Baby boomers comprised a larger share of voters in 2024, accounting for 32%, but they are trending lower after hitting a peak of 36% in 2016.
Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial herself, expects the younger generation will soon tip the scales in American politics.
“Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids,” she said. “And we—that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, sidelined, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us on everything from the economy to climate. And we’re taking the reins.”
From global warming to debt crisis to lack of affordable health insurance (all intentional), Boomers have definitely overstayed their welcome.
So, she didn’t say “boomer”. But she did frame it as a generational issue.
It really has nothing to do with age. In fact that’s backwards. It’s about people who have been in power too long, and are coincidentally old. They aren’t corrupt because they’re old, they’re corrupt because they’re in power, and they’re old because they’ve been in power a long time. Too long. Bernie is rare because he’s avoided becoming corrupt, his age is coincidental.
We need term limits for Congress. That won’t stop the corruption but it will mitigate the damage they can do, and help prevent them from becoming entrenched and forming damaging long-term alliances with other corrupt politicians and billionaires.
You might say, “voting is the term limit”, but voters are notoriously terrible at spotting corruption, and of course, the politicians do everything they can to hide it.
It’s a generational issue…
For the entirety of America’s recent decline, Boomers have been the largest voting demographic.
They were the ones active in primaries dragging both parties parties right and fucking up almost every aspect of American society.
No one is saying the problem is every single person in that demographic.
But it is 100% that demographics fault. Because they’re the ones that spent a literal lifetime voting for it.
The problem isn’t just the boomer politicians, it’s all the boomer voters who see voting for anyone younger than themselves as a personal insult.
They’re openly age discriminating against anyone younger than them, but anytime you get generations attempt to discuss it, boomers crawl out of the fucking woodwork saying “this” is why they can’t do the thing we were just saying you can’t do
Unfortunately decades of far right am talk radio pipeline adapted very well to gel with online platforms. Then they were able to cleverly take advantage of algorithms to "red pill " people. Younger generations are generally more liberal than their parents but far Right strategies have made a big dent in that.
Plenty of boomers who actually marched for civil rights out there, and plenty of young people stanning turning point usa and mourning charlie Kirk
That’s because the American education didn’t even really exist till the 1970s…
That’s when school buses to every student became a thing, and we stopped having one room school houses and started sending everyone to real schools.
From then till GW’s “no child left behind” we taught every American critical thinking and empathy.
Republicans recognized that was a bad thing for them, and changed our education system to rote memorization and the lowest denominator…
The numbers in a year don’t automatically make people more progressive, it’s not an innate thing that happens naturally.
It was happening for a couple decades because we put the work in as a society. We stopped doing that decades ago.
And it would be shocking to find out the people who can’t see that, got a public education within that brief window where critical thinking was actually taught.
Like, the reason Gen Z is the first generation to have lower IQs than their parents isn’t that Gen Z is stupid, they’re just the first full generation to all get “no child’d” some parts of older generations got it, but for Gen Z they all got it, so theres no one to bring the average up.
It’s important to talk about this stuff, because we’re still failing the kids in school today, and if people don’t understand what’s happening, we’ll never get it fixed.
Term limits will not do what you want.
It will just shift the corruption to an unelected support structure of beaurocrats and party suits that have no elections to even theoretically hold them accountable.
Look at the term limit we have: the 23 amendment was a mistake. The country and the world would be objectively better off if it had not been passed.
I think the bigger problem with corruption in government starts with the public service to private industry lobbyist pipeline. There needs to be a full 25 year prohibition on anyone leaving the government and becoming a lobbyist for any industry they had a hand in regulating while they were publicly employed. There are wayyy too many people in agencies that soft-ball the application of the rules they oversee with the aim of getting hired by those firms when they retire. Got that one straight from an inspector who came to the ATFE from the IRS and saw tons of that behavior from their co-workers. Called it out on several occasions and found millions in unpaid corporate taxes. Those laws need to be enforced with teeth.