirs. The point is that gang has no interest in anything beyond themselves. This country will be a far better place when they are out of power, by whatever means. It can’t come soon enough.
28
@Peter Riley: If this crew is pursuing happiness, I am a monkey's uncle.
1
This article makes me really proud to be a millennial. Unfortunately it also makes me have an even deeper disrespect for older generations, who’ve steered this country in a truly dangerous direction.
11
The GOP is hellbent on keeping its paymasters wealthy paymasters. It’s all greed. Nothing else.
2
What about Gen Xers? Ignored between generations and misunderstood. Undefinable. Also, Brooks refers to modern day, Republican “thought.” What, praytell is that? None. There IS no thought. Stupidity, yes. Ignorance. Yes. Racism. Yes. Jingoism, yes. But thought? No. None. Absolutely nonexistent.
23
No mention of the environment or gun control shows that David Brooks still doesn't get it either. Kids go to school every day wondering if there will be a mass shooting. Meanwhile, Republicans debate whether the latest shooting was a false flag.
687
@R Biggs
Republicans refuse to open their eyes to the harsh reality that their brand of politics has been infiltrated by foreign adversaries who wish to do harm to all of us, not just liberals.
You are spot on about kids expecting the next shooting to be at their school, playground, movie Theater, etc. Whatmyou failed to mention, and Brooks fails to comprehend, is that the NRA is a money laundering arm of Putin’s criminal organization and that conservatives are aiding and abetting him every time they run out to buy yet another gun. Every time a kid gets shot at school Putin cheers them on.
The Republican Party is now a criminal organization with a kingpin who thinks he’s king and no one from the right wing is willing to rein him in. Brooks is complicit.
65
@R Biggs
The GOP sells gun rights as "freedom" with acceptable consequences. And clean air and water as "job killing regulations". And poor wages and healthcare as their contribution for "Capitalism vs Soviet-style government". Works, too.
The problem with the young people is that they do not watch enough Fox News, as the older, wiser generation does.
67
Brooks Man be its bellwhether. Ice Age approacheth.
"..point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
That's your incantation? A warning to the young American Mastodons: Don't get mired in THEIR deep mud of pessimism!
So, that's supposed to grow a base who will later be reminded to the end of their days: "To put it bluntly, young adults hate (Republicans)".
You know, you could AT LEAST TRY discarding the anchor pulling you into the pit. Just sayin'. It's ludicrous to tacitly approve the stink of death being imbued to your home range.
2
This is all wishful thinking. I think we've all learned not to trust either common sense or reasoned predictions.
3
Most of this is correct except the claim that Republicans don't see the train that is running over them. They do see it and they do realize that they will be an unpopular minority for ever more. But they plan to hold on to power anyway. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, deliberate miscounts of the population in the census, misinformation, restriction of the ability of states to pursue policies on their own, defiance of Congress and the courts, stacking the courts with reactionaries who will declare any progressive legislation unconstitutional. These are the means whereby the old white male Republican power structure plans to hold onto power even as it becomes more of a minority and more unpopular. Given a choice between democracy and reaction their plan is to choose reaction and end meaningful democracy. This is pretty clear.
16
A very astute point. The next question is, what happens when these unrepresentative government branches — rigged legislatures, reactionary courts, and hobbled executive bureaucracies — come up against a frustrated and angry majority? It’s a recipe for revolution, of one sort or another.
7
Gerrymandering was perhaps the greatest contributor to GOP success in 2016. They are still at it, including ignoring ballot initiative in Florida
16
I believe the no-nothing GOP sees this and that's why they're packing the SCOTUS with antidiluvean right wing nut types who even invented a legal school of thought; this is their last bastion before they are out of power for forty days and nites.(we non-believers can pray too.)
8
The (Cor) Rupt-Licans have abandoned fiscal responsibility, family values (if they ever had them), and telling the truth. They have decided to play a short game of “grab all you can get while no one is looking,” including ignoring the public safety issues guns create. They are completely out of touch with young people, but, then again, look at the make-up of their constituents (again, older white males). They cater to the Evangelicals, who gave up whatever morals they once had, to install conservatives into judge positions.
Amorality breeds the culture they are now sowing. Their day of reckoning will be upon them in November 2020. Put an end to this grift in November 2020 - vote Dems across the board!
6
It's articles like this that give me an inferiority complex and want to show "what about 34-54 year olds!?!??!?!"
Are we just so few of voters that we don't even matter?
3
We are the smallest generation, that is true. And also, I think we whine and cry the least. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Most of us grew up with working parents or a working parent and learned to be self-sufficient.
5
Of course younger generations prefer Democrats. Two primary reasons:
The GOP pretty brazenly caters to racists in 2019 America. Before conservatives start clutching their pearls, I am not saying that all Republicans are racists. But from "good people on both sides" to refusing to call out white nationalist violence for what it is, it's undeniable that catering to racists is now a plank of the GOP. Millennials and Gen Z are the two most diverse generations in the history of America - why would they want any part of a party that treads in such hatefulness?
And of course the other reason is economic. Both millennials and Gen Z have grown up in a world where our economic system has been firmly planted on the right side of the spectrum. One where wealth has been redistributed upwards many times. One where a corporation's rights to profit - however short-sighted or otherwise detrimental to wider society it may be - is sacred above anything else. One where traditional jobs are giving way to "gig economy" self-employment in order to help corporations' bottom line. And one where the cost of healthcare and housing keep rising with no end in sight. All of these are "market friendly" outcomes of GOP policy. Is it any wonder 'socialism' is no longer a dirty word among the young?
Frankly, it is the young that provide the only glimmer of hope for our declining, dysfunctional, mean-spirited country. Hopefully they'll be able to build a better world for themselves (we've been no help).
842
@Vin: Bravo! You are so right with all of this. Too bad the GOP is still firmly entrenched in divisive political game playing instead of doing their jobs to help move our country forward.
65
@Vin
It is the media's fault. Because it is now OK for LGBTQ people to come out, young people have friends who identify this way and would rather help their friends than oppress them, like Conservatives want. And media stirs them up by constantly pointing out how bad student debt is, and how the environment is getting worse. The media should just do what Fox does and ignore all these issues and concentrate on things that actually can be accomplished, like oppressing the poor and minorities, which is the strength of Conservative thought, based on the legislation the GOP passes.
33
Your prediction of GOP support declining to 3 percent overlooks that 10 percent of US population believes Elvis is alive.
8
Yes, in this moment of conservative triumph, the sand is sliding around under their feet and the water is rising fast . . .
My response as a progressive 67-yo: pass the popcorn!
10
Right on David!
The demise of the current Republican cult will be the best thing to happen to this country and our Constitution
9
You mean your racist mentor William F. Buckley, who said Southern whites deserved to win politically and socially over blacks fighting for equal rights in the 1960s because whites are the more advanced race? That Buckley? His white nationalism is GOP orthodoxy now. Trumpism is not a deviation from modern, Nixonian Southern strategy conservatism it is the horrific fulfillment of all its despotic and cruel impulses.
18
Pass the popcorn and enjoy the show.
2
May it be so.
4
The Republicans deserve their eventual demise. They have been nothing short of EVIL to the common folk of the USA and they have treated the rest of the planet pretty rotten too. The Republicans will be remembered with no love by the history books; their tale is a shameful one.
4
If you read Mr. Brooks carefully, he never really blames the Republicans for anything. Not Trump, not McConnell, not gerrymandering and certainly a flawed electoral college. Things just happen to them, as if they are innocent bystanders who only live in their fears.
I guess that is what counts as deep analysis.
7
So many ask why Brooks doesn’t “go Democratic” as his understanding of America increasingly leans liberal.
I sympathize with his dilemma but I don’t think the decision is purely ideological. He possesses a niche in political discourse right now: the compassionate conservative. I dare say it’s a job description. I think this is why he stays put.
3
I am constantly amazed and appalled at how the Trump machine has drawn previously moral and ethical men into its midst. I say men because, for the most part, we are talking of white men. One might argue that these men were already ready to abandon their integrity and ethics for the power they now wield and I suspect this is true. However, the fact that so many within the GOP who once stood up to Trump now appear to worship at his feet remains puzzling.
Trump clearly has no knowledge or understanding of constitutional law. However, within the GOP there are men who once believed in our constitution and who once would have fought to protect it from attack. Today these men have allied themselves with the Trump machine and appear willing to sacrifice not just themselves, but our entire system of governance to protect Trump. Not only do they display a heidious disregard for the rule of law, they display a hatred of diversity, equality and true justice. One can only hope for the quick demise of a party that appears unable and unwilling to honor our constitution.
5
Hispanic Americans can be of any race or mixture of races, but most are white.
Census Bureau data shows 26.7 million of the nation’s 50.5 million Hispanics are white.
The data also shows 18.5 Hispanic Americans identify as “some other race,” 1.2 million are black, 0.7 million are Native American, and 0.2 million are Asian. Another 58,437 identify as Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.
Intermarriage between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites is so common that it is unlikely a distinction will be based between the two ethnic groups by 2060.
Table 6: Hispanic or Latino Population by Type of Origins and Race: 2010
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf
Census Bureau data shows the United States is currently 76.6 percent white, up from 75.1 percent in 2000.
The Census Bureau projects that whites will make up 77.5 percent of the U.S. population in 2060, but this is based on an expected influx of immigrants from Asia that may or may not take place.
If the anticipated Asian influx does not occur, whites will be an even larger percent of the population in 2060.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf
2
David Brooks is a 'NYT type of conservative'. Mildly conservative / centrist on perhaps a few issues. But, faithful to those things the NTY holds sacred. Happy to offer a 'insiders criticism of conservatism' on the opinion page (ie; 'conservative viewpoints are nothing but racism, absolutely nothing else to discuss'). Brooks affirms the leftist echo-chamber's viewpoints and faithfully provides a straw man to pummel.
1
We don't need a straw man. We have Trump.
2
Can’t come too soon. I’m sick of the damage these fools have done to my country.
6
The issue is that the Conservative GOP is lost. It is gone. McConnell, Graham and Grassley idly stand by as Trump demolishes Conservative Principles. I AM Left of center, and I miss the McCains, the Grahams of old, the Reaganites... where the hell did they go?
Bush II turned a balanced budget to a deficit. Trump has doubled down and made it worse. What happened to fiscally responsible? Where are all of calls to cut the Deficit?
The modern GOP Conservatives are not Trustworthy. THAT is why they are being dumped.
Because you never know what they'll do next.
2
Oh please David - of course Republicans understand the demographics that are working against them! That's why they are in a war against American Democracy as we know it, from gerrymandering to voter suppression! you've got to be kidding me....
5
Pertinent to this subject, read the Introduction of Prof. Nancy MacLean's {Duke U.) "Democracy in Chains", a documentary study, not a commentary, substantiated by 60 pages of footnotes attached. A 15 minute read as a start; available as an eBook.
1
This passage here needs addressing, again:
"There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down.
A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
Once again, this is basically what the Obama administration was about, and yet half of conservatives pretended not to hear him while the other half pretended he wasn't born in America. And then we get Trump, and folks like Mr Brooks saying "Oh, the left is so radical and has no real proposals, so young people have no place to turn," when clearly there are plenty of non-crazy workable solutions available. Is this really what feeling politically indecisive looks/feels like? I Just. Don't. Get it.
3
A big difference in perspective is that older people have a more distinct memory of oppressive totalitarian regimes. Fighting the Nazis and dealing with the Cold War are things our grandparents, or parents, or we dealt with. Now it's something of a relic from great or great-great grandpa's day that has little meaning for the later generations.
Appeals to socialism sound inviting to younger people because they've never seen the downside of it, the cost in lives it exacted (and still does in places like China and North Korea). This country isn't perfect. It never will be as long as it's governed by imperfect people. But the basic framework has given the most opportunity to more people over the last 230 years or so than any other government so far established. It should be repaired and re-established, not thrown out as the "baby with the bath water." If we don't, it would be a legacy future historians may well come to wonder, "how did they lose so much, in so short a time?"
2
@patrick
There never was a communist or socialist government in the way that old divided communist and capitalist world was levied at us in the 50s 60s and 70s
When convenient for the USA Stalin was our our ally to break Spain to destroy the people’s choices in Greece after ww2. USA is responsible for eliminating democracy and freedom all over the world throughout history. From its lack of support of the Hatian Revolution to its gunboat diplomacy. It’s betrayal of Cuba. It’s near genocidal attacks in south east Asia Many young people know this and know that baby boomers like ourselves are hardwired to believe the myths of yesteryear that you hold still has truths. Russia was always totalitarian. They never could overcome the entrenched Russian imperialism and the transition from serfs to modernity while being attacked by the rest of the world because of the audacity of overthrowing their elites. We never learned history clearly in school here but a propaganda clearly enunciated in the educational curriculum of the time ...not how most advancements in our country have come from workers, woman’s, civil rights struggles. There was so So much fight internally for anything progressive to be enacted. What happened to Reconstruction? What presently is happening to voting rights? Young people today don’t need the false external enemies we were Fed In Our youth
2
"There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down." - Brooks
LOL! Brook's only answer to the GOP's inability to embrace pluralism and diversity is to offer up a gaggle of strawman Liberal positions that don't exist.
The truth is the GOP can't be anything other than what you see today: racist, fearmongering, warmongering and rampant greed. It's the natural end of their toxic worldview.
I'd say "good luck with that" but the parties and policies you spent decades ignoring and rationalizing may not leave anything left to work with.
3
"[B}lacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down." A Democratic talking point? Now way. This is the Trump agenda. I do not recognize this as a Democratic point-of-view, from either the right-left-or middle of the party. It is the Republicans who have the burn-the-house-down mentality. The Democrats would like to save the house--and democracy.
4
When the Supreme Court over turns Roe v. Wade the evangelicals will have less reason to vote and the GOP probably will get even worse.
1
Oh, Republicans see the train coming. They just think they can disable it — through vote suppression tactics like removing voting stations from college campuses and removing minorities from voting rolls; through packing the courts with judges who will allow gerrymandering; through propaganda disseminated by Fox and anti-Democracy foreign powers. Have they been able to rig/hack the vote machines? Will we ever know?
Will the human species be the ultimate proof that “nice guys finish last”?
5
It is a mistake to underestimate white conservatives ability to seize and retain power. They have proven to be totally ruthless and cunning in undermining key functions of our democracy and to achieve their ultumate goal of a constitutional convention to where they will hamstring the federal goverment from leveraging taxes much beyond for defense and policing.
5
The Republican Party doesn’t like immigrants, diversity, pluralism and science...
Come 2020, they’re going to like irrelevance even less.
2
Conservative orthodoxy has run this country right into the ground. 12% is way more than they deserve.
4
Now you want multiculturalism!!
How convenient. A decade ago it was an anathema....
Your column has all the integrity of the conversion of a dying party.
2
Republican politics is in the process of becoming wholly about retaining power and wealth, completely divorced from any conservative ideology. Reason and argument are simply smokescreens. And they are perfectly poised to take down liberal democracy along the way.
This is my view as an oldster, and a student of history and politics. Republican/conservative apologists, i.e. “intellectuals” look more and more simply useful fools.
2
They've had over 40 years to prepare for this in California. They didn't. GOP voter registration is exceeed by Decline to State.
1
Don't get cocky my Democrat friends - certainly not based on something David Brooks of all people predicts. Remember that Donald Trump is president because of the votes of many many people who had voted for Obama in 2012. Political loyalties are not permanent.
135
I remember that the baby boomers were going to change America because of their liberalism. Rejecting the traditionist definitions of our society, only to elect Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump.
46
@Ambrose Rivers: Obama's voters left him twisting in the wind in the census year election of 2010. That killed any further opportunities for him to innovate.
47
@Ambrose Rivers
DT did NOT win by popular vote, remember that. And even with Clinton getting 3 million votes more than Trump, there was a split from Democrat voting when Bernie did not get the endorsement. Add those votes for Jill Stein (Bernie's replacement in progressive fervor) and see what you get.
77
The problem with this opinion piece is that most young people do not vote as regularly as older Americans. There was recently a mayoral election in Chicago and only about 35% of the electorate turned out. Most young people couldn't be bothered.
2
Too many Republicans believe they can defy math, as they defy science. Such fools- they hold power now, but will continue to lose ground steadily. Unfortunately, there will be much to clean up after their wrecking party is over.
3
In a nutshell, and without explicitly stating it you have explained the success of current resident of the White House - I cannot refer to him as the President. Fear and change go hand in hand and the minority of voters who supported Trump got a win due to the skewing of the electoral college and the fear of cultural change they see all around them, or put bluntly the coming minority-majority.
The younger generations, to use a term that dates me, understand and live multiculturalism because that is what and who they see. Aging Democrats are likely to be more fiscally conservative than their younger counterparts, but more culturally tolerant than similarly aged Republicans. The math is simple and as you point out, the numbers are overwhelming - our multicultural society will result in huge electoral changes over the next one to two decades. My biggest fear is that this transition will not be peaceful because of the remarkable number of available guns and the lying narcissist in the White House.
7
Hurrah!
1
Mr. Brooks fails to mention the most important demographic change taking place in this country: the rise of the Nones.
Religion is the reason why Conservatives are hostile to the LGBTQ community. Religion is the reason why Conservatives oppose abortion rights. Religion is why Conservatives ignore income inequality and poverty – not only does God help those who help themselves, he provides material rewards in this life to those whom he deems worthy. The poor, by definition, must be to blame for their fates. And when 58% of evangelicals believe that Christ will return in their lifetimes, it’s easy to dismiss the long-term existential threat of Climate Change.
As the GOP turns more people away from religion, more people will turn away from the GOP. It’s a vicious – or virtuous – cycle.
7
So is everyone ready to be a Democrat?
I don't think so.
Look at the problems in California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
People aren't leaving these states for no reason.
The Republican party has been around since the 1850's.
It'll be around in 2050.
Or am I missing something here?
This is also true at the international level: MADDISON’S FORECASTS REVISITED: WHAT WILL THE WORLD LOOK LIKE IN 2030? [OECD 2010]
'Developing countries have enjoyed strong economic performance over the past decade – often growing twice as fast as OECD economies. Updating Angus Maddison’s famous projections, it forecasts a world starkly different from today’s. The worlds’ poor countries will account for nearly 70% of global GDP in 2030.
In the 1960s, the world was typically divided into a first, second, and third world. By the turn of the millennium, it was more common to talk of the “West” and the “Rest”, or even just the “Rich” and the “Rest” (Maddison 2001, 2002).
In a new report, the OECD Development Centre forecasts that by 2030 non-OECD economies will account for 57% of global GDP, up from just 40% in 2000 (OECD 2010). This remarkable turnaround is due to the dynamism of the developing world, in particular India and China. Combined with their large populations, this means that the economic centre of gravity of the global economy is changing rapidly, with all kinds of implications for economic policy in many spheres – macroeconomics, natural resource management, technology, agricultural, and development policy.
Despite Maddison’s undisputed genius, he may well have underestimated the relative weight of developing countries in the global economy over the next two decades.
Subsequent events reveal a markedly more stark story to the one apparent then.'
1
It's not a disaster for a political party to lose touch. The lifeblood of political history is creative destruction of one set of ties, creative reconstruction of another set.
1
"It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away."
I think of all the Gen Z's who were 10 yrs. old when the Great Recession hit. One minute they were having a wonderful childhood - big new house in a new subdivision, all the latest video games, home equity loans paying for super cool bikes and trips to Disneyland, etc - and the next their house was in foreclosure and they had to move away from friends and schools, mom or dad lost their job, they stayed with grandma and grandpa for a few months while the family got back on their feet. Gen Z's had a front row seat to the fallout. Like kids who blame themselves for their parents marital problems, I think Gen Z's came to blame their materialism for their family's woes and in turn reject that materialism. As a result, they own fewer homes and cars; buy fewer clothes and toys, etc. The experience may also have changed their thinking about what they value in life; friends, family, and experiences. Kindness and empathy became more important because when they were down, they took care of each other and this was more important than a new outfit.
4
I would be willing to bet that packing the courts, gerrymandering and the electoral college will keep the GOP alive for decades to come - even if they are unpopular with the majority.
12
It would be interesting to see how these numbers change when the electoral college is factored in... My guess is that the urban areas have a lower average age than the rural ones which seem to have an outsize influence in our national elections.
9
Of course young people hate the GOP, a party that is hellbent on destroying the world millenials will have to live in (or will die in, if society collapses due to climate change). That's why the GOP has to lock down power through gerrymandering and packing the courts. Oh, have you heard Mitch McConnell has reversed his "not during an election year" promise about considering nominees for SCOTUS? If there's an opening next year, he'll try to fill it. Another reason anyone with a brain hates today's GOP. They're amoral, power-hungry, and vile.
20
'William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” I had to laugh. Don Quixote had higher probability of success against the windmills than a conservative does against change.
7
Older voters who pick their candidate primarily based on who they can think "can win" drive me nuts. Here's the deal: if the youth vote turns out, Dems win. If it doesn't, we don't. So please STOP picking someone other than who excites the youth vote merely because you think they can win, even though the youth aren't excited about them, and apparenly even YOU (us -- old people) aren't !
5
On the other hand, "Gen Z" might join the rest of the rational folks in this country and reject the Republican Party in toto, consigning it to the ash heap of history.
2
What well-respected liberal thinker/writer/commentator says that "American structures are so oppressive they have to be burned down"? I've never heard any say such, never read any who say such, never met any who say such. Why do so many conservative commentators think they have to go to claiming extremes for liberals when they criticize them? It is not only losing the youth the the GOP should understand as their coming downfall, but it is also losing any and all in the public discussion arena when such inane and exaggerated comments like these are made. This is another reason why the youth are opposed to the GOP and conservatives. I meet with a very well-read and informed, diversely educated and economic group of liberal/progressives every week and I've never heard any of them ever speak about burning down American structures--even with the destructive stupidity of this administration.
Rodney Noel Saunders
United Methodist Pastor, Retired
Florissant, CO
10
Can only hope that David is right about coming GOP apocalypse. Can't come soon enough, for people and planet. As for the idea that progressive multiculturalism is calling for "burning down" of American structures - I get your point. But these days, it's the radical right bomb throwers that are doing the most damage to traditional American institutions and values.
6
"Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over."
This progressive-Democrat-voter and septuagenarian says bring that train on! Can't happen soon enough. Republican leadership, as well as much of their base, has gone willfully deaf, dumb, and blind to the ever-changing world around them. If they think they can turn back the clock indefinitely, they are flat-out wrong.
5
The current Republican Party is the snake eating its own tail, while irrationally yelling. "don't tread on me".
3
The sooner that train arrives the better.
3
Brooks writes, “In one early New Hampshire poll, Joe Biden won 39 percent of the vote of those over 55, but just 22 percent of those under 35, trailing Bernie Sanders. Similarly, in an early Iowa poll, Biden won 41 percent of the oldster vote, but just 17 percent of the young adult vote, placing third, behind Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
But what about Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio (seriously?), Cory Booker, Steve Bullock, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mike Gravel, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Beto O'Rourke, Tim Ryan, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang?
Where do they stand? Are they insignificant? What do they contribute? Do they matter? Or are they wasting their time and ours?
Looks like another triumph for Trump is looming over the 2020 horizon. I support the President. I support Trump. America first, never last! MAGA! Thank you.
