Obama's Generational Dynamic

I'm back from New Orleans and catching up on email and reading, including a (newish) 55 page report from CIRCLE, and working on finishing some longer/more-researched pieces. Things should be back up to speed tomorrow. I'm also finally done with traveling for the next 5 weeks (until Iowa), so I'm hoping to maintain a quicker pace and higher word count here at FM through the end of the year. Until then, here's an interesting quick hit.

Scholars and Rogues has an interesting post that examines four recent news articles, each tackling the Obama campaign from a generational angle.

The piece is good in that each of the articles linked, while deploying a generational frame for their analysis, come to widely varied conclusions. However I disagree with some of the assessments.

That’s why, in the end, I will vote (or not vote) for a candidate based on what they stand for and how they live up to it. Not because a generational dynamic tells me to, or a self-projecting pundit believes I should, or because they happen to fulfill a token demographic. But because they can prove to me that they are deserving based on their own merit. As a guy who comes in on the tail end of Gen X, I’m old enough to be cynical of what people tell me, but young enough to still want to believe in it. I think that’s a fair compromise, and putting aside generational prognostications and cultural assignations to focus on what matters most–the issues–is equally fair in my view.

Chris Bowers has a similar beef with generational analysis in general over at Open Left.

Speaking as someone who writes about a single generation and their place in progressive politics, I think the author is looking at the concept of a generation all wrong. No one is going to vote a certain way because of their generation. The generational label doesn't emerge independent of environmental factors, family factors, ideology, etc. It emerges decades after those things have shaped people, and everyone who has read anything serious about generations knows that these are imprecise averages that get fuzzier the closer you get to the individual level. It's not a precise science like organic chemistry, it's more about averages, trends, and probability.

That said, I tend to agree with both of their assessments of Generational Arguments as directed at Obama - that they generally say more about the writer's own views than they do the candidate. This isn't because "generation" is a useless concept, but rather because the writers are trying to make one person - in this case Obama - carry all the water for everything anyone ever wrote about Gen X and the Boomers. They're taking it out of the aggregate and into the specific. This is why I've been so resistant to buying the story-line that Obama is the "youth candidate." Polling - a still imprecise but much more reliable tool than generational analysis - has shown time and again that young people - Gen X, Millennials, or any other group - do not vote monolithically. You can make generalizations about the ideology, partisanship, and even temperament of a "generation," but trying to nail that down into a specific candidate is a foolhardy endeavor.

Even so, I'm not nearly as willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater as Bowers and Scholars & Rogues. Of course you can always break "Generations" down into their more useful and informative constituent parts (as Bowers does in his piece). But there are useful things that you can do with generational labels as well. Writing about civic participation and ideological trends among Millennials is useful when trying to convince journalists or political operatives about the need for youth vote outreach or the advances we've seen in youth participation in the last 5 years, particularly among a journalist class immune to nuance. Generational analysis shouldn't be a catch-all for explaining political and cultural trends - which seems to be the big beef that S&R has with the Obama articles - but they can still be useful tools if one keeps it in perspective and is aware of the limitations.