Liz Truss is a Gen-Xer like me.We should not be in power now | Rafael Bale

T.His next Prime Minister will be too old for the job. That doesn’t mean you lack the necessary experience. I mean about the same age as you. It happened out of necessity. I’m used to baby-faced police officers and teachers who don’t seem old enough to leave school. It was literally only a matter of time before I saw one of my fellow girlfriends on Downing Street. There is nothing wrong with a prime minister in his 40s. David Cameron He was 43 years old when he became president. He was 36 when he became prime minister.

Tony Blair was 43 when he took power 25 years ago. Take 25 from 1997 and you land on his 1972, before either of today’s Conservative leadership candidates were born. When Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss Play Margaret Thatcher We dance to songs that are as relevant to the challenges facing Britain today as the Suez Crisis has brought to the New Labor Party. I am not saying that the past is meaningless. But history should inform the present, not hold it hostage.

Snack was 10 years old when Thatcher resigned. Truss was five years older. She and I went to the same Oxford college at the same time, but she studied differently and traveled with different people. Looking at photos of Truss from the mid-’90s and her viral videos, there’s a flicker of recognition. speak at a conference of the Liberal DemocratsIn that everyone in middle age is the same person as in their early twenties, it’s definitely the same Liz Truss.

Looking at pictures of myself back then (sadly no video), I can only assume I was still a kid and pretending to be an adult. Make sure it’s done perfectly.

“One of the many blessings of being 20, 21 or even 23,” she wrote. Joan Didion“It is the conviction that nothing like this has ever happened to anyone, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

It’s not completely delusional. The world in which each generation of adolescents emerges has its own peculiarities.In my case it was great moderation – Prolonged economic expansion and relative lack of global conflict. The end of the Cold War produced a budget-blowing peace dividend and a lukewarm liberal consensus. Many felt stupid not knowing how blessed it was to be safely bored with politics.

It felt true when Blair used the D:Ream song Things Can Only Get Better for her 1997 campaign anthem. When he described the New Labor Party as “all in all, none other than the political force of the British people,” it sounded pretentious, but ominous (as can be an equal boast in today’s populist climate). I didn’t think it was silly either. The rising national tide was apparently about to wipe out the Tories.

By then, Truss had quit the LDP, conservatives, which testifies to a strong ideological commitment. It’s not that our generation of 20s chose to be cool. Or it could have been a shrewd political investment decision to buy stocks in blue chip institutions at the bottom of the market, betting that they would eventually bounce back. She may have hit the jackpot.

Truss could also be counted as the first Prime Minister of Generation X. It depends on how you measure. We are baby boomers. Born in 1966, Cameron is at the forefront of statistics. All of these labels are fiction, and at best capture the myths told about themselves by their contemporaries. (Or, just like millennials, it can be a vile myth that resentful older people talk about reckless youth.)

The term Generation X was coined by an American cultural critic. Paul HusselHe defined us by our restless urge to escape the “back door of the theater of class surrounding others”. The impulses that drove its flight were “arrogance, intelligence, cynicism and spirit.” I’m not sure if it’s methodologically robust, but I consider this a compliment.

A more prominent feature of the Gen X experience is being perhaps the last human being to grow up without the Internet. When Truss was on John Major’s wreck, cell phones were still new and not smart. Old enough to remember.

Does that in-between state make us particularly nostalgic, or in some way hinder our political development? It defines us as much as the optimistic equilibrium that we thought was normal turned out to be an abnormal blip. It may have been bad luck that volatility was so good that it was complacent and unprepared for a rebound in volatility.

Gen-Xer’s caricature leans into its flaws with ironic self-awareness. should be observed. (At least, I did.)

But Truss has steely confidence in her worldview, which seems to come from another era. may have been made. In any case, I find it kind of striking and at the same time alarming. I don’t know how to believe the prescriptions of the But we were much older then. I can’t help but think we should be younger than we are now.