The Construction of Political "Losers": Generation Y's Turn?

OPINION | March 11, 2012
Opinion: The Go-Nowhere Generation
By TODD G. BUCHHOLZ and VICTORIA BUCHHOLZ
Americans have historically been on the move, but young people these days seem to prefer staying put.

The above link to an article from Sunday's New York Times will be of interest to most capstoners and others interested in the "politics of demonization."  We've seen this process at work for ages, but it has become especially pervasive and brutal in times of economic pinch when the factors conspiring to limit our options in the material world are too complex or remote to warrant an effort to understand, let alone manipulate with a public-policymaking system that, itself, is broken.  We've seen this phenomenon in particularly mean-spirited and discouraging form since President Obama was elected at a time in our history coincident with the meltdown of our financial system and, in turn, the macroeconomy of not only the states but most of the globe.  We've seen it in the "construction" of "Obamacare," the general, conservative public's characterization of the Patient Protection and Health Care Affordability Act as a socialist, big government takeover of one-sixth of the US economy.  There is the more primitive expression of the same dynamic in efforts to delegitimize Obama himself: he's not really an American, as the birthers insist; he's a Muslim, as 25% of GOP primary voters in Tennessee recently claimed.  He's a radical leftist, harbors disdain toward small town residents, is a elitist through and through, and so on and so forth interminably.  We've seen this in the efforts of Austrian-school economists to define our fiscal problems as the result of runaway spending, taking our eyes off the fact that government revenues have never been as small as a percentage of GDP in some 60 years.  And most recently, we've seen the battle over meaning in the "construction combat" over the efforts of some to define the proposed HHS rule for contraceptive converage as a threat to religious liberty, while American women have seen this and the state-level initiatives to require invasive ultrasounds of women considering abortion as a no-holds barred assault on women's rights and an expansion of government into the relationship between a woman and her doctor.  Even in what passes as the academic realm, we see Charles Murray's effort to affix blame for our socio-economic ills on the morality shortfall of the residents of Fishtown, not on the 1% who have benefitted handsomely from our tax policies and from profits drawn from investments in firms who have exported jobs to cheap-labor offshore locales.

So now we encounter an attempt to locate the roots of our collective ills in Generation Y, arguably the single most victimized collective of the New Gilded Age and its polarized politics.  This is not without precedent either.  As Generation X became of college age, it too was pilloried -- mostly by Baby Boomers -- as lacking in work ethic, content to exercise its rights as a generation of slackers and slobs.  I would encourage all of you, as members of Generation Y, to take a look at the latest form the quest for losers has taken since it lowers its sights on you.  And then I would suggest a look at some rebuttals by your cohorts that have materialized in the form of letters to the editor, reachable via the link below.  Close scrutiny will reveal yet another concourse ripe for picking as a Q study of the core political dynamics at issue in such efforts to construct reality out of whole cloth, the very essence of politics in the Age of Social Media.


OPINION | March 17, 2012
Letters: Generation Y Stands Up for Itself
Readers respond to a Sunday Review article, "The Go-Nowhere Generation."