Letters to the Editor: Gen Z didn’t vote for centrism. It voted against Republicans. But he doesn’t yet know that he’s a Republican. In fact, he might vote Democrat.
But in this year’s presidential campaign, one candidate, Bernie Sanders, is trying to make himself a better-than-President-Obama person. Bernie wants to use the bully pulpit to tell us all what the average person is thinking, and what’s possible.
Unfortunately, that message may be all too familiar. Bernie is talking to the very people who voted against his candidacy: Generation-Z, or “Gen Z.”
The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were among the newspapers that ignored the fact that Bernie would be the first presidential hopeful with a name derived from an older generation of voters. Instead, they wrote him off as a generational poseur.
But Bernie has now introduced himself to Gen Z. He wants to build an alliance. “We are both trying to change the conversation,” he said as he introduced his campaign to them this month. “We are trying to be the voice for the generations coming up that haven’t been heard.”
But they haven’t been heard. It was the generation Z that elected Donald Trump to the presidency. It was the generation Z, with its disdain for a business environment that’s left this country in tatters, that gave the world a man who, even though he was a multimillionaire like Bernie, decided to be a socialist.
Bernie’s campaign in fact has been a battle of the generations. He’s trying to bring younger voters into the political conversation by talking to them, by asking them to vote and by challenging what he calls the “elite,” or his own party, the same as he has in his campaign, which he’s been calling “a political revolution.”
If Sanders’ attempt to talk to Gen Z in a more personal way is a battle of the generations, the New York Times in its editorial this week has taken the other side. Bernie is the enemy of the new America, the New York Times says.
With Bernie, the Times says, we have an elderly politician trying to speak to an older generation. His “vision of the future is too narrow, too limited, and too old-fashioned,” the Times says. His campaign is “a bad idea, one that’s just a recipe for heartburn, resentment
