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True, but Kamala isn't that young either, in fact she's 5 years older now than Gorbachev was in 1985.
Again, true, but the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.
I suppose one can make a similar point about the Dem party leadership?
This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.
Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).
I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").
I didn't know that goo-goos was that old. I thought it was from the 1990s.
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Note also that the 1910s and 1920s were perhaps an even more woke time than the 2010s and 2020s; Prohibition and sufferage being the most famous wins for that faction, but Charismatic Christianity has its roots in that time as well. Indeed, the opinion of women was indeed taken so seriously in the WW1 years that they could get men to kill themselves [by signing up for some stupid European war] simply by performing certain gestures, which is not yet a power woke women enjoy quite so directly today.
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If I had to guess, it was probably radioactive.
I can confirm that Roosevelt’s Progressives were relatively extreme reformers. We take most of that era’s changes for granted, but people were understandably upset about Gilded Age excesses. Externalities, as it were.
I would have guessed LSD, personally.
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