How to Talk to Generation X

Don't You Forget About Us

Generation X voters, born between 1965 and 1980, were instrumental in delivering the White House to Donald Trump.

What’s the matter with us?

I was born in 1973, so I am here to represent. Here’s my explainer on where we come from:

Gen X grew up on our own. We were the latchkey kids who had to fend for ourselves during school breaks. There was no helicopter parenting in those days. When I had a day off from school, my mother told me to lock the door after she left for work and make myself food if I got hungry. When I was eight or nine, I set the toaster on fire trying to make pizza and had to figure out how to extinguish it myself. My mom would call me every few hours to make sure I was still alive. In the early 1980s, daytime tv did not get good until the re-runs began at 5 PM, so I would amuse myself all day by reading Sweet Valley High books or singing along to the Wham! Make It Big album. No one was around to entertain or schedule me.

Gen X grew up without being coddled. I don’t think my parents showed up to any of my games in high school or even knew when they were. It’s not that they didn’t care, it’s just that they had their own stuff going on. If I needed a ride somewhere, I would have to wait for one of them to be done with whatever they were doing to come get me. There were no cell phones, so sometimes my friends and I would have to wait at the Princeton Kiosk for a really long time until our parents showed up because that was the designated pick-up spot in town. That’s just how it went. Today, I schedule around my son’s soccer games, so I can leave work in the middle of the day and drive for forty-five minutes to an island in the middle of the East River to watch him play. I also know where he is at all times. And I’m one of the lucky ones who has the flexibility to do that.

Gen X grew up in the Greed is Good era. Our formative years were influenced by Ronald Reagan and then the first George Bush, by Alex P. Keaton and Gordon Gekko. When Tony Danza put his daughter in the blue van and moved her to Connecticut, it was because he wanted her to grow up among rich people in the suburbs. Like Trump, George and Weezie Jefferson left Queens for the East Side of Manhattan and moved on up to the deluxe apartment in the sky. For that matter, Trump himself was all over the New York tabloids when we were growing up, constantly boasting about the wealth he claimed to have even as his businesses were declaring bankruptcy. The Kardashians have nothing on the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s.

Gen X did not grow up PC. Our Hollywood muse was John Hughes, who made movies that many of us can still quote from memory. There was always a not-so-subtle class message that was geared towards the have-nots who aspired to be with the haves. The popular girl in the Breakfast Club was rich and spoiled. The popular guy in Sixteen Candles was rich and spoiled. The popular kids in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were rich and spoiled. The popular clique in Pretty in Pink was rich and spoiled. In that last movie, the girl did not end up with the working class guy who treated her well and had everything in common with her. Test audiences hated that ending, so Hughes changed it to make her end up with the rich kid who had ghosted her because she was poor. That was the happy ending.

Molly Ringwald, who starred in many of these movies, revisited them at the height of the #metoo movement and wrote an article about how problematic they really are. And it’s true — they are racist and sexist and send a horrible message about the treatment of people of color and women. In Sixteen Candles, the popular guy all but sells his unconscious girlfriend to a freshman in exchange for another girl’s panties. The freshman has sex with the girlfriend in the car while she is passed out — and she claims to have enjoyed it the next day, even though she did not consent to it because she was unconscious. In the real world, that is called sexual assault. The Chinese exchange student in that movie, whose appearance is always preceded with a gong, exists purely for laughs by leaning into every racial stereotype possible. For good measure, the actor playing him is of Japanese descent, because of course it never occurred to the people in casting that all Asians are not interchangeable.

None of this is appropriate. That movie could not be made today. Neither could Airplane! or Blazing Saddles or The Wedding Crashers or even The Hangover. But we grew up on these movies and don’t want to hear that everything we found funny in adolescence and young adulthood is suddenly verboten. Leave us alone with our memories.

Generation X is squeezed. We are the sandwich generation, simultaneously taking care of our kids and our elderly parents. The financial burden aside (and that is a big aside), we are run down and have little time for anything but responsibility. That’s ok — we grew up responsible because we have largely fended for ourselves our whole lives. But when you fend for yourself your whole life, it eventually grinds on you mentally and physically. For too many people who are approaching retirement age without having the savings to stop working, it also grinds financially, with no end in sight.

According to the Associated Press exit poll, Generation X turned out in higher numbers and voted for Trump at higher levels than others. This includes women, who only narrowly went for Kamala Harris. Compared to 2020, Harris underperformed with Black and Latino voters over the age of 45 and with Generation X and Baby Boomer women of color.

This is heartbreaking on a number of levels. Some of our rights were already eroded thanks to Trump’s decisions in his first term. Now, many more are at risk in his second. But we can’t just give the back of the hand to these voters and blame them for bringing back “the patriarchy” or refuse to engage with them at the dinner table because they voted for someone who is a racist and a misogynist.

