Talking About My Generation (and the Left)

...The "teach-ins" devised in the 1960s have reappeared in the work of contemporary labor organizers, and the sit-ins of the civil rights movement have been taken up by anti-sweatshop activists on college campuses...

...And even though many of the debates from the 1960s seem antiquated, there is a great deal to learn from some of them...

...Unfortunately, the tendency to roll one's eyes at any mention of the 1960s has become all too easy among members of my generation...

...There's a whole living legacy of practice and ideas that stem from the New Left...

...When they explained their generation to their readers, up went the clichés about the 1960s: "No fire hoses, tear gas, police dogs, or riots...

...To say that members of Generation X have grown up with radical changes in the political landscape is banal...

...Think of our last "end of ideology" phase—the late 1950s and early 1960s—when social critics like C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman developed scathing critiques of American culture in widely read books like White Collar and Growing Up Absurd...

...So now amid our own period of conservatism, where are our young social critics...

...it is the mantra of our consumer culture (as Daniel Bell pointed out in the mid-1970s...

...Though baby boomers might be embracing consumerism just as much as Generation X today, young people don't have any experience with a world not saturated by this cynical form of consumerism...

...Well-funded groups like Third Millennium suggest that since Gen Xers distrust the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, the programs should be abolished...

...Ellis's characters were incredibly stunted, superficial, and ironical (diffident even about snuff films...

...It's the personal, individual, and authentic feelings generated by doing service that cheer young souls...

...After all, personal liberation has become the status quo...

...In the Washington Post Magazine, John Fountain shows how hard it is to distinguish between 60 DISSENT / Fall 1999 Coffman's devotion to feeding the homeless and her self-promotion as a beauty contestant: "Amber's story is a particularly curious combination of selflessness, self-promotion, and social advocacy—for she is not only the quintessential volunteer, she is also a beauty queen with a strong taste for the limelight . . . . It's not as strange a combination as it may seem...

...sOME HOPE that service will lead young people straight into the arms of politics...

...The idea of a New Left relied upon some sort of unified vision that transcended the single-issue movements of the 1950s and 1960s—most important, the peace and civil rights movements...

...Their assumptions and many of their writings make no sense to a generation that has grown up in a world bereft of liberal ideals...

...Liberalism, for these thinkers, had become the status quo, and they believed moderate liberals would steer the state far into the future...

...And those not yet young adults fare no better, as William Finnegan points out in his Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country...

...Understand, Ellis is still viewed as a social critic by reviewers, but his one central idea is simple and monotonous: we are a culture immune to shock due to our consumer culture's superficiality...

...Organizations like Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee passed on a form of activism that many young people draw upon today, consciously or not...

...Ellis's first novel, Less Than Zero (1984), told the story of young, wealthy Los Angeles residents—making pointed criticisms along the way about the excesses of consumer culture, its superficiality and tendency to anesthetize young people...

...As he sees it, in Playing the Future, today's "screenagers" (his own annoying turn of phrase, which stands for kids addicted to computer games) are combating linear thinking and creating a "dynamic, holistic, animistic, weightless, and recapitulated culture...

...If we ever develop a political vision that can galvanize a young left (and I obviously have strong doubts), it will have to take into account this generation's wariness about big ideas with62 DISSENT / Fall 1999 out falling prey to the insipid "end of ideology" outlook of today's political critics...

...In conservative times like our own, when practicality seems our highest value, social criticism often opens up new avenues of debate...

...Generation X allegedly responds to this sort of message because we want immediate action and hands-on service—not the slow and conflictual world of political change...

...These young intellectuals would not (because they could not) recount their own experiences with the New Left but would rather ask some difficult questions: what can we take from that time...

...Individual volunteerism and community service—as substitution for the collective world of political action—are the central linchpins of this new, allegedly postideological politics...

...Social policies tell half the story...

...We need a coherent discussion about what traditions and ideas young people can build upon...

...Whether it be discussions about the limits and possibilities of electoral politics, the strengths and weaknesses of participatory democracy, the corruption of the university by corporate pressures, the role of intellectuals in politics (deDISSENT / Fall 1999 • 59 bates originated by C. Wright Mills and heightened during the teach-ins), the ideological nature of talk about economic "prosperity," the potential and limits of civil disobedience— all of these areas of discussion have relevance...

...Take Generation X's pioneering social critic, Bret Easton Ellis, who rose to fame during the 1980s...

