“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.
It’s also impossible to create exciting art in the land of the woke. Punk rock, Woody Allen, the novel Bright Lights, Big City, and the bizarre and brilliant 1983 James Woods movie Videodrome — none of these or anything like them was possible over the last three decades because the American Woke Stasi were correcting artists before they got out of the chute.
Liberals themselves should be eager to put woke in the trash. Conservatives tend to be more interested in business than culture, leaving the Left to create provocative art. Liberals have deprived themselves of that function. It is essential for the health of a culture that artists be free to do their thing.
It also makes things a lot more fun. One of Gen X’s great ambassadors is Robert Downey Jr. Like a lot of us, Downey was given a lot of freedom when he was young — maybe too much. But when he got in trouble with drugs and alcohol, he quickly turned his life around.
Gen X has a lot of compassion, but you also have to pull yourself out of the ditch you drive into and admit your mistakes. In the first Iron Man movie, Downey destroys a young reporter from Berkeley, dismissing her liberal cliches with facts about the importance of defense weapons and innovation. He comes across like Elon Musk, who may be the greatest Gen Xer of all time.
What has happened in America since the fall of communism is the refusal to be free.
The idea of the loss of freedom as a sin not only against society but against ourselves was explored in a great speech Vaclav Havel gave on Jan. 1, 1990. Havel was the playwright and rock ‘n’ roll-loving dissident who became the president of Czechoslovakia when communism was toppled. In his New Year’s Day speech, Havel put the blame for the disastrous previous decades under socialism at the feet of the people. Here’s how he explained it:
“Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last 40 years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably, and quickly.”
Havel went on to say that “the worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.” People under communism “learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us, they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships,” Havel explained.
As a final and crucially important point, Havel explained that the young people of Czechoslovakia embraced freedom so enthusiastically after socialism because they believed in God and in democracy: “People are never just a product of the external world. They are also able to relate themselves to something superior however systematically the external world tries to kill that ability in them.”
Additionally, “The humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so much idle talk, did after all slumber in the unconsciousness of our nations and ethnic minorities and were inconspicuously passed from one generation to another so that each of us could discover them at the right time and transform them into deeds.”
In 1990, Havel was looking toward a bright post-socialist future. Then came former President Barack Obama, whose mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a communist.
Then came speech codes and censorship. Then came Christian shopkeepers getting sued by the government. Then came COVID lockdowns, to which we sheepishly complied. Then came people in Congress who proudly call themselves socialists. Then came Vice President Kamala Harris.
The media grew so corrupt they would make the old Soviet Union proud. We began to lose our freedom, and we were the ones letting it happen.
Known for our tolerance and cynicism, Gen X didn’t want to get involved even as our rights eroded. Let the politicians fight it out.
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But this Election Day, Generation X finally announced that we have had it with censorship, with political hysteria, with being called racists, and with being forced to use the “proper” pronouns.
Enough is enough.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.