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THE ONES WEVE BEEN WAITING FOR How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform AmericaBy Charlotte Alter

The first wave of millennials tech savvy and type-A, thanks to hovering boomer parents is on the cusp of holding real political power. The number elected to Congress jumped from 6 to 26 in 2018, and mayoral offices and city councils are suddenly filled with them. More than one is running for president.

How this generation will wield power to change America when it fully acquires that power is the question Charlotte Alter, a national correspondent for Time, sets out to answer in The Ones Weve Been Waiting For.

To examine the issue, Alter retraces the careers of 10 elected millennials, weaving their voices together to describe the defining moments that unite this generation, from Sept. 11 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. We see the progressive icon and Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her family deal with the aftermath of the 2008 crash; the presidential candidate and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg pondering generational purpose while staring at a cloudless sky as a Harvard undergraduate on Sept. 11; and the Republican representative Dan Crenshaw losing his eye in Afghanistan. We also meet some less well-known, up-and-coming leaders, like Svante Myrick, who at the age of 24 became the youngest and first person of color to be elected mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., and Braxton Winston, a 30-something Charlotte, N.C., City Council member who ran for office after protesting police shootings of black people.

Saddled with student debt, freaked out by climate change and school shootings, and driven by a sense that their parents arent going to fix any of these problems, millennials, Alter suggests, are ready to harness their political potential.

She does an excellent job detailing with persuasive data what has shaped and motivated this young generation so far. The recession is an invisible postscript that explains how millennials have been economically disadvantaged. The low salaries and scarcity of jobs that confronted many of us upon graduating from college meant it took us much longer than previous generations to find our way in the world, to say nothing of repaying loans we took out for our very expensive degrees. By the time jobs began to come back, in 2012, Alter writes, employers were looking for younger, cheaper graduates, leaving some of us stuck in underemployment.

The forever war has inextricably colored how we view American foreign policy: Millennials are far less likely than boomers to think the United States should get involved in the affairs of other countries. And how we use technology has transformed the way we organize politically. As Alter points out, movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter began on the internet. (We also learn that Buttigiegs early internet use in college consisted mostly of just logging on to WNDU.com to look at a grainy picture of South Bend, a detail that will stay with me for a long time.)

Alter is upfront about the fact that we dont yet know what a millennial political revolution might look like, writing that by learning where theyve been, we can get a sense of where were going. The great millennial takeover is very much a work in progress; the average age of our congressional leaders still hovers in the 70s, and Senator Bernie Sanders (age 78) continues to poll highly among young voters in the Democratic primary far higher than Buttigieg, who remains unpopular with voters under 35.

Alters story is moving faster than she can write it. She depicts the young Republican representative Elise Stefanik, of New York, for instance, as trying to keep Trump at a safe distance but not be out of step with her party. However, with Trumps impeachment, Stefanik has transformed into one of Trumps biggest defenders and has raised considerable money for her re-election campaign because of it.

The Ones Weve Been Waiting For takes its name from a speech by Barack Obama during his 2008, millennial-galvanizing campaign, and its apt; it took us a little while to realize that boomers were not going to save the world and that any significant change would be up to us. Already, members of Generation Z, some of whom may be voting in their first presidential election this fall, have figured out how to engage in political activism at a much younger age than we did think March for Our Lives or Greta Thunberg but thanks to Alters timely book we can have a better understanding of why an entire generation was set back and whats driving it now.

See the article here:
Whats Driving the Millennial Political Takeover? - The New York Times