My main concern is the assumption in much of the politics that appears in Writing About Our Generation is the notion that its authors, editors and readers, occupy a generation.  What exactly is it?  And does it possess purely chronological, or also class, economic, educational, geographic, gender, political and other parameters?  If so, as I'd suggest, use of pure generational boundaries may be of little help and much obfuscation.

      In contrast, I'd suggest that there runs through most American, upper-middle-class, liberal minds—those of us who haven't yet given up on Enlightenment perspectives and hopes—several overlapping beliefs (perspectives?) about material progress, its links to social values, especially distributional ones, and democratic means of ensuring and securing through democracy, better things and ways for society, especially its poorest members. 

      Failure to deliver on this promise (hope?  wishful thinking?), while preserving our own comforts and privileges, produces cognitive dissonance at best, evasive hypocrisy at worst, and the drift of voters away from the likes of us and toward such dreadful tribalist hucksters as Trump and Netanyahu, two examples of a growing trend.  And focusing on generational, annual, geographic and other pigpens of thought makes it easier to treat our own fecklessness as transitory, our bad results flowing in streams of good intentions as, well, episodic rather than structurally flawed.  The alternative is profoundly challenging: to figure out why overall economic growth doesn't put an end to poverty or distribute surpluses equitably if not equally.  And find persuasive (charismatic? like FDR) leaders to convince the worried masses that we can and will deliver.

      So we travel, dine finely, or at least adequately, and emit bursts of outrage when even our Western allies, like Israel and Hungary, engage in mayhem, only to allow our well-honed fait-accompli skills to shift attention to such clownish players as Biden, Trump, Harris, and Bush who occupy the stage for a hunk of time or two and then waltz off into the too-easily forgotten past, just like prior generations and old technologies.  And we, the bien pensants, continue to feel absolved of responsibility because the likes of Harris were at least not as menacing as Trump.  Our generation, who roughly grew up in the post-war boom period (not the post-Depression), felt comforted by JFK glitter, excused by our opposition to LBJ and Nixon, in some cases Reagan too, and kept on supporting ugly elitists and warriors like Clinton, Harris and Biden because, as noted, they were less flawed or evil than their GOP adversaries.  

      Enough!