Did I get more conservative with age?
The journey of a Gen X cusper through an adulthood of political turmoil.
This is RiffPost, a weekly newsletter for people 38 and older. For information on what this newsletter is not about, click here. If you don’t like this post, I promise the next one will be different. Thank you for reading. —Nick Catucci
As a sensitive young boy, I was probably most shaped by my mother’s political beliefs. She is the quintessential John F. Kennedy admirer, raised in a working class Irish-American family in South Providence, Rhode Island. I remember, as an otherwise oblivious 9-year-old in 1988, rooting for Michael Dukakis. But around that time I also read my entrepreneur father’s paperback copy of The Art of the Deal. Why, I remember wondering, couldn’t Donald Trump expel his rent-stabilized tenants in order to build condos? (Meanwhile, Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward, another biography published in 1987, validated my OCD tendencies. Iacocca: An Autobiography left a less distinct impression.)
There’s no Camelot that looms in my political imagination. The ’90s were in many ways a more hopeful time than, well, the decades since, but Bill Clinton and his legacy are tainted, thanks, among other unsavory things, to his 1994 crime bill and (pre-2008) association with Jeffrey Epstein. My admiration for Trump was short-lived; my interest in the business world had ebbed by the time of his first bankruptcy (Trump Taj Mahal, 1991—never forget) and I did not watch The Apprentice. Later, I voted for Ralph Nader. I would eventually find myself working at The Atlantic—editing, with respect and admiration, David French and Tom Nichols and Molly Jong-Fast, among others—and seeing some validity in arguments about the “excesses” of wokeness. I’m on the Millennial/Gen X cusp; had I, like so many others around my age, drifted right?
I didn’t start developing any core political beliefs until I got deeply into music in middle school. Rap was an early influence. I remember surprising my eighth grade homeroom teacher Marc, a young black man, when I came in one morning with Too Short’s Shorty the Pimp in my yellow Walkman. The pimping and gangbanging personas were fascinating, of course, and I assumed it was all storytelling, maybe even more than it was. But I took to heart that cops were waging war on the inner city. After all, I had just seen the Rodney King beating and LA riots unfold on TV. “Cop Killer”—which was included on the cassette my older brother bought before the song, by Ice-T’s hardcore group Body Count, was removed from the album—was galvanizing for a 13-year-old who listened to it on over-ear headphones while his mother drove him to Quaker school.
Before I discovered Operation Ivy and the Buzzcocks and Jawbreaker, which would be key influences on my high school band, I got deeply into Fugazi, and their politics were more earnest and totalizing than any other band’s. My favorite album, In on the Kill Taker, included a song, “Smallpox Champion,” about European colonizers secretly waging biological warfare on American Indians, but they also distributed their own music, capped ticket prices at $5, and refused to make merch. Bob Marley and Cypress Hill—and, if I’m being honest, 311—persuaded me that marijuana should be legal (little did I know that Bob was only smoking dirt weed, and corporations would target a growing cohort of deeply unwell addicts with superstrains). But Fugazi convinced me that all music should be “political,” and as I first began writing and playing songs with friends, this imagined responsibility weighed on me.
Clinton started his first term in 1993, when I was in ninth grade, a few months before In on the Kill Taker was released. Five years later, when he would be impeached for lying about his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, I remember loudly arguing that he should be removed from office, but not for perjury—for bombing the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which contained needed drug supplies and not chemical weapons, earlier that year. I also recall talking over a landline with a high school friend about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and, not to brag, more or less independently arriving at the imperial boomerang theory.
This progression was sped along by a junior-year history teacher (we remember you fondly, Lucia Case) who used Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as our principal textbook. What a revelation—“Smallpox Champion” with footnotes! (Well, technically, a bibliographical essay relying on primary sources among marginalized people.) At the time, my father was serving 24 months in a federal prison for a nonviolent crime I believe he did not commit—a subject for another Riff. For a kid at a New England prep school you could say I was radicalized.
At NYU, I marched against Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attended panels on prison abolition. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000; The Village Voice, where I had been an intern and was writing regularly, famously endorsed him against Al Gore and George W. Bush. 9/11 happened a few months after I graduated, while I was living in a loft in South Williamsburg, putting on the occasional show by post-screamo bands. I knew Bush had stolen the election, and that the Supreme Court had proven itself illegitimate by aiding him in doing so.
But when Barack Obama finally floated in on his cloud of oratory, I was ready to believe in Democrats and the establishment again, and working at New York magazine, where I edited the online coverage of the 2008 race, I was professionally invested in the horse race for the first time. I need not recount much of the next 12 years or so; like so many of us, I wound up watching MSNBC and rooting for James Comey and “the rule of law.” By 2024, I had, in a certain sense, regressed to my 9-year-old self, supporting Michael Dukakis. Except now I was defending Biden’s brain freezes and then, suddenly, agreeing that Democrats needed to pivot to Kamala Harris and not risk an open convention. The war on Gaza was already well underway. My wife and I remained renters, financially precarious, decades into accomplished professional careers. But I feared—not without reason, then or now—for American democracy above all else.
And here we are. I tell you all this not because my story is unique, but because it is not. I’ve never been a capital-C conservative, never voted Republican, even believe in paying taxes. If I got more conservative as I aged, it’s because I came to believe in the Democrats again. I can see how I was taken by Obama—his message, what he represented, and his desire to unify America—and, less so, why he remains the most popular politician in the US. But though he inherited Iraq, Afghanistan, and the great recession and was subjected to the rise of birtherism—and despite his accomplishments steering the country through the financial crisis and launching Obamacare—he was, and is, seemingly focused on safeguarding his dignity and legacy above all else. Emerging out of the shambles of neoconservatism, Obama could have been a transformative leader, commanding an army of campaign volunteers to rebuild the Democratic party. Instead, he was a bridge crossed by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the party that Bill Clinton built. Obama and Trump are the defining presidents of my adulthood, and only one of them changed our idea of America.
I say this now, but I did not support Bernie Sanders in 2016. The 21-year-old Nick who voted for Nader would have definitely gone for Sanders—maybe that’s why. But I was for Warren. Now, with Gaza and the affordability crisis having cracked open the Democrats, exposing the vulnerable flesh within, I at long last find myself inspired by some politicians again. Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and, honorable mention, Ro Khanna) represent the closest thing I’ve seen in my adulthood to a new paradigm in Democratic politics, one that’s responsive to what’s actually happening at home and abroad and not some abstract idea of reality. It’s gratifying to see Mamdani end Democratic candidates, like Antonio Reynoso, who took for granted that their turns had come. Even Graham Platner, who dropped out of the Maine race for US Senate race after being accused of sexual assault, offers a lesson: Talk often and in person to voters about what really matters in their lives—issues with clear material and moral stakes.
But after all this time, I don’t trust myself to be inspired by a politician. We need to stop pretending that these charismatic, power-hungry main characters aren’t going to cheat on their spouses or have posted dumb shit—but we cannot look the other way when they vote against our interests or go senile in office. I am still reading Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, and I’m very glad Mamdani wants to build a lot more housing in addition to bus lanes and grocery stores (I know, kill myself). I’m also quite sure DSA meetings are not for me. I do deeply hope Democrats take back the House and the Senate in November and actually check Donald Trump. But to do that—and for it to mean anything—they finally need to smother the belief that it is simply their turn, and a liberal promised land awaits.
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