Win One For the Geezer
On the afternoon of November 4, 1980, I was sitting in a
back office of a major media organization looking at exit polling results that
seemed incomprehensible. Ronald Reagan
was not only winning nationally, but also led everywhere in the South except
for Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia.
I thought this was so improbable that I wondered if we had
corrupted data. I knew that the “Solid
South” wasn’t anymore. Nixon’s Southern Strategy had caught two emerging
trends: the anger in the region over the adoption of the Civil Rights Acts, and
the inherent cultural conservatism there.
Carter, however, was unmistakably Southern, down to the peanut farm and
the redneck brother. In 1976, he had beat Jerry Ford because of the Solid South,
carrying every single state in the region except for Virginia, for an Electoral
Vote margin of 143 to 12.
Carter was also a tragic figure, and pretty much everyone
knew it. Objectively, people understood he
had been dealt a very bad hand. The
economy was in terrible shape, inflation was brutal, energy prices were going
through the roof, the Russians were up to no good, and a bunch of Iranians
wearing strange clothes had gone mad.
But Carter was also a lousy President, all good intentions and bad execution. He beat back a strong, late, primary
challenge from Ted Kennedy without making any effort to heal the split (I
attended one day of the 1980 Democratic Convention, and the two strongest
emotions in the room were anger and despair) and hunkered down in his
bunker. He was still a Southern
Democrat.
And, I thought, he had caught a tremendous break: Who would
vote for Ronald Reagan, a radical, war-mongering, out-of office Governor who
once starred in a movie with a chimp?
Obviously, this was wildly wrong. I (and I wasn’t alone) was working on a set
of assumptions that were hidebound by obsolete certainties like the permanence
of the old FDR coalition. Full-term
Kennedy and Johnson Presidencies might have kept that coalition together,
modernized and strengthened it. But that
never happened, and liberal Democrats, emboldened by their success in opposing
the Viet Nam war, failed to recognize that Nixon’s destruction of George
McGovern in 1972 wasn’t an aberration, but in fact part of an enormous secular
change in the electorate. Reagan just
put the exclamation point on something that should have been obvious. Northern and Western Democrats had nothing to
offer the South, besides a historical fact.
And that, in the final analysis, was nothing at all. The region (and the entire country) just
wasn’t the same anymore.
I mention this because of a very interesting study, “The Next America,” written by Paul
Taylor for the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank. The country is in
the midst of changing again, and Taylor identifies several long-term trends
that are moving faster that our politics seems able to absorb.
The first is obvious.
Our population is getting older.
Life expectancy is increasing, and birth rates are declining. Older
people, thanks to public health advances, can remain healthy, productive, and self-reliant. But they are also looking at longer
retirements of declining physical and mental resources. In short, they need support for a much longer
time than was anticipated when Social Security and Medicare were created. Our mid-20th Century system wasn’t
built for this.
The second is an explosion of racial diversity. In 1960, 85% of Americans were white. In 2010, 64% were white. By 2030, it is projected to be 55%. That fits with our immigration trends. The waves of immigration that ended in the
1920s were 90% European. Now, only 12%
come from Europe, and 50% come from Latin America. We are also intermarrying at a rate
unthinkable just a generation ago. Our mid
20th Century culture wasn’t built for this either.
What is our future? It is already here, in adult form, in
the Millennials. Per the Pew study, four
in ten are non-white. They are also very different in attitudes and approach
than any group that preceded them. They
are doing everything slower and at a lower intensity: marrying later, having
kids later, starting careers later, joining religious and civic organizations
later. Even if they follow the arc that
many of their elders expect; getting more conservative when they “grow up,”
they are not going to replace the 65 and up group’s overall social and economic
views. They are just different.
The Pew study talks about more numbers, and the single most
important set is the one that both Democrats and Republicans seem completely
oblivious to. 16/1 and 3/1. Those are the ratios of active workers to
retired workers, measured in 1950, and again in 2010. Right now, as Taylor notes, programs that
benefit the elderly take up close to half of the entire Federal budget, money
that crowds out other spending. Those other expenditures include longer-term
investments in education, job training, and infrastructure—all things that
would do little for seniors but a great deal for younger voters. Taylor calls this disconnect a problem of
“generational equity.” I think that’s a
diplomatic phrase. It’s closer to
generational malfeasance.
Why this lack of generational equity? It is largely a product of electoral math and
intellectual inflexibility. The
Democrats, as is their wont, have been using the last war’s strategy to fight
the next one. Democratic orthodoxy is still tied up in FDR social contract of
entitlements, and Social Security and Medicare were ostensibly the “Third Rail”
which would bind seniors to them in perpetuity.
But seniors are this generation’s Southern Democrats. They want stability in a world that seems to
be changing too fast. They want their
community, their church, their values, and their checks to be life-long. Democrats have become a threat to their way of
life. But the party seems to have no
other way. They have to support senior entitlements, even when seniors don’t
support Democrats, because all the other social programs are indefensible when
you are making Granny go without her pills.
That leaves the Democrats nothing to offer Millennials besides a
friendlier cultural package. That’s just not very much for a group that has
their economic lives in front of them.
The Republicans are no better. They smartly latched on to senior’s fears and
have sold them on a centurion at the gate strategy. The GOP will protect them—they will keep out
the immigrants, keep back the unfaithful rabble, the ugly and crass, the loud
music and noisy gays, and make sure that no dollar gets wasted on someone who
is merely poor or young. The GOP will be
the moat around Sunshine Village.
But the Republicans haven’t really changed. They are still in thrall to the social
conservatives, still hostile towards a growing segment of the population. They still
hate entitlements in specific and domestic spending in general. The Ryan Budget, just passed in the House,
makes that clear. They will sustain
their older voting block, for now, but there is no money and no plan to deal
with generational equity besides their “growth and opportunity” slogan. That, as a friend is fond of saying, is a
“nothingburger.”
Of course, that ratio, 16/1, or 3/1, headed to 2/1, isn’t
going to go away. Just 6% of Millennials
think they are going to get full Social Security benefits--half believe they
are going to get nothing. That should
tell both sides that the Millennials are realists who are open to global
solutions, particularly if we can do this as a community, with all
participating.
In short, Millennials aren’t the problem. It’s the two political parties, frightened of
the short-term consequences, and trapped in past-century certainties, who seem
unwilling to deal with generational inequality.
Both are still trying to win one for the geezer.
Michael Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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