1
"There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism"
There is a conservative way to stay conservative, and that's to mischaracterize progressivism. Basically, there is no rational argument for conservative politics these days.
9
The conservative answer to this predicament is to make such a significant part of this country unwelcome and unappealing to anyone that's the least bit different or educated. By pushing them to coastal cities the GOP is able to retain its power through the Electoral College and the Senate. I wouldn't be surprised if future presidential elections are won but lost in the electoral college by significantly more than the 3.5 million votes in 2016.
3
Too many potential voters who identify as Democrats don’t bother to vote.
The Republican propaganda machine dominates the political narrative.
A significant number of Republicans are religious zealots who believe they’ve been directed by God to achieve their political objectives. They work harder, more diligently, and with more passion than Democrats to win elections.
The wealthiest and most dedicated, politically-active campaign contributors are predominantly Republicans.
Republicans are generally more willing than Democrats to use lies, half-truths, bigotry, and prejudices to manipulate voters.
Republicans are simply much better than Democrats at acquiring and maintaining power in our broken and corrupt political system.
Demographic and generational data spell doom for the Republican Party? I’ll believe it when I see it.
7
Being brought up in a strong GOP family, I grew up GOP and in high school managed to 'sneak' on stage with Barry Gold Water in Ft. Worth, TX during the '64 election. Hearing about the 'Tea Party' early on I was glad to see [what I believed was ] a 3rd party emerge to challenge the GOP and Dems. . . was I WRONG as a result it felt I was 'tossed' out of the GOP as the years passed and their 'power' grew in the GOP. By 2011 I felt totally, estranged from the GOP tent that had some semblance of diversity of thought, [but none or very little of ethnicity or culture] and claimed my self as an INDEPENDENT, voting for both GOP and Dems! Sadly as this shift as noted in this opinion, it seems I won't be finding any GOP candidates that I'm able to support in virtually any Federal election race.
3
The major mistake the GOP made--besides its recent total sellout to Trumpism--was the decision it made decades ago to embrace the Christian right.
At least Trump has performed a service by exposing the real goal of the evangelical movement, which has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with accruing and exercising political power.
The GOP is laser focused on remaking the judiciary in large part to curry favor with its evangelical base. The way Trump, who is in no way Christian, kowtows to them (and they to him) is disgusting and is leading our country down a distinctly unAmerican path.
Show me one person, of any age, who likes to be judged, told what to believe, who to love and who to hate. No one wants his or her personal freedom and rights defined by a vocal and unduly influential minority of citizens.
No wonder young people hate Republicans. I'm far from young, and I hate them too.
8
Just watch, once they get wind of this, the GOP will work to increase the voting age,
3
Meh, the worse the Republicans get the worse Democrats will get, so that Republicans can keep winning enough to give Democrats a reason for why they can’t do progressive legislation they don’t want to do anyway.
I read that last paragraph again, & felt the same anger I had felt before...
If Mr Buckley ever stood "athwart" anything, it was a stinking stream of veiled racism, intolerance and profound distortion of American ideals. He can stay there for all eternity.
As regards Mr Brooks whole article about the young adults hating Republican party... I teach residents/fellows, ages 24-40 mostly. And hear their political opinions often. I dont discuss politics at work but I've never discouraged my students, rather taught them-- the first rule of being an intellectual is the capacity to listen to an argument/opinion diametrically opposite to yours calmly, acknowledge it & even defend it. This is how you see others' perspective.
And majority are liberals, the ones who aren't, have conservative thought process, still dislike Trump and the Republican party. Thier reasons are as following:
- They deny climate change and their policies will kill this earth for us and our children. Our children will be living on an earth which literally would be Hades.
- They are misogynistic and these abortion laws prove that.
- They are racists at heart, their tax cuts hurt blacks and minorities the most.
- They are hypocrites, they espouse christian values and are perfectly happy with children and women going through purgatory at the border.
- They do not represent the actual racial face of USA. American is not made up of old white men, who are still living in the past.
Need I say more.
9
Rather than trying to appeal to younger voters, I suspect the GOP will just step up their efforts to disenfranchise large parts of the electorate through voter suppression.
6
The young voter needs to get out and actually vote. Statistically, they sign up to vote and don’t show up at the polls.
5
I keep missing the word "balance."
Oh, right. It's never discussed. As anyone will find throughout history, you go too far one way, something happens to make things go back the other way. Unfortunately, much of the time, that has been war.
The real fight is to pull this country into some kind of working balance where people can live their lives in a way where they are not teetering on the brink of financial ruin, have a shot at affordable health care and can do something to improve the greater good.
These are not radical concepts and I am very bored by listening to people who see these things as some sort of a radical agenda. Quality of life and a shot at opportunity are not radical ideas.
Yet, David, your warning to Republicans is a good one because THEY see the things I above describe as some sort of a radical agenda - fairness for everyone under the auspices of the Constitution!
When we get Democrat candidates proffering the idea of fair and equal treatment as some kind of a new, radical idea, I want to snap a pencil in my hand and shake my head so hard that my neck breaks.
Balance, people. Give and take. Protecting our land, water and air. Making sure people have food and a place to live. Making sure we are not ripping apart the country with hollow deeds that do not advance the common good.
None of this is radical. It is a shame that the youngest voting generations actually believe it is.
They are not radical ideas - they are your Constitutional rights.
3
I know it's time for a brain MRI scan when I agree with David Brooks. My kids are in the early 20s, and I see what David is talking about in their friends.
The Republican party isn't even fighting the last war any more -- they're fighting in an imaginary world where women commit infanticide, where giving people with $20M estates a tax break is the most important tax policy imaginable, and where educating our young people isn't as important as building a fence in Texas that people will be flying over anyway.
Yet, I also agree that although there is too much sexism and racism in this country, this country has improved immensely since I was a teen in the early '70s. I wouldn't call young people pessimistic, they're just a bit naive. They have no idea how much better things are now than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But most young people don't believe the the American project is fatally flawed, they just wish things were improving faster.
5
You’re wrong, I grew up in the 60s, and this is quickly becoming 1968’s chaos all over again! Wait until the House opens Impeachment hearings...duck, cover, and hold on tight!
Does anyone really think that either party can bring about major "systematic change" in this era of unwillingness and inability for Congressional representatives to reach across the aisle? Good luck!
Just when demographers think that the new majority minority will make conservatives irrelevant, Democrats are working harder than ever to splinter and never be united.
1
Two of the last three paragraphs of this otherwise fine article are complete tripe. Progressives are not pessimistic they are attempting to inspire change for the better and do believe multiculturalism can work and they rightly point out that racism is common within our social fabric and institutions. Progressives seek to make those institutions better, not to burn them down, which seems the very focus of modern conservatism. The fear of successful public institutions practically drives the entirety of conservative thought, for success means government works, and the conservative is always sure this is not the case. As with so many conservatives, Brooks would attempt to convince us that conservatism has all the makings of a forward looking progressivism, just without those pesky forward looking progressives.
Conservatism seems doomed to ignore all facts, work counter to pragmatism, and cry foul the winds of change, all the while weaving a quaint sophistry of its optimistic embrace of all of it.
Boy, Reagan really did a number on you guys, problem is, he and his acolytes have done a number on the nation too, and the rest of us are never going to forget it, because none of us are going to outlive the cost of it all.
7
The American multiculturalism is pragmatic. We do not assume that communication across differences is possible or impossible; we just try to make it happen, and honestly monitor our results, honestly admit our failures, and look for ways to fix them.
Our structures are not basically sound or unsound. They are basically experiments, to be honestly evaluated and continued, modified, or abandoned based on that evaluation. This country itself was, when founded, a radical experiment, and it looks like our situation demands some other radical experiments. That is how we got the Donald; Trump was a radical experiment, and most of us think it is not working out very well.
The Green New Deal is the next radical experiment on the line, although it is also a continuation of the radical experiment of FDR. Our last radical experiment was to adopt the guiding principle that government was the problem, and this is not going too well. It turns out that the establishment, the deep state, uses government to defend money, finance, and ever-larger corporations, and that this whole thing is the problem because it is not working well and got us Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 meltdown, Enron, Purdue Pharma, the politics-as-war of Newt, the Koch brothers, and an inability or failure to learn very much from any of them or even see them as failures.
1
Don't worry, David, the Republicans will just cheat extra hard and everything will be alright.
1
David, let’s face it. You’re a Democrat at heart. It’s time to register as one.
1
@LAM
What would David Brooks have in common with AOC?
We can't assume the future of the Democratic will be similar to Joe Biden.
Let's be honest; at this point young adults, women, people of color, evolved men, anyone with a heart hate republicans.
10
If you think all old white people are reactionary, you are flat out wrong. I'm 73 and I have mellowed from radical to socialist. Old geezers who don't want change will all be dead soon, to be replaced by shiny new Americans who may have a chance of making the country work properly.
474
@Bonnie Balanda
I’m 72. I was a young socialist when I was in my teens, a Democrat in my late twenties to forties. A declined to state from then on and now I’m joint DSA. I was right to begin with.
34
@Bonnie Balanda
Your post made my day. Thank you.
And if all the older generation were to have your attitude, we wouldn't be in such a mess, as we are now.
46
I’m 82 and with you!
43
Many older voters recognize that the handwriting is on the wall for their vision of life in the USA. They also realize that it will take a while for the change to they fear to occur. Not irrationally, they are doing their best to delay it as long as possible, in order to enjoy life as they choose to, while they can.
"Apres moi, le déluge."
2
This is high tide for the right: Every elected official who can be bought, is bought...and every judicial gown is filled with a right-wing toady...regulations and are being dismantled, along with the structures of reliable and pudent governance...corporate taxes have been slashed (and, along with them, revenue for public works).
What can the right wing say, surveying all of this? "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Like Ozymandias, who seems not to have been notably public-spirited, the right has used its apogee-moment to shut off and strangle diversity, dialog, and democratic spirit.
When the earth turns again, the progressive left should not reciprocate, but I fear that it may--perpetuating the decline in American governance in armed and hostile camps.
People generally become more conservative with age. It is a fallacy to think that the younger generation will keep its preferences throughout life. Otherwise Trump's generation would be full of hippies.
2
@Andreas
Except thats not actually true politically. Follow link in article.
1
@Andreas
It isn't a fallacy. Actually people do keep their party identification with them. I started my voting life as a Democrat and now at my 40s I am still a Democrat and a Liberal. I do not expect that to change because the Republican party has become the party of the xenophobes, the racists, sexists, homophobes, deniers of science, and climate change, anti-environmentalists, etc. When you look at that how can you be anything but Democrat and liberal?
The hippies were a bunch of hypocrites to begin with, and they were always in the minority among Boomers. Don't believe the hindsight hype about free love and flower power.
1
So, David, why do you still call yourself a Republican (if you do)? And why do you still call yourself a Democrat (if you do)?
Please, tell us.
Or is it time to let go, and take seriously the implications of that second mountain you talk about? The Democratic Party is a big tent (we need that with so many candidates to fit under it). And it's time to be supporting government that supports the things you claim to believe in (as opposed to Republican each-man-with-a-gun and each-billionaire-for-himself.
Come on in, the water's fine.
@Peter Wolf
Whoops! My bad. My second sentence should be "why do you still call yourself a Conservative?
Currently reading Madeline Albright book - "Fascism - A Warning" - she is a wise and experienced great lady. As I read, the "History Repeats Itself" warning comes to mind. The paths taken by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin - were partially similar. The times when their rise to power occurred tougher than what we see today, but again - some parallels. To me what we see taking place both here and overseas is not unique. So, our younger generations are learning an abject lesson. They are smart enough to do their homework and make up their own minds. History is a good guide. Trumputin is a Red Light! Beware.
If you are going to attack a cartoon caricature of progressivism, you will get nowhere. Trying to paint people like Sanders and Warren as wild-eyed Communists might work for the benighted Republican base, but that tactic has already failed with the young. The kind of changes that would be necessary to enable the GOP to have a non-hateful posture toward diversity are, frankly, impossible; fear of the other is the only brand Republicans have left. I actually hope that the wealthy people conservatism exists to serve are making the same calculation they did in the 1960s: that their coalition, nowadays of white, cis-gendered bigots, will soon no longer win them national elections, and that they need to deceive a new one.
1
Oh, It’s much worse than a G.O.P. meltdown. Many people are sick of both the right and the left so right with them will be a Democratic Party Democolypse as well! They certainly don’t see it coming but it is coming too. They (democrats) also indulge in gerrymandering; they also indulge in the fudging of numbers; they excel in blocking out true discourse regarding a multitude of topics. They don’t see it coming but it is coming: a revamp of major proportions!
1
A good portion of millennials have a difficult time with our economy as they are saddled with college debt and face high housing and transportation costs on mediocre salaries.
But they are educated. They are not naive about injustice in the system and can see the racism in the GOP.
Give them credit for having sense and expecting more from their country and for their tax dollars.
Also, does this article position itself as though the millennials are primarily white?
They are diverse and the GOP stands against them. Look at Trump.
1
GOP policies are bad, short-sighted and primarily benefit only 1% of the population. They continue to win because that 1% is inordinately powerful and they are willing to do whatever it takes, including lying, cheating and stealing, to retain their power. We need to stop trying to meet in the middle because the GOP is continually moving the middle to the right. Ideas like Medicare for All and affordable childcare are not radical, they are what every other civilized economy does to promote the well being of all of their citizens. Americans who support the GOP need to wake up, unless you are very wealthy the Republican party is NOT on your side.
4
As in any biological system we are seeing that non whites are exhibiting better reproductive fitness and whites will vanish, as a practical matter. Many seem to think it is racist to say that but I am a dark skinned Asian and it is reality and it is about time. Along with the change will come a population with lower expectations and more willingness to work hard at low wage jobs. That will help the economy become more profitable and competitive with the rest of the world.
In the second sentence, you explain the gender gap with a parenthetical "(women preferring Democrats)" but you leave the education gap unexplained. Why no "(the educated preferring Democrats)" as well?
4
As a millennial, I know I speak for most of us when I say we are fully intent in becoming one of the greatest generations by wiping out one of the greatest cancers in the history of the United States: the modern Republican Party.
8
And it can't happen soon enough.
Older Democrats and older people in general vote on the basis of name recognition. They've heard the name Biden a lot due to his being VP and in the news for quite a few years. They haven't heard of the others much. So when a young person votes, the person's decision has to do with policy preferences, being honest instead of a hypocrite, etc. Old-timers with senile voting habits just go for the name and the party they recognize.
Don’t disparage older people; you can’t lump them all together. I’m 61 and white and think Joe Biden is boring as heck. I like the younger, more liberal candidates.
1
Republicans have been laying the groundwork for their being a minority ruling party ala South Africa's apartheid, for decades. They've aggressively worked to pack to Supreme Court, ensuring rulings go their way in all matters relating to voting restrictions, gerrymandering and the like, as well as reproductive rights. Although I probably won't live to see 2050, no one should be shocked then to see a white minority dominating a non-white majority, thanks to the Electoral College and years of Supreme Court rulings cementing the Republicans rule.
2
The world would be better off without conservatives of any stripe.
1
Thankfully, Dave, racism is timeless, so I'm sure the GOP will be just fine.
Necessity is the mother of invention--and boy will the GOP have necessity in the coming decades to be more open to more people. Expect the GOP to adapt. Expect Latinx people to be more than blind Democrats. The GOP will embrace diverse people only when it is forced to--until then they'll grip tightly on what they know and who has brought them power.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving (Trump) party.
Young people saved the country following the Nixon/Agnew-Moral/Silent Majority attempted takeover and young people will save us from the cowards and neofascists that were once the GOP.
1
Brooks is not now, nor has he ever been, a conservative.
Of course Brooks is a conservative — one with sense.
Republicans appear to be partially aware of what demographics has to say---as they are working really hard to disenfranchise voters through political gerrymandering, citizen questions, and ID laws--and preserve the power to the white male elites.
This is the most encouraging column David Brooks has ever written.
1
Well welcome to Earth David!
One way to change millennial and Genxyzers is to stop supporting them.
Like a great many Americans -- probably an overwhelming majority, at least among those who have thought about the issue at all -- I believe that the two-party system is infinitely better than having only one.
I'd just really, really, really prefer that neither of them was the Republicans.
I have no idea what David Brooks is talking about here.
"[T[here is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
In fact, my beliefs are a lot closer to what he describes as conservative multicuturalism:
"A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
But of course Brooks can't see that because he's blinded by a cartoon version of reality.
2
"A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
It is impossible for me to think of these statements as conservative rallying points when everything about modern liberalism embraces them and everything about modern conservatism rejects them.
In 2019, which party is trying to maintain and reform American structures and which party is trying to undermine them?
Which party is engaged in a multi-decade attempt to entrench its power in defiance of democratic principles by gerrymandering every district in the United States in its favor?
Which party engages in "thick and respectful pluralism" and which party created a torture program in which to disappear America's enemies?
Which party spearheaded the invasion of Iraq?
Which party has championed war with Iran?
Which party is trying to dismantle the current world trade system?
6
Karl Rove's Republican party has, according to him and his acolytes, figured out how to remain in control of the government for the foreseeable future. With the exception of two years, he is correct. To win the Electoral College, you need to ensure your desired results in just a few precincts in toss-up states by any possible means. That's what happened in the last presidential election. Nothing has been done to alter the same scenario for 2020. The odds favor another big popular vote win for the Democrats and an Electoral College win for Republicans. They keep the Senate with the same scenario!
4
@Alice: Didn’t Canada have Harper before Trudeau? One can hope the United States goes in the same direction?
"A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
Well David, that sounds like a pretty liberal position to me. Good luck selling that to todays reactionary Republican Party.
2
From your lips to God's ears Mr. Brooks. Scientists are turning out to be wrong on climate change. It's happening much faster than they predicted and the young people know it. We're past the tipping point and our roller coaster car is heading straight down into who knows what. World weather and change is a chaotic system that slowly changes until it turns chaotic and models become useless. Things will only get worse for the foreseeable future and now that the millions of square miles of Arctic tundra are starting to melt which will release gigatons of CO2 so we're just making it up as we go along now. We'll be playing defense for the next century. Sorry kids, we messed up.
This sounds great for forward thinking people, until you realize the dinosaur-Republicans can and are holding power using the anti-democratic Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court, long after the majority of Americans have left them.
The Trump Electoral College fluke and minority-Republican controlled Senate and thus Supreme Court has already delayed the day of reckoning for Republicans by many years.
If our institutions actually reflected the will of the people, Republicans would be hopelessly out of power, probably for good.
Hopefully the Dems will enjoy a massive landslide in 2020, which might barely enable them to eke out the White House and a razor-thin Senate majority.
7
Just today the UN identified the latest food crisis in Sudan as climate driven. And asked for yet more money they don't seem to be getting for refugees, not from the West, not from the Musim world, certainly not from China or Russia. A recent Gallup poll said that something like 750 million adults on this planet feel they need to move north. I see a world quite soon where the residents of the West, with liberties they have taken for granted, with a threatened but liveable life style,are going to have a lot more to worry about than diversity. Millenials may well change their ideas about a lot of things when their survival is at stake.
3
Millenials? You've got your reality backwards. Millenials vote overwhelmingly in support of progressive action; the elderly are statistically much more likely to have been hoodwinked by fake news, vote in favor of populist autocrats, etc. This, and a whole world more of genuine scholarship, is well established. But sure, you can throw out the word "Millenials", as if that absolves you or the elder generation of the horrorific results of decades of rubbish monetary policy, environmental despotism, and the general lack of empathy which pervades American national politics and has seeped it's way into the global milieu. What a base level of public discourse this exemplifies: evidently vindictive, reliant on false prejudices, and wholly counterproductive. We are all on the same team: the human team. Perhaps it would be beneficial to reflect on that, and then maybe read any peer-reviewed work on the social and economic inequities of American life and the factors which underpin those, so that you could move to helping fix our world issues, rather than denigrating a swath of the population that, frankly, presents the best electoral hope for turning around our current global democratic and environmental suicide.
Even if you don't agree that "millenials are not the problem" and are unwilling to do the research necessary to deprogram generational bias, please at least try to see how such statements are evidently counterproductive. In that case, help millenials vote. Don't denigrate.
1
In one year there are more children born in Nigeria alone than in all of Europe despite massive immigration of high birth rate groups. Global migration will become normal.
1
The GOP will prevent their losses in the younger generations more easily than they are subverting other demographic trends (gerrmandering, voter suppression, census citizenship questions, exact match, etc.) They can simply raise the voting age to 65. If you cant beat democracy, cheat.
5
" In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country." -- Too late! By then, Republicans will have destroyed democratic America -- gerrymandering works! Especially well with a politically biased Supreme Court. Jefferson's fears for a too strong central government will have been realized while Hamilton's hopes for a strong federal benevolence will have been destroyed.
3
@sterileneutrino "Jefferson's fears for a too strong central government will have been realized"
Never mind Jefferson, what about all those hordes of "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" conservatives?
1
Don’ worry, none of this will bother conservatives. The conservative mindset is to just deny any inconvenient fact.
3
I work with college students, and I often talk with them informally. I can assure you that they are reluctant to say out loud what they actually believe and that they are mostly unwilling (or unable) to engage in questioning the hegemonic left-progressivism of higher ed. I agree that they are tolerant and that they are interested in accommodating difference and in reducing intolerance. They really do, for the most part, seek mutual understanding.
They are also suppressed by the monocultural faculties and bureaucracies and the general conformist environment of modern college life. Many of them would never dare even to explore--out loud--the idea that the GOP had some meritorious people or ideas. It would be near social suicide for them to try to defend President Trump in public.
But this period will pass. They do listen to dissenting podcasts and interviews and sometimes debates--online and mostly alone. One-on-one they will sometimes talk about this. They will not, in five or ten years, have the same political beliefs they have today. No matter what they might find it necessary to say.
4
@Nathan thankful for your insights. I am female, educated, world travelled, reasonably well read blah blah blah...everything they say we’re not. As a conservative compassionate retired MD and grandmother of 6, you give me hope. Thank you for this thread of sanity in the midst of madness
@Nathan "Many of them would never dare even to explore--out loud--the idea that the GOP had some meritorious people or ideas. It would be near social suicide for them to try to defend President Trump in public."
You do realize that you're describing a pack of cowards, right?
1
“The most burning question for conservatives should be: What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in?”
Wrong. The most burning question should be “now that our ideology has been completely exposed for the fraud and stalking horse for fascism that it is, how can I personally expiate my sin and complicity?”
The bushido code would have an answer for this, but they’ll need to come up with their own.
2
@sedanchair Alas, the question that they'd be asking is "how can I pin the blame on somebody else?"
1
Ah yes, the younger generations are more liberal, but that can be dealt with. We will probably find that most of them have not voted or their votes have not counted.
I’m a boomer from the last year of the boom, 1963, and I am delighted that this younger generation has finally come along. Unfortunately, we’ve left them with a packed reactionary court that will leave them hamstrung as they try to clean up the mess we’ve left them. Please remember that not all of us boomers are myopic old codgers.
1
I'm disgusted with the backward right and the self serving 'me machine' of the new left.
Any other options?
1
@PulSamsara "Any other options?"
Well, you could recognize that "the self serving 'me machine' of the new left" is a lie that's been sold to you by professional propagandists.
