I want to hate on this column, but then again I don’t want to hate on it because it is in many respects quiet incisive. But let me tell you what I don’t like about it.
I don’t like it when people talk about whole generations of people like an astrologer, suggesting that we’re all a certain way because of when we were born. I don’t like it when someone who was born in 1976 speaks for all of Generation X, using references that had no relevance to my formation because I was already out of high school when they became a thing. I don’t like it when being a white man is presumptively defective, and having lived a middle class or better life is delegitimizing.
To me, going to high school in the 1980’s was different enough from going to high school in the nineties that it’s hard to classify both groups as part of the same generation. When I graduated from high school, the Berlin Wall was still standing and the prospect of nuclear annihilation was our climate change-level rationale for anti-authoritarianism or even nihilism. By the time the Class of 1994 graduated from high school, people were beginning to believe that democracy had triumphed over authoritarianism and the end of major conflict was nigh. For that reason, being a skate punk in 1985 had a different meaning than being a skate punk in 1993.
What both groups shared in common was a rejection of the establishment often inherited from hippie parents who had battled through Vietnam and Watergate, but without anything on that scale to organize their resistance. That hippie boomers sold out and made careers and families was a cliche, but one their children were reluctant to follow with enthusiasm. You can call that “having a problem with authority [that is] more about being appealingly subversive than having experienced real oppression at the hands of people who abuse authority,” or you can just write it off as the privileged finding it “easier to project a willingness to subvert norms than to actually subvert them.” What I call it is growing up.
Elizabeth Spiers describes young Beto O’Rourke somewhat dismissively as a “sometimes lost, arty type, skeptical of institutions and playfully rebellious, but not antisocial.” That really describes anyone who was basically a good, law-abiding kid who was born with a healthy amount of skepticism and a bit of sensitivity. Was his skepticism illegitimate because he wasn’t experiencing ” real oppression at the hands of people who abuse authority”? Were his aimlessness and drift suspect because they didn’t devolve into anti-social behaviors? Are the only people with a valid point of view those who were breaking windows to protest the WTO?
Elizabeth Spiers sums up her problem with a simple sentence: “Beto O’Rourke is a very familiar kind of Generation X white dude.” She doesn’t say that like it’s okay. In fact, her whole column is an effort to explain what is wrong with it and why it’s not a good fit for someone who wants to be the president of the United States.
Typical Gen X white dudes are all about posing and affectation, pretending to be ironic and rebellious when they’re really being coddled at home. They demonstrate their unearned authenticity by wearing eye-liner for three weeks, listening to thrash punk skater music and slacking off to the point that they reach their mid-20’s with no goal established for their lives. Spiers says, “I don’t object to this, personally. I’m a Gen Xer, too,” but she actually objects to it rather strenuously.
But O’Rourke so completely — and hilariously — embodies the stereotype of a white male Xer that if someone wrote him into a dystopian fantasy about a youthful 40-something ex-punk-rocker dropped into politics (reluctantly and with some conflictedness, of course) to save America from a selfish boomer narcissist who failed upward into the presidency despite a history of corruption and incompetency, the character would be way too on the nose.
The worst part of her piece is also the best part.
Since he declared that he was running for president, O’Rourke has spent a lot of time standing on things. Not because he needs to; he’s 6-foot-4, but he still often climbs atop furniture to talk to crowds. Or he climbs up and then perches kneeling to address a specific potential constituent, while emanating something akin to a cool camp counselor vibe that says: I’m here to listen to you and fix your problems. And I also maybe have a pot stash everyone knows about that I’ll consider sharing because you seem cool, and I know you won’t narc on me. The posture is a little subversive — diner counters are not for standing on! — but not too much so. O’Rourke isn’t taking a baseball bat to the counter, he’s just demonstrating that he’s not hemmed in by restrictive traditional notions of where people should stand. And because he’s charismatic and maybe a little emo, he can pull it off without seeming horribly awkward. It works for O’Rourke partly because it feels like a generational affect and thus of a piece with the rest of his persona.
But it also works for him because Gen X affectations don’t have much downside for straight white men.
I like this writing and I think it’s insightful about what makes Beto tick, why he has a certain appeal, and how the privileged are free to act in ways that are severely punished in others. But it really amounts to an argument that O’Rourke’s earnestness is somewhere between a shallow illusion and a paternalistic scam.
If you would prefer that our next president not be white or not be a man or not be from a specific generation or not have spent part of their youth with the luxury of being aimless, that’s your right. But these are not good reasons to criticize people and dismiss what they are trying to bring to the table.
It’s tough enough to get through your teenage years and become a functioning adult. The idea that you never had a chance to be taken seriously because of your gender, your skin-tone, or when you were born? That’s not something we should want to enforce. Do we want to dismiss people because their parents provided them a good enough life that they could “waste” some of it playing in a punk band or perusing the works of Joseph Campbell?
Even having made all these critiques of the article, I still think it’s a good piece of writing with more than a few good observations. It’s more the genre I hate than the piece. And I can’t stand self-loathing, especially when its generational.
