Book Review: The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America. Charlotte Alter. Viking. 2020
It’s easy to make fun of American millennials, the children of late Boomers, the ones born between 1981 and 1996. You know who they are: educated and outspoken with high expectations and an irritating sense of privilege. After only a few months on a new job, they’re the ones who expect an evaluation, leading to a salary raise.
Setting ridicule aside, we must admit that millennials enter adult life with burdens earlier generations did not carry. One is debt. The second is fear about climate change. The third is an awareness that – unlike other modern Western nations - America does not have a Public Health System.
These children had childhoods more competitive than prior generations but also more coddled. Trained and talented, most millennials are also spoiled, feeling entitled yet paradoxically unprepared to enter the precarious adulthood they inherited. In an insecure employment market, young Americans have racked up a total of 1.5 trillion dollars in student debt. The planet on which they will live another sixty to seventy years is rapidly declining, giving them only ten years to reverse the causes of global warming. And should they have the misfortune of getting sick, they have few options. Instead of a public health system, America has an unreliable social insurance arrangement for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job.
Millennials are already the largest living generation and the majority of the workforce, and they will soon be the biggest bloc of eligible voters. Why is this significant? Because millennial voters lean politically Left by a 2:1 margin. For them, socialism is not a dirty word, primarily because their concept of socialism is closer to FDR’s New Deal and Europe’s Social Democracies than it is to state ownership of production under an authoritarian government.
Most millennials want social equality, and the systems they've built tend to resemble networks more than hierarchies. Everyone participates, but nobody is in charge. Think about leaderless Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Millennials do not know one another personally, but they use Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to create community. This is what got Barack Obama elected President in 2008 and what moved a Latina bartender from obscurity to the US Congress, unseating a veteran Democrat in New York’s Fourteenth District. As a freshman in the US Congress, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (b.1989) had over five million people following her on Twitter.
AOC’s use of social media is typical of her millennial generation, using a technology unknown to earlier generations. Consider the rise of search engines (Google was founded in 1998), the growth of crowd sourced collaboration (Wikipedia launched in 2001, Facebook in 2004), and the transition to mobile communication (the iPhone was released in 2007). “All three of these shifts,” Charlotte Alter reminds us, “happened right smack in the middle of the millennial adolescence.” They and those in Generation Z live in a technological world incomprehensible to the old white men who control the Republican Party in 2020. Alter calls social media buzz “the oxygen of twenty-first- century American politics.”
Alter gives the reader biographical information on the new politicians, focusing more on some than others. By the end of her book, it is obvious that millennials are abandoning the Republican Party and that Pete Buttigieg (b. 1982) and AOC represent the two paths forward for the Democrats. “He is a peacemaker; she is a warrior,” Alter says. “He is a Midwesterner trying to reconcile with aging, white rural voters; she a New Yorker who focuses on mobilizing working-class people of color. He is an intellectual pragmatist; she an ideological activist.”
Alter shows us how Mayor Pete and AOC have more in common than we think. They both see themselves as change agents, but they differ on when and how. Buttigieg is ready to draft legislation that has a chance to pass. AOC drafts legislation – e.g., her Green New Deal - that won’t pass but functions as an exercise in consciousness-raising. Both of them want structural changes, but one wants to work within the system and the other to “fuck the system.” (The very title of Alter’s Chapter 9.)
Not all of Mayor Pete’s ideas were pragmatic. While still a viable candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Buttigieg wanted to abolish the Electoral College and reform the Supreme Court — significant structural changes — and while they don’t conjure up images of tax hikes or massive government programs, neither was likely to happen in the near future.
Charlotte Alter, herself a millennial (b. 1989) introduces the reader to many others of her generation who ran for office, either locally or nationally. We meet Svante Myrick (b. 1987), who championed affordable housing in Ithaca, New York, and who, at 24, became the youngest ever and first black Mayor. Eric Lesser (b. 1985), who had worked for Obama in the White House, went home to Western Massachusetts to run for office, and in 2014, he won a seat in the State Senate. Michael Tubbs (b. 1990) was elected Mayor of Stockton, California, 26 in 2016, the youngest Mayor in the city's history as well as the first black.
In North Carolina, Braxton Winston (b. 1983) is a man with dreadlocks who wears a suit to Charlotte City Council meetings, showing up to fulfil an office he was elected to in 2017. His success came a little more than a year after he was arrested during demonstrations to protest the death of Keith Scott at the hands of the police. When Winston stood shirtless in front of riot police in full gear, a photographer from the Charlotte Observer snapped the picture and the image went viral.
Lauren Underwood (b. 1986) is an African American nurse with two master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University. She started her career as a policy professional in the Obama administration and eventually was elected to the US House of Representatives for Illinois´ 14th Congressional District. Haley Stevens (b. 1983) unseated two-term Republican, David Trott, when she was elected to represent Michigan´s 11th Congressional District, a region that includes many of Detroit's northern and eastern suburbs. In 2009, Steven Rattner hired her to join the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry. Ilhan Omar (b. 1982) is the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from Africa, and the first non-white woman elected from Minnesota, representing their 5th Congressional District. Max Rose (b. 1986) is an American veteran who was elected to represent New York's 11th Congressional District, a region that includes all of Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn.
Some millennials are moderate. Haley Stevens and Lauren Underwood did not sponsor AOC's Green New Deal. And some are radically Left-liberal. Ilhan Omar, along with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, is a member of The Squad, an ultra-Left-wing of the Democratic Party. The other Squad members, too old to be millennials, are Ayanna Pressley (Mass. -7), a lawyer and activist, and the first woman of color to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan -13), the first woman of Palestinian descent and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.
The title of Alter’s book, the ones we’ve been waiting for comes from a 2008 speech by Barack Obama. Using social media, millennials got Obama elected, but then disillusionment kicked in as he failed to achieve his goals. His greatest strength was his speech and his greatest power was his rhetoric, but in the end his policies were circumscribed by “the system” in which he operated. “He could save a failing economy,” Alter writes, “but he couldn’t solve income inequality or close the growing gap between the rich and poor. He could provide a role model for black children, but he couldn’t cure systemic racism. He couldn’t keep black kids from being shot in the street.”
If this was the best Obama could do, then the system itself needs transformation. Transforming America will not happen until the old white men who control “the system” retire from public life, but Alter seems optimistic. “The millennials´ lurch to the Left can be defined by the progressive activism of people like AOC and the technocratic pragmatism of people like Pete Buttigieg. “They wouldn’t like to admit it,” she says, “but their goals are largely aligned: universal health care, a massive government investment to reverse climate change, a twenty-first century safety social net, and a reformed democracy.”
The two unlikely young stars, Alter says, are like twin strands of DNA, a double helix that contains the blueprint for the Democratic Party’s future. “And that future, regardless of the outcome in 2020, has already arrived.”