Candidates of the New Greatest Generation

[War on Want]

What matters is not so much a severe and destructive Crisis or that it turns out reasonably well. This Crisis could be muted, and such an event as the subprime/mortgage meltdown could be defined as a Crisis. The timing is about right; the peak of the Stock Market booms of 1929 and 2007 were about 80 years apart. Nothing says that this Crisis will be a near-replay of the 1929-1945 Crisis; if anything, events of the last Crisis still scare the Hell out of people born long after the Crisis. Nobody dares repeat the Holocaust.     

Even so, eighty years after the go-go Roaring Twenties, a slum of a decade if there ever was one, Americans forgot the lessons of the 1930s -- that banking was best done with an eye to collecting loan payments and recycling them into new loans than getting cheap money from the Fed and charging people who couldn't afford to meat the loans (think of Sinclair Lewis' fictional George Babbitt selling people houses that they couldn't afford -- in the 1920s). Economic inequality intensified as Big Business became all-powerful and labor unions became impotent; the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality  for 2006 reached 47.0 in the United States  -- the highest-measurement of that index in American history. That was higher than the estimate for 1929.

(Need a good explanation? "0" is absolute equality of income, and "100" is absolute inequality of income. In the first everyone would be earning the same pay; in the second, one person would command all of the income and others would be at that person's complete mercy. Denmark has a very low Gini coefficient, and Brazil has one of the highest for a country recognized as an economic power. The Gini coefficient for the US is about the same as for Mexico, a country long infamous for economic inequality).

It's possible to see George W. Bush as a composite of three bad Missionary Presidents (Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover) except with a nasty war thrown in and an economic disaster seven years after the accession of a very poor President instead of eight.

The Millennial Generation, as Howe and Strauss call it (born from 1982 to about 2000) has grown up or is growing up in a political climate of severe and intensifying inequality, with glass ceilings and piked pits in business bureaucracies as manufacturing jobs vanish. It sees  severe poverty just as elites enrich themselves. Its mass culture has known such stock villains as the grasshoppers in A Bug's Life characters who demand much, offer little in return, and then ask for sheepish consent from creatures stripped of choices.  It has been taught to play by the rules and expect good results as rewards. Seeing economic inequality and insecurity intensify despite their efforts, they are not likely to blame themselves for economic distress as did Generation X, which relied upon personal athleticism on the job to make things go right for the boss with the hope of good results.

Boomers and Generation X have shaped the Millennial Generation. Boomers set the expectations; Generation X complained about the raw deal that they got.

I doubt that the Millennial Generation will long tolerate the economic norms of recent years -- one in which the common man is to be squeezed as harshly as ever while being asked to count his blessings. Much like the GI generation it will be remarkably liberal in its political leanings, and it will expect fair returns for its toils. Today liberalism implies the Democratic Party, the Republican Party representing the sorts of people who take the goodies (much like the grasshoppers of A Bug's Life.

Add to this -- it is the best-educated generation in American history at every level. It has more faith in science and engineering than it does in religious authorities. Unlike Boomers in the Religious Right, it does not heed the instructions of preachers who tell them to vote (for right-wing politicians) because the direction of their souls depends upon doing so. In every State of the Union it votes much more liberal than any other generation -- both in the areas that have voted Democratic in every Presidential election after 1988 and in places in which the Republicans still prevail.

Within ten years many of them will be entering elective office -- with liberalism intact. Sure, they have yet to have successful businesses in which they are more concerned about labor costs and taxes than about revenue -- and few have yet begun to rake in the dough from successful practices in the professions, and practically none have yet entered the executive suites. But the political attitudes of most are already set -- thanks to rapacious plutocrats and executives,  ruthless and arrogant right-wing politicians, and religious hucksters who have become parodies of themselves. Add to this that the President that they best knew going into the 2008 election, a man who showed the diametric opposite of the virtues that Millennial kids and young adults learned, demonstrated through his failure the necessity of those virtues. 

Your analysis is brilliant however didn't Messrs. Strauss and Howe say while the Millenials will be economically liberal (like the Greatest Generation) it would be socially conservative (again like the Greatest Generation)? I do think it will avoid the extremes of the Baby Boomers who were much either hedonistic hippies or Bible thumping Baptists.

There's nothing socially conservative about my generation...