As it nears another birthday, America is forging the outlines of a new century.
It’s moving with now remarkable speed to cast aside some of the traditions and mores that dominated American life for centuries. The Confederate flag is coming down, 150 years after the end of the Civil War and a half-century after it was raised in defiance of civil rights. Marriage is being redefined. Whites are fast becoming a minority. And after electing its first African-American president, the country is poised to elect a new leader from among a roster including a woman, two Cuban-Americans, and the scion of an old Yankee family married to a Mexican-American.
All of it is driven by a new generation, magnified by demographic change and accelerated by social media.
The biggest influence is the millennial generation, born between 1982 and 2000, a massive group that represents about one-fourth of the nation’s population, a bigger percentage than the baby boomers who upended the American political system themselves.
The millenials are different. They’re more diverse than their parents’ generation. They came of age in a time already distant from the institutions that moderated the last century: the church, government, media.
And armed with smartphones and social media, they create mandates for change with their own contemporaneous means of associating. Finding comfort with newfound acquaintances in far-flung places and banding together to pressure decision-makers is now commonplace. More striking, the rise of these electronic communities means a softening of the peer pressure of traditional geographic neighborhoods, where outliers were often reluctant to become vocal for fear of ridicule or worse.
“Organizing today is easier. People don’t have to wait to see what their elders tell them,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE, a nonpartisan group specializing in young voter research.