The extremism of the right (blockading of health care, tax cuts for the super rich, NRA support, climate science denial, attempts to overturn Roe vs. Wade, voter suppression), a reaction from the left has happened. If the right hadn't been commandeered by nut jobs like Grover Norquist, the Koch's and Mercer's in the first place, we wouldn't be hearing about socialism.
3
Demographics and translations to political power are not single variable problems. Young liberals live predominantly in cities with other liberals. But Republicans have learned how to centralize power in their camp with demographic disadvantages. The age apocalypse has been coming for decades. A fuller analysis would couple age and geographic distribution to understand the real risks to Republicans power and opportunities for Democrats.
My two Millennial sons have no illusions about how much the landscape has changed since my youth. Climate change is a huge issue for them, as well as the severe limitations of the new gig economy. Trump and Trumpism is abhorrent to them. We just watched "Chernobyl" on HBO, and the issue of the despoiling of the planet, which continues apace, has not been lost on them. As well as the fecklessness of entrenched bureaucrats.
5
Healthcare, Climate Change, and Police Brutality are three main topics when I vote this year. Corruption is fourth. I doubt Democrats will do anything about that. They are in deep pockets for corporations.
The Republican Party has no real agenda other than to stay in power. Young people recognize this. McConnell, McCarthy, Republican legislatures and governors demonstrate this on a daily basis. They have no real vision for the United States other than to rule as an oligarchy, shared between them and the corporations. The Constitution and American democracy be damned.
Many older Americans (I am one) find the the ideals of today's youth frightening. Yet if we remember our heyday, we espoused nearly the same ideals. It’s time we turned this country over to them with our full support and blessing. It's going to be their world whether we like it or not.
Kids, please rid us of these particular cretinous Republicans.
6
As an educated, long-time conservative who's watched in horror as Brooks spent decades cheering on the Republican establishment's rejection of both conservatism and common sense in an effort to solidify power, run up astronomical debt, ignore our aging infrastructure, denigrate minorities, and funnel money from the poor and middle-class to the wealthy, this is the best news I've read all day!
Republicans deserve to lose big for a very long time.
7
"American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
That's exactly what Trump and McConnell and the Republicans are doing and they are creating an Ayn Rand nightmarish dystopia, starting with tearing down the basic principles of the Constitution.
The separation of powers, respect for the courts, for free speech and press, all the amendments that guarantee freedom, fair justice and privacy are ALL being burnt down, to the cheers of the Right.
As Republicans keep turning away in denial and LYING about Trump's criminal thuggery, it's impossible to uphold our structures.
We have a close-minded ignoramus as President who is the ideal of Mark Twain's fear "It's not what you don't know. It's what you know that ain't so!"
So-called Democratic leaders think they can woo Trumpian voters who simply didn't like the Clintons when, in fact, most Democrats aren't interested in the middle of the road. Because no Republican is IN the middle of the road! Meanwhile they are alienating the Millennials and too many of the minorities.
Finally, it's not that the demographic predictions were "wrong", it's that Republicans got away with voter suppression and gerrymandering. With an honest vote, both Florida and Georgia would now have African-American Democratic Governors, and Bill Nelson would still be in the Senate.
Cheating doesn't disprove demographics, it simply is a way to counteract them.
5
According to David Brooks "There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
This statement, which turns reality on its head, is delusional. It is liberals/progressives who believe that blacks and whites CAN really understand each other; racism is NOT endemic; the American project's flaws can be rectified. And it is liberals/progressives who are actively working towards a more just and peaceful multi-cultural society.
It is "conservatives" and Trump voters who embrace racist appeals and white cultural (at least) supremacy, and hate the changes a multi-cultural society brings.
3
I have no idea what it means when he says, "there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism."
1
How one - many - can deny the existence of the reality of this country is how the #GOP and the #conservatives are able to justify their draconian behaviors and policies. As long as they continue to see and judge everything from a filter that only shows Olde Whyte Mayles, they will continue to believe red 4-letter hats and the buffoon who sells them for profit.
4
That is why Andrew Yang will shock everyone with his quietly booming following..
Since young people typically vote liberal, as David pointed out, look for the Republicans to somehow restrict their voting and disenfranchise them.
7
The GOP and the base they represent does not want cross-cultural communication, not believe its intrinsic to the modern world.
And it does not seem conceptually possible for the GOP to embrace a positive liberty view of government and representation given their unwavering (conceptual) allegiance to negative liberty.
And progressivism as expressive of a deep strain of pessimism? Nope, that's a big swing and a miss.
2
The problem with the numbers Brooks cites is that he didn't do a regional breakdown but made sweeping generalizations (in all fairness, I dont see that Pew did either). I believe that if you broke the numbers down by region or between rural and urban areas, you'd see little difference between age groups in the South, Rust Belt, most of the Western States, or in rural areas. As far as the theory that a train is running over the GOP, I think that's stretching things more than just a little. The GOP voter is driven primarily by hate and greed, and there is little shortage of either in these (dis)United States across all age groups.
As I look ahead to 2020 I recall the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential election. There was a lot of youthful enthusiasm there too. McGovern got some bad breaks with serious flaws in his VP choice but Nixon was the same Nixon who resigned in disgrace. I don't want to wait until the middle of Trump's second term for people to come to their senses.
1.) Boomers in their 50s will still be voting for the next 20-30 years and are overwhelmingly conservative so this "apocalypse" has a long way to go and
2.) We currently live under minority rule in this country. Seeing as the current Republican Party doesn't need majority support to wield power, I don't think they are that worried.
2
"Republicans have not found a meaningful way to address their party’s generation gap."
So they warp the voting system in this country at every level to retain power...... Minority rule.
3
Mr. Brooks writes: "[T]here is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
That is a caricature of progressive multiculturalism, and few if any of its proponents past the legal drinking age would espouse any of it. We're not all militants who want to turn over police cars and set them ablaze. Conservatives who "point out" anything like the above -- and it seems that would include you -- are not telling the truth, and young people should know better than to listen to them.
3
@JMS: That is not at all what I gleaned from this article. Mr. Brooks is saying that the Republican Party must evolve if it is to survive.
@JMS in BKLYN "That is a caricature of progressive multiculturalism,"
No, it's just a lie.
OK David. This is progress. The next step is to understand how the conservatism you decry is the natural and inevitable outgrowth of the conservatism you embrace. They are one and the same thing.
1
The title "The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse" was clearly meant to refer to the apocalypse that the Republican Party will confront due to increasing diversity in the country.
Interesting enough, it could also be read as "the apocalypse that will be inflicted by the Republican Party." By not representing the values of an increasing majority of citizens, yet managing to hang on to power due to gerrymandering, voter suppression, divisions among the left, etc.
3
Really? Defending conservatism in the face of the cataclysmic issues demanding dramatic attention today? Look up the words "conservative" and "liberal" and see which we need now, by literal definition. The same "radical" mindset that gave us the New Deal, and civil rights, and marriage equality, and the minimum wage, needs to address climate change and institutionalized racism and out of control access to guns - NOW. Not when sloths like Brooks get around to recognizing the righteousness and urgency these issues demand - if ever.
1
@jh2: Maybe we need liberal conservation. It would be helpful to conserve the English Language to avoid unnecessary confusion.
1
Apocalypse now, please.
9
My two twenty-something sons have developed fatalistic points of view based on their deep concerns and fears about the health of our planet. This is what's most prevalent in their thoughts about their future (not starting families, etc.) and they have voted religiously since they were eligible. If you're a candidate and don't have a solid plan to address climate change, you have no chance in hell as far as they and their friends are concerned.
942
@Eileen: I did not expect to be told by young people that they don't expect to live to my age when I was their age.
27
@sterileneutrino Did you misunderstand the post? Eileen's sons won't vote for someone who DOESN'T want change. As in, candidates must have a plan to change how we are not sufficiently addressing climate change.
28
@Eileen I don't understand why young people are opposed to change -- do they somehow know that the recent world climate is the best of all possible climates?
4
Today’s GOP is an unintended consequence of the graying of America. Old people vote. The average 70 something Fox viewer cheers on Mitch like he’s a pro athlete, while he acts against their best interest and gives tax breaks to the super rich, tries to take away health care, and steals a court seat from the American majority who elected 44. All in the name of fairness and the rule of law. I’ll be so glad when they’re all gone.
22
I’m 70 and I agree! But with this proviso: the Gen Z/millennials must support an electable candidate in 2020 or it will be too late. If we lose this one, the ones after won’t matter.
16
I’m 68 and I agree too. I’m ready for the younger generation to step up, I’m sick of the old, ignorant, white men, mostly of the Republican Party. We need fresh, new blood running things not the cranks who are currently in charge. And I will vote for these younger people. Age is a huge factor for me, I think that Biden and Sanders are both too old to run for President. But put me down for almost anybody but Trump.
756
The Democrats should have one of each group - President, VP - instead of going by the usual geographic selection
In the final episode of HBO's Chernobyl, Valery Legasov (played masterfully by Jared Harris) states "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid." Republicans have built their current position on a foundation of lies and wishful thinking, the most obvious facet being the denial of climate science. While generational voting trends do not favor Republicans, the real downfall of the GOP will come with the victory of truth over propaganda.
11
To understand our human collective future we need only to understand our individual past and present. We each were young and selfish, but evolved to maturity and cooperation or suffered relentlessly. Now, thanks in large part to communication advances, we see ourselves as a single human organism with collective needs and aspirations, unlimited by anachronistic secondary differences. Working together, cooperatively, maturely is increasingly self-evident. Humanity is coming of age.
5
My only reaction to this column is "Choo-choo! C'mon, train!"
4
Regarding your conclusion, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.
5
Conservatism is dead in America....Trumpism is reactionary
4
I’m in my 60’s and completely despise Republicans. To even acknowledge their humanity is difficult. They are cruel, stupid, utterly immoral, untruthful and selfish. They have nothing to offer the 99.9% or the non-Christian fanatic.
The Party needs a complete rethink, starting with getting their Christian fanaticism off my back, then breaking links with the top 0.00001%.
Please keep your religion in your churches. There’s no shortage of them.
10
Now you get it, mr brooks.
2
“These days the Republican Party looks like a direct reaction against this ethos — against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism.”
That could be a description of the Nazi party in the 1930s.
7
@Ezra It took Godwin's law a while to kick in.
Well, duh.
Bluntly put the boomers have to go. Retire. Your impact on the world has been selfishly destructive and now we need to come clean up the mess.
Id advise you go quietly lest your legacy handouts disappear.
2
As a Millennial, I'd like to give Baby Boomers and in particularly the author David Brooks some advice. The reason why so many of us are against the GOP is the duplicity, hypocrisy, and general corruption of the everyday Republican politician. The constituents which the GOP caters to hates minorities and in particularly encourage a culture of racial animosity and resentment towards minorities of all kinds.
To give context to my generation I grew up and came to age in the 2000s. When I was a kid I remember when Bush swore he had evidence to prove that Saddam Hussein was trying to get nuclear power and lied to us. I remember when my friends enlisted out of patriotic duty for 9/11. During the 2008 recession. I saw my mom's home foreclosed on. My father lost his job when it was sent overseas to Asia. I've seen my father cry only a few times in his life - Once when my sister nearly died of leukemia at 7 years old and was gasping to breathe. Suffering on a hospital bed and then he saw the bills accrued. Second was when he told my sister and I that he could not pay for our College Tuitions because he lost his job and full pension. See the CEO and executives who closed down the plant which was the backbone to my community felt it was necessary to give themselves millions while stripping the pension promise by filing for bankruptcy to absolve the company of any responsibilities. I cannot in anyway support the party which is responsible for my family's suffering. I don't side w/ evil
13
The Republicans have turned themselves into a party of "Barberians are at the gates."
In their paranoia, they believe that their children are about to be seduced and molested by LBGTQ people (despite evidence that it is the heteronormative community that commits, disproportionately, sexual abuse against minors), that the Iranians want to conquer America and have it be an extension of their Caliphate (which hasn't happened in the 42 years it has been predicted), that secular people and atheists want to murder all the Bible Believing Christians (despite evidence that the contrary is really the case -- see case of Matthew Shepard), that women want to rule over men with an iron rod and emasculate men with physical violence (despite evidence that the opposite is the real situation), that non-uniformity leads to cultural, psychological and moral chaos (despite obvious evidence that non-uniformity is the rule in nature and that biodiversity is built-in to evolution).
The Republican oligarch plan is to grab as much wealth as they can and stack the courts and create bridge-burning laws as they retreat to their bunkers where their food supplies will eventually dwindle.
Love the Davos comment from the billionaire trying to decide how he will control his security guards with electronic collar shock-devices to prevent them turning on him and his food storage system in the imagined apocalypse to come.
https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
3
It's tough to embrace diversity when the bedrock principle of your party has been racism for the past 50 years.
6
The republican party has embraced racism, isolation, and general dishonesty as banners. They are grasping at straws in attempt to hang on to power. When the demographic wave and rationality engulf them, they deserve their fate - to be known as the do nothing / know nothing party...
3
The 40% of the country that supports the GOP are afraid. They are afraid of a future driven by skills and brainpower, afraid of a future with a spectrum of cultural experiences other than white bread, afraid of climate disaster even as they deny it, afraid of change. When people are afraid they act like stupid animals and this is what we have to contend with for a while. But only for a while. Because you can delay the future, but you can never stop it. And the longer it is delayed the bigger the explosion when it breaks loose.
6
The Democratic penchants of millenials and Gen Z people are worthless unless they vote. And, of all age groups, these are the ones who tend to vote least often.
If they feel a need for action, they need to vote.
2
>They are much more likely than other groups to say that racial discrimination is the main barrier to black progress.
That is not progressive it is regressive. It shows that the Neo-liberal elite on both sides of the aisle and behind the media have tricked Americans again into completely ignoring class issues.
I challenge any New York Times reader, journalist, editor, or contributor, to point me a singular society in history where the rich did not enforce some form of discrimination against the poor.
If Trump and GOP loose the election, he will declare a national emergency and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. because they own the courts and the military, I see a dictatorship in place on in 2020.
1
@wyatt "because they own the courts and the military"
I for one believe that the military will refuse to obey any commands which are not lawful. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military in domestic law enforcement unless Congress authorizes it, and such authorization is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. The outcome would be generals and admirals who merely stand at attention in front of the Commander-in-Chief while he tantrums at them.
Really? That's nice - but literally - no one cares in the states that will decide the election. The premise that people living pay check to pay check actually vote based on personal finances if false. Voters vote based on emotional visceral appeal or dislike. The lesson of the last election has not been learned. Obama was Jimmy Carter-Part II to Trump voters who recalled know-nothing naive nitwits like Ben Rhodes counseling Obama about being on the "right side of history" in the context of the Arab Spring or doggedly promoting a 2 state solution in Israel despite the realities of Jihadist movements (Hizbollah, HAMAS, Islamic Palestinian Jihad, Al Quaeda - funded and armed courtesy of Obama's crowning jewel of deluded appeasement, the JCPOA). Even the dimmest "fly-over- country" soybean farmer knows "stupid" when he/she sees it over and over again. The erudite, but myopic, policy wonk, Warren, like Bernie and other fools still refuses to acknowledge the errors of Obama (i.e., promoting democracy & human rights at the expense of allies and stability in vain delusional hope that tribes with flags weaned on Jihadi zealotry for centuries would suddenly embrace western democratic ideals of modernity and coexistence).
Young people are simply ignorant. It has always been that way. That does not mean they are bad, just naïve. For all its flaws, America is a great country. Yet, some kid who went to college on borrowed money and majored in some useless subject resents the country because he or she cannot get a good job and/or have his or her debt forgiven. Unfortunately, some people never outgrow their lack of knowledge and understanding of how the world works. They are called progressive Democrats, aka socialists. They believe money grows on trees; that everything should be "free."
2
America hasn’t been a great country for some time now. Unless you’re white, male, upper income, and, well, you get the picture....nuff said.
3
@Tim Lewis "They are called progressive Democrats, aka socialists. They believe money grows on trees; that everything should be 'free.'"
No they don't. You've just been convinced of that by professional liars.
1
What world (bubble) are you living in, David? "[T]here is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down." That's not the progressive multiculturalism I know. You refute that in your own piece - 79% of millennials think immigration is good for America and 61% think racial diversity is good for America. These statistics don't support your false narrative that the same people believe blacks and whites will never understand each other (though we do believe that racist whites will never understand what it means to be black in America). Or that racism is endemic. In fact, their own life experiences teach them otherwise. As for the American project, it depends on what you consider that to be. If it's the live and let live melting pot, again, you're wrong. It's not fatally flawed and your own stats don't support that. It is true that what your GOP brethren would like to do to that project (completely shred it), if successful, would render it fatally flawed. But not as it was conceived and has worked, quite nicely until the GOP got greedy, for a couple of hundred years. You may be right about American structures. They may need to be torn down. But isn't that what the dear leader told his cult he'd do? Why is one man's tearing down welcomed and applauded, and another's derided?
1
Fear. Hatred. Greed. The GOP message simply put. Cant imagine why my kids and their friends arent into that??? Oh, it's because they care about their country, their fellow citizens and the world at large.
5
Today’s conservatives are communicating the exact opposite of a multicultural society. What part of make America white again are you not getting Brooks?
2
The GOP: stumbling blind into the age of diversity; standing tall in this, their age of ridicule.
2
Currently, the GOP has NO appeal to:
1. The educated.
2. Anyone with average to above intelligence.
3. Anyone <40.
4. Non-whites
5. LGBTQ
6. Normal people
McConnell and his ilk know this and is why they do EVERYTHING they can hold onto power.
10
David can at times be insightful but what he continues to not realize is that it is possible to prune away all dog whistles, slurs, and dehumanizing tropes—and still not know what good language does, to whom, or why.
Liberals, including DB, and their communication tactics can stand to be improved - repetition becomes boring. What we see across progressive social media platforms, is a strange, repetitive cognitive bias. Liberals using authoritarian registers to put their points across. Patronizing other leftists, telling them they are all "correct" just not voting on the same candidate. [A]nd that they are on the ‘same side’, while smugly offering their own glib view of the ‘real world’ and ‘common sense’, or versions of these tendencies one way or another. When one employs the tactics (as writers in the NYTs almost always do)- it takes away from the substance of the argument, and betrays your subconscious subordination to authority.
@Dixon Duval "Liberals using authoritarian registers to put their points across."
I don't even know what that means. And saying "Liberals, including DB" is just silly.
1
The Republicans are Fascists, exaggerating to instill fear. The latest is Donald Trump's claim that millions (of terrorists) are invading our border with Mexico. It isn't new to Trump. George W. Bush found it convenient to make wild claims like WMD and the "mushroom cloud". Now, too, it is David's apocalypse.
2
This is useful information, if the numbers are reliable, and when are they ever? Conservatives, trying to take the tough-guy stance, need to understand that they can't stop the young from being the next generation to run the world. The 2016 elections gave the seemingly dead post-Bush Republican party a last gasp only because the elders of the DNC also chose a corrupt, backward-thinking candidate. The Republicans have chosen to use that reprieve to boldly and publicly embrace corruption, malfeasance, and impunity, hence the 2018 takeover of the House by Democrats. I sincerely hope that the outdated hierarchy of the Democratic Party, with its "superdelegates" weakened but not completely squashed, will see the light and let go of their Biden fixation.
255
@Fern Do not sell Biden short. He is highly respected and I believe he has a pragmatic side that will reach out and absorb the younger generations. He certainly understand their perspective and outlook. My current take - Biden/Warren. Time will tell. Things are still shaking out. But, look for Republican scream to be Socialism. That is easy to counter - Socialism comes in many forms - to Americans it means Social Conscience. Free enterprise is not at risk. Unfettered free enterprise is.
20
@Fern Still waiting for proof that Clinton is corrupt. Either of them.
The GOP (as opposed to Republicans in general) began to embrace corruption, malfeasance, and impunity a long time ago, and were bold and public about it at least since McConnell and company announced they were bound to make Obama a one term president. Trump merely forced it all out into the open, so the GOP has to cement their hold on the government before it's too late for them...which, if successful, could make it too late for the USA to escape de facto authoritarian pseudo-conservative rule without some kind of civil war.
46
@Fern
“...also chose a corrupt, backward-thinking candidate.”
Really? Would you really compare Clinton, who admittedly is not without warts, to the wrecking ball that is donald trump?
Anyways, hopefully the DNC has learned not to meddle in the Primary and let the voters decide who best represents them. And most importantly, hopefully no matter whether the Dem candidate is Bernie or Biden, Kamala or Klobuchar, every thinking American will get fully behind them and vote Dem up and down the ticket.
42
I suspect that this younger/older split has always been true. Unfortunately, as the younger voters get older, build careers, start families, own houses they also lose some of that liberal zeal, becoming their parents all over again. Look what happened to all the college radicals of the 60s and 70s; they all got corporate jobs and became today's baby boomer conservative generation.
2
I respect David Brooks for his intellect and amazing writing skills. I also admire his objectivity.
I think he's disingenuous when he claims Buckley as his mentor.
I don't buy it, David.
Why should 'conservatives' try to 'win' anything? Is winning important in society? In weeding out abilities to categorize people's skills for appropriate jobs, it matters. But in the political spectrum, does winning matter?
Wiser men believed otherwise. We're on the cusp of understanding this. Let's not blow it.
We need to give Republican politicians lattitude and leeway to become more normalized. We need Democratic politicians to accept the inevitable socialization of country-wide, critical industries like health care and higher education.
Despite the fears many people have, we'll be a much happier and harmonious nation as a result. This isn't marketing hype that dictators portray, but as evidenced by most of the developed world, it is inevitable.
1
When the voter participation rates of younger voters and minority voters ramps up to the level of their supposed lack of identification and alarm with the direction the GOP is taking this country, be sure to let me know, OK?
Why should the GOP waste its time trying to come up with ways to keep those blocs from voting? They seem to come up with reasons to not vote all by themselves.
3
"American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
At 69, I don't think American structures that are based on an unsustainable ever expanding economy, weighted toward preserving wealth, are capable of addressing the problems of climate change, or income inequality, quickly enough to consider them "basically sound."
I think many younger people see that clearly.
Any coming political apocalypse will affect both parties, and "American structures."
Let's hope it comes in time.
4
And the Republican Party has itself to blame. It's cynicism of the last 25 years was bound to catch up to. One of the best examples was after Romney's 2012 defeat the party came up with a blueprint to start attract more diverse voters. That playbook was immediately thrust in the garbage.
Conservatism was never the animating force of the rank and file post Reagan era Republicans. It's been tribalism.
3
Comments on ethnic diversity frequently skip over the large land mass between Texas and Arizona. We are more diverse than either of them.
The GOP deal breaker for me is its tolerance of white supremacy. Being a non-white, I don't care about low tax, low regulation, free market, and all the other benefits of traditional conservatism if I have to worry about my own physical safety.
4
Given their abysmal turnout rate what millennials believe is of little consequence.
3
I couldn’t agree more. Failure of Democrats to vote is why we have a President who is a disgrace to the office and a Senate controlled by the likes of Mitch McConnell. If you don’t vote, your opinion is irrelevant.
1
Republicans and conservatives are in the minority and are most often wrong. But, they are passionately wrong. That Trumps the majority wvo are just merely right. The GOP knows what the future looks like. They know that they will not win on the merits of any issues. So they peddle in alternative facts, gerrymander congressional districts, supress voting, block Supreme Court nominees, use deceptive videos, fire FBI Directors, obstruct congressional oversight, reduce funding for educational programs to protect their base of poorly educated for generations to come....... and on top of of it all, monopolize conservative media outlets around the world to to ensure a myopic viewership.
