Many of the lawmakers who must now grapple with questions of net neutrality, cyberwarfare and how to regulate Facebook were approaching retirement age when social media was invented. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, 79, and two of the top Democratic presidential candidates– former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, and Senator Bernie Sanders, 78–were born before the discovery of the polio vaccine and the bikini. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, 77, graduated from the University of Louisville when tuition ran just $330 a year, and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, 86, was kindergarten age before the chocolate-chip cookie was invented, in 1938. Trump’s Senate allies are similarly geriatric. He is surrounded in Washington by senior citizens like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, 82, who can manage only a small window every day when he can “focus and pay attention and not fall asleep,” according to one Politico report. history, elected largely by older, white voters. Donald Trump is the oldest first-term President in U.S. Millennials, after all, are starting to gain political power at a time when America looks more like a gerontocracy than ever. If I set out to learn what millennials believe and why, I ended up with something more compelling: a glimpse of our country’s future. The result is my book, The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.
I interviewed rookie Democratic Congresswomen like Lauren Underwood, 33, and Haley Stevens, 36, and a smattering of local leaders from California to New York, including Stockton, Calif., Mayor Michael Tubbs, 29, and Ithaca, N.Y., Mayor Svante Myrick, 32. I sat down with Democratic stars like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 30, and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg, 38, and Republican up-and-comers like Representatives Elise Stefanik and Dan Crenshaw, both 35. So what’s America going to look like when this generation rises to power? I spent the past three years trying to answer that question by crisscrossing the country, interviewing the young leaders who are among the first in their cohort to be elected to public office. The millennial wave is coming: the only questions are when and how fast it will arrive. They tend to favor government-run health care, student debt relief, marijuana legalization and criminal-justice reform, and they demand urgent government action on climate change. Millennials are more racially diverse, more tuned in to the power of networks and systems and more socially progressive than either Gen X or baby boomers on nearly every available metric. When it occurs, it may feel like a revolution, in part because this generation has different political views than those in power now. American politics is the next arena ripe for disruption. Their startups have revolutionized the economy, their tastes have shifted the culture, and their enormous appetite for social media has transformed human interaction. They outnumber Gen X (born 1965–1980) and will soon outnumber baby boomers (born 1946–1964) among American voters. Millennials–born between 19–are already the largest living generation and the largest age group in the workforce.
This is neither wish nor warning but fact, rooted in the physics of time and the biology of human cells. Love ’em or hate ’em, this much is true: one day soon, millennials will rule America. SHARE Illustration by Michelle Thompson for TIME Getty Images (8) Shutterstock (8) American politics is still defined by the values and priorities of baby boomers.
0 kommentar(er)
