I hadn’t called Shawn the drummer for months, and I felt cheesy about it. With the class and the kids and everything else there’s just no time to rock and roll, but my stuff - an amp, microphone, various stands, etc. - were still at his house. So I dropped him an e-mail: Uh, I know we were going to get together and play but things have been really hectic around here…

Turns out he’s been even busier than me. “I sold your stuff on eBay and bought a Wii,” he said, kidding. At least, I hoped he was kidding. He was.

So I stopped by on a Saturday afternoon and we got to talking. And the talk, as always, turned to politics. Shawn and I were friends in high school; he was a year behind me, graduated in 1986. And back then we - and virtually all our friends - self-identified as Republican, and conservative. Because it was the thing to be; the Reagan ’80s, and there was a real cachet to it. It was “cool” to be conservative, and especially when your parents were conservative, out here in the suburbs - it seemed natural. You didn’t give that much thought to it, honestly; we listened to the music of the time, like Simple Minds. Politically, our own simple minds just went with the flow, too.

I’ve obviously turned around since then, but Shawn remains what I’ll call a reluctant conservative. Which means he still identifies himself as such…. but. But what? Well, things obviously aren’t going well in the country. The president - his party - well, they really don’t seem to have the answers. Haven’t had the answer in recent years; what, they’re suddenly going to come up with the answer in four more years? But his view of the Democratic Party is still the hidebound one - shaped by what the Republicans say the Democratic Party is rather than what it actually is (or could be, under someone like Obama).

He’s not ready to jump, he’s not sure there’s a there there on the other side of the fence. But we got to talking about how, if we were kids today - no way would we be Republican.

Because just as it was the trend when we were kids, now the trend is away from it. And even if our parents were rock-ribbed, the wreckage of the past eight years can’t be avoided. Conservatism feels like a spent force.

And so it’s interesting to find that there are figures backing up these sort of idle observations:

That’s from a Pew Research study, noting:

The current generation of young voters, who came of age during the George W. Bush years, is leading the way in giving the Democrats a wide advantage in party identification, just as the previous generation of young people who grew up in the Reagan years — Generation X — fueled the Republican surge of the mid-1990’s.

So Reagan ignited conservatism among a generation of voters - my generation. But Bush has destroyed it among the current generation of voters. Indeed, reports Pew:

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

This absolutely shapes politics for the next 20 years. And in that light, bits like this - SF Chronicle piece on the front page of today’s Era about how Limbaugh is trying to “sow discord” among the Democrats - is nothing but a rearguard action, and a laughable one at that. Rush and his cohorts on the right have the politics of Rove and subterfuge on their side.

The Democrats have a generation. Guess which one’s going to win?