Ask Lemmy

GenX has never had nor will it ever have significant political power. Outnumbered by older and younger generations. Also, I doubt we're very unified in our political beliefs and asperations since we tend to be pretty independent and mostly want to avoid attracting too much attention.

Everyone thinks grandpa should die but nobody wants to kill their grandpa

Boomers are still in electorate power by a long shot.

I'm 40. The largest voting group in my country is 60+. It really doesn't have a lot of effect what you vote or try to do as someone <60, 60+ decides. Same goes for a lot of companies I've been in. 50+ is in the majority, especially in positions of power. Either learn to talk like them and kiss their ass or you'll never succeed and be out of the job in no time.

Millenials are just not in charge. I've seen it in so many areas of life, be it business or civil society. Younger people try to change something and someone 50/60+ will scream bloody murder so things will stay the same because "we can't alienate those people".

Every generation has lost at class warfare.

You can pretty much vibe out the answer by looking at how the world is today. We have as standard devices in our pockets at all times that can connect us to anyone else. Anyone can create a video message that can be seen by pretty much anyone and everyone on the planet.

In theory we have more power and potential unity than any other human society in history, and its somehow getting worse.

Millennials failed by not being born in the 50's. I think you're making an assumption that newer generations took over politically from Boomers and The Silent Generation, but that shift never occurred. We failed at political change because we never had the same political, social, and economic power as Boomers.

Millennials were children in the 90s, don't blame us we didn't fix shit.

It's been the obscenely wealthy of every generation that has fucked everything, not any one demographic in particular.

I'm 45, I've been pegged into being a gen x-er, and a millennial. I can't really speak for either generation, but at this point I feel I have more in common financially with millennials, despite having absolutely 0 adult supervision the way many genXers experienced. What I can say is that my cohort is tired, financially fucked over, and ready to burn it all to the ground.

It's been this way since before the banking system of the Catholic Church by the Medici family in Italy in the 1400s. Money always breeds corruption and power. Nothing new, history repeats itself. We just need to start killing the rich like they did back then. Corruption and abuse/extortion should face actual consequences.

All the generational stuff does is divide us. No war but class war.

It's a class war, not a generational one. Millennials have just as many rich jerks as any other generation.

We never got the power. Look at the government, everyone is 80 years old.

Those are songs, not actions. Many of us had much larger plans and were sold a life that we never had the opportunity to have.

Most of us got trapped in low wage jobs or not getting a job at all after college. All of us had to go through several recessions, inflation skyrocketing, politicians bought by the wealthy so you can't run for office unless you are well connected, housing market crashed, etc.

Getting into politics to change all of the issues we saw was never an option. There is always a wealthier, better connected opponent to win.

Trickle down economics was a lie and most of us got cheated out of life and never got to amass the wealth needed to actually MAKE CHANGE HAPPEN. We spend all our time working, keeping our little relationships alive, and trying to make it day to day.

Because there's still more boomers than gen X...

Even after a lot of boomers are dying off. Generations after X were immediately larger, so there's never been or never will be a time where Gen X is the largest/target demographic.

It just happens like that sometimes, Gen X just never had the numbers

I think the basic premise of your question is kind of flawed.

Generational age brackets are always a little fuzzy, but most definitions tend to define millennials as people born from about 1981-1996

Which means come the end of the 90's, the oldest millennials were just turning 18, the youngest were just entering preschool, the "average" millennial would have been about 10. Personally, I was 8 in 1999.

So most of us weren't exactly politically-aware in the 90s, let alone actively criticizing anything besides homework. And a lot of us probably had parents who wouldn't have let us listen to RATM because of the parental advisory sticker on their albums.

My main concerns at the time were things like video games and cartoons

Then right around the time we started to be old enough to really form political opinions, 9/11 happened and the world went insane around us.

Gen X isn't as radical on the whole as one might think (of course there's some incredibly rad exceptions) and, well, boomers haven't died off yet. They still hold most of the wealth ergo most of the power in America. It's a geriocracy and it ain't the 50+ year old Millenials running the show.

At my age, my parents were on their 5th house. My rent takes half my paycheck and I'm trapped here because I can't afford to move.

when they'll finally take the power

This has still not happened.

Boomers are still a massively oversized voting demographic, so vast quantities of political energy are still spent on them.

They're also typically more susceptible to modern propaganda techniques than any subsequent demographic.

The bulk of modern propaganda is trying to stop people from seeing and tackling the issues causing the problems. If people get angry at immigrants, they'll not point their fingers at the ultra-wealthy who are actually causing all the issues pricing them out of living their lives.

The people in power are predominantly boomers and gen-Xers with views that align with boomers. There're practically no millennials in any position of meaningful power across most of the world's politics. The more radical gen-Xers were never let into the establishment parties, so they languished in the political cold unable to get enough votes under FPTP based systems.

No one can really change shit until the generations go back to being roughly the same size as each other. Hopefully it's not too late to fix things by that point.

Reminder that the oligarchs want us divided and fighting each other.

The “baby boom” (whence Boomers) was called that because it was a huge demographic spike that has given that birth cohort disproportionate political and cultural power ever since—and the generation most negatively impacted by that was the immediately-following Gen X. (Even now, after decades of an increasing mortality rate, Boomers still outnumber Gen X by about 8 million.)

Because the shit head boomers are still in charge and doing everything in their power to keep it that way.

There’s a huge gap between those that understood RATM’s message and those who owned their albums. Many people liked their music but would never oppose capitalism especially when it worked for them.

We're not monolithic. No generation is. Those movies were kinda popular, but they found their success with a subset of the generation, not the entire group.

Just like every other generation, when we're relatively comfortable (or exhausted from daily survival), we don't have time to foment revolution.

A few reasons.

Part of it is that wealth never really got passed down to us. Boomers got money and houses from their parents. Some GenX got money and houses from theirs. Millennials increasingly have family that live longer because of modern medicine (depending on your family, good or bad) and increasingly have family that burn through all their money because they want to buy mypillows and trump watches. Not to mention how many of us went zero contact because of the aforementioned trumpism.

Which, combined with multiple economic crises (how many of us saw the job market and said "I'mma gonna get a PhD and deal with that later"?) means that millennials have kinda been struggling to even get their lives "started" well into their late 30s. Hard to become a professional politician when you are always a few months away from poverty.

And the last part is... 9-11 kinda fucked us. Basically starting in the early 00s it became a mortal sin to criticize the military. Even today, we are allowed to criticize "the military industrial complex" but NOT the brave men and women who are on our streets oppressing people and helping ice round up brown people and protesters.

So by the time a good chunk of millennials reached the point where we are stable enough to fight and the world isn't going to villify us for doing so... we also have responsibilities. In your teens and twenties you can talk about burning it all down and quitting your job to live in a tent for 14 months while you smoke weed and protest and smoke weed. You might have kids that you need to give a chance at a better life. A partner with medical concerns. Or just a cat that would slit your throat in your sleep if you moved into a tent.

So all the pushes for progressive politics and the like get us labeled as "traitor neo libs' by the kids who want to live in tents and film tiktoks and protest and film tiktoks. And when you get told "okay boomer" when you are in your 30s... it is REAL fucking demoralizing (this is where some jackass replies "okay boomer").

Pedantry, but the song is called Killing in the Name. There's no "of" in the title.