“Generation X delivered the White House to Trump.”
That was the post-election analysis of political writer Philip Klein, who noted this week that people between the ages of 45 and 64 voted for President-elect Donald Trump 53% to 45%. Other generations, both older and younger, went for Vice President Kamala Harris. This result follows several recent articles calling Generation X, my generation, the “Trumpiest” generation.
For those of us in that demographic, born between the mid-1960s and 1980, it’s easy to understand why we went for Trump. For one, we aren’t easily offended — even by Trump, the king of the politically incorrect put-down. Bret Easton Ellis, a popular novelist of Gen X, once noted in an interview that those of us who were teenagers in the 1980s “loved to be offended.”
It’s true. We were born in the 1960s, were children in the ’70s, and were teens in the ’80s. We liked gritty and sexy novels like Tropic of Cancer that were not socially acceptable, as well as loud punk rock and challenging movies. Yet we also love J.R.R. Tolkien, Beethoven, C.S. Lewis, jazz, and Flannery O’Connor — and patriotic movies such as Top Gun.
We were children in 1976 during the bicentennial celebrations of the founding of America, and like the children under communism, we had in our hearts a desire for God and an awareness of the value of freedom. We love America and know Marxism is a lie.
It seemed like our time had come with the collapse of communism in 1989. All of the things Gen X loves — the freedom to read, watch, and say what you want, the acceptance of gay people, including their protection from bullies, the ability to tell jokes and let stuff roll off our backs, and self-reliance — were becoming mainstream around the world.
But that was short-lived. Communism stayed alive in the universities and then spread into the wider culture. If somebody had told us back in 1990 that in 2024 we would have censorship, speech codes, sensitivity readers for novels, and Christian bakers charged with crimes for following their conscience, we would not have believed them.
One post-election comment hit the nail on the head: “We grew up not caring about Boy George wearing a dress. Who you slept with. What color you are. And then the whole progressive machinery spent the last decade calling us racist, sexist Nazis. … Enough is enough.”
It’s been amazing to watch over the last 30 years as younger people have become more “woke” while my generation stays the same. Recently, a Generation Z friend who works with me at a grocery store watched slack-jawed as my manager, who, like me, is Gen X, and I went toe-to-toe over a disagreement. The expletives were flying, as well as the insults and personal put-downs. There were slurs going in both directions. Then, my manager and I fist-bumped, laughed, and went back to work. It’s how we roll. That’s much healthier than going to HR every week.