Boomers by Proxy

Russell Michaels

Russell is inside his own mind, a comfortable yet silly place. He is also on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

17 Responses

  1. North says:

    Yeah it’s a fairly predictable pattern. Old conservatives are aware, uncomfortably, that the later generations don’t buy into their schticks… like at all… and these bright young “conservative” people make them feel better about the future. They’re political narcotics. They are, though, making bank.

    It’ll be interesting to see, in 20-30 years or so when the Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil, what this group of people do? They’ll presumably be very wealthy by that point. I wonder if they actually have any political principles they genuinely believe in that they’ll try to advance or will they just drain every last drop of blood from that generation they can out of sheer muscle memory?

    And good catch on the white CRT peddlers. Robin Diangelo does seem like a somewhat parallel left wing version- albeit she’s not catering to old people- she’s catering somewhat to the social justice crowd and majorly to the corporate set who need smokescreens and camouflage to get along in the current social justice paradigm.Report

    • JS in reply to North says:

      “old conservatives are aware, uncomfortably, that the later generations don’t buy into their schticks… like at all… and these bright young “conservative” people make them feel better about the future.”

      Diamond and Silk is what you get when no matter how obvious the pander is, your audience will never notice — or feel insulted.

      Everything about Diamond and Silk was custom-tailored to appeal to white conservative boomers. Absolutely designed to reinforce their priors, while also allowing them to feel gloriously non-racist (after all, if you agree with Diamond and Silk and they’re black, how can you possibly be any sort of racist? They’re right there on TV, saying all the things I say!).

      Even the names were a marketing stroke of genius.

      “let’s put two black women on Fox to tell old white conservatives that they’re correct and it really is all the kids and minorities and hippies at fault. But let’s make sure we name them after cheap appeals to wealth, because we know how them black people are? Living off my taxes, and selling dope for expensive shoes and gauche displays of wealth, amiright?”

      I don’t know what brilliant sociopath flack managed that, but it’s quite a trick to convince people they’re totally post-racial while simultaneously reaffirming some of their worse racist beliefs.Report

      • North in reply to JS says:

        I have never had the “pleasure” of seeing them on Fox. I watch little TV and no Fox at all.Report

        • JS in reply to North says:

          A little late, but….

          Imagine you’re a 60 year old white Fox Executive, you feel your audience is 60+ white rural and suburban dwellers who are, at the very least, products of their time when it comes to race relations. They’ve had 40 years of “welfare queens” and “inner city thugs” to internalize.

          So you take two young black women and you want them to sell conservative talking points WHILE simultaneously reassuring said viewers that they are not racist, and in fact all the things they’ve been told about black people that form a single, subconscious image, are in fact correct. And you are very, very good at your job.

          Enter Diamond and Silk. Down to their very names, they reinforce the stereotype of blacks being obsessed with shallow displays of wealth despite being poor — welfare queens with Cadillacs, single mom’s eating lobster, right. And the whole time, while reaffirming that stereotype, they speak right wing talking points.

          So said viewer gets to have their racist priors affirmed while simultaneously feeling protected against claims or racism and bias — after all, don’t Diamond and Silk believe the same things he does?

          A master’s class in tokenism and stage management. My only real question is whether D&S are a Fox News creation (in which case someone needs a raise for sheer skill), or grifters in their own right — in which case, kudos for skill again. I suspect the latter.Report

  2. Jerry D says:

    You say: “Go to NYC, Austin, San Fran, and L.A. and ask what super liberal Millennials with really high-paying jobs, smart and hard-working professionals, see as the problems facing the world.”
    Because these people have problems like the vast majority of hard working Americans of their generation??? Are their opinions somehow more valuable? No and no. You are such a whiner. Stop complaining about how hard you have it. Nobody handed me anything. I worked and saved. Most savvy people of any age know that works for the vast majority. Show them that Republicans have policies to support this rather than get in their way and they’ll follow with their votes.Report

    • y10nerd in reply to Jerry D says:

      Okay boomer.Report

      • Ferny Reyes in reply to y10nerd says:

        Though seriously, I would probably pick Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix as the cities to visit in the liberal safari tour for millennials.Report

        • JS in reply to Ferny Reyes says:

          Houston’s not all that different from Austin these days.

          It wasn’t Austin’s new voting measures and turnout that’s driving the GOP-controlled State Leg to crack down on voting. They wrote off Austin long ago.

          They’re terrified of the numbers coming out of the much, much bigger Houston — and the trendlines in the suburbs.Report

          • Ferny Reyes in reply to JS says:

            Having lived in Houston and traveled a fair bit to Austin, I’d say the biggest difference is that Austin is still in that sorta ‘we’re trying to be like the cool places like Williamsburg’ phase and attracts a lot of highly educated white liberals.

            Houston’s growing liberalism is just a reflection of suburbanites plus the increasing weight of average millennials moving or remaining left.Report

            • JS in reply to Ferny Reyes says:

              Well, and it’s a port town with a LOT of varied ethnic groups.

              “A taco truck on every corner” does not, in fact, upset Houstonians. That sounds delicious.

