The Times had a great front page piece about a changing of the guard in academia — how the old liberal professors are on the cusp of retirement, and on their heels is a new generation that is less ideological.
The decline of self-identified liberals has given way to moderates, but despite a shift to the middle, the vast majority of professors identify as Democrats, albeit less vociferously so, citing Barrack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
Another interesting shift is that as women now make up nearly half of academia, issues have moved away from epic power struggles to everyday issues such as family-friendly benefits. I have a whole chapter in Slackonomics about how Generation X has repurposed feminism, but now I’m wondering if I’ve underestimated the impact that post-feminism has had on the political culture in a much broader sense. When men were the predominant force in political life, grand revolutionary struggles were emphasized over issues that affect people’s individual lives more directly. I quote an academic in the book who noted this about feminism, but maybe the same could be said for politics? Substitute “post-feminism” below (another term for Third Wave Feminism) with “post-liberalism” or “post-baby-boomerism” and you get essentially the same thing:
“Post-feminism assumes … that now it is up to individual women to make personal choices that simply reinforce those fundamental societal changes. Put this way, ‘feminist’ practices become matters of personal style or individual choice and any emphasis on organized intervention is regarded as naive ….”
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I love the concept of a slacker superhero. MaryAnn over at flick filosopher (who I interviewed for my book Slackonomics) loved the idea, too (“He’s cranky. He drinks too much. He’s not particularly sensitive to the needs of anyone but himself.”), but she didn’t think it was true to itself all the way through. She still recommends it, though:
“So here’s the thing: Can you tolerate a Great Idea that doesn’t entirely pull itself off in the execution? Can you forgive a movie for starting off awesome and ending not quite so awesomely? I’ve decided that I can.”
While David Brooks doesn’t put this in generational terms, that is clearly the underlying force of what he’s describing in today’s Times column:
The real core of [Obama's] financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators. …
The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy.
Brooks has really hit his stride. I find him to be the only unpredictable, must-read columnist at the Times. Maureen Dowd has become a caricature, Paul Krugman is still worthwhile but never unpredictable, Bob Herbert is neither worthwhile or unpredictable, Thomas Friedman needs no further piling on, William Kristol is a joke, etc.