4
The characteristics that lead (the new) conservatives to wish and work for "the old times", are the very same ones that do not allow them to see the oncoming sea change in American beliefs and allegiances. It's a sort of "cover your face with the sheets" behavior, namely, the fear of the unknown, the unknown being pluralism. Fear, fear is what leads conservatives. Fear of change is what drives this angry ideology. Change is loss of status, loss of power, loss of finances, change is sharing. Image that! sharing a little of that rising tide so that other might not live in poverty, what madness!
2
What progressive believes the things that Brooks attributes to them. Sounds like a Trump tactic - sticking your adversary with a false image and attacking the false image.
"It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
1
I would attribute those qualities to Republicans not Democrats.
1
It appears that diversity is no match for gerrymandering, voter suppression, and disinformation via social media.
2
I'm pretty sure the reason the current GOP cannot get themselves up off the tracks of the train that destined to run them over is due to the fact they all seemed to have donated their spines to support the current president. While I believe our country is better off having multiple perspectives, based on their shameless abandonment of principles, I will not miss them.
1
Good. Back the train up and run over them again and again and again. They've become one of the greatest stains on this nation's history. Time for someone new and young and, hopefully, female and of color to lead us into the rest of the 21st and beyond. Can't happen fast enough for this boomer.
3
not a palindrome
So, Joe say it ain't so, Joe. but I'll take it. I really want the pendulum recovery of America to feature fresh ideas for America and the planet. Enough of the kleptocrats. When the pendulum recovers its stored energy as velocity lets see great progress, not baby steps.
1
Don't worry the repubs are slippery as eels. In a few years they will all swear they were working against trump, and trying to save the environment at the same time.
4
Republicans have been doing all they can to resist social change since the Civil Rights era and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. To their chagrin that change (propelled in many ways by modern technology) keeps on developing, leading them to take additional steps like gerrymandering and voter suppression. And yet, as the 2018 congressional elections demonstrated in the dramatic number of wins for women and minorities, change continues to happen. The pressures built up in the tension between this change and Republican resistance are not sustainable.
A dying star becomes a blinding supernova just before burning out. In a similar way, the current Trump-Republican party has become the supernova of the “Father Knows Best 50s.” It will soon burn itself out. Whatever follows - and it wouldn’t be good to have a single party running everything - Trump-Republicanism is likely to become a distasteful historical footnote.
3
I suspect these numbers are accurate but the more important numbers are the opinions of those who vote. Trump consistently maintains a 40-43% popularity rating, come what may. These supporters are probably three times as likely to vote than the younger generations. They are driven by all sorts of feelings while younger people do not have the voting habit or feel like it matters. I doubt that will ever change.
2
It appears that instead of asking, as Brooks suggests, "What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in?" Republicans are asking how they can gerrymander and suppress votes to continue to hold fast to their shrinking "majority."
1
Both of my children grew up with Barack Obama as the first president they really knew and admire him greatly. They have been appalled watching Trump dismantle his achievements, many of which were ones they felt were moving our society forward and addressing the most pressing issues of our times. They are equally appalled at the hypocrisy and spinelessness they see from other Republicans in government, and the push to undo progress in marriage equality, immigration and education.
They will never, ever vote for a Republican in their lifetimes. Neither will any of their friends. Why would they?
7
Republicans do see the train coming. Instead of getting out of the way, they are trying to derail it. How? By cementing minority rule through the Electoral College, the Senate, the courts, voter suppression and ever more extreme and creative gerrymandering (counting only voting age citizens ,or even just registered voters, in apportionment is coming to a community near you).
They may yet succeed, especially if Trump gets a second term.
4
"As Ronald Brownstein pointed out in The Atlantic, older Democrats prefer a more moderate candidate who they think can win. Younger Democrats prefer a more progressive candidate who they think can bring systemic change."
If age is the big differentiator amongst Dems, then why did Republicans of all ages vote for Trump for systemic change?
4
@Skeptical1. What evidence is there to support the notion that a vote for Trump was anything other than a vote for the GOP status quo? Trump simply got a few more of the base to turn up and Clinton did not. And she still won the popular vote.
Trump is something that happened due to a perfect storm of wackiness. That’s all.
4
@Skeptical1 Because Clinton was the candidate of no change whatsoever in our corporate-driven, big-money political system.
1
Some good thoughts from Mr Brooks but unfortunately the demographic wave he purports is skewed to the coasts and other liberal enclaves. In key states where national elections are truly decided the Electoral College, and abundance of power given to conservative legislators that allows Gerrymandering to flourish, will hamper any liberal resurgence that millenials represent.
4
@swainer. Gerrymandering flourishes quite well in Maryland - controlled by Democrats.
I get tired of hearing these issues always framed as Dems vs. Reps. More people in this country identify as independent than to either party. I think all Brooks says here about the Reps losing votes is true, but how many are shy to embrace the Dems? The gross money in politics is equally shared by both. Goldman Sachs doesn’t care which party wins, their people will be in the administration either way. We need a shakeup, not a burning down, of the status quo, and Mr. Brooks, astute and perceptive as he is, is not the right person to do this.
3
Brooks seems to miss an important difference between the anti-system young of the Sixties/Seventies and those of today. Back then, the large majority of anti-system activities, essentially ignored electoral politics, instead engaging in creating alternative institutions or actions to prevent "business as usual" by the mainstream institutions. This ranged from the establishment of free clinics, tenant unions, alternative media, and food conspiracies to civil disopedience to underground groups using violence against property (and occasionally people) to impede government actions, make a dramatic statement, or pressure private entities to do various things.
Today young people seem primarily caught up in an internet addiction designed primarily to achieve electoral results, oblivious to the fact that the electoral changes of the Sixties and Seventies, which largely concerned Civil Rights and the Viet Nam War but also women's, gay, and disability issues, essentially resulted from millions of people "taking to the streets" in many ways other than demonstrations. Electoral progress resulted from substantial non-electoral pressure put in place by people willing to take individual and personal risks.
Which leaves the bottom line question: will a generation of young people worried about microagressions and demanding their colleges provide them with a "safe emotional space" be prepared to become their generations, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman?
5
This is a good start at analyzing Republican corruption, but there's so much more to say about it. I'll limit it to this comment: the so-called GOP has devolved into a party resistant to complexity and nuance. It makes simplistic appeals to its base, with Continetti's new right blocs epitomizing people looking for myths of simplicity. Those appeals become effective if you can keep fooling "most of the people most of the time" (to paraphrase Lincoln's famous saying.)
I don't want to underestimate the Republican propaganda machine and fall into the conventional line that pieces like this one suggest, that identity politics are key to conquering the future. My idealism/optimism bends in another direction: only when enuf Americans become savvy enuf to see thru the fraudulence of a party like what "The Great Divider" Trump represents will they move to other options--and move the party of fraud to more honesty and defensible positions.
2
@Tom. What corruption are you talking about?
@Jackson
Moral and intellectual corruption. The formerly majority party talks and acts like government is strictly a negative, not a positive force in people's lives. Government is fundamentally ours, but if it's forever portrayed as a burden and not as an active agent for good, then it's not worth our ownership.
It refuses to educate its base on the simple public virtue of taxation as the price we all pay for our freedom, as well as what we pay for necessary services. It perceives free markets as a concept of unregulated markets, rather than of markets accessible to all--and therefore in need of basic regulation to assure such openness.
That enuf for you?
Where is there any room for families and their children in safe environments that foster growth and development seeking to potentiate the promise of youth in communities that care and protect and foster the emergence of their youth to participate fully in the life shared by us all? Pluralism is a reality of life not the color of one's skin nor one's National origins. Rather, embracing and engaging with a diverse world is the only adaptive strategy that can foster peace and collaboration rather than tribal warfare. We have yet to fully emerge from the jungles, caves and huts if we cannot see one world with pluralism as the rich diversity of promise and possibility for us all.
2
You say that progressive multiculturalism thinks American structures should be burned down. Wait a minute! Isn't that what Trump and the GOP are trying to do—burn down the institutions and values that made this country great in the first place? I think you're defining the wrong set of people as pessimistic. It's the GOP that decided our two-party system wasn't good enough and worked to give itself a permanent majority through gerrymandering and vote suppression. And Trump is the result of that un-American activity. The rest of us want our political system to survive and all of our citizens to have full rights. You're right that the GOP is setting itself up for eventual destruction, but it's doing that by rejecting Americanism. We'll be better off when the GOP is gone.
12
"Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over." - oh they do!
that's why they are appointing every single judge, scotus, supremes, etc they can. They are trying to shape america for the next 30/40 years without young folks coming in play.
14
David Brooks is right with regard to demographics but the GOP has spent a generation making systemic changes that will keep them in a position to impose their ideology on the country. By stacking the Supreme Court with conservatives and gerrymandering they will continue to influence politics for decades even if they are voted out of office and lose their majority.
10
@Talin: Democrats understand that consent of the governed must be won to maintain domestic tranquility. We seek to govern by persuasion, not gunpoint.
3
@Steve Bolger of course, but Brooks left out important factors, that is the point I was making. Statistics alone don't tell the whole story.
this fails to take into account that as the young become older and become more plugged into the economic system, they will become more moderate. The proportion of elderly are also increasing in the US population relative to the young, which points to increased support toward toward moderates and republicans. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics and Asians likely also follow this path. That is probably why the republicans are not changing their policies
2
I do not understand what David Brooks means when he says: "there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism." If liberals are pessimistic, it is because they wonder when if ever the conservatives will lose their power to control our nation and our lives. They are a minority of our population, yet they still run everything. Yes, that is discouraging.
9
I had lunch yesterday with several women ALL of us over 60 and we want Radical Change. I don't know why they say older voters are moderate.
17
For Mr Brooks’ thesis, that liberalism is the wave of the future and conservatism is going the way of the dodo, to actually come to fruition young people must head to the polls and vote. Hopefully the actions taken by the current administration leading up to the 2020 election will rule up the younger generation and get them to turnout.
6
“A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed.”
Funny, I could swear this sounds a whole lot like what American progressives want. The folks burning down the house with pessimism aren’t progressives, but rather the GOP with its goal of retaining power at all cost through gerrymandering, vote suppression, power grabs that put our constitutional system at risk, and an absolute disregard for the unethical, totalitarian behavior of “our” president.
Mr. Brooks isn’t winning me over with his double speak. This piece isn’t a call to honest, forward-looking conservatism but a call to more political mumbo jumbo messaging.
6
Apocalypse is a perfect word to associate with republicans and old people.
It is becoming obvious to the millennial and Z generations that climate change will cause catastrophic events to bear down on them, long after today’s old people and republicans are dead.
Young people are reaching an obvious conclusion: by doing nothing to solve the climate problem, old people and the republican party care little about their future lives.
So why vote republican, like old people do?
6
Well said. However, as the new generation starts paying taxes.....they’ll smooth out. Everyone from the east coast starts as a liberal. Then a decade or two of watching the government waste your efforts turns them to more of a moderate/conservative. At least most of the people I know.
The only things the GOP has conserved in the past 20 years are 1) Tax cuts for the wealthy and 2) Reckless military spending
3) Disregard for health care 4) Taking away women’s autonomy.
I will never vote for them again.
10
Republicans used to stand for fiscal responsibility but in the past 20 years they've stood for lower taxes resulting in record federal deficits and a record national debt. Democrats aren't much better. They want every social program known to man, Free Tuition for Higher Education and Free Health Care for All being their most recent government free bees...but only expecting the super rich to pay for it...thus also contributing to our ongoing national fiscal irresponsibility. Until both parties are willing to face reality and pay for what we spend, we as a country are doomed. A pox on both of their houses.
1
@Lost In Utah The actual track record of the Dems on fiscal responsibility is vastly better than that of the reckless Republicans. Recall please that when Clinton left office there was a surplus. The net results of university education and health security are likely economically positive for the society. So, assuming intelligent management--not an impossibility--these will not be wasteful programs.
6
@Lost In Utah
Germany has all those social programs, is almost fully unionized, has only a fraction of the US’s population, yet rivals us in exports. Where is their pox?
1
@whim Don't rewrite history. Yes there was a budget surplus but it was orchestrated by the once fiscally responsible Republican held Congress in cooperation with the Clinton Administration. Remember that 1994 Republican pledge to balance the budget? And as for the net positives of so called free college education and so called free healthcare...nothing come's free. According to a recent Atlantic article...it would cost almost 3 trillion dollars to fund health care for everyone. That's equal to 100% of what the federal government currently collects in all taxes. Are you prepared for a 100% increase in your taxes? and this is before you tac on so called free college education. Even with this...we would still be running a 1 trillion deficit even with that 100% increase in taxes. Before we go adding even more give aways...let pay for what we currently spend.
If Republicans continue their successful efforts to suppress the voting rights of people with whom they disagree, it really won’t matter what the opposition thinks.
The system needs to be fixed before it becomes irreparable.
10
Ah, Brooks and his vague but consoling bromides.
"A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
How can he miss the irony of such imaginary GOP messages, when Republicans' only remaining "creed" (as John McCain saw) is self-enriching power, and to them, "structures" - from science to journalism, treaty obligations to reproductive autonomy, clean air/water regulation to Congressional norms - are merely targets for the political, legislative and judicial wrecking ball.
Young adults need no schooling from Brooks on realistic reform. They're voting with exactly that in mind.
7
If the new generation wants to give me free healthcare, let them. They'll feel the pain of their optimism that central planning by absolute power will work. These errors are how cultures learn or disappear. They have experienced no real hardship, and thus think that's the norm.
2
@David. Health care as a business is not a success. It is extremely corrupt and dysfunctional. Many nations manage health care better than we do. To depict them all as Soviet style monsters is an error. It is thought disconnected from, without guidance from, reality.
2
@David True, some believe that if you want to teach the young'uns a lesson, you need to dish 'em up some hardship. That's why we don't need political leaders who were born with the proverbial silver spoon and have never done or even seen an honest day's work, in either party. It is a common thread running through Bush the oil baron heir, Trump the shady real estate heir, Chao the Chinese shipping magnate heir, and countless others. They dish up hardship to the people who already have to worry about their next month's bills, and keep more for themselves and their wealthy peers. All of them put together will never come close to being worth one--wait for it---AOC.
@David
Old white guys opinion. We need more of these.
If there is a modern "conservative" movement today, it is a movement to cement power and control for wealthy, white America. The GOP will adapt, evolve and work their way slightly left of their current position. Moving right-of-center, where the "center" has been artificially tinkered with through gerrymandering and suppressing the voices of voters. They will claim themselves to be absolute constitutionalist patriots whose only mission is to see that every American be given a fair shake at the American dream.
And people will buy it hook, line and sinker because, for a new generation, it will be the first viewing of this old routine.
4
If conservatives really believe “that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism,” then they are in more trouble than Mr. Brooks believes. The progressives and liberals I know think that the world can be changed for the better, that we are still fighting the good fight for equality, that we can wage a much stronger battle against climate disruption, and that we will have a better country with greater racial diversity.
The Republicans and those who call themselves conservatives have just the opposite views: if you want to call opposition to their ideas and policies pessimistic, that is a misuse of the word. The conservatives I read about every day want to maintain the status quo when everything around us is calling for real change.
The status quo is not acceptable, and that is a fact.
7
My fear, and I'm ashamed to say it, is that instead of moving optimistically forward, communicating unifying conservative values that are inherent somewhere in a pluralistic culture, the GOP will, out of fear and short-term gain, back itself instead into a totalitarianistic mindset and reality. In order to retain power/status, necessary oppression, if you will. This President shows all the signs.
6
I do not think that a party that rides on a wave of racial hatred and cultural xenophobia can pretend to get behind, “the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism.” This is what conservatives complain about as “political correctness” which refers to their inner conflict when they have to conduct themselves as if they do not hate and deride this or that group of people.
7
Without acknowledgment, and ultimately, correction—yes, a flaw such as a country founded on slavery will prove fatal.
Where is there pessimism in MLK’s speeches or writings about White and Blacks understanding one another? Who has suggested burning (literally or figuratively ) anything down on the progressive “left”? Racism is indeed endemic now, but hardly destiny as the rise of mixed -race relationships goes up and essentially forced integration of institutions such as the army (opposed, not endorsed by conservatives) has proven.
It is just really implausible and very unlikely, that even Trump-hating tories such as George Will will be an innovative force in some sort of leveling new paradigm of “respectful plurality” (sounds like separate but equal) ?
Where are the Black conservatives, aside from the utterly despised by African Americans Clarence Thomas, who are even out there that would be essential to this new paradigm Brooks suggests? Ben Carson maybe? Herman Cain?
Working class white Trump -haters (if such a thing exists) who call themselves conservatives tend to deny history, upper class white conservatives go to their country club and gated communities to ignore it. Neither believe that active intellectual engagement around race is important, much less requires reaching out to or listening to what Ta Ne Hisi Coates, or Michael Eric Dyson or Louis Gates for example, has to say on the subject.
Dream on.
4
There really are almost no true conservatives in America. There is the cuckoo coalition that the GOP has assembled to back its rich people first agenda and Trump is the natural consequence of that. The real conservatives have left the current GOP and are a group of refugees without a party.
4
Republicans will never change. They will only change their marketing strategies, their messaging. And they are good at it. Much better than the Democrats.
They have for many decades been the party of the rich. But they’ve used issues like abortion and “family values” and the racism and xenophobia of their low information voter base to keep their party alive. If they were honest about who they served and what they stand for, they’d never win.
Oh, and they cheat. They suppress the vote, they warp the census, they’ll take help from Russians- whatever it takes. They!ll block their opponents rightful Supreme Court picks, they’ll change laws to thwart an incoming Democratic governor and the will of the majority of voters.
And it’s working. We now live in a country run by a party who has gotten less votes for the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Republicans only care for raw power- not for the rule of law on the Constitution that makes this country great.
7
Nothing about climate change or right to choose?
I am an "older Gen X" but have three daughters age 18-23 and they all list climate change and science denial as a top issue for them. The two older ones are seriously considering not have children because of climate change - which Mike Lee and Tucker Carlson immediately made fun of. They are aghast by the recent abortion restriction laws, including in their home state of Ohio. These three young adults represent three strikes against the GOP -- college educated women under 25. They can't even say Republican without spitting. They aren't starry eyed either -- they understand that things need to be paid for, we need a military and compromise is needed, but my goodness, today's GOP has lost them for life.
7
OK, I agree many younger folks don’t like the greedy money grubbing, race baiting, climate ignoring creed of the GOP. So, what gets them to vote and get out the vote for change and their priorities?
3
Why does Brooks continue to write about conservatism as if it is even a player? While there are likely still many individual conservatives (though fewer and fewer), the Republican Party is not conservative. It is an alliance of climate change profiteers using corporate wealth, race-bating, sexism, and abortion etc to manipulate a scared group of people into keeping their servants in power. Their motivation is to suck the wealth out of the country and move on.
13
Actually, the GOP is doing just fine while showing contempt for diversity. Ann Coulter callled it during the 2016 cycle, saying that white voters alone were enough to win the election if properly aroused, If Trump wins again, his second four years will be sufficient for him to remake the judiciary and destroy “liberal” policy infrastructure on everything from climate change to to Europe to the Middle East to Asia, The damage at that point will be so extensive that 10 democratic administrations in a row won’t be able to undo it. Like William Barr, Trumpists don’t care about the future. They are interested in maximum power right now. And they have it, and have a great chance to keep for at least another four years if the Democrats don’t put forward a spokesperson who can match Trump sound byte for sound byte while mastering and coming up with saleable policies to solve the most complex policy issues.
5
Democrats are creating unlivable cities and other disasters; their projects beat up the middle class; people are fleeing into Rep areas. People may be voting against the Dems, instead of for the Reps. Not voting at all is a way of doing that.
People don't see either Dems or Reps as saviours, and small wonder. Biden is just another rich guy donor pet. Like a male Hillary.
What about dumping both parties and starting afresh with a parliamentary system? We might get something done.
2
The demographic shift is from rural areas to urban, and traditional red states are now purple. You think Biden& Clinton are apologists for the rich? How about Trump (Deutsche Bank), Mitch McConnell, Mnuchen, Wilbur Ross, etc. they are not selfless altruists.
1
@AKM Correct. Both parties work for the rich. A plague on both their houses.
1
"In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted electoral doom for the G.O.P. based on demographic data. That prediction turned out to be wrong, or at least wildly premature." At that time gerrymandering was not in the use it has been since 2010 and the noise from F(alse)ox was not quite so deafening.
I challenge Brooks to find a true conservative anywhere in the republican party. The entire party is headed down the rabbit hole of fascism, autocracy, and (hopefully) oblivion.
In 2004 it is quite within the possible that voting in Ohio was hacked to give Bush his reelection. If not that is the only presidential election since 1992 that saw a republican capture the popular vote nation wide. Yet we have seen 3 republican administrations in that span. 3 real lulus, I would add.
Remember that the last 4 elections that were awarded to a Democrat saw historic obstruction from republicans start to finish. Brooks, your party just does NOT believe in democracy, and lately I would add it does NOT believe in the Constitution.
5
The Republican Party has proven that it stands for basically one thing only: white “Christian” and plutocratic hegemony in our politics.
The GOP has turned its back on reason, law, communitarian values, and justice. It is a threat to humanity and freedom. The GOP must be defeated so soundly that it ceases to be a functional political voice.
6
How can Brooks write an entire article about younger voters and not even mention climate change? Us oldsters will be dead before the worst, maybe lethal, effects of global warming are evident, but our children and grandchildren have a real stake in the fate of our poor planet.
993
@Susan Wladaver-Morgan: I look at all of this from the perspective of a child born when nuclear fusion was supposed to be practical in 20 years who wanted to invent such a device small and light enough to heat the core of a turbofan engine. They've got a tough row to hoe.
10
@Steve Bolger, as an older adult this is exactly why I want radical change, due to the climate change.
30
@Susan Wladaver-Morgan Because so many of us reject the raving lunacy and repeatedly disproven alarmism of the climate catastrophists? On the other hand if government is fool enough to buy into such insanity then our children and grandchildren will suffer the lethal effects of a destroyed economy and damaged social structure whilst China will be the sole superpower and able to impose its will on the globe.
8
The Republicans recognize this potential generational time bomb and already are working to defuse it by stacking the courts with relatively young ultra-conservative, anti-diversity, anti-voting rights, anti-civil rights judges with lifetime appointments. Since most of trump's judicial picks are white and male, they will go the extra mile to try to ensure a white patriarchy even if America becomes a majority-minority country.
5
I wish electorate polling questions were more pointed like asking if they believe Congressional Republicans will ever support any of Sanders' or Warren's policy initiatives such as universal health care or breaking up all the big tech companies, etc. And if Congressional Democrats will ever support Trump & GOP policies which ignore climate change & make immigration highly restrictive in the US, among other issues. Without the same political party in control of both the Executive branch & holding an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress, do any voters expect systemic change to germinate in Washington DC?
