Trump, generations and Brexit
When I grew up as a teenager there was almost constant talk about the ‘generation gap’ and about how young people were so different to previous generations. Then when it got our turn to have kids my wife and I joked that the only think our kids could do to shock us was to wear suits and like classical music. Which strangely they did! But I was almost more shocked when my oldest son asked for a CD for Christmas that I had listened to as a gramophone record while doing my A levels when it first came out.
There was respect for the older generations
who were the ‘wise’ people of the family
In centuries gone by people tended to live in extended families, where generations lived together for their entire lives. There was respect for the older generations who were the ‘wise’ people of the family, because they had accumulated knowledge over their years.
Sometimes generational respect became inverted. I remember visiting Oman about a quarter of a century ago. Before 1970 it had been a very much third world country with a mere few miles of roads when Sultan Qaboos came to power in a palace coup. He introduced nation wide education and created an inversion in the process. There was a stage in the country when almost everyone over 40 could not read and almost everyone under 30 could read.
So, soon after Brexit referendum results were announced people were saying that it was an old/young split, with older people voting Leave and younger people voting Remain. This created tension for a couple of reasons, since two years earlier, in the Scotland referendum young people 16 and over had been permitted to vote, but only young people 18 and over was allowed to vote in the EU referendum. Secondly, young people felt it was their future that the older generation were wrecking. In fact there were a very large number of older people who voted Remain but also many of those older Leave voters felt they were wiser than the youngsters. As usual a lot was based on anecdotal reports including a BBC film of a family in the north where the parents were hardly speaking to their teenage children who voted Remain and the children angry with their parents for voting Leave.
Almost as soon as the young/old breakdown was expressed it was then claimed inaccurate, and the issue subsided. However, within the last month detailed analysis of localised breakdown of votes from nearly half of the local authorities which counted EU referendum ballots last June by the BBC in January 2017 showed that in fact this was an extremely accurate generalisation, though like all generalisations it did not completely tell the story. This same Brexit age split could be seen in the United States with older people voting Trump and younger people voting Clinton, again with exceptions both ways.
This same Brexit age split was true in the United States
One of the issues we’re dealing with over the generational divide is what is called a hinge generation. A hinge generation is a generation that processes a major change one generation after that major change actually happened but was too traumatic for the generation in which it happened to process it. One clear example of a hinge generation is the children of Holocaust survivors, for instance:
In her writings about the children of Holocaust survivors (and speaking to the notion of intergenerational trauma), Hoffman (2004) contends that “the generation after atrocity is the hinge generation—the point at which the past is transmuted into history or myth” (p. 198). It is this “hinge” that moves us away from an exclusive focus on present-day socioeconomic conditions and allows us to consider the possibility that young people’s experiences offer a window into theorizing a psychological legacy. The metaphor of a “hinge” is useful for conceptualizing the psychology of the second generation because it suggests that rather than a generation fissure, post conflict societies are characterized by connections to and continuities with their conflictual histories that are carried forward into the present and future through what Freeman (2010) evocatively refers to as the “narrative unconscious” of subsequent generations. (Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association 2012, Vol. 18, No. 3, 294–306)
In a hinge generation the past is
transmuted into history or myth
Note how in a hinge generation the past is transmuted into history or myth. South Africa is where the trauma of Apartheid is the instance the authors used to see how intergenerational talk within families allowed the past to be reconstructed and communicated to the next generations of young people, creating these new myths and a relatively healthy hinge generation. Where these stories are not told or embraced, the silence marks discontinuities that creates an unhealthy hinge generation. It should also be noted that the myths of the victors are always different from the myths of the downtrodden or losers.
In dealing with the evolving myths leading to the Trump and Brexit issues, it appears to me that we’re dealing with an elderly wartime generation whose childhood was traumatised by war, a post-war hinge generation, of which I am a member, and a third generation on the other side of the door.
For young intelligent third generation people in the UK and USA they are faced with two things: Firstly, a world where they have known relative peace and stability throughout their lives and secondly many more life problems than their parents experienced. The problems are an increasing debt for tertiary education, which many may never pay off, leaving them permanently indebted to the government, and a very much greater difficulty in the jobs market allied with spiralling cost of housing. Alongside this we know that the hinge generation was also the turning point between modernism and postmodernism, where myths and stories have taken on greater importance than for the immediately preceding generations. Hence neither the myths of their grandparents nor the myths of their parents match their experience of life. Many young people therefore feel disenfranchised.
So again 2016 was the year that this generational divide became blindingly obvious, not because the problem had not existed for a many years, but because of the two events of the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA and the UK-EU referendum resulting in a vote for Brexit. Both these two events split their respective countries into what can be seen as generational divides. And although it has somewhat reduced there is was early strong criticism of the older generation for what happened.
This generational divide is also something that people, particularly politicians and community leaders, are not adequately wrestling with. Though this overlaps with the problem of unemployment and underemployment within the context of worth in society, it is much wider than that embracing also long-term debt and affordable housing. There is also the issue of hope. As a young person I hoped for and indeed expected a better future. Sadly I no longer hope for or expect a better future and many of the young people I speak to also don’t expect it either, of if they do not in the way our generation did. There’s a Biblical proverb ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’.
We should also think wider in the context of trauma generation and hinge generation of the migrants fleeing war zones today. The problems we are facing in the USA and UK today are those these people will face in 30 and 60 years time in their hinge and third generations. This should not be forgotten or ignored, because it will raise it's head again. How we deal with these migrants today will determine, to a large extent, how the future will be for them in generations two and three.
Indeed, though the Israel-Palestine conflict goes back millennia, to some degree the current conflict can also be traced to a hinge-third generation problem for both communities. The myths of both communities are very much determining the actions of the third generation population.
It's useful to see how some traumas, for instance the post-war separation of Germany, resolved peacefully, in part because it was done during the early part of the third generation period, where new myths and stories could be created relatively easily. Cyprus, where the invasion happened more recently is only just transitioning from hinge to third generation. This then poses a challenge, will it be resolved into peace and stability like Germany or will it degenerate into something similar to what the USA and UK are facing now or worse an Israel-Palestine one?
Some traumas... resolved peacefully...
where new myths and stories could be created
But for now the USA and UK desperately need a new hope and a new vision for both our generation and the generations to come. Not one looking backward towards some unrecoverable golden era that was, in reality merely rust, but striving towards a peace and stability that gives our children and grandchildren a chance of a better life. This cannot be a leap into the unknown, it cannot be throwing everything in the air like a pack of cards hoping it will come down sorted into suits and in correct order, as seems to be happening right now. There are values that are important to peace and stability. It is the way towards interdependence not independence.
A new common vision is not merely important but critically urgent. It cannot be a vision for fragmentation, but one for common and wider community. Let’s find a way for impossible breakthroughs.
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