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.
She didn’t say “boomers”, fucking Fortune added that. And they reported this specifically to stir the bogus generational conflict.
AOC should not have mentioned generations at all, she’s supposed to be uniting us against the billionaire class, and here she is quoted in a billionaire rag about this. I hope she does better, and soon.
That’s some big “all
livesgenerations matter” energy you got there…Generational warfare is counterproductive. I have much more in common with a working class boomer, than I do with a rich person who is my same age.
Yeah we’re middle aged punks now!
This framing gets it wrong. It isn’t boomers vs. millennials. It isn’t immigrants vs. citizens. It’s ordinary people fighting over a shrinking share while an extraordinarily wealthy few accumulate more money, assets and political power than they could ever need. Stop turning class problems into generational wars. Tax extreme wealth.
It’s a little bit boomers vs. millennials, based on the boomers and the millennials I have encountered
… Let’s unpack this.
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Person points out this is just another case of wealthy and powerful people stirring up trouble between two groups of people. This is easy because people are easy to trick. If the headline is to be believed, even AOC, who isn’t stupid, believes boomers are the source of the problem.
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You point out that, based on the people you know, there’s a conflict between boomers and millennials.
but… that’s not proof that the source of the problem actually IS either group. It’s still the case that this conflict is caused by a third group of people who have a vested interest in making sure the poors fight each other.
Okay yes let’s unpack it, please
What percentage of “the people who have a vested interest in making sure the poor fight each other” do you think are boomers, and what percentage are millennials? And of those millennials, what percentage of them are acting on behalf of, and/or dependent on a mega powerful boomer?
And to be fair I said a little bit.
There are millennials in this US administration. The fuck are you talking about?
It’s class. Not age.
Does “on behalf of a powerful boomer” include…ya know…having an inheritance from them and working in the family business?
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I agree that is class war but boomers are enabling the wealthy.
Boomers would rather punish millennials for our avocado toast than see billionaires taxed.
There is a story for everyone. For you it’s Boomer for others expats and yet for others men. (Or Flanders)
Everyone gets his story so a small portion can fly private!
Exactly right. They manufacture enemies out of us and enjoy their yachts while we squabble and miss the point.
Again, you are falling for their propaganda. “Boomers” wants no such thing, but fascists do. Fascists comes in all ages, including millenials and gen zs. This is not about age, it is about whether you are in the ruling class or not.
It is not generational war, it is class war.
Yeah that’s a hard one to understand though, I had to see people my own age teaching hate worse than “the boomers” before realizing them dying out won’t fix the real problem.
There’s also a non-negligible amount of Gen X, millennials and Gen Z who are fascist supporters.
Fascist appeal transcends generational lines.
“Boomers” wants no such thing, but fascists do
I would say “boomers” have largely contributed to the conditions that have brought about fascism in this country, and have normalized looking the other way in service to the almighty dollar.
I must have missed a memo, since the boomers did do quite a lot to push things forward, too. Not all boomers are Faux watchers FFS.
Did I say all boomers?
Every single generation in the past 100 years has said the same thing. “My generation will fix it when we’re in charge”.
The God Damn boomers were the hippies from the 60s. What the fuck happened to peace and love?
My generation (Gen X), my goodness, we could see through all the bullshit. We’re the original centrists.
Every single one of my children’s Gen Z friends are all so woke they never sleep.
Turns out every generation is full of selfish shortsighted dumbasses just like the one before it. Just like “The Greatest Generation”. Just like the boomers. Just like Gen X.
Faith in humanity…fading
"My generation will fix it when we’re in charge”.
Except my generation hasn’t had a chance yet to prove that they will. My generation is fucked.
I hope I’m wrong but it seems like the ratio of selfish stupid people is constant across generations.
The people who were hippies in the 60s are mostly still hippies today. Well, the ones who subscribed to the peace and love philosophy at least. Despite the media attention the hippies were never large enough to be a politically influential group in that generation. Most of the boomers grew up bullying the hippies.
Both my boomer parents were hippies. My Mom literally lived in a commune for some time in her early 20s. She voted for the T-Dog in 2016 because she wanted to see real change.
I used to chuckle when I was a kid the way my Dad would look at me and roll his eyes when my grandparents would talk about politics and religion. My Dad loves his MAGA hats now. And wonders why his grandchildren don’t want to be around him.
My sample size of 2 says otherwise!
Counter anecdote: my parents are still far left. My mom was a local union rep, still attends protests, and is volunteering today.
Just like the death of the Republican party, we’ve been hearing this too for a decade now.
Millennials will be the next biggest voting block! Gen Y is pissed and going to change everything in the voting landscape!
So far, not a god damn thing. I mean, we’re not seeing record turn out outside of one single election and in the last election we even saw that millennials increased their voting share to Republicans.
They may be mad but they’re the exact same morons as the rest of America.
So far, not a god damn thing.
It’s starting just now, like this year. Millenials had the numbers for at least 8 years, but not the turnout. Well, Cheeto man finally made them mad enough to get out there and vote and we’re seeing quite a few upsets even within the Dem establishment party itself.
