Over the next two decades "the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history," notes Jeff Giesea at The Free Press. Keisuke - stock.adobe.com Culture critic: Don’t Let Boomers Eat the Future Over the next two decades “the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history,” notes Jeff Giesea at The Free Press, and if we fail to reckon with this shift “we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed.” Boomers, “wealthier and healthier than any generation before them,” are “understandably reluctant to step aside”; meanwhile, “Social Security and Medicare, which primarily benefit them, consume 40% of the federal budget.” While “resentment toward boomers” is “stupid,” our system needs “fixes,” starting with “honest entitlement reform,” “greater support for young families” and more “political representation for young Americans” to address the “asymmetry of organized political power between the old and the young.”
“For almost a year now, America’s two parties have been engaged in a mass congressional redistricting battle royale,” explains Josh Hammer at RealClear Politics. So “which party will come out on top in advance of the midterm elections this November?” Odds are “the big victor will be the GOP.” One recent move gave Republicans four seats in Florida; if Virginia Dems’ “new map is tossed,” they’ll “be out an additional four seats.” Longer-term, the Supreme Court’s “landmark redistricting” ruling put an end to “race-conscious mapmaking,” a big blow to Dems — and voter migration “from blue states to red states” is “a trend not even the most aggressive gerrymandering can possibly alleviate.”
“What the Supreme Court has ‘gutted’ ” in Louisiana v. Callais “is not the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” as Democrats charge, “but a nakedly racial form of gerrymandering,” thunders Daniel McCarthy at The Spectator. The ruling “represents a great retrenchment” in US politics, rightly casting racial gerrymandering as not a legitimate response to discrimination, but “an enduring form of discrimination in its own right.” Now Democrats, who depended on it, “will have to make a different kind of case” in “districts which are no longer so racially segregated”; “geography matters.” Hence their drive “to write new rules for their benefit”: Pack the Supreme Court with liberals; statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. “The rules themselves are now stakes in the game.”
In polling for the ’28 primaries, the “leading Democratic candidate is consistently Kamala Harris, the face of the party’s 2024 debacle,” marvels The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. Why? Trump’s unpopularity makes Dems think “they can keep everything basically as it was in the Biden era, with the same broad priorities and deference to activists and interest groups, and float back to power automatically.” And Harris “was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.” The party’s poised to make “the exact same mistakes.”
High-school graduates learning trades are poised to be “the winners of the next great transition,” which “is more tied to the production of tangible goods than the manufacturing of digits and images,” reports Joel Kotkin at UnHerd. The end of the Information Age “has many implications: political, economic and social.” “The pandemic and now the Hormuz crisis demonstrate why countries need strong energy and industrial sectors.” “The great transition offers a way out of the West’s decline,” with growing demand for “skilled tradespeople or industrial, chemical or civil engineers, who are critical to the production of goods as opposed to bytes.” This transition is “reshaping the geography of opportunity,” shifting “political power” while “creating opportunities for the neo-socialists.” “The great transition is on, and it will shape our future.”
