Rarely have the tectonic plates of American politics collided as visibly and explosively as they did earlier this month in Tennessee.
The procession of predominantly middle-aged or older White Republicans who rose almost two weeks ago in the Tennessee House of Representatives to castigate, and then expel, two young Black Democrats crystallized the overlapping generational and racial confrontation that underpins the competition between the political parties.
The Republican vote to expel those Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, encapsulated in a single moment the struggle for control over America’s direction between the nation’s increasingly diverse younger generations and its mostly White older cohorts. While kids of color now comprise just over half of all Americans younger than 18, Whites still constitute about three-fourths of the nation’s seniors, according to Census data analyzed by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.
That stark division – what Frey terms “the cultural generation gap” and I’ve called the competition between “the brown and the gray” – has become a central fault line in the nation’s politics. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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