What Generation X hates more than anything is a scold. We have been conditioned to tune out the nagging from birth. And Democrats have often come across as scolds, to anyone who said that the economy was not working for them, to anyone who mistakenly used the wrong terminology, to anyone who felt he or she had to walk on egg shells in order not to get canceled. As Rahm Emanuel, another Gen-Xer, said in The NY Times, “When the woke police come at you, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

My two cents is that Generation X went for Trump because he refused to indulge anyone. Trump spoke for many in a generation that grew up giving everyone the middle finger and silently rolling its eyes at both our parents and the indulged generations that came after us. We are the last generation to grow up without a cell phone or the internet, so we know how to disconnect. We are the generation that just wants to get on with it. And Trump certainly promised to get on with it.

So we need to get on with it too. Out of chaos comes opportunity and the opportunity now is to speak to Generation X in its own language and on its own terms.

We have an economic argument to make to a generation that is approaching retirement where many only have social security as a safety net. Explain why our economic policies actually benefit these voters. We have a cultural argument to make to a generation that doesn’t want to hear a lecture because what was once acceptable is now taboo. Rather than cancel them or disengage from people who voted in ways with which you disagree, state your case for why progress demands greater respect — for everyone. There is no grand savior coming to message for the Democratic Party. It is up to each of us to be the savior.

Look, I get it. There are people out there demanding that you stop associating with your cousin at Thanksgiving because he voted for Trump. You are upset that your college friend voted for a man who boasted about grabbing women by the pussy, who took credit for overturning Roe v Wade, who platforms nationalists and wants to govern as an authoritarian. You feel betrayed. But now is not the time to disengage.

Take it from me. I co-founded a non-profit organization that successfully spearheaded the only two pieces of legislation of the #metoo movement. It wasn’t easy. We met over and over again with senators and Members of Congress with whom I vehemently disagree on almost every issue. In the most partisan moment in our lives, it seemed impossible to get the bipartisan support necessary for these bills to pass and get to the president’s desk. But we plugged away until we convinced enough people on both sides of the aisle to join us. We did not get everything we wanted but we got more than enough to give millions of women who were sexually assaulted or harassed an ability to stand up for themselves. That’s how progress happens — by convincing the other side of the merits of your argument, no matter who they are.

Voters are typically more open-minded than Washington politicians. You just have to meet them where they are and persuade them of the merits of your case, by stowing the judgement and the scolding.

If they agree, great. If they don’t, keep engaging them respectfully. Don’t isolate them or disengage because you feel betrayed that they haven’t come around to your way of thinking. That advice may work when you’re on cable, stoking outrage for ratings. But it does not win elections.

Odds and Ends:

Speaking of Moving Forward

Nancy Pelosi may be the best politician of her generation, bar none. But this weekend, she made a colossal mistake in sitting down with the New York Times to blame President Biden for not abandoning his re-election bid sooner so that Democrats could have an open primary.

It’s over. The infighting among a generation of politicians who are trying to cement their own legacies is not constructive. Pelosi does not need to put the shank in Biden one last time. He does not need to take the time to respond to her, which he inevitably will through background quotes from loyalists. Autopsies are important but Pelosi is less a coroner than an executioner defending her role in the beheading. Is this really what we need to focus on?

There are important elections coming up next year in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City. Harris got about half the margin in Virginia than Biden received in 2020. Pelosi noted that Democrats picked up several seats in New York as justification for why Democrats there are not down and out. But New Yorkers and New Jerseyans have been sounding the alarm for several elections now about the Democrats governing their states. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy almost blew a million-plus vote plurality to come within a few points of losing his re-election. Since then, Republican voter registration has surged — while the governor has prioritized his own interests, like trying and ultimately failing to shove his wife’s senate candidacy down the throats of Democratic voters . Governor Kathy Hochul came within a few points of losing her election the following year to a MAGA congressman from Long Island and has since ticked off voters on both sides of the issue downstate by championing and then scrapping and now again reviving the possibility of congestion pricing.

Voters in New York and New Jersey once again sent Code Red messages to the Democratic Party on Tuesday, with Republicans flipping a Democratic stronghold county in the northern part of the state and making incredible gains among Latinos everywhere. Harris won a Democratic stronghold district in the central part of the state, represented by the Speaker of the General Assembly, by less than 1%. In New York, Trump picked up a huge share of the vote in communities of color, including in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

And that’s just the challenge in 2025.

In less than two years, the House and one-third of the senate will be up for election. Focus on how to win those races. If you need to review why we lost — and you do — focus on the structural problems that got us here. It’s not just Biden’s fault.