Vassenor wrote:Gallia- wrote:
Yet it's still smaller than the Iraq War protests in 2003.
Just like Trump's inauguration parades, the protests against him were "low energy".
I'm not sure I understand your point.
I don't really have a point beyond poking fun at the notion that Millennials care about politics.
They have no trust in institutions or other people, because they're mired by individualism taken to an absurd extreme. This does not bode well for the future of American democracy, or indeed the future of America, because both of those institutions rely on trust in people besides yourself. For Congress to do its job, it needs real feedback from the people who vote for it, which generally comes from voters. If the people who vote for it don't care about politics, which is the case for most Millennials, then the machine will eventually stop. Either because voters have either stopped making informed decisions or because they've become so apathetic that only the most fringe political viewpoints are allowed to persist to election day.
We're probably headed towards the latter, though.
How much that resembles previous Americas is something that I don't think anyone can make a statement on. Comprehensive polling data and the sociology related only came into being in the 1960s and '70s, which is basically living memory. All we can really know is that, since the Carter administration, we've been on somewhat a downward trend in trust in civil institutions like the Supreme Court and Congress, and an increase in trust in autocratic institutions like the military and police.
Vassenor wrote:Pasong Tirad wrote:Undermining millennials for not being violent enough? Not making enough of an impact? Pfft, hell if I know.
At the moment it seems to be "these protests are invalid because these protests a decade before against something completely different were bigger" or something.
Protest and voter turnout correlates strongly with political engagement and discourse. Protests against the Iraq War were a minority position and still larger than protests against Trump. If Millennials actually believe that Trump is bad, why aren't they showing it? Why aren't they engaging in acts of civil disobedience on the scale of previous generations? Either they don't believe Trump is bad, or they don't care enough about a healthy, functioning democracy that they're willing to shirk even the smallest of their civic duties.
I suspect the latter, though.
The key to the argument I guess is whether or not you consider majority participation and consensus, rather than fringe partisanship, to be an enabler of a healthy democracy. If you don't agree with that, it sorta falls flat on its face as to why shrinking rates of voter turnout and fewer/smaller acts of civil disobedience is a bad thing. Or if you think that voter turnout is proportionate to reality rather than perceptions of reality, which I sort of agree with but I don't think it's true.
Pasong Tirad wrote:Vassenor wrote:
At the moment it seems to be "these protests are invalid because these protests a decade before against something completely different were bigger" or something.
Failing to take into account the meaningfulness and the vibrancy of protests that don't take place out in the streets. Online protest is a thing and millennials are pretty good at it.
There is no "vibrancy" in "online protest". No one cares about those.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ss/340316/
Millennials are risking becoming another Silent Generation, at best.
We are probably seeing the peak of voter turnout either this election, or the next. 2016 was similar to 1960 (both were ~60%), and we'll see a precipitous drop in voter turnout over the coming decades, like what happened between 1968-2000, as Millennials begin to push out senior citizens as the latter die off, and continue to not vote. Millennials will probably continue to be unhappy with how the system works and equally be unable to work within the confines of the system to make it change. Which is to say, they will complain about the people being elected and still refuse to vote.
That's quite subpar compared to the Boomers and Greatest generations. Although equally relevant, to the extent that senior citizens decide Congressional elections, the people in charge of government may be in for a rude shock in a few years time. An even more partisan Congress is a bit difficult to imagine.
The question I guess for the Internet Age is whether or not you can adapt a bureaucracy to deal with the tidal wave of meaningless information (read: online protests) and still gather useful data. Previous administrations had to rely on news articles and/or cold calls at dinnertime, while ultra-modern administrations will probably just look at Gallup online surveys, but gathering information is a bit irrelevant if the people in charge of making decisions are incompetents or incapable of reaching consensus.
e: I'm also kind of salty that if Millennials had simply had a turnout comparable to our parents, the Democrats would control Congress and Clinton would be the leader of the Free World (again).
