Between 1982 and 1989, NBC aired a sitcom called “Family Ties” that most Americans born before 1975 remember. At the heart of the show was an ongoing political conflict between liberal parents and a conservative son, Alex, played by the actor Michael J. Fox. Alex’s sister, Mallory, played by the actress Justine Bateman, represented the consumerist and status-obsessed culture of the 1980s, which the show’s liberal parents lamented alongside their son’s love of pro-capitalist Reaganomics.
I thought about the show yesterday after reading a thread on X, formerly Twitter, written by Bateman, that summarized my feelings exactly: “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years,” she wrote. “I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of “permitted positions” in order to assess acceptability.”
There is nothing about Bateman or her career that indicates that she is a particularly conservative person. In fact, what Bateman writes is — like so much of the rest of the reaction to the intolerant Wokeism that rampaged through American society over the last decade — more liberal than conservative.
“I’ve never in my life known that to be an American environment,” Bateman went on, “It’s an environment I have encountered in smaller groupings (a church, a private club, a clique), but never before as a national blanket. It has been suffocating. Common sense was discarded, intellectual discussion was demonized. Only ‘permitted position’ behavior and speech was ‘allowed.’”
The only demographic in America to vote, in the majority, for President-elect Donald Trump was Generation X, to which Bateman belongs. And at 54% to 44%, according to exit polls, it wasn’t a small margin. Even though Generation X is a smaller generation than both the Baby Boomers and Millennials who surround us, it was the vote of us Generation Xers that tipped the balance to Trump.
