Generations are 20 years, the usual start dates are the end of WWII in 1945. Boomers are 45-65, Gen-X is 65-85, Millienials/Y is 85-2005, Gen-Z are kids just starting to hit the teen years now so we don't know much about them except they're kids who don't remember before Facebook, Youtube, Twitter even existed.
One thing that I've noticed is that people tend to want to center their "generation" around themselves and limit it to 5 years either side. But then you have to stretch other people's generation to be like 30+ years long, which is just offloading the innaccuracy of the generations concept onto other generations. We can't all be right about that.
I suppose it is more interesting than "Trump did yet another stupid thing today" and I suppose it is relevant in that we should be thankful that the Boomers are losing out on their political oomph finally, hopefully they'll finish the die-off before burning up everything, but we should be terrified because a surprisingly large chunk of Millenials seem to be big fans of hateful racist shitbags and they outnumber the racist hateful shitbag loving Gen X AND Boomer cohorts now. If I don't fall in X we need to chop it back something like 4 or 5 years early, and using the "80~00" method means it would be 60~80: Gen X, 40~60: Boomers? So the post-war baby boom in the US--which they are named after here--got started a year before the US entered the war? Yes, there was a surge from like '41 or so, but that kinda paled in comparison to the '46 one.
I do guess that information generation would fit the upcoming one pretty well, as they are fully immersed in a world where wifi and broadband were always there, like the babies poking at pictures in a magazine and trying to scroll the page.
The hateful millenials aren't very numerous, and from what little I know of it they tend to be the 30+ ones. The racist under 20s are extremely vocal on certain parts of the internet but judging by the vote they aren't prevalent. Remember, if only young people had voted Trump wouldn't have won *any* state. He would have I think tied Alabama. And as someone mentioned a while back the first 3 elections you vote in tend to predict how you'll vote for the rest of your life.
The main fear we should have is that racist groups in the US are acting more like sleeper terrorist cells than activists. The militia/KKK crowd has only a tiny portion of the population supporting them, but they aren't aiming for popular support any more. What they're doing is trying to recruit a small number of people and radicalize them, then try to place them in positions of authority, or into armed groups that meet regularly and have a radicalizing circle jerk. These are the kind of groups that you hear about getting caught by the FBI trying to make homemade bombs to blow up government buildings. One day one of them is going to succeed and that'll be one less DMV I guess. We've already gotten far right mass shootings and murders but those have mainly been individuals radicalized by material on the internet. The kind of guy who shoots up a black church is equivalent to some muslim teen that read about ISIS on the internet. They aren't the same thing as actual terrorist groups operating within their own country. The right wing anti-government groups ARE the direct equivalent of groups like the Taliban, with similar aims. Thankfully they have nowhere near that level of support or power thus far. The military has already started filtering out recruits on basis of far right radicalization, but police forces across the country have not.
The FBI wanted to keep a database on domestic terrorists in the police but were specifically ordered not to by congress.Meanwhile the alt right is, like everybody else, using Trump for their own purposes. They aren't trying to get a 50% majority to like Trump, what they're trying to do is radicalize young frustrated 20 somethings. The kind of person that worked hard to get through college and then graduates and doesn't have a job/girlfriend/house like they were promised and gets angry. That's why r/ the_donald is so offputting whereas most political subreddits try to put on a clean and friendly face. r/ the_donald isn't trying to get 50% of the population to like Trump for 2020. They're trying to pull people into their movement while they still have web traffic. For their purposes its better to have 10% of the population be absolute fanatics than to have 51% of the population be sympathetic to them. In 30 years if Millennials end up with a large segment of racist old people, it'll likely be because of radicalizing alt right materials. Currently we're pretty much in the clear on that. I mean obviously we'll end up as racist old uncles at Thanksgiving compared to the next generation, but the alt right would make Thanksgiving awkward even now.
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