Only the wealthy and the highly educated? What about the motivated, the interested, those who bother to show up at the polls in November? Can't they participate? Of course they can. They participate already, and likely always will. This is the beauty of the American political system: it is run by those who care enough to run it. Everybody else gets the government he deserves.

From Post & Riposte: "I still don't see the point in talking about a generation as a whole when a middle class student in suburbia and a working class student in the inner city have nothing in common in their opportunities. It begs the question of two Americas. Then there are AT LEAST two Generation X's, two Baby Boomer generations, and so on. Who has the luxury of worrying about what name to give one's generation? Especially if you're poor and the middle class part of your age group, ALONG with THEIR parents (get it now?) are intent on forgetting that you exist. Discussions about people in different age groups dissolve into discussions over fads that are of no interest to the majority in any group. Of course by fads I mean intellectual fads. We tried politicizing youth. It didn't work. Try what should've been tried from the start, a dissection of class." --William Duane, "Class and Re-Class" (08/16) What do you think? Join the conversation.

Halstead misses this entirely. Instead he complains that Washington is unresponsive to young people, that the "the current political climate in our nation's capital is the precise opposite of the agenda favored by the majority of Xers." This may be true. But whose fault is it? The meanies in Congress Halstead has such contempt for? The mysterious "overclass" he makes reference to? Please. Generation X isn't shaping the political agenda because most members of Generation X don't vote.

And thank God they don't. Hardly anyone ever says so, but the fact is, you shouldn't vote if you don't know what you're voting for. Too much is at stake. If someone asked you to decide guilt or innocence in a capital-murder trial without first hearing the evidence, would you agree to do it? Of course not. The very question is ridiculous. How is the exercise of democracy terribly different? If we really believe that politics and policy matter -- and I'm assuming we do -- then why are we so cavalier about the sacred privilege of voting? I'd rather have an oligarchy any day than government by the bored, lazy, and uninformed.

Not that we're going to get an oligarchy. At some point Generation X will get its act together and take control of the government it inherited. What will happen then? Halstead suggests that what young people today really want -- and what America really needs -- is a "bipartisan cease-fire when it comes to most social and cultural issues." Sounds good. The only problem is, Americans don't agree on "most social and cultural issues." A lot of people, for instance, think abortion is murder. A lot of others think it is morally equivalent to an appendectomy. Both groups have to live in the same country. Politics -- that icky process of debate, compromise, debate, compromise -- allows them to do it without killing one another (very often, anyway). Pretending the differences don't exist won't make them go away. (Though it would leave Roe v. Wade as the last word on abortion.)

One other thing. Halstead frets that "the potential budget surplus" will be "squandered on tax cuts." Consider the language here. When money is diverted from government to the people who earned it, is that money really being "squandered"? Halstead would like to see more tax revenue go to paying down the national debt and shoring up Social Security. Worthy causes both. But not everyone has Halstead's high-minded priorities. Some of us simply want to send our kids to camp, or go out to dinner once in a while, or perhaps just worry a bit less about paying the mortgage every month. Halstead seems to think people like us are selfish, or at a minimum silly, incapable of making good choices about how to spend our own money. In the same breath, Halstead describes himself as a populist. Must be a new, Generation X definition of the term.

Next page: Farai Chideya

Tucker Carlson writes for Talk and The Weekly Standard. His profile of George W. Bush appeared in Talk's premiere issue.