The Generational Dispute Over the ‘Safe’ Choice for President
Biden makes boomer-generation Democrats feel secure. But Bernie is the choice of security for a younger generation.
“The Depression was a way of life for me,” Chicago schoolteacher Elsa Poncelle told the legendary historian Studs Terkel during an interview in the late 1960s. “I thought it was going to be forever and ever and ever. That people would always live in fear of losing their jobs. You know, fear.”
Fear and insecurity prompted a wave of both grassroots organizing and federal action that transformed America during the Great Depression. By 1939, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had committed the government to providing a minimum wage, old-age pensions through Social Security, jobs programs, and banking regulation; underwriting loans for homeowners; and providing protections for workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain. But the New Deal didn’t abolish capitalism in the United States, and even by its own standards, it often fell short: Neither Roosevelt nor his successor Harry Truman were able to pass a universal health coverage plan in the 1930s or 1940s.
But the lives of millions of Americans dramatically improved thanks to the New Deal, and when Roosevelt declared in his 1941 State of the Union…
