From Post & Riposte: "It isn't surprising Xers aren't interested in involving themselves deeply in a system that appears to be so deeply corrupted that reform is impossible. It's simple cost-benefit analysis -- why would you want to waste your life on reform, when the prospect of even the most marginal success appears to verge on nil? I personally think it is higher than that, but it will require some radical and probably unpleasant solutions to get US political and civic society working again. It will be interesting to see whether people are willing to pay the cost (and I'm not talking monetary cost) of fixing what needs to be fixed." --Ian Welsh, "Generational Costs/Benefits" (08/13) What do you think? Join the conversation.

Tucker Carlson (whose article in the premiere issue of Talk is one of the best profiles of George W. so far) is right when he says that political activity and involvement are not themselves proxies for the social health of a country. Often it's just the opposite. And Carlson's points about the deadening effects of prosperity on the Xer political consciousness are well taken. But what happens when the economy cycles downward, or when the stock market takes a tumble, and all that paper wealth we've accumulated in dotcom stock-options evaporates? Are we best off getting politicized only when things go bad? Bad times tend to radicalize the population, usually in directions that I think Carlson would not like. He's right that we are the leveraged generation. But that just means that -- like Barings Bank or Long-Term Capital Management or the Thai economy -- when the bottom falls out, the ground is a long, long way away. Let's hope that's not the galvanizing event our generation has been lacking. (And I do hope Carlson reads Farai Chideya's opening gambit and responds to her contention that America has a "covert economics.")

Once again I agree completely with Ted Halstead on one level. His analysis of the fundamental flaws of the tax cuts the Republicans just passed is dead on. And he's no doubt right that Xers, insofar as we're paying attention to the tax-cut plan, tend to oppose it (although one large exception may be all the Internet entrepreneur millionaires, who would naturally like to see the government's share of their capital gains reduced). But then he goes and muddies up the water with statements like these: "Most Xers would prefer two parties on economics (with one representing the interests of the working class), and a bipartisan cease-fire when it comes to most social and cultural issues." Huh? If politics is significantly based on self-interest (as well as on, one hopes, some concern for the common good), then preferring two parties, per se, on economics doesn't make sense. Logically one shouldn't care how many political parties there are, only that there is at least one powerful party that represents one's own interests. Saying that Xers wish there were two parties on economics betrays a cafeteria-style approach to politics: i.e., I'd like there to be two economic main courses, and three social-cultural side-dishes to choose from. It's the mall-shopping approach to politics, and it doesn't speak well of our generation. (It would be helpful if Halstead could provide the poll data indicating that Xers want two parties on economics and a bipartisan ceasefire on social and cultural issues.)

Halstead does raise in his statement here some interesting ideas about what might galvanize our generation. These potentially catalyzing influences are not events but epoch-shaping trends: primarily, the end of the Cold War's bipolar division of the world, and the interrelated advances of information technology and globalization. It's too early to say if or how these might shape an explicitly generational politics. But the transformative and dislocating effects these factors will have on us could in the end be as profound and disruptive as those wrought by the Industrial Revolution. It's not impossible to imagine that, just as the shift from feudalism to early capitalism in the West profoundly changed social relations not only between nation-states but among individuals, so the shift to a truly global village will radically (potentially for better, potentially for much worse) change who we are and how we think of ourselves.

A final thought, to put a fine point on what this shift might mean. It is disconcerting to consider that just as succeeding generations of software applications are not always compatible with one another (the version of Microsoft Word that I have at home can't read documents created by the more recent version of Word that I have at the office), we may find that the accelerating rate of technological change produces generational compatibility problems. The World War II generation has never understood the Boomer generation culturally. But it may be that the Boomers will never be able to understand us, the first digital generation, functionally. Worse yet, the generation that succeeds us is the first generation truly born into digital culture: What if we find we can't understand them? Scary.

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Scott Stossel is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications.