Buttigieg's ascent shows millennial revolution spreading to U.S. Andrew Romano Yahoo News

[applegrove]

Buttigieg’s ascent shows millennial revolution spreading to U.S.

Andrew Romano

Yahoo News

https://news.yahoo.com/buttigiegs-ascent-shows-millennial-revolution-spreading-to-us-130000139.html

"SNIP....


Any exercise in generational essentialism — any attempt to say “all millennials are like this” or “all younger leaders are like that” — is foolish, especially when you’re talking about figures as dissimilar as Ardern, Varadkar, Macron and Kurz. But look closely at their paths to power and styles of persuasion and a few common threads stand out.

The first is that all of them tend to question basic assumptions. Beyond her remarks about capitalism, Ardern remains unapologetically unmarried to her long-term partner, celebrity TV fisherman Clarke Gayford, and she did not hesitate to take six weeks of maternity leave during her first year in office. “It’s not our normal yet,” she said at the time. “But one day it will be.” After a white supremacist shot and killed 50 Muslims in Christchurch in March, Ardern donned a hijab and refused to utter his name, resisting revenge-based “war rhetoric,” as the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen put it, and “quietly upend[ing] every expectation about the way Western states and their leaders respond to terrorist attacks.”

It’s almost as if it’s easier for younger leaders, formed by fresher forces than their predecessors, to see conventional wisdom for what it is — merely conventional, and not necessarily all that wise. When Macron abandoned France’s existing party structure and the ideological extremes it embodied; when Kurz contained the far right by coopting some of its positions, upsetting much of the rest of Europe; when Varadkar, at that timethe minister for health, came out in the midst of Ireland’s referendum on legalizing same-sex marriage — “a political risk in a country where being gay was illegal until 1993,” according to Time — each was making the kind of outside-the-box moves that might not have occurred to more senior politicians.

“The traditional divide between left and right, capital and labor, small state and big state, high taxes and low taxes doesn’t define politics in the way it did in the past,” Varadkar has said. “We see new divisions emerging.”


.....SNIP"

[crazytown]

1. Youth is an advantage. Experience is an advantage.

Last edited Sun Apr 14, 2019, 06:53 AM - Edit history (1)

Intelligence is an advantage. Empathy is an advantage. Knowing your way around Washington is an advantage.

Of all Mayor Pete’s advantages, his youth, per se, is the one I’m least impressed with and he is an impressive young man.

[applegrove]

2. He's older than his years. Certainly much more mature than any republican.

[WeekiWater]

3. That would be more like a millennial evolution. NT