Say what you will about older voters but they WILL absolutely show up at the polls to vote regardless of the candidates or the challenges of getting to a voting place. Politics has historically never been consistently a critically important issue for youth unless there has existed some major rallying cry like the Vietnam war. Not sure the issue of climate change is the powerful catalyst to drive youth to vote in droves in 2020. As far as the issue of diversity, it doesn't appear to be a hot button issue for youth who have grown up in a more highly diverse & welcoming environment than their parents, even as Republicans have been attempting to slowly roll back civil rights legislation under the radar.
Who knows what 2020 holds as the Russian threat seems just as likely & an emboldened Republican party continues to show brazen contempt for the Constitution.
2
How can anyone credibly write a column that talks about the generations alive and of voting age today and never once even mention Generation X? Just because the Baby Boomers and the Millennials are larger doesn't mean Gen X doesn't exist, doesn't vote, doesn't produce, and doesn't have some say in national trends.
Seems to me that if the Boomers swing one way and the Millennials swing the other way, Gen X will be the deciding generation.
6
Mr. Brooks provides an interesting statistical review of the complex points of view embedded in the voting public, and a crystalline view of the strategic state of mind of the GOP leadership.
The book he mentions, written in 2002?, about Democrats rising to power, I am sure was read by Republican strategists. They took it seriously.
With the recent discovery of hard drives and revelation of GOP strategy to control voting districts by suppressing votes and enhancing gerrymandered districts, it is now clear that Democrats are operating from a very weak position in terms of winning enough seats to take control of government.
It really doesn't matter what young people think or want; the bottom line is controlling voting districts, and it appears the Senate may be locked in.
The lesson of the Obama electoral win to the GOP strategists is that a big turnout can be overcome by purging voter lists.
Now with important gerrymander questions in front of the Supreme Court, the fate of the 2020 election will be somewhat determined.
The only hope for Democrats is mass voter registration throughout 2019 and 2020 and mass voter turnout by young and old people November 3, 2020.
6
This focus on political and age groupings exalts statistics over reality. Is Bernie Sanders really a Democrat? Is Donald Trump really a Republican? Are young people Democrats and old people Republicans?
Hard to say. There is too much variation and things change over the years. Just like the economy. Cycles occur that are unpredictable in their particulars but inevitable in their boom and bust nature. We can not do much to affect them and can only observe them.
Everyone wants peace and prosperity. But how do we get it? Utopia on one side is socialism, where each gives according to his or her ability and receives according to need. Utopia on the other side is an unregulated free market, where all compete and are rewarded for their talents and effort.
Both Utopias are unrealistic and we sit somewhere on the spectrum. The best thing to do is to compromise and go with the flow of events. The worst thing to do is to freeze up and do nothing like Buridan's, errrr, donkey, unable to decide as a society which way to turn.
We'll find a good way, I think. We always have. We will always will.
2
Almost makes me optimistic. The GOP is already gone and the Trump party's slide into oblivion can't come fast enough. I long to see Mitch McConnell relegated to cleaning stalls at some horse farm in Kentucky owned by Democrats.
3
Multiculturalism means people with different physical and social characteristics ( I guess). People, in the end, are people. This business of concentrating on our differences is getting old. Maybe thinking about all of our similarities is the way to go...
and I'm an aging Baby Boomer.
4
If I were a young person I would want to side with the party that wanted to lift up all its country's citizens regardless of melanin count, that wanted to protect its future by bravely facing the ecological disaster that science had proved was overtaking us, that sought to protect the right of all its citizens to vote, that didn't side with religious fanatics in a cynical ploy to gain their votes, that didn't adopt a philosophy that believed that the rich have a natural right to rule over everyone else.... If I were a young person I would not side with the GOP, a party whose craven will to power is antithetical to a healthy, happy future.
8
I think the GOP is well aware of this, and it's precisely why they are working so hard at voter suppression, gerrymandering, and packing the judiciary. Basically they recognize that they are in trouble democratically and are doing everything they can to put conservatism in place for the future without having to deal with those pesky voters. Unfortunately they're doing pretty well at it, too.
19
David Brooks has outed himself as being dragged kicking and screaming into a new definition of diversity. But he should take some comfort in mastering the obvious as he surveys the world's current condition wrought by millions of years of physical evolution and diversity - even as the industrial class seeks to kill it. What got us to where we are ain't gonna get us to where we desperately need to be. A sincere Thank You to Mr. Brooks.
1
I would like to believe Mr. Brooks' relative optimism, but I fear that the Citizens United decision, above all else, has cemented the position of the evil 0.1% Republican oligarchs. Can we undo Citizens United in an orderly way, or will the pitchforks come out?
9
Focusing exclusively on a philosophical disagreement on diversity let’s the Republicans off the hook for other behaviors that are sinking them with young voters.
If you are 30 year-old voter, most likely your first real experience with Republicans was 2009. After a decisive, positive election and facing a national crisis, Republicans did everything they could to scuttle decent policy making and devoted themselves to manufacturing outrage against a President that appealed to most young people.
Since then, Republicans have been putting out increasingly absurd arguments that are blatantly contradicted by basic facts on a whole host of issues, climate change, gun safety, and what constitutes acceptable Presidential behavior to name a few. In the Trump era, the knots that Republicans twist themselves into to haul Trump through one more news cycle are poisoning the well for people who are even a little bit objective.
10
@Muirnov: I wonder if President Obama understands how he was used to lose in 2008. He hit their stone wall the day he was sworn in.
2
When largely unchecked capitalism funnels wealth to the very rich, those left behind with moderately more power will prey on those with less. Under Republican corporatist politics, the old eat their young. The rich get richer, the olds pull in the welcome mat behind them, and everyone else is left in circumstances of anger and despair that have fueled basically every political upheaval, ever.
3
Honestly, I hope and pray that nobody fixes the brakes on that train that Mr. Brooks claims is about to run over the GOP. The behaviour of the current GOP is unconscionable almost to the point of criminaļity.
16
Only 21% of the population is 18-35. 29% is over 40. A high percentage of those citizens over 55 vote. The question that no demographic data can answer is what percentage of 18 to 40 year olds will show up and vote. They are those who came of age as America was becoming more diverse and the Era when the Republican party voluntarily became the party of White transformed by Nixon and Reagan’s Southern Strategy.
The real threat to the Republican party is that 25% of the population is under 18. That generation raised in the internet age is ,and will likely remain, more ethnically and racially diverse than their parents and grandparents demographic age group. That may, as Brooks predicts, become the true existential threat to the Republicans.
2
Some of the generational difference in Biden's popularity surely has to do with simple familiarity, or lack thereof.
Older Millennials do remember him in the Obama years, younger ones, probably not so much.
2
Millennials don’t get that diversity isn’t a reason to burn down America’s structures but a reason to expand them to take in those who have been left out. The current reasoning of young progressives is a straight path to lower level mediocrity for all.
Sadly, the Republicans's answer to Mr. Brook's vision is to game the electoral system so that they retain political power no matter what. Packing the federal courts with political operatives (they have already done that with the Supreme Court), jerrymandering majorities in state and federal legislatures, disenfranchising people who would likely vote against them, all strategies leading to dictatorship. Thanks Republicans!
6
Oh David they see the train as clearly as I see my hand in front of my face. What do you think all this power grabbing, voter suppression and judge packing is all about? The GOP refuse to soften their policies because they'd lose whatever base they have. The only solution is one party rule by becoming a democracy in name only. We're nearly there. Congress is being virtually ignored right now even though the American people came out in huge numbers to send them there. The GOP will use the 3 tools above to insure that America becomes just like the red states they've already captured and made permanently Republican.
Surely you've noticed some of this David?
8
I like Mr. Brooks even though I disagree with him politically and socially on most matters.
But my opinion of him dropped dramatically when I read this line:
“My mentor William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” “
I had not realize that Buckley was his mentor. Sad, very sad. And to quote favorably the ridiculous idea of standing athwart history, let alone trying to stop it, simply reinforces his conservative naïveté.
That sort of pedigree explains a lot of what's wrong with Mr. Brooks's thinking and writing.
Still, he is right that the Republicans are doomed unless they succeed in turning our democracy into an authoritarian, rightwing, despotic, White Nationalist, Christian State, as they have been trying to do for the past generation.
6
Wait a minute.
The way Brooks describes so-called progressive pessimism -- characterizing multiculturalism as a belief that "blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down" -- is one of the most cart-before-the-horse funhouse-mirror, one-plus-one-equals-three bits of gobbledygook rhetoric ever to enter American politics.
Multiculturalism is *by definition* a belief that different demographic groups can and should get along, and that diversity is what makes America strong. If anything, the fatalistic formula Brooks lays out describes Trump-era Republicanism.
Mr. Brooks: it's okay. You can stop reflexively propagandizing for a conservative polity that no longer exists. And please stop trying to spin liberalism into something that it's not.
4
The GOP is merely a con-job on the American public: the plutocrats are taking over everything of value in the U.S.A.
The Supreme Court is already lost.
3
How about planetary destruction? Have you heard about it at all?
3
Oh I can hear the GOP response already, "I'm not a train conductor. How would I know if there's a train rushing down the tracks?"
A flaw in the thesis of this article is that the parties change themselves to attract voters. This is seen most recently in 2016. The Republican Party of today bears no resemblance to that of Lincoln, except for the name.
3
I hope you are right, that younger voters do, on the whole, hate the Republicans and that they will not sit out the 2020 election which so many did in 2016, essentially handing the presidency to the worse one ever, but will become as energized as they were in 2008 and 2012 when they, on the whole, voted for one of the best presidents we have ever had. I cannot understand how any young person (I'm 78 but am a retired English teacher who relates well to young people) could possibly be Republicans given how little they have to offer other than bigotry in all its forms.
6
Churchill once said "A man that is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. A man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no brain." I would like to see any political shifts as this younger generation ages. Also, I would like to see the differences between each demographic generation over time as to how many actually vote. Us old coots may be slow in everything except going to the polls.
@Lazarus
Churchill also said:
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
He also referred to Palestinians as "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung."
He also dismissed the starvation of millions of Bengalis because they 'breed like rabbits'
Maybe we shouldn't accept everything he said uncritically?
I'm 25 - I'll eat my hat if I end up voting Republican in my lifetime.
@Chris Actually, I do like a sell turned phrase no matter who said it. I especially like his comments on alcohol. By the way, I do agree with your last sentence, except for the 25 part.
I think they (the religious right/conservatives/Federalist Society libertarians, etc.) see the train running over them very clearly. That's why they're doing everything in their power to cement their power and legacy permanently into the system by taking over the courts, disenfranchising as many center-left voters as possible and putting up roadblocks to any democratically-enacted changes to the status quo.
11
@john Or they see how the Far Left has wielded the system to disadvantage and persecute them and are thus ensuring that this isn't possible in the near future. Who wants to be made a criminal simply because of ones identity? Who wants to be made a second class citizen, or employee, simply because of their skin? Who wants to be sacked or ostracised simply because they believe in science? If the Left\Regressives have their way all these things are true. One Democrat suggested that if Trump wins in 2020 camps for undesirables will be built. Only the Fringe Left might believe that, but plenty on the Right know that should Democrats seize power those camps are effectively where they'll end up.
2
@John Smythe Dems have been saying that for 50 years. The Reps will build camps. Hah. They're the ones who will build re education camps for those who disagree with them.
"Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America."
No, they do not.
They FEEL these things. Or more accurately they are coerced by peer and authority pressure into group"think" ("think" belongs in quotes because little independent thought is used to arrive at opinions expressed to pollsters).
Do the poll questions differentiate between immigrants who cross the border illegally and those who follow the laws of the United States - immigration laws that are the most welcoming of any nation in the world? Unlikely.
Do the poll questions about "racial diversity" move beyond the abstract and discover a preference for a less-qualified minority over a more-qualified white or male for professor? Surgeon? Firefighter? Airline pilot?
6
@Charles
Right, because illegals are crossing in from Mexico to fly planes and perform surgery LOL
I am in my 70's and apparently vote with the under 30's. Not every poll gets it right. I sense many in my chort group vote as i do.
Conservatism is backward looking and unable to grasp the changing world. The nature of work & job security have both changed with the information revolution. Conservatives just don't understand what is changing, young people do - they are living it.
4
Mr. Brooks left one other thing out from this piece which distinguishes Millennials and their younger cohorts, is that they are not affiliated with religion. Nones is the largest growing group in this country, and it is composed mainly of Millennials and younger people, who are leaving organized religion behind in droves. It is hard to see that they would ever align themselves with the current iteration of the Republican party with this cross clutching and flag-waving faux Christianity and patriotism. On a final note, I wish mr. Brooks would have had a different mentor other than William F Buckley. I watched a debate at Oxford between Buckley and James Baldwin on race, and Baldwin wiped the floor with Buckley, whose main attributes seem to be covert racism hidden by a sarcastic sneer and pseudo intellectualism.
8
People vote their emotions. And they don’t begin to get permanently emotionally attached to a political party until their mid 30’s. If republicans could create policies that actually solved some of the real problems facing the country they could easily grab large parts of the population of any color. It is not like the liberals have solved many problems despite multiple programs and enormous spending
Our K to 12 education just keeps getting worse on a global comparison. Our welfare programs have not allowed the poir to arise from what is basically permanent underclass status. Obamacare made a little progress by expanding medicaid, but the rest of the program was not worth the effort and is failing. College is broadly unaffordable. Immigration is a total mess. Our carbon emissions are going up again, we ate driving bigger suv’s and trucks, not even extreme liberal states will vote for a carbon tax that makes a difference. So what are the great accomplishments the democrats can claim. They cannot even claim christian charity in all the welfare programs they have built
It’s just that republicans are too narrowly focused on economic growth at any cost. That’s their weakness. But based on their record who thinks democrats have any answers? Easy targets as Trump proved by pulling the white working class away
2
Haven't they been predicting this since the 60's? Politics has a funny way of settling-out. And, as we all know, party platforms are (very) malleable. 10 years from now, D and R platforms will be very different. But I bet both parties will still very much be around.
1
If David Brooks were representative of the Republican party, I would become a Republican. I wish Mr. Brooks would run for president. He is the only Republican whose intelligence, moral character, fair-mindedness and level-headed patriotism I can respect. In fact, he is the only Republican so far whose opinion I care to know. I don’t always agree with him, but he always gives me something to think about.
2
I'm dreading the GOP losing control just as much as I despise their current monopoly on power. In a prosperous country that only needs modest redirection (stronger regulation and progressive taxes, but less identity politics), domination by the fringes is bouncing us from the right guardrail to the left, shattering long-standing institutions along the way.
3
The sooner the G.O.P. disappears the better. "Tinkering around the edges" is a losing proposition. We need systemic change.
2
One can't bring about systemic change if one doesn't win. And one doesn't win if young people sulk and don't vote because they didn't get their way.
5
The Republican Party doesn't just look like a direct reaction against immigration, against diversity, against pluralism, it IS a reaction against this ethos. The word reactionary has never been more aptly applied.
And their tendencies don't look like cloud cuckooland to young adults, they look like cloud cuckooland to this 70 year old as well, and to most of my friends.
8
The problem for Conservatives is that by and large they're letting their children be taught what to think by the Left. Academia and entertainment heavily skew Far Left - it's a toss up whether Leftists or Far Leftists comprise the largest group, but while Centrists are rare, Conservatives are next to non-existent. In light of that is it any wonder that the next generation tends to vote ever further Left?
Some parents do ensure their kids are taught to think for themselves, taught Conservative values, and inoculated against Leftism, but that's a definite minority. Such kids hate what the Left advocate, and if they're not as militant as their Leftist peers they're still equally committed to the values they hold.
As people age they tend to grow more conservative, but if most Millennials and Gen Z have been taught to embrace Far Leftism, is it likely many will ever shift to a pro-American position?
@John Smythe
Please define “conservative values” to the youth of today. Your definition will not go down well with this group. The youth of today sees the corruption, hypocrisy and the overt racism,sexism and the corrupting right winged christian interference in this country,they demand change.
2
John, there are thousands of college and universities in this country are most are parochial, technical, conservative, job preparing, and many even religiously affiliated. Even the major universities that are well known as bastions of liberalism are filled with conservatives and technocratic, neoliberal departments. They are bastions of entrepreneurship and human capital development, and heavily corporatized and bureaucratic.
Rather of young adults being brainwashed into Leftist ideas, they are being trained in largely conservative institutions and being prepared to take their place in corporations that are running roughshod over our democracy.
Wish that they were bastions of liberalism!
2
@Marsha Pembroke And yet studies show that staff at those colleges fall on the extreme left of the spectrum, and increasingly even so called religiously affiliated institutions are explicit in their rejection of those same religious values. As for bastions of entrepreneurship, human capital development etc, how do you square this with the extreme identity politics and militant Marxism seen so often on campuses? Conservatives often no longer feel safe revealing their identity as such because to do so invites abuse from staff and students.
Republicans ARE working to address this problem - through redistricting and voter suppression.
8
The first dividing line is Abortion.
There are millions of Americans that will not vote to support Abortion. No matter what age they are.
Some of the younger ones in that group would consider a Democrat President...but not one that promotes abortion.
In time if our borders stay wide open ,some Democrats because of employment threat, will start looking as Republicans.
Rich and educated Democrats will not be effected by immigration. They as of now are pro open borders out of Trump Hatred.
In time though as our public schools get flooded by kids of parents that pay no property taxes ( school funding ) even those Democrats will consider sensible immigration...if there is a Democrat President....only then will they support sensible immigration..( one can go on utube and see Hillary, Kerry,,Obama,,Biden,,,all of them talking about closing the border )
Its not as simple as David pretends.
2
Gen X here. I can’t wait for the coming demographic shift so that the new generations will save us from ourselves before the GOP dinosaurs make us all extinct.
6
The issue of demographics is really secondary. Sure, declining numbers of old white people partially explains the insanity behind voter suppression, xenophobia, fear-mongering, etc. but only partially.
The fact is that the GOP is morally bankrupt. It is a zombie party - dead but staggering onward doing whatever it takes to survive. Zombie's in the party like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell will literally say anything and do anything to keep the racket going.
I don't think young people in this country are even rejecting conservatism. What we are seeing from the GOP is not conservative. rather it is a gross caricature of conservatism. Tariffs? Trashing the Constitution? Condoning the murder of journalists by foreign heads of state? Attacking the integrity of the public servants in the national security apparatus? Allowing the abuse of power by the executive branch to go unchecked? Racism?
No. Young people are not rejecting conservatism so much as they are rejecting the practitioners of the dark arts who now inhabit the GOP.
Young people in this country have picked up on the hate, hypocrisy, and dishonesty. They don't want any part of it. The same can be said of their rejection by young people of Christianity as practiced by right-wing evangelicals.
This is a profound change. We do not know what the future holds but we know that the demise of the current GOP is essential to Making America Great Again.
9
@Al Miller The Republican Party is no longer a conservative party but a reactionary one. (I can find things to respect in conservatives. I do not respect reactionaries in any way at all.)
2
This anedote explains why I am left of center on the political spectrum. During the Reagan years I was watching William F. Buckley's PBS broadcast of "Firing Line." Buckley's guest was Howard Philips a born-again member of a conservative think tank.Bill Buckley during the interview defended the rioters of Soweto in South Africa. Philips called William F. Buckley and I quote, "A Communist." William F. Buckley a Communist? From that moment on I dedicated my life and political afiliations to causes which were left of center. I was born and raised a conservative. A a child my parents forced me to pray that Richard Nixon would defeat John F. Kennedy on election night in 1960. But no more. American conservatives have lost their way. The election of Donald Trump is a glaring example of what I am posting about.
7
The only reason Republicans exist in our State Legislatures and Congress is Gerrymandering.
3
what was that old saw? a person who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a person who is not a conservative at age 40 has no brain... true or not, the trend is usually not for conservativism to lose out on power. this psychological reality combined with the lack of liberal voter turn out , as a rule, in local elections makes it unlikely that the conservatives will fade away from the political scene , unless there is an undeniable catastrophe like 20 millions of war dead that drove out the devil in Germany but even there liberalism is increasingly at risk
1
This is why the GOP's strategy right now is to cheat as much as possible to win elections and pack the courts. They know they have a dead ideology that doesn't work, so they will control the country for decades to come by having their judges overturn all democratic norms. The people who thought Trump and Clinton were the same and sat out the last election or voted third party are to blame for this country's disastrous future.
7
I read a story earlier that life may end by 2050 considering what is happening with the planet. My son is 22. I spoke to him yesterday and he said "mom, I don't even know why I'm putting money away for retirement when the planet won't even be here". I know I will never retire but I always hoped he would. He had a point though. He wondered should he take that money and just go and see the places that won't be around in 15 years due to climate change and blow off retirement? Perhaps....unless his generation gets out and votes like last time I might advise him to not save for retirement and enjoy the planet while he can.
My son is also a LGBT kid. What is the GOP offering him? NOTHING but taking his rights away. The right to parent, the right to non discrimination in housing, jobs and healthcare, and soon (mark my words on this one) to marry.
6
@Aimee A. I'm sorry for people like your son. He's been taught so many lies that as he sees it, he has no future. And in accepting that he makes it a self fulfilling prophecy. By not putting away money for retirement, by not investing property, but not taking the steps he needs to for the future, he undermines that future. The future may be an amazing place, but how many Millennials and Gen Z will be able to afford to live there?
@John Smythe
The generational disadvantages are not stories, they are facts.
Is the 1200% increase in college tuition just a lie?
1
The problem for Conservatives is that by and large they're letting their children be taught what to think by the Left. Academia and entertainment heavily skew Far Left - it's a toss up whether Leftists or Far Leftists comprise the largest group, but while Centrists are rare, Conservatives are next to non-existent. In light of that is it any wonder that the next generation tends to vote ever further Left?
Some parents do ensure their kids are taught to think for themselves, taught Conservative values, and inoculated against Leftism, but that's a definite minority. Such kids hate what the Left advocate, and if they're not as militant as their Leftist peers they're still equally committed to the values they hold.
As people age they tend to grow more conservative, but if most Millennials and Gen Z have been taught to embrace Far Leftism, is it likely many will ever shift to a pro-American position?
@John Smythe
Conservative values are the problem, as least as manifested by this administration. Ignoring science and the environment, doing nothing to address concerns about lack of access to healthcare or the cost and quality of education, basically structuring the whole system to favor corporations and the already rich, is not a way to impress intelligent young people that their future is safe in conservative hands.
1
@Mary K The problem is the science regarding climate change is highly disputed but questioning the green gravy train is professional suicide, and political suicide for those on the Left where it is an article of faith. Healthcare is a valid concern but Obamacare just made a bad situation worse. As for education, choice and alternatives to state education are the key. I agree corporations and the already rich shouldn't be privileged but that's just another reason to not vote Democrat! When the wealthy and entitled - Hollywood, Silicon Valley etc, actually show their concern rather than saying concern means vote Democrats their words might have meaning. For now Democrats seem to rely on the support of the super-rich to buy the votes of the serfs so they can pass legislation that destroys America. Trump was never my first pick, but he is the least bad option.
Yes facts just so happen to have a liberal bias.
I've spent the past twenty years of political awareness watching Republicans act like hypocritical, bible-thumping bigots. What's to like? They've lost me and every one of my millennial friends for life.
11
"A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism...."
And you expect this out of the "American carnage" party and the old straight white male, mostly from the South and West, crowd?
FAT CHANCE!
4
David, despite your predictions I can’t help but recall what I once read posted on the wall of a 50 something manager of a mostly younger staff. “Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill any day.”