...A recent report on youth volunteerism and politics by the National Association of the Secretaries of States (NASS) confirms this: "While youth volunteerism is on the rise, this involvement remains decidedly individualistic and apolitical...

...The unregulated and all-powerful consumer market now defines the social lives of Generation X. The average child today has been subjected to 380,000 television commercials by high school graduation...

...So let me be clear: all I mean by Generation X is a set of young people who follow the baby boomers—people who are now in their twenties and thirties (which, for sake of disclosure, includes myself...

...There wasn't anything terribly deep about the work, but it propelled Ellis to the heights of punditry—he served as critical spokesperson for his generation in such venues as the New York Times Magazine...

...KEVIN MATTSON is author of Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy during the Progressive Era...

...Liberals are hanging onto the last threads of the programs they instituted and watching as most of those threads—like welfare—unravel...

...Soon, the immediate spotlight turned on Ellis highlighted his flaws...

...For instance, after tutoring disadvantaged students, young people might start asking bigger questions about more equitable school funding policies...

...Let's face it: Most of us aren't looking for unnecessary confrontation...

...He celebrates non-linear thinking, as against the unhip ways of baby boomer parents...

...The politics of radical pressure —as Arnold Kaufman called it—was passed down to students who during the 1980s and 1990s demanded that their universities and colleges divest from the racist South African regime...

...Ironically, one source of hope might come from a simple and gloomy fact: Generation X is doing notoriously worse than baby boomers in terms of economic standing...

...Privatization as a catch-all answer to political reform dominates debate...

...Though Coupland pointed to America's wastefulness, there was little sense that he expected anything more than for young people to perfect their defensiveness against a (predictably) cruel world...

...Social critics like Theodore Roszak, with their faith in the revolutionary power of personal liberation, have nothing to teach us...

...The book industry turns writers into overnight stars who might lack ideas but grin with marketability...

...That's what made sociocultural analysis so important to them...

...No wonder Bill Clinton used his service initiative (AmeriCorps) to attract disaffected Generation Xers...

...Well put...

...Characters never seemed truly damaged by the difficult situations they faced, just flippant and superficially supercilious...

...The libertarian dream of modeling all relationships on the basis of the market weighs heavily on people who have come of political age under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton...

...That's why this generation might lend an open ear to a responsible left that focuses its attention on economic inequalities...

...Conservative politics and everyday culture feed off one another...

...in fact in some ways it reflects a fundamental truth about a society in which the celebration of self and the ethic of selflessness have come together...

...Unlike the boomers, Mitchell argues in A New Kind of Party Animal: How the Young Are Tearing Up the Political Landscape, Gen Xers disdain partisanship and ideology...

...Young activists are out there...

...Like the editors at Wired magazine, Rushkoff fetishizes the Internet, computer games, and virtual reality...

...Take the case of New Left political criticism...

...Political possibilities looked pretty bleak to Mills and Goodman at the end of the 1950s...

...In the face of these realities—the death of liberalism and the hyper-extension of a cynical consumer culture—the major hand-me58 DISSENT / Fall 1999 downs of baby-boomer leftism seem outdated and barren to most young radicals today...

...Another End of Ideology...

...They pointed to fissures in the cultural landscape by dissecting middle-class alienation, boredom with schooling, and the meaningless nature of work and career...

...We need young historians and political thinkers who can sort through the wreckage of the past to assess what still lives today...

...ADDITIONALLY, we can't allow the general conservative mood in America— and the "end of ideology" ideas touted by Generation X political critics or the hip irony of social critics—to cloud the activities of young people actively engaged in the left...

...today, cultural rebellion inspires new marketing initiatives...

...All of this culminated in American Psycho (1991), which juxtaposed grotesque descriptions of murders with detailed accountings of New York City yuppie culture...

...Cowan and Nelson, in a book on Generation X and politics which was as simplistic and shallow as most of them (though brazenly entitled Revolution X), used the "we're practical" mantra throughout...

...As the pundits make clear, Generation X—standing proudly against the inherited spirit of the 1960s—disdains politics (or any collective and public activity) and craves authentic and individual experience...

...Today, reading New Left political criticism, which assumes that liberalism is the main impediment to radicalism, is like reading obscure theological writings from an ancient world...

...But they aren't being revisited, in part because baby boomers have a tendency to talk as if these are their things—their intellectual possessions...