Better late than never.
True to form - Gen X getting skipped over in the discussion again.
True to form, people still framing the class war as a generational war.
Entire generations are not in power, only a few corrupt examples of them. All we’ve done, all we’ve ever done, is vote for the “lesser of two evils”. That’s how we got here. We were all duped, and are still being duped, as the voting record will show.
Make no mistake, Gen-X is part of the problem.
~And I fully expect to be downvoted for my unpopular opinion.~
As are millennials and Gen Z
There’s dumb asses in each generation
We’re all the problem, which is why generational blaming is just pointing fingers to make oneself feel less accountable.
@Rhaedas@fedia.io saying nothing with gusto lol
“We’re all the problem” is some “both sides” level victim blaming and erasure of intrinsic context.
If everyone was “the problem” — There would be no problem.
Sure doesn’t look like we’re all the problem equally…
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
This is not old versus young, plenty of old heads want what the younger gen wants.
This is class warfare. The Epstein class has been attacking the rest of us for ages with impunity. The first strike came from Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
I appreciate what AOC does in most respects, but this is a miss for her. We can’t afford this divisive messaging and she needs to be told this.
Accountability to the people for ALL politicians.
Except in a way it is old vs young. The old will need more and more care, and that ends up coming from the youth. The same youth that were promised a future that doesn’t exist, and now have little desire to give giving what they cannot afford. Many countries are going to have to have a real reckoning with aging populations, and few have even started the conversation.
Young people would not mind providing that care if they were paid for it.
If we soaked the rich to fund the welfare state there wouldn’t be so much simmering anger.
Not doctors and lawyers, the billionaires and decimillionaires. The epstein class.
Tax wealth not work.
If we soaked the rich to fund the welfare state there wouldn’t be so much simmering anger.
Not doctors and lawyers, the billionaires and decimillionaires. The epstein class.
If you taxed 100% of the 0.01% wealthiest, took every drop and redistributed it, each person in the world would get $5k USD.
When you get to that 1%, you are already talking about the doctors and lawyers and people you don’t want to target, and compared to many parts of the world, you may already be in the 1 or top 5% of wealth. Should your money be taken as well, so those in Afica with nothing get something more?
Maybe that would certainly change things for some, but wouldn’t have the effect you want, and would also collapse the world economy and put all of us back in the stone age. Certainly I think when you hit a billion of net worth you get a nice little trophy and have 99% of it redistributed, but just ‘taxing’ wealth isn’t going to do a damn thing about fixing societal issues that cost far far more than $5k a person.
I live in the US. I’m assuming each nation deals with its superwealthy internally.
Separately, I think the US should dismantle its empire, which would redistribute wealth to the rest of the world.
So because you are in the US, only the US deserves all of the wealth? That doesn’t sound very fair when you think about it. Sorry Canada, sorry Mexico, you deserve nothing. Seems like all your idea would do is just make every person over ‘X’ wealth move to a different country, which has happened everytime high welath taxes have been implemented.
To your first sentence, that’s the opposite of what I said.
I don’t think wealth taxes should be limited to citizens. If billionaires own wealth here they can pay taxes here. If they don’t like it they can sell their assets in the US.
If billionaires want to move they can obviously do so, but they can keep paying the wealth tax or they can sell their assets in the US. If enough billionaires sell their assets then eventually non billionaires will be able to afford assets. That’s a win for Non billionaires either way.
If billionaires own wealth here they can pay taxes here.
Soooo property taxes? They already pay those.
It’s almost like you haven’t really thought about the proposal or even if it’s going to generate the revenue for the services you are demanding.
Know what’s a quicker path? End wars around the world, invest in local economies, and elect leaders that will do so.
I’m 43 and have been married for nearly 20 years. We are the old people now
AOC says millennials aren’t punk kids anymore? No shit. I haven’t been a punk kid for 20 years. Even Gen Z aren’t kids anymore. There are a few of them that are already managers at my workplace. Insane how US mainstream culture has held space for boomers for so long. So frustrating how unserious we’re considered to be when we’ve been the ones on the ground making shit happen for the last decade or more. Shout out to Gen X for never having been taken seriously.
I mean, the US is still dealing with the silent generation running the country. It’s going to be a long time before the ‘youngest’ baby boomers are gone, like 20+ years still.
Still dealing with? Former President Biden was the first and only silent generation president.
I mean, you’d probably include Trump, Bush Senior and Clinton in there as well.
You wouldn’t, because they aren’t.
They are, but try again.
They very literally are not. Trump barely doesn’t make the cutoff and Clinton is younger than both of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation
1945 is the last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
Donald Trump was born in 1946. No need for me to “try again” when I’m right the first time.
This day and age with a growing positive sentiment toward authoritarianism, anti intellectualism, and fascism, I think some punk would be good. A lot of punk, even.
I loved the phrasing in this one.
Many will read it as:
We’re not punk kids anymore
But it should be read as:
We’re not pink kids anymore
We are adults. Punk adults.
I’m a millennial. I’m well into my 40’s ffs.
There is a vested interest in making you think you are still young.