              I mean just offhand and fairly close by, there’s a handful of Ramen places, at least two authentic German places (one with live music, or at least pre-COVID it was), several Vietnamese places including one rather fantastic fusion place with a ridiculously long craft beer menu (and that has lines out the door on Saturdays for their pho) — that’s in addition to the usual Italian, French places, Mexican, and Tex-Mex places.

              Now if I could get a Dim Sum place that wasn’t quite so far (there’s a number of great ones in Houston, but they’re all a hefty drive from my side of town)….

              In short, Houston is incredibly multi-cultural for the reasons most port cities end up that way.

              Which is why our Congressional districts have started getting weird, even by gerrymandered standards.Report

  3. LeeEsq says:

    After one of the Obama administration mid-terms where the Republican one big, I think it might have been in 2014, I had to go to Houston, Texas for work. The hotel where I was staying was predictably playing Fox. What I noticed is that they had a show where young millennials were giving Republican talking points including a young African-American man. There was an element of trying to get boomers calm.Report

  4. The Boomers have all the wealth, while the Millennials they decry constantly have almost nothing.

    But you know, nowadays
    It’s the old man
    He’s got all the money
    And a young man ain’t got nothin’ in the world these days

    Report

  5. DavidTC says:

    Local problems are easier to solve, but harder to enact solutions to. Local elections are where the GOP can start to build an intergenerational and lasting coalition. But the GOP would actually have to show up to do that. Which they haven’t in the major metropolitan areas for some fifty odd years. You can’t win if you don’t even try.

    I see a kinda obvious flaw there: In places the GOP _does_ win local elections, they don’t solve problems either!

    It seems extremely unlikely they’d come up with any solutions in larger cities.

    This is on top of the fact that denser places need to operate in a more ‘collectivist’ manner anyway. It’s not some random chance that people in cities want more government…people in cities need more government than people in rural areas.

    And the GOP is nowhere near enough flexible to operate in a universe like that, where they might required to decide ‘Actually, we _do_ need to deal with a specific problem here in a city, despite the fact in rural areas it’s fine to leave it alone.’Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to DavidTC says:

      I wonder, what kinds of easy-to-solve local problems for GOP politicians to tackle are we talking about here? Let’s run through some typical problems facing a large number of urban areas and imagine what, if any, GOP-friendly solution might be offered to these sorts of problems:

      • Crime.
      • Inadequate public transit. Related: traffic.
      • The rent’s too damn high. Related: homelessness. Also related: too expensive for most first-time buyers to enter the housing market.
      • Damn near no one can afford health insurance.
      • Businesses are leaving downtown.
      • Food deserts / not enough markets for people to easily purchase necessities.
      • Not enough people are wearing masks and COVID is running rampant.
      • Poor race relations, particularly between African-Americans and the police.
      • How can we get more people to register to vote, and then actually vote?
      • Underfunded schools, parks, and libraries. Related: inadequately educated workforce.
      • Not enough snowplows and pothole repair crews.
      • Public utilities like electricity, water, and sewer have fewer resources to distribute, which are significantly more expensive to obtain or generate than they were in the past, and only a crumbling infrastructure suffering from decades of deferred maintenance to do it with.
      • Public employees are demanding pay raises. Related: unfunded mandates for public employee pensions.

      About the only sort of answers I hear from Republicans to these kinds of issues are a) “privatize it!,” b) “lower your expectation of what the government’s going to do, because we’re cutting taxes rather than solve this problem,” or c) “do nothing at all and hope the problem goes away, if it’s even a problem at all which we’re not sure that it is.”

      Granted, my list above is based on the sorts of things that I perceive as problems a local government is likely to address. When I last lived in a Republican-run city, the local city council identified and tackled problems like:

      • Insufficient respect being paid by attendees of City Council meetings to the U.S. Flag and to God.
      • Insufficient respect being paid by municipal residents to veterans, and also the U.S. Flag.
      • Insufficient public contracts and land development permits to be given to friends and campaign donors of the mayor. (YMMV re: local corruption, graft, fraud, and patronage; this is not a one-party problem.)
      • Homelessness, but only in the downtown commercial district, purportedly caused by the administration of a larger nearby city giving one-way regional transit tickets to homeless people. (The proposed solution, by the way, was to shut down the regional transit service to this city completely.)
      • Sale and consumption of drugs.
      • Avoidance of expense of compliance with state-mandated environmental protection measures.
      • Overabundance of “Maoism” manifesting in the form of “political correctness” in various local school districts.

      So maybe I’m not really seeing the kinds of problems Republican rising stars will. I guess that’s why there are two parties in this great nation of ours!Report

      • JS in reply to Burt Likko says:

        Here in Texas, after a freeze that killed people and saw large swathes of the state without power — a situation that came within mere moments of lasting MONTHS not days….

        The Republican controlled Texas State Leg has decided to tackle the following problems:

        1. It’s too easy to vote in Houston, let’s outlaw a lot of stuff they started doing.
        2. Asking people to get a permit to carry a gun is too onerous.

        That is it. The sum total of their focus.Report