...David Gergen, a middle-of-the-roader himself, noticed the rise in volunteerism and declared, "Contrary to myths that they are slackers, generation Xers are actually brimming with idealism...

...Their direct attempts to serve poor immigrants led them to push for national legislation like child welfare laws...

...Coupland's characters, like Ellis's, were ironic DISSENT /Fall 1999 61 and detached about the situations they faced in their lives—underemployment, too much television, downward mobility, and broken families...

...Advertisers and Hollywood films encourage people to sneer at tradition—to openly embrace rebellion...

...This generation has heard enough about cultural rebellion from the corporate marketers and enough about the supposed glory days of the 1960s from burned out boomers, but not nearly enough about what might be done to make their economic future stronger and more just...

...In reading about Coffman, you can imagine many other young people feeling good about doing service and simply stopping there (or better yet, running home to write it all down on their C.V.'s...

...Unfortunately, this assumption was wrong: Americans had other ideologies at hand—including a nastier form of libertarianism and cold-blooded capitalism (couldn't the historians at Studies on the Left remember the Gilded Age...

...Like these other writers, Douglas Rushkoff has turned skimming the surface into a career in social criticism...

...Drawing from an assumption that spread across the political spectrum during the 1950s—that liberalism was the dominant ideology of America (an idea found in the work of Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, Lionel Trilling, and others)—these critics argued to push liberalism to the left...

...Not only have we witnessed the end of the cold war, we have witnessed the complete crash of modern liberalism...

...I recently heard a self-confessed liberal say that we'd be lucky if we still had Social Security and Medicare in the near future...

...Radicalism's late-1960s flameout also makes it difficult for us to remember the less strident activities and debates of the New Left's early years...

...All of this, of course, is somehow outside the realm of politics or ideology...

...He started pumping out more novels that were seen increasingly for what they were: tedious and cheap attempts to shock his audience (Ellis never seemed to imagine that his readers were like his characters and therefore unshockable...

...So Long 1960s...

...What would benefit these movements is a critical reassessment of the New Left's legacy—a reassessment neither dismissive nor celebratory...

...He turns young computer game players into the foot soldiers for postmodern cultural liberation...

...In the minds of young pundits like Michele Mitchell, Rob Nelson, and Jonathan Cowan, the reason Generation X doesn't care about the sixties is because it is practical and focused and therefore less taken by violent confrontations than were baby boomers...

...From the heyday of the Great Society— when liberalism triumphed in the realm of social policy and leadership—to now, the course has been sliding downward fast...

...Many of their ideas—including Mills's call to form democratic publics and Goodman's criticism of the schooling system— inspired 1960s activism...

...DISSENT / Fall 1999 63...

...But this conclusion might be too pessimistic...

...In an interview, Mitchell contrasted the "large scale, grand visions" of the baby boomers with her own generation's down-to-earthness...

...At best, it has become a cheap tag devised by corporate advertisers...

...Statistics show that more and more young people perform voluntary service, and now the pundits have grabbed onto this fact and argue that it represents a new model of engagement...

...If it fails to make this clear to young people facing their political future today, the left will most certainly consign itself to the past, as it has too many times before...

...Elizabeth Dole's recent promotion of her own volunteerism follows suit...

...The NASS found no correlation between those who do service and those who vote or are politically engaged...

...Beyond Generation X Clearly, my generation is not about to produce a renaissance of the left...

...He recently explained to a Rolling Stone writer what his writing is all about: "A kind of shallowness, vanity, narcissism, an obsession with surfaces, finding the truth in surface...

...At the same time, we must recognize that political skepticism can be healthy so long as it's more than just pragmatic conservatism...

...If some key assumptions of New Left political thought became anachronistic, the hopes placed in youth and the counterculture —another legacy of the 1960s—became surreal...

...Turn on the television, and you'll get messages of revolution and personal liberation sold by Nike and Coke...

...One of the few interesting organizations to emerge recently, the 2030 Center, just issued a report entitled "When Good Jobs Go Bad: Temporary Work in the New Economy...

...But it's up to young social critics to crash through the generational stereotypes that have formed—those that peg young people as hopelessly cynical and forlorn about politics...

...He's made clear his affiliation with this generation by editing the Generation X Reader...

...Whenever an elder starts talking about that decade, it sounds like "good ol' days" talk to so many of us...

...This explains, I suppose, why so many liberals jump to the defense of Bill Clinton, who has done more to destroy the original liberal dream than Ronald Reagan (liberals know that there are worse things around the corner...