2
Brooks' right leaning pseudo-centrism cannot exist withgout dishonest caricature:
"There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down.
A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed."
It's so easy to oppose liberalism when one's view of it is a strawman.
2
Oh Mr. Brooks, give me your tired, your dour, your huddled delusional conservatives yearning to be free of imagined "Liberal" views.
It's a fantasy that there is a "deep strain of pessimism" in "Liberal" multiculturalism. In the 60s, I was a relentless optimist. The racism on the TV with George Wallace and his ilk seemed doomed to the dustbin of history given its ignorance and stupidity. Or so I thought. But the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017---JUST 2 YEARS AGO proves otherwise. Racism is endemic if we mean a disease regularly found among the American people.
I am not throwing up my hands in despair. I am using heart, mind, and body to oppose racism despite of the fact that the children of the racists I confronted in the 60s continue to spew the poison of their parents.
Change is difficult, but not impossible--realizing the fact that ignorance and prejudice are rooted deeply in American life is particularly realistic.
What I am deeply pessimistic about is your claim that Conservatism (an ideology largely dominated by White people) has anything to contribute to the debate. Trump the demagogue is your party's standard bearer and it ain't pretty, Show me a conservative argument for multiculturalism.
Buckley didn't have one. He was originally a card carrying racist who had a change of heart in the 60s when he began to rail against the racist "kooks" in the South who disgusted him. Now those kooks have taken over Conservatism. Sad but true.
7
I hope you're right David but....you are not old enough to remember the 60s but a lot of those maga hat wearers voted for McGovern and the silent generation came from solid FDR families and were rabid Kennedy supporters both JFK and RFK. Those who believe in the iron rule of demographics I believe will be disappointed when these kids turn into their parents.
@jm
Those examples are a result of shifting party identities, not a result of people aging.
But Trump won, right? And you think the 2020 election won't be close?
1
@Rick
He has the lowest approval rating of any POTUS at this point since Jimmy Carter. Not saying he won’t win but he is no shoo in
Which is why, wisely, they realized that their best defense against the rising tide of diversity was to ensure that the judiciary was reliably and chronologically conservative. Going forward, as this country's voters become more democratic, the laws may likely become less so. Just take a look at abortion rights and voting rights. And as for immigration and the checks and balances of the Constitution, yesterday there was a decision, by a 2017 trump nominee to the federal bench, stating that the House lawsuit against trump's moving money around to pay for the wall, could not go forward. This decision is in conflict with another decision by a CA court. Conservative Supreme Court anyone? Will trump, mcconnell, and other right wing demagogues get what they paid for? Stay tuned.
2
Enough already with the tired canard that America is becoming majority minority! America is becoming majority mixed race. It is our totally out of date thinking that anyone with any "minority" in them is a minority. Most younger people I know realize this and don't sort people on color or race lines like older ones do "yeah, my mom is from Puerto Rico, my grandfather was Haitian, and my grandmother was a Mayflower descendant" is just a descriptor. Nothing more than saying you have brown hair or green eyes. In 100 years (assuming we are still here) people will look back in astonishment.
Why isn't more being done about gerrymandering?
3
@Caterina Because the practitioners are in power.
1
@Caterina
There are things being done to curtail gerrymandering and to challenge the current electoral boundaries. Obama & Holder are working tirelessly to do just that. We,the people, need to do out bit,and encourage our family and friends to get out and vote to take the power away from the GOP in municipal,state and federal elections.
So maybe if young people want a progressive candidate they should actually come out and vote. Desiring an outcome without action to make it happen is tantamount to wishful thinking.
5
Brooks seems to think that it is the left that sees the only option as burning American structures down. However, it seems to me that much of the right wing voted to burn them all down when they voted for Trump. The extreme alienation that characterized the "new left" in the sixties (of which I was a part) is now present in rural areas that have been left behind economically and culturally. Thus the impulse to vote for a figure that promises to destroy the present state structures.
3
And don't you feel sorry for these younger generations who will have to deal with the Republican packed Federal Court system for much of their adult lives? At every turn the Courts will swing back toward this bleak Republican philosophy. If I were young I'd be sick at heart at my and my children's future.
5
@Michael when you look at the data for voting for those aged 18-30 compared to those 50+, then no, I don’t feel sorry for them.
True enough, but many people do get more conservative as they age nonetheless -- particularly as they see their taxes rise and government spending increase, all to no avail in terms of fixing society's ills. That likely won't change simply because of your ethnicity.
2
Though I often disagree with David Brooks’ opinion pieces, I read him for his generally optimistic view of finding middle ground. But when he tosses in his little jabs at the opposition, it kind of makes me mad, like when characterizes progressive multiculturalism by saying “American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down.”
When I was younger, there was a hope that if you worked hard, you could get ahead. College didn’t put you in debt for life. You could still find full-time employment with benefits. We had a robust, if not perfect public education system in America; we were working toward including more people on the voting rolls; women and minorities were making progress in fields previously closed to them; companies used to honor their commitments to workers regarding healthcare, retirement and pensions; I could go on and on.
In my 5+ decades, the cynicism and wanton political destruction that has taken place has, for the most part, been perpetrated the GOP; by people like Newt Gingrich, the Bush administration, Grover Norquist, the Koch brothers, and most recently Mitch McConnell.
If anyone has been burning down America’s political and social structures, it’s been the libertarians and corporatists of the GOP.
3299
@KHL
Well stated, both factual and eloquent. Instead of writing my own comment, I'll support yours. I find your second paragraph particularly poignant. I got out of university in 1987, and your description in that paragraph is how the world felt then. I thought that by the time I was middle-aged (now), the world would be a noticeably better place. Not only is it not better, it's decidedly worse. And when I look at the perpetrators behind the decline of the US, I see the cynicism and destruction of the GOP. If we are not careful, the GOP will destroy this country.
348
@Teedee. Couldn't agree more. There are many VALID reasons today's young ma be a bit upset by what they see today. Why not focus on those here?
53
@KHL
I am so glad you included Grover Norquist on your list of the GOP destruction crew. IMHO to have congressmen sign an oath to his no ta x increase organisation is treason for him and the signers. Ask any congressman to give up any other Constitutional authority and imagine the answer you'd get.
167
Brooks (and most commenters) seem to miss an important difference between the anti-system young of the Sixties/Seventies and those of today. Back then, the large majority of anti-system activities, essentially ignored electoral politics, instead engaging in creating alternative institutions or actions to prevent "business as usual" by the mainstream institutions. This ranged from the establishment of free clinics, tenant unions, alternative media, and food conspiracies to civil disobedience to underground groups using violence against property (and occasionally people) to impede government actions, make a dramatic statement, or pressure private entities to do various things.
Today young people seem primarily caught up in an internet addiction designed primarily to achieve electoral results, oblivious to the fact that the electoral changes of the Sixties and Seventies, which largely concerned Civil Rights and the Viet Nam War but also women's, gay, and disability issues, essentially resulted from millions of people "taking to the streets" in many ways other than demonstrations. Electoral progress resulted from substantial non-electoral pressure put in place by people willing to take individual and personal risks.
The $64,000 question: will a generation of younger folks worried about microagressions and demanding colleges provide them with a "safe emotional space" be prepared to become their generation's, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman?
3
Republicans may have not have "found a meaningful way to address their party’s generation gap," but if so, progressives could take more hope if the Democratic Party had the prescience, the inspiration and the drive to capitalize on this clear demographic advantage.
As David Leonhardt reported two years ago, the voting rate among 18-44 year-olds in 2016 was 50%; for those over 65, it was 71%. In response Democratic grandees are now moving to protect its moderate incumbents against the insurgency of younger progressives. The old guard possesses all the élan of a cheap dollar-store toupée.
America is not alone in failing to inspire the youth vote. If the young had voted in greater numbers in the UK, the unholy Brexit mess tearing that country apart today would be nothing more than a narrowly-dodged bad memory.
2
The Republicans know time is running out therefore their best move is to get as much as they can, while they can. There is little/no concern for future generations and the assumption seems to be that if you amass enough money, your descendants can buy their way out of stuff like a changing climate.
5
I find it striking that even Brooks ideal conservative path forward relies on twisting and denigrating opponents' views (i.e. "there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism...").
But I've always found the GOP to be the more pessimistic of the two parties.
Though there are differences of opinion on the left about whether incremental or radical change is most productive, it's at least clear that the left believes there are large challenges in the world which we can meet collectively.
Where is the right-wing optimism on that front? Where are the platitudes about exceptionalism when we're trying to provide health care, or education, or other services?
To the right, the greatest country in the world can never afford anything but more guns. To the right, compassion encourages sloth and only dog eat dog crony capitalism will properly incentivize the poor to rise from their contemptible station.
3
Once you've eliminated all the other options, the remaining one must be correct.
Conservatives are doomed tat the ballot box unless they change, but they are not changing.
Conclusion: they will do away with the ballot box. See: gerrymandering, not letting felons vote, and, coming soon, straight-up violence. 84% of police officers supported Trump in 2016. He's also got a majority of the armed forces.
3
What do Republicans have to say to younger voters? Among other things:
1. Obama and Biden and Pelosi and Schumer were wrong when they said that high unemployment and low economic growth were the "new normal."
2. If you want realistically to get control over your student debt, you need the Republican formula of de-regulation, tax cuts and strong economic growth, so that you can get a good paying job with income-growth potential.
3. If you want to have a better society, we need to return to the principles that founded and guided our country for 200 years. Diversity has been perverted into identity politics. And victimhood is sapping our civil society.
4. Democrats have been running our big cities and our big school districts for the last 60 years. And those cities and school districts are disasters.
5. Shake off the chains of Progressive illiberalism and enjoy freedom and opportunity once again.
The real apocalypse is what is happening to the Democrat party as it falls into identify-politics factionalism, endless victimhood and attacks on white males. The Dem party will once again ignore reality, nominate a socialist, and lose badly in 2020.
2
@Uysses
The United States does not have a "Democrat Party" (though Thailand does). We have a Democratic Party. And I am sad to say that those to call that party the "Democrat Party" align themselves with race hatred, even if they do not themselves directly participated in race hatred. It really is this simple, Mr Ulysses.
2
@Wise Alphonse’s No, it’s not. It just a way of gently poking fun at the Democratic Party and its pretensions. If you’re offended by that and spin racist conspiracies therefrom, the Democratic Party is in worse shape than I thought.
1
So, sell them on the principles that the GOP no longer believes? Awesome.
Tell them that if they care about the cities and public schools that Republicans abandoned out of racism, vote Republican? Makes sense.
Tell them that Obama was wrong about the economy by pointing to things he never said? Sure, why the heck not.
It isn't just the Millennials and Generation Z. It's those of us Boomers who were always left of center, who never went through the supposed "Big Chill," and indeed went through experiences that only increased our cynicism about the status quo and conventional wisdom and our desire for change.
Thirty years ago, I could and did vote for the occasional (very occasional) Republican. No longer. I would no more vote for Trump or his enablers than I would vote for Benito Mussolini or Augusto Pinochet.
By the way, purveyors of conventional wisdom might be surprised at how many Boomers of my acquaintance were ardent supporters of Bernie Sanders.
900
People did vote for Mussolini but nobody voted for Pinochet. That difference really does matter. Casting "illiberal democrats" beyond the pale only invites them (and their supporters) to reject liberalism in the name of democracy.
3
@Pdxtran
Same with my friends and acquaintances.
9
@Pdxtran I agree. I am generation X. I consider myself a moderate. Now I cannot ever see voting for that pack of spineless hypocrites. I want to see a president that works to improve our lives inside these borders in meaningful ways. The GOP are distracting folks from unfunded roads and programs in the US by focusing on China, Canada, Mexico, Iran and anything else but the reality of their inadequacies. I feel sorry for the moderates inside the GOP. I expect that they will chew them all up and spit them out soon.
35
I usually like to point out the inaccuracies involved with polling young people, polling in general really, but these figures seem about right. They definitely have my number pegged. Under 35 and actively hostile to the GOP.
I am conservative on some issues. I think environmental conservation and climate change are inherently conservative. Don't destroy what you don't know how to fix. That's a pretty conservative position. However, the GOP obviously aren't doing themselves any favors in this category either.
That doesn't mean I'll take Democrats carte blanche though. That's the point 50+ liberals don't seem to understand. Just because young people hate the GOP doesn't mean they like, or will vote, for you.
Right now Boomers and Millennials represent almost the exact same proportion of the voting electorate. Younger voters expect equal representation in their candidates and their policies. Democrats so far have been mostly unwillingly to provide that representation. Exhibit A: HRC.
The GOP won't melt down until Democrats shape up. They're currently taking Republican weakness among young voters for granted. That needs to change or the GOP is going to continuing out-performing their demographic vulnerability.
That's a good argument against Joe Biden in 2020.
1
It's odd that Brooks doesn't take a look at what young Conservatism does look like in this country - it's the self-conscious trangressiveness of the alt-right + the fervor of evangelicals.
So, just as mainstream Republicanism has been replaced with Fox and MAGA and doublethink, the youth are doing the same with ramped-up intensity - even more explicit racism, transphobia and misogyny.
2
I suppose it's SO MUCH EASIER to write a column if facts don't matter to you. Brooks for much of the 20th Century describes one of the two defining gaps of politics as gender, with women preferring Democrats. I have lived longer and have paid closer attention to numerical facts than Mr. Brooks and I had a different impression. So I went to Jo Freeman's excellent enumeration of the gender gap in presidential elections beginning when women got the vote nation-wide in 1920. Overwhelmingly women in the 20th Century preferred Republicans, in several cases providing the margin of victory. Even where a Democrat won a majority of the female vote (eg FDR) often women gave less of a victory margin than men did. I myself looked at the early 20th Century elections where only a few states let women vote. There weren't a lot of polls but obviously women voted mainly Republican.
Brooks, you're a millionaire being paid big bucks. If you're allergic to numerical facts, hire a poor grad student to fact-check your work. It won't cost much.
3
Look at the GOP. They are wrong in nearly every sense of the word. I'm an "older white voter" and I'd never vote for them as things stand now. They deny climate change. They want to steal money from workers. They want to pay off the rich. They want to use religion to further their agenda. They deny that all people are created equal. They want to treat women like chattels. they want to rob, steal and cheat to keep old white man supremacy.
How could anyone who can string two thoughts together EVER vote for them.
6
“We cannot go back to the old ways, we have got to go forward with a new and progressive agenda.” — Senator Bernie Sanders
#NoMiddleGround
#BERNIE2020
2
Oh, poor David Brooks. He is getting closer and closer to the realization that there was never much 'thought' behind conservative thinking. Movement conservatism was always a cover for the rich and powerful to take more riches and power. Brooks fell for his own propaganda. Sad. Better late then never.
4
It's the Christians. The Christians! Don't forget the Christians. All my life the Christians have been leading us into ugly war after ugly war. The Christians stuff our jails like no other country. The Christians promote Republican blaming of the poor for their poverty. The Christians sustain the high rate of gun deaths in America and promote abortions through poverty and lack of opportunity and distress. The Christians have killed millions of poor people from S.E.Asia to the Middle East. The American swamp is a Christian cesspool that kills, incarcerates, impoverishes, and destroys. REPUBLICANISM is it's name! Fascism is it's form.
2
But David, a decade ago the New York Times and other liberal media loudly declared that the GOP was dead. How can there be an apocalypse on an organization that is gone? Or were you wrong then and are you wrong now?
1
Pitch for follow-up: ...and this is why the GOP does everything possible to disenfranchise voters. This is why they purge the rolls, gerrymander, move polling places, restrict early voting, resist logical reforms etc. They know that the only way to stay viable and fight this math is to prevent as many of these younger and more diverse people as possible from voting.
5
But, wait... In 20 years more or less, 70% of the US Population will live in only 15 States. That means 30% of the people will control 70% of the Senate.
That 30% will not be the minority-majority Brooks discusses. Indeed that 30% will barely resemble the rest of the country. How will we withstand that pressure? I fear our institutions will not survive.
2
After Obama won in 2012 the GOP said it needed to broaden its tent, reach out to minorities. There weren't enough older when men to keep them in power.
Instead they narrowed the ten. They doubled-down on securing the vote of older whites, using gerrymandering, voter suppression, every possible scheme to limit voting by minorities and the poor who tend to vote Democratic.
It's been working. But unless something changes, there should be a shift to Democratic power as whites die off.
Republicans are not going to go down without a fight. They have money and an end justifies the means approach to politics.
I hope I live long enough to see Democrats take over so there's hope for the future.
5
Let us do the essentials: the young must vote and change the anachronistic electoral college. All others is hogwash.
William F. Buckley must be rolling in his grave at what the republican party has become.
That GOP sage, Bobby Jindall said it best: the republican party IS the party of stupid.
It's no coincidence that educated people in metropolitan areas of this country are democrats. The more education you have, the more glaring GOP hypocrisy and lies and living in a diverse society tends to make people embrace diversity;
With education and thought, the more destructive and cruel appears the GOP's gerrymandering and voter suppression.
The more you know, the more despicable the GOP demonizing the poor, denying millions healthcare, denying women their rights, stifling labor, bashing immigrants and promoting overt racism among the GOP base, and the more insane the GOP's support for the NRA and weapons of war.
The GOP has become the party of ignorant resentment of "snobs" who "talk down to them" or "don't listen to them", those "snobs" who simply think decent education, healthcare, living wages for all is good.
The GOP has become the party of the ignorant, resentful, deluded, in other words, the party of Trump. And the rest of us will not soon forgive the GOP it's stupidity or its sins.
9
"Today's Republicans" are Trumpsters. They are immune to logic and impervious to empathy. They are defined by their ignorance, belligerence & tolerance of corruption.
May they be extinct very soon!
9
David, constantly lamenting the destruction of a party that was always regressive, corporatist, racist. Now add science-denial, voter supression, Christian Nationalism and The Cult of Trump - yet he’s still a Republican!
What values keep you there, David? Or are we to have another article apologizing with false equivalence?
9
The Republican party may well lose it's power over time because of the changing demographics and response to our current events and history over the last 50 years but we are seeing them do everything in their power to stop it. They are now blatantly corrupt and willing to openly lie and defy our laws in their abandonment of our Constitution.
Until voting is seen as everyone's civic duty we will continue to see the GOP power grabs and egregious Constitutional crimes. It would serve this Democracy well to mandate voting with the government creating the infrastructure and funding that would provide easily accessible methods for citizens to execute their most important right. This would include secure the voting system against intrusion and manipulation. Gerrymandering must end. Hidden and large donations from PAC's must be stopped and made illegal. Government funding should be allocated for candidates and elections that provide a level playing field for all. This would stop us from being told who to vote for by those who now can afford to fund candidates they want to have in place. We have bought and paid for leadership. The Republicans and Dems both are complicit. Until we level the playing field, the American people will never get to choose who they want. We will be forced into accepting whoever has the most money to get elected.
2
Conservative Republicans do not exist. There exists the Democratic Party, with a moderate (conservative) wing, and the Anti-government Party.
Somehow the Republican party has to figure out how to help the millions of Americans who suffer from high levels of job and economic insecurity, living paycheck to paycheck, without the certainty of health care when they need it, with high levels of college debt, with the uncertainties of old age security, with the knowledge that very wealthy Americans keep getting richer while they have greater struggles, with health and addiction problems, and on and on. Republican politicians have managed to hold onto their primarily rural constituency mostly through cultural and ethnic biases, a currently anti-immigration stance, low taxation policies (including for the rich), and pronouncements that the past will become the present, but those will no longer work with the young, or with middle and older Americans who are becoming increasingly disillusioned with them (as seen in the last election). If Republicans continue to shy away from developing any serious, workable conservative programs and policies that will significantly help average Americans, they will be a party of the past. It is only a matter of time.
I hope that you are right...that the GOP is heading to an Grand Old End. However, I know quite a few old hippies who marched in their day. They are now avid FOX watchers. Now that is terrifying.
1
A bigger factor is urban vs. suburban/rural.
Look at any election map in the last 10 years and this is clearly the deciding factor. Cities vote Democrat, suburbs & rural vote Republican.
1
The lashing out against Trump and the Republican Party by so many Democratic candidates surely reflects the urgent need to unseat an unfit president---many consider him unhinged.
He's the reality television president. Everything's staged. Thus, he's been relentlessly overexposed. People tire of melodrama and televised repetition. His public presence is going to do him in.
For the life of me, I can't understand why the GOP has hitched its star to Donald Trump when it's so obvious that their long-term survival would be far better served by dumping the man. The only explanations are that the GOP is incredibly shortsighted, or really are horrific thugs who believe they can build a dictatorship, or both.
3
@Brookhawk The actual party hasn't hitched itself to Trump, as it's pre-election strong desire that Trump not become President shows. The party has minimal power. It's simply in most GOP office holders' selfish immediate interest to be re-elected. That's absolutely all they care about. The twists of L. Graham show that more than anything. "Horrific thugs" describes them quite well.
The GOP is in no danger as long as the Electoral College remains in place. The Electoral College guarantees older, less educated, more racially resentful whites keep a decisive advantage in electing the president, which translates into an advantage in the courts, in defining the values of the US, and in determining the future of the country.
All that will happen is the American population will find itself hostage of an ever shrinking, ever more resentful, and ever more ignorant white minority. In this regard, the US is in a position not too dissimilar to that of Islamic nations whose destinies are defined by the most retrograde among their people.
3
Nothing will stop the GOP. If they don’t like the outcomes as suggested, they will get their thuggish cronies, via the census, courts and statehouses, to gerrymander the results.
2
The GOP stands for guns, tax cuts (for billionaires) and abortion judges. Their complicity with team trump to get their goals demonstrates they are morally bankrupt. No sane young person wants to have anything to do with them.
6
@ C.L.S.
Brooks could even call himself a moderate Dem and that would be fine.
Mr. Brooks, you ask from the conservatives "what do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in?" They answered that question a long time ago. Gerrymander, build a wall, pack the courts, steal elections, and obstruct in every conceivable way efforts to reveal them for what they really are. Oh, did I mention enable a racist, narcissist to accomplish all of the above.
8
"Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young"
Bob Dylan
3
What is the interest in Russia by the Republican party. What makes a communist dictator acceptable? While the Republican party has for some time moving to world domination, I wonder whether they consider why Putin would ever be an ally much less Donald Trump. His language is configured to reverse perception of his actions. Everything out of his mouth is "fake".
1
What you call diversity, Mr. Brooks, others would call defense of a way of life.
It's a wonder that conservatism has lasted as long as it has. The generation in their 70's and 80's today were the original conservatives back in the 1960's and 1970's. During their lifetime, their primary principal was to preserve the status quo and avoid progressive changes to government and society. As the conservative movement grew to control more and more power, it used its lack of empathy and greed to continually tilt the scales in its favor. This is reaching its pinnacle today.
However, as its members become older, grouchier, and more rascist, their conservative ideals morphed into something different and ugly. Trump is no different from your boring old uncle who sits in front of the TV cursing at people. This is your Republican party today. The GOP's remaining purpose is to prevent change and go backwards, like any senior citizen wishing for the good old days. What old racist guy complaining about the changing demographic of America worries about preserving the country for the future generations?
Today conservatives are outnumbered and their message doesn't resonate with anyone who doesn't remember these glory days. Old guys grasping to protect a disappearing past at the expense of today and tomorrow.
