Generation X’s Lessons For the Second Trump Era
A military incursion into Latin America. A war to control another country’s oil. A Show of Corrupt Administrative Engineering (“We Want a Show”) to distract the public. A president visibly in decline whose experience in theater and television transforms governance into pantomime. A frozen economy. A pandemic teeming beneath the surface that the powerful would prefer to ignore.
We express the weaknesses of the Reagan and Bush I administrations, but even worse.
A friend of mine suggested that rather than protest, we simply build an animatronic Christian Slater to post in the back of a smoky bar (I name the 9:30 Club) to mechanically lift a clove cigarette to his lips, repeating, “No blood for oil” and “Eat the rich” until the heat death of the universe.
We are a generation considered cynical – more steeped in irony than sincerity. But Generation X’s most important contribution to American discourse is that we rejected the discourse before it excluded us. We diagnosed the inefficiency of work from within and governed ourselves accordingly. It may have looked like apathy, but it was rejection.
There is a particularly dark nostalgia attached to this moment. What I miss isn’t so much my youth as the version of me that thought standing aside meant something. The migraine of recognition comes from the fact that it was once believed that rejection itself could be enough to prevent history from repeating itself. Instead: not just more corporatism, but more consolidation. Exactly the same war, with worse consequences. Maybe Obama wasn’t so much a breath of fresh air as a prolonged wheeze between heartbreaking coughs.
I am a white woman in my 50s; I’m confused about the crazy parallel craft culture that gravitated around my entry-level jobs. A mutable fashion that crisscrossed subcultural zones. (Are you punk? Goth? New Wave? Another secret thing?) Photocopied zines with fake ads. Arguing over who sold. But the insularity and mockery were only a reaction to being born already excluded from the system.
The astringent, quotable Douglas Coupland novel that gave my generational cohort their nom de guerredetails the sensation of realizing the emptiness of the American promise: “When someone tells you they just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. » Or, more succinctly, of the film Lazy: “Every commodity you produce is a part of your own death. » More lyrically, from Paul Westerberg laying out a single thesis at the door of the materialist Yuppie church: “Everything you dream of is right in front of you, and it’s all a lie / Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m satisfied.” » (This week, the discontent among Westerberg’s fellow Minnesotans has been particularly notable.)
The television shows, movies, and music of the era didn’t so much call us to action as they translated our continued disappointment into emotions.
The baby boomers who raised us constructed their politics from an exquisite sensitivity to their own feelings: they were the first students of vibrations. We have seen their self-interest transform into neoliberalism and a desire to quickly climb the ladder behind them. There is a straight line between Woodstock and Bill Clinton’s social reform.
Our rejection of this hypocrisy grew into a core belief: Selling out was the worst thing a person could do.
Since then, history has played a cruel trick on us. Generation X voters are now among the most likely to switch from Democratic affiliation to Trumpism or outright support for Republicans. If selling is the crime, that’s where it happened. Not out of irony or withdrawal, but by taking grievances as principles.
Yet there’s a hardcore group among us who still pay attention. We can always adopt a posture of protective cynicism, but I want to affirm that this is not a handicap. For the current era, this is our remaining advantage.
The contemporary right – its bigotry, its conspiracy thinking, its white supremacy, its neo-Nazism – is fundamentally nihilistic. It is based on zero-sum logic, exclusion and a pathologically selfish view of the world. Gen X’s cynicism is something else entirely. It’s not apathy. It’s not despair. It is the insistence that the world should be held to higher standards than it seems willing to meet.
Cynicism is not pessimism. It is a refusal to settle. The most important thing about Diogenes’ search for an honest man is not that he didn’t find one, it’s that he kept looking.
What we Gen We know that we should not believe that everything depends on an election, a demonstration, a perfect speech. Change is incremental, fragile, and often invisible when it happens.
Cynicism teaches that the world you desire will likely remain out of reach during your lifetime. It also teaches that this is not an excuse to stop paying attention. You may not believe in saviors, but you learn to gather people around you who don’t believe in them either.
The search for truth, cynicism, is the most powerful binder there is, because it is always in motion. It’s the opposite of spectacle. He refuses catharsis. It accumulates through insistence, through repetition, through the refusal to allow ourselves to be distracted or dazzled to the point of forgetting what we already know, however burning our memory may be. More importantly, it contributes to our survival. In times like these – raptors in charge, sickening violence on the horizon – our greatest obligation to ourselves and to each other is a Gen X specialty: to simply endure.