...But while Goodman worried about youth culture, Rushkoff quickly celebrates its most insidious elements...

...Also a novelist, Rushkoff has taken more of a whack at straight-ahead social criticism...

...The editors of Studies on the Left, an important New Left journal that was clearly influenced by Mills and Williams, explained to their readers in 1962 that "if the left" wanted "to play a meaningful role in American life it must cut itself free from the stifling framework of liberal rhetoric...

...But volunteerism doesn't operate this way in today's culture of narcissism...

...It's Theodore Roszak meets the computer chip...

...To paraphrase Irving Howe, when things seem bleak, ideas, analysis, and the life of the mind take on a higher importance...

...There's little serious discussion about public goods...

...The reader became like the author—detached, but knowing, cynical, but still functioning...

...Just as important as the decline in social programs, though, is the general mood and range of debates in America today...

...One need not buy into all the silly speculation and over-determined talk about Generation X to see that it merits careful attention—its experiences tell us a lot about the potential future of the left...

...It's not just that young people have grown up witnessing the shattering of the New Deal/Great Society paradigm that boomers grew up with, it's that the alternatives—libertarianism and market triumphalism—have insinuated their way into the everyday life of so many young people...

...The real problem, though, is that Generation X pundits have created a new Weltanschauung of amnesia that takes the chaos of the late 1960s and turns it into an excuse to banish the past to the past...

...Our political critics are too enamored with pragmatic conservatism, and our social critics are too flippantly detached or too busy pining for the past...

...Whatever that means, Rushkoff likes it...

...Instead of protesting or getting involved in electoral or community-based politics, the critics argue, young people feed the homeless or tutor disadvantaged kids in school or clean up polluted rivers...

...Worse still is the spread of consumer values throughout all of contemporary political culture...

...Even with a story that ended with a touching bit of sentimentality, this novel simply mirrored the culture of consumption that it seemingly mocked...

...Today, the 1960s slogan "Youth Will Make the Revolution" sounds like a marketing clich...

...Today, that means the world of what has been called Generation X. I know all too well the obnoxious ring of this term...

...As is usually the case, we can learn much more from the past than our political culture assumes...

...we want, instead, to do practical work on behalf of local communities...

...Something like that happened to Jane Addams and many other young settlement house workers at the turn of the century...

...Douglas Coupland perfected this authorial attitude in Generation X (1992...

...And yet Ellis sees no way out of this syndrome...

...Before naming names, let's start with the obvious: the book industry of the 1990s is different from that of the 1950s...

...A New Conservatism of Mind...

...Rushkoff tries to speak for youth, a bit like Paul Goodman...

...To hear old counterculture types talk about doing battle with Puritan codes from yesteryear sounds bizarre...

...What lessons from that era can we draw upon to make sense of our current political situation...

...Who would have thought that public school systems—which date back to the nineteenth century, after all—would be considered up for sale to experiments like vouchers...

...These findings are given a human face in a story about Amber Coffman, a young woman who has combined the work of voluntary service (feeding homeless people in this case) and her effort to become state-wide beauty queen...

...So the quick response is to ignore it without any attempt to discern what might be worthwhile or salvageable from that decade...

...Perhaps "dropping out" in the late sixties entailed asking questions about capitalism and a conformist culture...

...at worst, it has become a prop used in arguments for gutting Social Security and Medicare...

...Loads of young activists have joined the labor movement via Union Summer, students are preventing their schools from carrying sweatshop clothing, and Gen Xers run a number of environmentalist organizations...

...The report documents how young adults face a new economy—one founded on temporary work with low pay and decreasing benefits...

...Its infatuation with service is the sort that makes sense within the context of a society that no longer trusts government or public life in general...

...The critic's role was to remain smirking about a world fallen apart...

...The sort of megalomania that the New Left fell into (especially during the late 1960s when "the revolution" appeared just around the corner) will never be our fate, and that is a good thing...

...New Left radicals helped push liberalism off the political map of America...

...to make sense of their political world...

...In fact, service can simply make young people feel good about themselves—believing their civic obligation has been performed in the act of ladling soup...

...The critique that informed the New Left stemmed largely from the thinking of C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams...

...We are too skeptical and jaded about political possibilities...

...F LLIS'S SUPERFICIALITY highlights the most important features of Generation X soI cial criticism—hip detachment and cool irony, an attitude that has become a fixture in contemporary popular culture...