Conservatism is dead. Soon the GOP will need a complete makeover if the Republican brand doesn't become another term for fascism.
Well, that's one thing you can't gerrymander!
The question is not whether there is a Democratic Party majority in the US.
There clearly already is.
Hillary, as flawed as she is, won the popular vote by 3M votes.
There is this pesky thing called the Electoral College, and the way the Senate is immune from demographic shifts and massively over-represents rural aka conservative states.
Republicans have done a great job politically at stacking the courts at all levels. Our most revered leader as Democrats, Barack Obama, folded his tent and limped away from getting his constitutionally requires Supreme Court judge rather than burn down McConnellville. GOP was willing to napalm Obamatown.
The fact that Pelosi and Schumer are still hemming and hawing about Impeachment tells you that there are no limits on GOP when they are in power.
4
@JerseyJon - Our entire federal government is now set up to secure rule by the minority. Twice in 16 years the Democrat has won the popular vote and lost in the anti-democratic EC. The Senate, with only 2 senators per state, regardless of population, was always designed to privilege the smaller states - not deliberately, but as part of an unwise compromise. In 2016, Senate Democrats got 20 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans kept the majority. In 2018, Senate Democrats got "only" 11.5 million more votes, and lost seats.
In 2016, House Democrats got 3 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans kept a 23 sweat majority, thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression. In 2018, Democrats turned out in force and won 40 seats in the House. But the last time Democrats turned out in such numbers, they won 60 seats. History shows that countries can be ruled for decades by a minority party, if there's an authoritarian ruler, but eventually citizens rise up in revolt.
Yes, obviously those over 40 who don't support Trump "have no brain." I think that adage is finally blown out of the water. On a side note: Always keep in mind when reading Mr. Brooks that his mentor, as he admits, was William F. Buckley--that great intellect who was wrong about virtually every issue-including support for segregation.
3
Sounds more like wishful thinking on David's part. The proof is in the pudding and we'll see what happens a year from November. If Biden runs, I think the Dems have a shot. If one of the Dem liberal socialists runs, my take is forget it and get used to Trump for another four years.
2
If you support modern republicanism... you are making money off it or you're too ignorant to know better. It really is that simple... so it's no surprise that an entire subset of people without anything to gain from supporting obvious insanity, do not support insanity.
It's only when their palms start getting greased that they start making deals with themselves about what they'll tolerate... that doesn't come until they've networked for a few years and had a lot of their faith in the goodness of society bled from them by the competitive and unfeeling beast that we actually are.
“The most burning question for conservatives should be: What do we have to say to young adults and about the diverse world they are living in?”
Oh, I know! “Please don’t leave me to die in a nursing home.”
“To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.”
As they should.
2
Census Bureau data shows the United States is currently 76.6 percent white, up from 75.1 percent in 2000. The Census Bureau projects that whites will make up 77.5 percent of the U.S. population in 2060, but that is based on an expected influx of immigrants from Asia that may not take place. If the anticipated Asian influx does not take place, whites will be a larger percent of the population in 2060.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf
Most Hispanic Americans are white. Census Bureau data shows 26.7 million of the nation’s 50.5 million Hispanics are white. Intermarriage between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites is so common that it is unlikely a distinction will be based between the two ethnic groups by 2060.
Table 6: Hispanic or Latino Population by Type of Origins and Race: 2010
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-04.pdf
This is a time when in which people have either forgotten or don’t know history-any history beyond the latest episode of the Batchelor or GOT. Cause and effect are concepts Americans can’t seem to grasp anymore, and we will suffer for it, but our children and their children will suffer worse if we don’t wake up. Conservatism doesn’t mean, ‘take and hold on to all you can grab’, and liberalism isn’t just giving it all away. Time to listen to those who are suffering and help instead of criminalizing them; time to vote the windbags out and pay attention to getting a society educated again.
This op-ed is interesting but ignores the point: The young people historically DO NOT VOTE so who they support is not important from a share standpoint.
And supporting Sanders? Forget whether I agree with him or not--that's irrelevant. The older voters are correct. He doesn't seem equipped to beat Trump.
5
Today’s GOP is the party of the 1 percent. This is clear from the policies they enact once in power: loosening of regulations, tax cuts for the rich etc. But 1 percent won’t win elections, hence the culture wars. Fortunately we’ve made progress on sexual identity but abortion, racism, guns, science denial, religious fundamentalism, and immigration are still fertile ground for exploitation.
I lived in California under the despicable Pete Wilson administration, hopefully the old adage “as California goes, so goes the nation” still rings true, as this article predicts.
Brooks would be better served as a Democrat pulling toward the center than one who has abetted the GOP assault on morality by lending intellectual credence to a party that bears no resemblance to true conservatism.
1
It seems oldsters judge a politician by what they say. It appears the younger of use attend to what they do.
I am ever so grateful for the younger Americans.
3
However conservatives in general and Republicans in particular may strive to overcome this most recent existential crisis of theirs, they'd do well to keep in mind that post-war Republicans' so-called "southern strategy" is deeply rooted in the "Compromise of 1877," by which Rutherford "His Fraudulency" Hayes and wife, "Lemonade Lucy," became legitimate residents of the White House.
Dividing the vote according to age, sex, party, region, religion, etc. is a retrograde step. The country needs to advance; the division should be based on those who want the country to advance and keep it in step with the rest of the world and those who are stuck in the status quo. It is time that the voter, irrespective of his/her current affiliation and belief system, think anew, and vote according to the needs of the country as a whole.
Our major issues are gross inequality, a corrupt and biased system of financing elections, lack of universal healthcare, and lack of affordable higher education, a deteriorating environment, global warming which is already showing up as more severe hurricanes, more tornadoes, and more deadly fires. No previous or current philosophy of governance is able to address all these issues simultaneously. We must come out of our self-imposed cages and clearly think what will work.
The current crop of Democratic candidates offer some hope. At this time, there are too many of them; in a few more months, the more promising ones will emerge. The commentators, like Brooks, in the meantime should concentrate their energy and writing skills on the immediate needs of the country and what needs to be done instead of doing sterile and frivolous analysis of voter preferences.
2
Brooks continues to ise the Republican-Party-approved playbook unabashedly. When you can’t come up with a cogent, honest argument for your side, lie. First comes the blatant lie that
Republicans have only recently become reactionary. The Republican Party has been reactionary, not conservative, for the six decades I have been observing it. Growing up in a small town filled with Republicans, I saw and heard the same frightened, ignorant reactionary bigotry that I see today from the right. Republican politicians used basically the same lies and fear to herd their base sixty years ago as they use today. Second, he naturally goes to the playbook for standard right-wing nonsense used to attack the Left: his posited “deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism” is nothing more than a disingenuous right-wing straw man flogged by racist reactionary Republicans projecting their own sins. The problem with the American project, as actual progressives see it, is not that it itself is fatally flawed, it’s that the sanitized history of it is. The majority of progressives actually want to change American structures for the better, not burn them down. The real progressives in the Democratic Party are doing what Brooks suggests.
If Brooks’ beloved Party is dying, that is a good thing. It means America is progressing intellectually and morally as humanity always has: young people make progress which can become permanent only when the stultified old guard dies out.
5
You are missing the point. Young educated people know what is right and good. They believe that the world can be better. They know that rejecting the hate spewed by Republicans is the way to make the world a better place.
4
To pick just one issue that the Republicans are bungling horribly ------- Climate Change. The current High School graduating class calls themselves the "Class of Zero" that advocates zero emissions, zero delays, and zero excuses by politicians for not addressing Climate Change. It is becoming a major movement, and I doubt many Republicans are among these young people.
I hate the word "existential" because it sounds elitist and snobbish. I prefer to say that "our very existence" depends on curbing Climate Change. And the major burden will fall to the younger generation.
Greta Thunberg has made it a point to chastise us non-millennials, saying: "You did not act in time."
3
Brooks gets it wrong again. Yes there is a demographic bullet train about to run over the “conservative agenda”, but this idea that “there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism” is pure hogwash.
Progressive Multiculturalism is the expression of the optimism that we all can, in fact, live together and celebrate our different contributions to a thriving pluralistic society.
Some of us old boomers got the clue in 1969 and the Millenials and Gen Z are picking it up en masse:
We can be together
Ah, You and me.
We should be together ...
We are all outlaws in the eyes of (republican) America...
We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent,
and young. (so trump says)
...
We must begin, here and now...
Tear down the walls
Tear down the walls
...
Won’t you try?
We are finally getting some traction on that.
I'm not so sure I would dismiss the delusions of a minority of the American People. The Republican Party has not be relevant to America for at least 40 years, yet here we are with a House that just barely squeaked by with a Dem majority , a Senate dominated by ultra right wing fanatics and a "president" who embraces the most delusional aspects of what used to be commonly understood to be delusional by normal people.
Over the past 40 years it seemed that every few years the Repubs did such outrageous acts against the American people that all normal people would think "this has to be the end of them." Nope, they just keep coming back with more idiocy. Anti-education, anti-health care, anti-environment, anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-immigration. Pro-gun deaths, pro-pollution, pro-rich over everyone else.
The fact is that our political structure builds in a heavy right wing bias due to the gross imbalance of low-population right wing states represented by the Senate and the right wing bias of the Electoral College. No one can be President without being at least center-right. Obama and H Clinton were both center-right as was Bill Clinton (only someone without worldly education would think they were anything but center right conservatives).
So, no, there will not be an "apocalypse" for the GOP any time soon. Their control by the minority is built into the Constitution and will not be dislodged by the majority of the American People who despise their delusions
6
Best news ever!!!!. Great piece Mr. Brooks. Keep these coming!
This is a red herring. Young people have ALWAYS been liberal with small exception. It’s a time of idealism and optimism and of course change is the order of the day. As they grow up they realize the value of stability and institutions and become more conservative. This is well documented and I don’t believe personally much has changed but the volume knob.
2
@Sam
But the Republican Party stands for neither stability nor institutions. It is rapidly tearing apart institutions like the Supreme Court, the Senate, and non-partisan media in order to shove a hardline agenda down the throats of a young, urban population which actively hates its principles.
I'm one of the young voters Mr. Brooks alludes to and in no way do I perceive this as contest between pragmatic conservatism and optimistic idealism. Liberal voices today are addressing fundamental problems with democracy - like inequality, systemic discrimination, and an increasingly diverse society - with ambitious but reasonable and considered policy. Moreover, as far as I'm concerned, climate change is an existential threat, and liberal voices are the only ones addressing it seriously.
Conversely, not one iota of 'the value of stability and institutions' has come across in the Republican messaging. To the contrary, that party has sought to ban my friends and loved ones from the country, strip my family of healthcare, and trade long-term environmental health for extractive corporations' shareholder value which will never accrue to me or mine in any significant way. All the while, it has vilified and demonised nearly every demographic to which everyone I care about belongs.
Does anyone really think that millennials are going to turn around and vote for the party of stripping parents from their kids, drilling national parks, controlling women's bodies, and taking healthcare?
4
Not in the eighties...
Conservatives won the election by digging in and sticking to their guns. 'Firing' up their base. Their entire thought process is linear. It's a scientific approach- economics and military. This approach has been maxed out, reached its zenith. The country is in need of cultural innovation and compassionate politics, long overdo especially in conservative states, their own backyard (ironic); the poor rural areas are the new inner cities, hollowed out by drug addiction and lack of resources: Ohio, Iowa, Oklahoma. Check your local trailer park. There is little opportunity in these areas and they mimic the poor inner cities except for the fact that white flight is now moving in reverse (to the inner city). The republican party won't be able to recover by doing the exact thing they've been doing, digging in and fighting: this is all they know. Young people want more compassion in politics/economics- animal rights, environmental protections, less capitalism motivated by greed/breakneck profit seeking. As a conservative thinker, I do not tie myself to political thought. This is why I cannot vote for a republican because they are unable to see the bigger picture and the core needs of the country.
1
Not blind. Stumbling mean. Since Reagan, then Gingrich, now McConnell, Republicans have grown increasingly disdainful of working Americans culminating in a party that works against the common good.
4
Whats frustrating is that if young people had come out and voted their numbers in the past few decades their votes would have stopped the power the Republicans have managed to accumulate. Now it may be too late.
5
@terri smith - The Senate and the EC are anti-democratic in that Democrats routinely get more votes but Republicans hold control. The same has become true at the House level as well, thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression. It's estimated that Democrats have to get 8% more votes than Republicans just to break even. It's not at all helpful to blame the results on young people, or on old people either, for that matter. It's time for the country to wake up and realize that with population shifts, we're destined to have more and more rule by the minority. If the country doesn't manage to rectify this flawed design (it won't happen in my lifetime), we'll eventually split apart.
There are anti immigrant groups in Europe as well as the US and with both sides the countries where they are coming from are totally different. I wonder how Americans would react if the groups were reversed.
Republicans know this, which is why they are trying to put the citizenship question on the census and are involved in all sorts of voter suppression. It’s the only way they can hold onto power. As it is why right now we are minority ruled due to gerrymandering.
3
The old guard wants to slice up the pie with a little helping for everyone...the new generation wants everyone to take as much pie as they want.
They think their parent’s pie is all that they will need.
They better think again!
1
Thanks for ignoring Gen X again, and dismissing whatever influence we may have. Gen X may be sandwiched between two larger generations, but our numbers are sufficient enough to tip the balance one way or another (much like a swing vote on the Supreme Court). Such "balance-tipping" leverage should be more-closely examined, as it will better reveal Gen X's influence in charting our Nation's direction over the next several years (assuming that we are indeed in the midst of a generational conflict). In the alternative, you can continue to ignore us . . . at your peril . . . whatever.
2
David Brooks is wrong as usual. It is the Democrats who face the Demographic apocalypse. The baby boomers, who at one time were the most liberal generation in history, are now the bulwark of the Republican party. Because of the sheer size of this generation, they are likely to dominate politics for another 15 years or so. By then, the genXers and the millennials will have had enough of big taxes and big government, and will also be voting Republican. Of course, fifteen years hence, another pundit will be claiming that the Republicans will be facing another demographic crisis, because yet another generation of young people will be more liberal than their parents.
2
Strange how hard Boomers cling to their presumed liberalism of the 60's. When you look at the actual numbers liberal Boomers were the minority in the 60's. Anti war movement was more accurately labelled the "don't draft me" movement. A precious few stood up for the rights of the minorities.
Those same people adopted hedonism in the 70's. The Reagan riech in the 80's and fully embodied the "Greed is good" mantra.
We have this messed up world to show for it.
Not surprising! Our country's academic institutions have done a thorough job at indoctrinating young people into left leaning socialist views. As we speak, college campuses silence the voices and influence of conservatives intellectuals like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and many others. Young people who have never lived on their own and many from privileged backgrounds tend to take for granted--or just have no clue--the institutions that maintain their liberty and enabled their priviledge. . .Conservatives are needed more than ever to inform and guide these youths on just what we are trying to conserve and what we risk destroying by trading in the Founder's project for a socialist pie in the sky.
2
One of the key realities in all of what we see today (and much of it is very painful to experience) is that change is constant and change cannot be denied. The fact that the courts are being stacked, voting districts are being gerrymandered, congress is clogged up with bad apples like McConnell and any other nasty trickery that can be conjured up by the Republicans (and/or is that the Russians)...etc, all of these factors will eventually dissolve and balance will be restored.
1
For a thoroughly documented analysis of this generational divide in values and its polarizing political effects in the US, the UK and across Europe, read Cultural Backlash, Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. I found it very illuminating.
Great article Mr. Brooks. I would add that the electoral college system and gerrymandering in general have exacerbated the generational political gap, over frustrating a majority of Millennials, Gen-Z'rs etc. It's unbelievable that in the 21st century some states want to go back to pre-Roe v Wade obscurantism or erase evolution from their curriculum...
Good column--always a relief to see Mr. Brooks using actual numbers, as opposed to wishful thinking. (Something The Times needs much, much more of.)
The problem with predicting the rise of the Democrats surfing a demographic wave is that coalitions that big tend to fracture in the only battle that finally counts: the divvying-up of governmental spoils. Once Trump departs as a unifying force for the left, then the internal bloodletting will begin--we can see hints of the fractures in the emerging Presidential primaries: everyone vs. Joe. A year to go and the long-knives are already out.
Who needs "multiculturalism" when most white men and enormous chunks of white college educated women vote Republican?
Republicans will embrace multiculturalism when self interest forces them to.
Till then, underlying (sometimes overt) racism will continue to drive the agenda of their party and many individuals in it.
1
I, for one, am happy to hear that the Republicans don't see the train running over them -- their performance or lack thereof has been a disgrace...their hatred for everything they consider "the other", which is almost the entire country has been disheartening to watch. They appoint judges as if the majority of the country has no say and should have no representation at all. They are still talking about Bork and the so-called injustice that was done to them by Democrats who were doing their job. They forget that Bork's opinions and his partisanship were the factors that helped him lose that seat. Reagan knew it and what did Reagan do, he appointed Kennedy who was a conservative and seemed for most of his years on the bench to understand that he represented ALL Americans. Now, what did we get -- Gorsuch and Kavanaugh (who is talking about Clinton Conspiracies instead of taking responsibility for his bad behavior) -- the Clinton Conspiracies line should have disqualified him, but no, now we have ultra partisan justices who care nothing for the majority and hate anyone who doesn't think like they do. So, let that train roll right over them -- they surely deserve it.
7
THere is an older saying that goes something like, "if you are young, and you don't vote Democrat, you don't have a heart; but if you are older and don't vote Republican, you don't have a brain."
As millennials age, they will see the folly and expense of bloated government and the cost of this ideology to them personally. Many will become more Republican. At the same time, the Republican party will become far more socially moderate.
Most Americans, outside of the New York and CA, are moderates who want to find common ground. It is the political class that refuses to appear weak to their outer wing supporters who are afraid to bend. This needs to change. And by then, CA, Chicago, and NY will all be broke anyhow
2
" They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world."
I'd love to see a thoughtful piece from you, Mr. Brooks, explaining why US conservatives place so much importance on empty words like "best" and "greatest." These words offer praise without content or specificity, presenting what they celebrate as a self-evident truth and an article of religious faith. America is the greatest because it is the greatest, and good citizens accept this as an article of faith. In this context, asking exactly why or how America is "the greatest country" smacks of blasphemy.
Is it really necessary to believe that your country is "the greatest" to love it? Do people in Germay, Russia, Sweden, or Peru obsess over whether their fellow citizens believe that their country is "the best?" Or do they recognize "best" and "greatest" for the childish, narcissistic blandishments that they are?
4
The scariest aspect of this insightful column? That desperate times will call for desperate measures. We may see a return to the turbulent late 1960s when a similar generational change was not accomplished without considerable violence.
1
The end of the GOP and its coterie of moralistic old white men cannot happen soon enough.
I am 70 and probably won't live to see the demise of the GOP. I wish it would happen sooner. It isn't just that we share a difference of opinion. Their opinion is irrelevant because it is not backed by facts and science.
Their beliefs are based on fear, lack of education, lack of exposure to different kinds of people, belief in an unproven fairy tale called religion, anti-intellectualism, and a healthy dose of hate.
They are a minority pushing around the majority by any means possible. The fact that 40% of Americans still support the worst president in American history is still a shocking statistic. The 2020 Presidential election shouldn't even be close.
America is only #1 in gun ownership, gun deaths, drug addiction, and incarcerations.
While ending slavery was a good reason to fight the Civil War, once the war was won and the slaves freed, Lincoln should have let the Confederate states secede and have their own backward, racist, born-again anti-christian Christian nation.
The South would be a third world country by now and we'd be building a wall along the Mason Dixon line to keep those poor illiterate white people out of a prosperous and humane America.
America has such potential to be a truly great country, a real beacon on a hill, but it will never happen until the Republican Party dies.
4
This thought alone captures the nonsense of this way of thinking: ". . . and the way many assimilated Hispanics would vote like non-Hispanic whites."
Such Identity Group Think is the dream of liberals, but far from reality.
1
And, as ever, Gen X gets totally ignored. Le sigh.
@Sean As a charter Gen. X member (same age as Cobain) I say, good. Let the self-important Boomers argue with the self-righteous Millennials all day. They deserve each other.
We will keep quietly doing our little work to keep the world going, raising our kids with little fuss or notice. Whatever. Never mind.
Once again, an older white male pundit has a glaring blind spot. The Republican Party simply does not exist in 2019. Yes, they have retained the name, but the Tea Party now holds sway. Newt Gingrich and Lee Atwater gave rise to the likes of Steven Miller. Donald Trump is but a Trojan rose. If a pundit such as David Brooks cannot see the forest for the trees, he needs to begin understanding the nature of Fascism. It is hatred of others which is carrying the national disintegration. The politics of LBJ and Tip O'Neil are not applicable anymore. It's all about the numbers now, and this generation has little black boxes which count every nuance. They're counting the entire country the way a Whip used to count votes in the House.
1
Age? That tells you that the variable at work is our K-12 and higher ed systems. They are dominated by Democrats and they are producing Democrats.
It may be terminal but many of us refuse to accept that US "diversity", which resulted largely from mass illegal "immigration", compounded by the continuing lunacy of Birthright Citizenship, should be accepted.
4
I’ve been of the opinion that Trump represents the death rattle of the GOP for just this reason. He’s not the harbinger of things to come or the start of a revolution, he’s the last grotesque manifestation of a dissipated, morally empty ideology.
The youth of today are overwhelmingly liberal - it’s their future and, while I don’t necessarily agree with all of their dogma, I say good for them. My only misgiving is that the Left seems as intolerant of divergent opinions as the Right, I hope they correct their course as that road leads to fascism.
5
Your best column in a year Mr Brooks!!
I am an independent never registered with either party. But mostly I voted Republican from Regan until Bush II. I never thought Regan was perfect but conservative principles, well thought out (i.e. cap & trade) and many borrowed by the Dems proliferated.
Since then the thing that Buckley did for the conservative movement (‘get rid of the racists, Birchers and kooks”) has collapsed. Since then they no longer even stand for democratic values (voter suppression and gerrymandering).
My principles were violated when a Republican state politician from NC said that “yes they were trying to gerrymander but that was because liberals were bad for America so the Rs needed to stay in power even if by undemocratic means”).
I can never vote for Republican again.......on principle.
3
No matter how liberal or progressive younger voters are in this country, it's all a moot point until they actually start showing up at the polls. Older voters do show up and that makes a difference. Texas, for example, is already majority minority, but since the Hispanic turnout and young turnout is so pathetic, the old white conservatives are still in charge.
3
As goes California, so goes the nation. California had an anti-immigrant, anti-diversity frenzy in its Republican-dominated politics in the 1990’s. It was caustic, divisive, destructive and just plain ugly. Fast forward to today: the Republican Party in California is small and rather low on power. The demographic shift happened here sooner. A glimpse at the national Republican party’s future.
1
More young voters turn out, the sooner GOP dies. This is especially important in non-presidential races. Look at the increase in young voters in recent midterm years 2014 and 2018. That's a big part of blue wave. When under 40 voters turn out like their parents the Republican party will die out.
Kaiser Family Foundation - Individuals who voted as a share of the voter population by age.
AGE 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-64 65+
YEAR
2014 17% 28% 38% 50% 59%
2016 43 % 53% 60% 67% 71%
2018 32% 42% 51% 60% 66%
1
I'm not sure Brooks needs to be so pessimistic about conservatism/Republicanism's prospects in the face of millenial liberalism and demographic diversity.
