Baby boomers have lived through one of the most remarkable economic expansions in history. They thought it would never end. Now they are looking for messiahs and scape goats to blame for the reason it has gone sour. This kind of thinking emphasizes the 'baby' in baby boomers.
They should look in a mirror. Entitlement is not destiny.
In 2008, the magical thinking was primarily happening in the minds of those on the left, or the center-left, and in this election they are suffering the consequences. Progressives who pinned extravagantly high hopes on Barack Obama to marshal the powers of government are now devastated to discover that he is far from perfect. The decisive figure who seemed to radiate adult authority—he’d play fair, keep his cool, provide—couldn’t deliver, so now it’s back to the old Democratic intra-family squabbling. The president has been called a “sellout” for his uncomfortably close ties to Wall Street; he is accused of “fecklessness” for escalating the war in Afghanistan. Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went so far as to say that he’d vote to kill the health-care bill if he were in the Senate.
During the 2010 cycle, meanwhile, the magical thinking has belonged to the right. The tea party, and those who share its values, think the solution is to destroy as much of government as possible, like a sullen teenager who believes that all would be fine if his parents simply dropped dead, and it has punished anyone in the GOP who may have seen a role for Washington, apart from waging war. The Delaware Republican Mike Castle, who’s served in public office for the better part of 35 years, was called “the King RINO”—Republican in Name Only—by his Senate primary opponent, Christine O’Donnell, for supporting TARP, and she became the nominee. Bob Bennett was cast out of office in Utah, Charlie Crist was run out of the GOP primary in Florida. In the words of Rand Paul, the Kentucky tea-party candidate who bested a far more reasonable choice in the GOP Senate primary: “Government is the servant, not the master.” It was an unfortunate comment from a man who’s expressed disdain for the Civil Rights Act. But also quite representative of where we are generally. We are thinking in fanciful, binary choices. Obama and his government must save us; he and his government must disappear. Neither option is especially real.
Add this all up, and we are experiencing a pandemic of electoral innumeracy. Lulled by years of bottomless credit, we cannot shake from our heads the idea that we are entitled to certain comforts. We expect quicker fixes to this economy than may, alas, be feasible, and we believe intractable problems can be solved without sacrifice. If these are impossible demands, we would prefer not to know. The depth of entitlement out there is best exemplified by the bankers
That the left doesn’t recognize the similarities between the Obama and the tea-party movements is probably a function of just how good the Obama movement was at making its supporters feel special. But the fact is, this cycle, Republicans are taking advantage of this same desire for reempowerment, and they’re using the same tools. The tea-party movement is propelled by Facebook activity, copious tweets, and rallies celebrating the power of the audience. At the inaugural tea-party convention in February, Palin described the movement as “a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful. This is about the people.” In other words, Yes, we can.
http://nymag.com/news/features/69267/">The Benjamin Button Election/
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