Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics

Chapter 4: Meet the Millennials

Chapter 4 Meet the Millennials A new generation arrives on the scene about once every twenty years, and every time it does, older generations struggle to understand how “these kids today” think and behave.While every generation is unique, many of the clues to understanding its members’ behavior can be found by taking a longer historical view and noting recurring patterns of child rearing and parental attitudes toward their children, which play such an important role in establishing each individual’s belief system. Of course, not every member of any given generation exhibits the archetypical behavior of their cohort, but survey and aggregate data do reveal clear behavioral tendencies that define a given generation. So, too, does the popular culture’s portrayal of young people and their parents , a favorite subject of both television sitcoms and movies. Looking at both the social research data and media portrayals of each generation helps to draw a clear picture of Millennials and how they differ from Baby Boomers and Generation X. Millennials Are a Lot Like Their Great-Grandparents The Millennial Generation was born in the years 1982 to 2003. Millennials are the children of Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, but in many key respects they are more like their GI Generation (Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”) grandparents and great-grandparents than they are like their own parents.The parallels between the Millennial Generation and the GI Generation (born in the years 1901 to 1924) provide us a glimpse into how Millennials might influence America and its future. Millennials are the largest and most racially diverse generation of Americans ever.About 40 percent of Millennials are of African American, 66 Chap-04.qxd 11/23/07 5:15 PM Page 66 Latin American, Asian, or racially mixed backgrounds, compared with nearly 25 percent of the two next older generations.Twenty percent of Millennials have at least one parent who is an immigrant. While nearly 90 percent of the GI Generation was white, it was also diverse by the standards of its era. Many were immigrants themselves or the children of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who composed the last great wave of Europeans to enter the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The ethnic diversity of the GI Generation is reflected both in the sneering comment of Adolf Hitler that the United States was a “mongrel nation” incapable of successfully waging war and the Hollywood movies that frequently depict American World War II fighting units as comprising soldiers of widely varying ethnic and regional backgrounds. Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical comedy Biloxi Blues perfectly captures the moment in American history when members of the GI Generation came out of their ethnic enclaves and lost their cultural innocence in the forced solidarity of boot camp. Both the GI and Millennial Generations were also large in comparison with the generations that immediately preceded their own. There are now twice as many Millennials as Gen-Xers and already a million more Millennials alive than Baby Boomers—a gap that will only increase over the next several decades as the Baby Boomers age and die. In 1930, when the GI Generation was poised to start making its mark on American society and politics, there were nearly as many members of that generation living at that time as there were members of the two previous American generations combined.Then, just as now, the sheer numbers of that generation allowed its beliefs and attitudes to become the dominant style of its era. There are also parallels in the societal, economic, and political settings in which the GI and Millennial Generations grew up and came of age. In both settings, labeled idealist eras, there was loud demand for limiting immigration to protect American culture, values, and jobs, even as both generations were significantly changing those very values and culture. Both eras also featured widespread exhortations and major governmental expenditures to eliminate potentially addictive substances: the struggle to enact and enforce Prohibition during the GI Generation’s youth, and the War on Drugs in the time of the Millennials.Economically,both eras were Meet the Millennials 67 Chap-04.qxd 11/23/07 5:15 PM Page 67 marked by modest recoveries from the troughs that had occurred during the previous generation’s coming of age, recoveries that were most clearly distinguished by rising stock markets and also by sharpening...