The GOP appears to have settled on a pragmatic, practical solution: To employ avery form of political brute force and skulduggery necessary to nail down their control of government, especially the judicial system with its lifetime tenure, while the opportunity exists.
"There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down."
Oh, please. What this writer calls "pessimism" is only the blunt realization that racism and the flaws hobbling America are explicit for a larger number of Americans than we'd hoped before Trump exposed the truth. And it is implicit for an even larger number of Americans, because it is human nature to think of ourselves as essentially good, enough so that we rationalize away subconscious biases, while it is often difficult to determine how such biases have infected "American structures". Oh, and let's not forget the self benefit for many in power of maintaining the flaws, lest they have to support effective ideas and stop running on fear and division.
If progressives are pessimistic, it is because they see how so-called conservatives not only fight progressive ideas, but ignore their own putative ideology. Fiscal responsibility abandoned to run up the national debt/deficit, to further enrich the rich. Christian values trampled in favor of Old Testament virtual stoning of the "guilty". The McConnells of the GOP are not true conservatives; they're the ones who would burn down the structures, rather than give up control of them.
1
In 2012, when Barack Obama won a second term, there was lots of handwringing among Republicans about what they needed to do to become relevant again. Since Trump "won" in 2016, lots of handwringing among Democrats on how they were doomed unless they descended on the "heartland" to find out where they went wrong.
Politics is cyclical. That doesn't mean I --and many others--do not fervently hope that Brooks is right, and that this era's Republican party is bound for history's ash bin. But I'm not that hopeful.
Mr. Brooks doesn't understand the young right wing. I am a mid 20's man. Everyone I know who is my age is also more right wing than the standard GOP establishment. There is a large upswell in right-wing traditional desires of the younger generation in comparison to our Woodstock-attending Gore Vidal-listening fore-bearers.
1
All the Republicans have to do is change the voting age to 40, and I would not put it past them to try!
1
Old story... Krugman was extolling this argument in the age of Bush... and now we have Trump. It's not getting better all the time, as John Lennon espoused, though I wish he were right.
I never considered myself conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, but always considered the issues at hand. I liked Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, admired John McCain, loved Obama, and respected Romney. But, considering what Republicans stand for now, and what Trump stands for as a man, there is simply no way I could ever vote Republican again. Until they change, which I expect to take a long time - they have lost their moral compass.
5
One glitch in this thinking is that "diversity" is not really a political goal, just a description of demographics. Ultimately, once the "movin' on up" energy of minority groups becomes actual power, then diversity just means people who don't have much in common. Right now "victims of historical oppression" is sort of unifying, but if these groups achieve their goals at all, that description will cease to have any meaning.
To assume that minorities, once they are not minorities, will continue as some progressive monolith, is shortsighted.
2
The column does not mention climate change, which, as a few comments have noted, surely contributes to young people's hostility to the GOP. Another factor, not mentioned in any of the comments I have seen (though I have not seen all of them, there are so many): the GOP's positively punitive attitude toward student debt. Others who find the burden intolerable can declare bankruptcy, but the Republicans made sure that does not apply to holders of student debt.
5
I am so jaded at this point. I almost see this article as lolling Democrats into some state of inevitability. I hope it is true that upcoming generations will become the adults in the room and bring back sense of values, common sense and sanity to our politics. Will this be possible with the current state of money and power and the embrace of deregulation by the rich and powerful? I would like to know, for example, why you believe the poll data you are using? Just asking....
2
The big problem with this article is use of the term "conservative thought." Conservatism today isn't about thinking -- with a few exceptions, like Brooks himself. It is about fear and loathing. Fear of change, fear of the other, fear of loss and for some this fear turns into loathing. It is also about fear of Trump. GOP leaders' prime motivation on all issues seems to be not having the beast that is Trump turn his gaze on them lest the fire follow. Their secondary motivation is doing the bidding of their paymasters like the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson. What in the world is there for a young person to like in any of this?
7
The Republican party would rather use their energy to rig the voting system than actually accept and evolve. Oh, and let's not forget about the devastating effects young people will need to deal with from global climate change which the Republican Party largely ignores or denies.
4
I'm 62, I hope I live long enough to witness the political ascendancy of the millennial, Gen Z and brown skin majority and the resulting crash of the evangelical led ultra-right wing GOP cult. You can count on my vote kids, bring it on. Oh and the idea that one gets more conservative as one ages, meh.
12
I think your analysis is spot on. I lean democratic, socially liberal, and (but?) lean fiscally conservative. I worry about the implosion of the Republican party, which now seems the party of Christianity, Big Business, guns and whiteness. Not conservatism. Really quite terrible to behold because if the party does collapse I worry about the ensuing gap in opposing views to balance our democracy in the aftermath.
1
The end of today's GOP cannot come soon enough. It will take America many years to recover from trumplicanism - and that is the best case scenario if Trump becomes a one-term president.
3
When is David Brooks going to have a "Come to Jesus" moment of clarity and declare that Trump's Republican Party has strayed so far from Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" that he is leaving that political party and joining the Big Tent of the Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party is open to people of all ages, all genders, all colors, all religious beliefs (and non-beliefs), and applies science and knowledge to make our country a better place than before for everyone.
"Reformed" Republicans are welcome. No Grover Norquist or Trump loyalty oaths required.
6
I am classified a boomer, though born at the tail end of that demographic bump, I have not felt really connected to that generation. I am an engineer by training, and naturally lean to the conservative side of things. Somehow, since about the time of Newt Gingrich's "contract with America", I have become a raging liberal... but I have not changed my views. What has changed is the definition of conservative, which now seems to align somewhere to the right of National Socialism.
Republicans used to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Three massive tax cuts later, with increased government spending, not so much. Income is increasingly distributed to the richest, income from active sources is taxed more than investment income, corporations are given cuts to spur spending on R&D and employment but it goes to stock buybacks.
Republicans argued that taxes were a means of income distribution. They have certainly proven that, as the tax cuts have moved more and more income to the 1%.
Republicans used to espouse the idea of personal liberty. Now, not so much, unless it means the ability to discriminate based on your religious beliefs or to own a gun. Otherwise, no personal freedom for you.
Republicans used to support public infrastructure, and the environment. Now, not so much.
Republicans have an ideological litmus test. How do you have new ideas when you must hew to the old.
Privatize profits; socialize costs; spend like there is no tomorrow. The wheels have fallen off the bus.
3
This is why the Republicans feel it is so vital to pack the courts with lifetime appointments professing right-wing ideology. They know they will lose eventually the demographic race, but can still maintain power through the courts. The country will be suffering with the effects of Mitch McConnell long after he is dead.
6
The “GOP”? What is it, but the following?
1. Gerrymandering—of districts and of the Supreme Court (in the latter case, by refusing to give Obama’s nomination a fair shot).
2. Turning Mueller’s report on its head through verbal deceit.
3. Extreme restricting of women’s access to medical information and medical care.
4. Orchestrated attacks on scientists and science (climate science, atmospheric science, air quality science).
4. Acceptance of inequality (economic inequality, social inequality, inequality of opportunity, inequality under the law).
5. Acceptance of racism and misogyny.
6. Cow-towing to Trump’s ludicrousness and lying.
Who benefits from any of that, except for a very few very rich “good old (white) boys”?
4
David,
I beg to differ but under Trump I believe you need to modify your thinking - it’s not “acceptance” of inequality, racism and misogyny but active “promotion”...
Brooks appears to forget that he was part of the GOP that laid the foundation for the GOP of today. Now he's crying buyer's remorse. His transparent attempts to endorse diversity and generational recognition are, to say the least, too little, too late.
3
Now we wait for the Supreme Court to decide whether
1) to give us the convenient already decided verdict in favor of enforcing changes in the census that will help maintain a gerrymandered Republican “majority”
or
2) admit new evidence that proves the Trump Administration lied to the Court regarding the purpose of the question to further their dishonest gaming of the electoral process.
If only we could have some reason to except justice over political expediency. But we all know justice is not the purpose of the Robert’s court.
Clearly Republicans have no intention of allowing anything as democratic as a majority of voters to interfere with their ruthless and immoral goal of keeping power at all costs.
Rumors of the death of the Republican Party have been greatly exaggerated.
1
The Republican elites know that the numbers aren’t with them, and that’s why they are grabbing and empowering all the non majoritarian levers of power: an unelected lifetime judiciary, a Senate that is tilted to a rural minority, money in politics, and an assist from foreign powers.
If that isn’t enough to let the minority rule permanently, so what? The goal of the Republican elite is centered around personal enrichment. The grift is the good, and generation interviewing with the federalist society today can plan on a good decade in the Vast Right Enterprise.
Asking the Republican Party to care about its future prospects is like asking oil company CEOs to worry about global climate change.
6
“But it’s hard to look at the generational data and not see long-term disaster for Republicans.”
I don’t assume such long-term disaster for Republicans is inevitable, given their track-record of doing whatever raw power-plays they need to to stay in power, including gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter misinformation, etc. Add to that the structural benefit the Electoral College (and like institutions at the state level) provide the minority-party Republicans.
Add to that the Republican voters’ high motivation to rally around, get out and vote for their “tribe,” whoever is nominated (e.g., Trump).
Meanwhile, for all their increasing numbers, the Dems also have their own structural disadvantages. After all, "diversity" reflects "different" and "unlikeness," and in each election a coalition of the "diverse" must be stitched together to support one candidate and his/her set of policies. It is in the nature of the Democratic coalition to endlessly argue with each other over progressive versus moderate policies, the need to "fall in love" with a candidate, etc. And Republicans are if nothing else masters at exploiting those divisions among Dems.
1
I am fearful... Because the demographic case for Republican failure is sound, and the steady erosion of norms of behavior in the civic space will empower the moribund party to act out in ways that we can only imagine today.
3
It’s this, yes indeed — but so much more as well. Young people are more technologically gifted, they’re educated, they have access to more information than ever before, and they have long memories. What’s coming for the current GOP isn’t just irrelevance, but justice and punishment and a reckoning — and no one will be able to say later that they didn’t deserve it.
3
Mr. Brooks has gotten to a point that he may actually believe what he says. For instance, he says that republicans, or those who vote for Trump are against migration. That is a stretch. hat Trump has been against is not immigration but control of our boarders. Repeatedly the NYT shows photos of all the people coming up from central America to cross the border with no intention of going though immigration. Reports of all the numbers, about who are not documented, are common. What a lot of people want is control of our boarders. But some in the democratic party seem to say we should have open borders with no restriction and no screening. Mr. Brooks talks about Hispanics as segment voting. But Hispanics now have some that was only p[art of politician's promises before, new jobs and the lowest unemployment ever. African Americans have been told forever of how they have been left behind. Now they have the lowest unemployment ever and that includes their youth. So, in 2020 we will see if a pay check instead of an unemployment check and decades of unfilled promises will have an impact on voting instead of age groups.
1
Ron,
No one in the Democratic Party wants unlimited immigration with no screening. It does not escape young adults' attention that the GOP constantly lies about the Democratic position on immigration etc etc etc and treats all their ideas with contempt; they want no part in it.
2
@Sherry Check out Ortez. She wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She stated that Latinos have a right to come here without limits. The others in her party may not come out to say the same thing so precisely, but by the time they take away all the things that ICE does, it would not be much more than a desk and chair.
OMG, what does David know about how young Americans think when he writes: "... there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed..." On the contrary, (although I am a boomer, I do know how progressives think, as I am one of them, and my grown children are the next leaders) we believe and know that America can do better, that we have to shed the pessimism of ageing conservatives, as embodied by Brooks, and that if we work together we can bring about change.
1
This is a very fine column, Mr. Brooks. Several authors have identified the causes of white angst and anger, while at the same time demonstrating the coming demographic shift.
Yet, somehow, Trump still won. It remains to be seen whether or not the coming apocalypse for Republicans will happen.
For the sake of the country, I hope it does.
1
As I read this article and the accompanying comments, it is apparent that there seems to be some confusion as to the exact motives of the Republican party: the Republicans have one and only one primary motive which simply put is to increase the wealth of their already well-to-do supporters; consequently, their primary interest is to enact tax cuts that strongly favor individuals with means (e.g., the Trump tax cut which is the only important piece of legislation passed by the current administration); a supporting motive is to significantly reduce the amount of money spent on the social safety net (e.g., the failed Trump health care bill) the environment, and other initiatives to help the majority of Americans. Simply put, the well-to-do Republicans are not interested in supporting the safety net and other initiatives because their increasing bankrolls allow them to buy good health care, avoid the dangers of environmental deterioration and otherwise insulate themselves from the problems inherent in our current system. If you want to truly understand Republicans just think "more money for me."
8
@Mathman314
This is as simplistic as the claim that democrats have only one goal: To grow government. This impugns all the do gooders as phonies who just want more raw power.
This kind of myopic thinking that fails on so many levels.
@AACNY I beg to differ - have you heard of Occam's Razor? Sometimes the simple explanation is the one closest to the truth.
1
Mr.Brooks
The key issue is not the horse race stuff but the damage Trump judges and treaty shredding is causing. Conservatives have to speak to the generation that will have to withstand the extreme weather and worse brought on by climate change. Why cannot your fellow conservatives support conservation - the best use of resources? Electric cars are not liberal they are conservative. As are windmills and solar panels. And they creat jobs. Conservatives can take this win-win and run with it while the Dems wallow in their intramural-party squabbling.
5
The more damage Mitch McConnel and his ilk inflict upon the democratic norms of our nation, the more swift and viscous the rebuttal from the majority will be.
Republicans can keep enjoying their short term control of this nation, but don’t be surprised when Democrats take over again if the filibuster is removed altogether and the Supreme Court gets packed.
By the time the GOP regains their footing, much of their electorate will be done and the party rendered largely irrelevant.
The future politics of America are playing out in the Democratic primary process. It will be democratic socialism vs. center-left moderation.
Buckle up Alabama. It’s going to get rough to watch for you in the not so distant future.
6
If conservatives have their way (and they seem to be getting almost everything they want these days despite their minority status in the electorate), the hostile opinions of the young towards them will be irrelevant in a few short years.
Conservatives, knowing full well the trends Brooks describes, abandoned democracy years ago and have embraced autocracy and the perversion of our democratic system as their only pathway to retain power.
They have perverted the electoral process across the country (gerrymandering, voter suppression). They have perverted the legislative process at the State and Federal levels (employing unprecedented parliamentary tactics to stymie their opposition). They have perverted the Executive branch of the Federal Government (most worrisome, the DOJ). They are in the process of perverting the Federal Judiciary. They have created a massive propaganda machine that undermines faith in any institutions that stand in their way (such as the free press).
They have been conducting this anti-democratic campaign for the last 40 years and are in the late stages of what amounts to (in very real terms) a "slow motion right wing coup" as we speak. The majority of Americans who reject conservative politics have a VERY small window of opportunity to prevent conservatives from permanently ensconcing themselves in power. If conservatives succeed in their quest, dissent will be suppressed and democracy will die. Just as they wish.
Wake up America. Time is short.
8
"...It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism:"
David, I was doing fine until I got to the above statement. I don't know where that zinger came from but you're way wide of your target. As a lifelong (and now considerably dated) libbie I think the young folks are more optimistic than ever about the possibilities for the future. They, like I, know that what passes for Republican conservatism is almost literally on life support.
A really effective Democratic candidate and a strong program which restores fairness in all its aspects, resurrects enthusiasm for rebuilding infrastructure and holding kleptocrats to account will light an enormous fire in Democrats and Independents everywhere.
And let me you, that ain't pessimism.
4
Reminds me of that Mark Twain quote: "The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated." I prefer, "Stuff happens." For example, whoever suspected that the majority of democratic presidential candidates would lurch so far left that Americans jumped at the first non-leftist candidate, Joe Biden. His success is a reflection of the rejection of this leftward move.
3
@AACNY
His success, if it happens, will be a reflection of the desire of Americans to make sure Delusional Donnie gets voted out on November 3, 2020, and NOT a rejection of this leftward move.
A centrist has a much better chance of peeling off REPUBLICANS who still think, and are not just members of the Cult of Trump.
But Democrats should vote for WHICHEVER person gets the nomination.
ANY Democrat is a lot better than Delusional Donnie.
1
The GOP is bending conservatism into fascism while believing they’re good conservatives. They are betraying our country while believing they’re the strongest patriots. They want to control us with an American apartheid system while “liberating” their own constituents to the hallowed levels of power only reserved for first class citizens.
7
The GOP platform is to the left of Pat Buchanan's '92 convention speech. The left keeps going left, the right goes left more slowly. Read what mainstream Democrats wrote about immigration 20 or even 10 years ago. Any facist shouts from the fringe are responses to demographic displacement, and the growing roar of vicious anti-white rhetoric.
The election will say it all, only if the Democrats nominate a young, progressive. Biden is not the person to be President. Never was.
7
@Julia Agreed, his moment has passed.
@Julia
WHICHEVER Democrat gets nominated should get your vote.
Third party candidates NEVER win.
H. Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote in 1992, and ZERO Electoral College votes.
in 2000, and in 2016, more people voted for the third party candidate (Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000; each of Stein and Johnson in PA, MI and WI in 2016) than the winning margin in the few states that determined the outcome of the election, and each time the R, unqualified and uninformed as he was, managed to eke out a win, even though he LOST the popular vote.
People should not repeat that mistake in 2020.
@Julia
Evan and older progressive with a younger running mate.
Why would young folks vote Republican ? The Republicans have made it plain that they prioritize short term corporate profit over the planets health. That's OK for the old folks, they don't have to be here much longer. Young folks ? They're going to have to live in the world that we've made today for decades to come. A vote for any Republican is just hastening their own demise.
9
I think a lot of conservative leadership is yelling "Stop!" They are trying to get minorities to stop coming into the country, to stop voting, to keep them from being a part of society. That is their interest now. It seems they've come to the conclusion that their only hope of retaining power is to suppress anyone who opposes them. They have lost the battle; they don't appeal to the majority, so it's high time to ensure that when it's a majority minority country, politics and representation don't bear any resemblance of the population.
4
It's worthwhile to take a moment to consider just how the GOP got to the point where it's traditional views, outlook, and policy goals all got subordinated to the whims of an unbalanced TV personality with the philosophy of a caller to right wing talk radio.
It happened as a foreseeable consequence of the toleration of lie after lie in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama. The best examples are easily recalled:
-Obama, McCain and George W Bush all backed closing Gitmo. Come January 21, 2009 this became a radical and dangerous idea that had to be blocked.
-Obama, McCain, Gingrich and others from both parties all backed something akin to cap and trade to limit carbon emissions. Come January 21, 2009 this became socialism.
-Before January 21, 2009 well over two dozen major Republican politicians, inclusive of about 15 senators, two governors, and the ubiquitous Mr. Gingrich, all backed the GOP's health care plan as formulated by the far right Heritage Foundation. Under Obama this became Kenyan Mau-Mauism and socialism.
And of course the birth certificate.
In 2009 the GOP saw a mob assembling. Rather than talk truth to it the GOP handed out torches, pitchforks, torch oil and matches.
And when trump came along all he did was build on those lies. But nobody in the GOP had the guts to say that he's lying because he did nothing but stretch the same lies that the party had nurtured for 8 years.
The GOP has only itself to blame.
12
25 years before this editorial, theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (Columbia Theological Seminary) said that we are witnessing the steady meltdown of the white, male, colonialist hegemony. Mr. Brooks' data only bolsters this prophetic observation.
2
Given that young people typically don't vote, I'd be putting my money on Biden.
1
Biden definitely does not inspire young people.
Just imagine what it's like to be a kid raised in a home where Dad's a Republican and watches Fox News. If a teenager values information, Fox News disappoints; all its news is spun pro-Republican. For example, nearly 70% of its news on climate change was given to science deniers. If a child has any respect for other values such as tolerance, education, or healthcare, those raised in Fox News households have heard its anchors sneer at what he respects, even values, his whole life. But worst of all, Dads ape Fox style -- laughing at and shouting down people who disagree at the dinner table -- leaving children weeping. Forget voting GOP; its adherents will be lucky to have many young friends, let alone to convince a young woman to marry, and have children, with him.
4
To Brooks' way of thinking progressive outlook is based on pessimism while a more optimistic approach is there for conservative taking.
"American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed." He fails to recognized that "American Structures" are based on the concept that "money talks". Progressives are more interested in transforming those structures in to one where "people talk".
4
Demographic arguments aside, the GOP -- and America to the extent it continues to follow the GOP -- is doomed because it is simply wrong about most everything important. The party has embraced ignorance and fear, and these are losing propositions. Its solutions to all the problems the world presents are lower taxes and less government. This will not get the job done. If Trump and his party do not lead us into catastrophe sooner, they surely will later.
5
Why does the silent generation, by its very designation--silence--have a value judgment attached to it while the others--baby boomers, millennials, Xs, and Zs--get away with a time or mere letter designation? Being from the so-called silent generation, I resent the simplistic value summation.
2
Since Richard Nixon, I have always felt that Republicans were a little bit inside the "cuckooland cloud." With Reagan, they found supporting philosophy for entering the "cuckooland cloud." With George W. they flew recklessly into the "cuckooland cloud," with an unnecessary war and a deregulated Great Recession. Enter Trump, the King of Cuckooland. With him they bluster and build walls against reality. Please, let us out of the "cuckooland cloud."
5
The moralists GOP has been ignoring the coming of diversity for years and years. I think they were hoping that, you know, being gay or trans was a fad. The "way back" machine to the 1950's wasn't and isn't working.
3
Ah, the conservative fantasy that the GOP doesn’t really represent them, and that the pestilence their failed ideology has visited on America since 1980 didn’t really happen that way.
Younger people hate the Republican Party on merit - for its destruction of the middle class in favor of a few super-rich, and for the racism, sexism, homophobia and religious bigotry it openly embraces in the cynical pursuit of its more corporate goals.
The GOP represents an ever-smaller minority, and that’s why it’s had to resort to ever more extreme rigging of the electoral system - extensive gerrymandering, voter suppression, stacking the census and relying on the electoral college while repeatedly losing the popular vote - to maintain power.
Unfortunately, because of climate change, we are out of time to wait. We have to get Trump, McConnell and their malign ilk out of power in 2020, not slowly over time as demographics change. Donate, organize, volunteer, vote.
11
In liberal Boston, 2018 saw a longtime and powerful white male Democratic congressman, with strong support from unions and with a strong left-wing resume, knocked out of his House seat by a relatively unknown young African-American woman Dem city councilor with an agenda centered on supporting women, people of color, LGBTQ, and fighting against drivers of climate change. Didn’t matter what the older white male Democratic incumbent said or promised along the lines of the traditional Democratic agenda, young voters demanded change.
Don’t underestimate frustrated young voters’ passion for a seismic electoral wave in 2020.
9
This white guy in 50's (me) welcomes the progressive change brought on by the youth wing. Oh Silent Generation I beseech you, stand up and shout! It's your world now.
Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over.
Because here's why: They don't need to because they know it ain't gonna happen. California is as progressive as it gets but totally unrealistic which is why it's home to the biggest bullet train blunder ever not to be built. Reps see a train like that and they laugh at the thought that such an wild-eyed idealist pipe dream as that will ever come close to even touching them.