Dear Millennials: I’m Sorry We Didn’t Stop Them

Dear millennials: back in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to try to stop the Reagan revolution. We failed. This may be our last chance to save American democracy and the American middle-class.

When my boomer generation was the same average age as your millennial generation is today, back in 1990, our generation held 21.3% of the nation’s wealth. Louise and I shared in that wealth; although we were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business (our fourth) and a nice home in suburban Atlanta.

That was, in fact, the “American dream.” It was normal then. My dad (born 1928), who worked in a tool-and-die shop, was able to buy a house, a new car every two years, and take a two-week vacation every year because the middle class in America before Reagan had a pretty damn good life. He retired in the 1990s with a full pension that let him and my mom travel the world.

Your generation today, in contrast, is about the same number of people but holds only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth and, if you’re the same age I was in 1990, you’re most likely struggling to own a home, are deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.

Yes, you read that right. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 of the nation’s wealth; Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nation’s wealth.

What happened? In a word, Republicans.

George HW Bush was president that year, and you were probably just born around then: the millennial generation spans those born between 1981 and 1996.

First, GOP fat-cats came for your wages.

Those first two decades of the Reagan Revolution saw the first major attack on workers’ wages since Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act, giving union members legal protection from physical and economic violence, way back in 1935.

In 1990, Republicans were still just getting started: 56% of workers who applied for union representation got their union. That wasn’t as good as during my dad’s generation — 80% of workers got a union when they petitioned for one in the 1940s — but it was still a far cry from what you’re facing today as giant trillion-dollar corporations employ the billion-dollar union-busting industry (that largely didn’t exist in 1990) to keep you from having democracy in the workplace.