28 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICGen X politicians could
help check the hubris
of the present—if only
they would now defend
what they once believed.support for free trade has left them ideo-
logically marooned. Castro now calls
for renegotiating NAFTA, and has said
he sympathizes with people who feel
that many trade deals were “entered
into with the concern of the big corpo-
rations first instead of the American
worker.” O’Rourke wants to renegotiate
it too, though not markedly, despite most
studies showing that NAFTA has had amodestly positive overall impact on the
American economy.
Kamala Harris’s retreat has been on
truancy. In 2006, as San Francisco’s dis-
trict attorney, she launched an initiative
to reduce the number of students who
chronically missed school without a valid
excuse, a problem that, in the words of
one 2005 study, had “reached epidemic
proportions in urban academic settings.”
The initiative was classically Clintonian,
an effort to pair the two principles in
which he grounded many of his policies:
opportunity and responsibility. To help
parents keep their kids in school, Har-
ris created a hotline through which they
could get referrals to services. Her office
advertised the hotline on city buses that
passed through neighborhoods where
truancy rates were high. But she also
sent a letter to parents warning them that
truancy was against the law. Before pros-
ecution, parents of truant children went
through a lengthy, noncriminal process
with school officials. But when that didn’t
work, Harris’s office could bring them
to court.
At the time, Harris’s tough-on- truancy
policy fit the Democratic mood. Thirteen
years later, it’s become a political liability.
Numerous left-leaning commentators
have slammed it as part of the criminal-
ization of poverty that in recent decades
has incarcerated vast numbers of young
men of color. Progressives are right that
the tough-on-crime policies of the ClintonThe insincerity was obvious, and it
didn’t work. In many primaries and cau-
cuses, according to data published by
FiveThirtyEight, Trump won the lion’s
share of voters who called immigration
their top concern. During his presidency,
Rubio and Cruz have largely supported
his immigration agenda in the Senate.
That’s unfortunate. Comprehensive
research suggests that while immigration
imposes some fiscal costs,
and dis advantages some
Americans, it benefits the
American economy as a
whole. But these Gen X
Republicans who once
promoted that view have
mostly gone silent.G
EN X DEMOCRATS
have suffered a simi-
lar crisis of confidence.
Consider Beto O’Rourke’s
and Julián Castro’s shifting stances on
trade. By the time each ran for city council
in their Texas hometowns of El Paso and
San Antonio in the 2000s, they had wit-
nessed the effects of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton
had signed into law in 1993. Initially, El
Paso saw low-wage manufacturing jobs
go south of the border, but over time, as
Texas and Mexico grew more economi-
cally intertwined, fortunes rebounded. A
2016 study by the Federal Reserve Bank
of Dallas found that since NAFTA had
gone into effect, average income levels
in El Paso and other Texas border cities
had come closer to those in the nation as
a whole. And according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate
in San Antonio, which averaged more than
6 percent in the three years prior to NAFTA
taking effect (the Bureau’s data starts in
1990), has averaged about 5 percent in the
25 years since.
Given the data, it’s not surprising that
both O’Rourke and Castro hailed free
trade before running for president. “Since
the signing of NAFTA,” Castro declared
in 2012, “San Antonio has blossomed into
a major center of trade.” O’Rourke in 2015
voted to give Obama the authority to
negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
which, he said, offered the “chance for El
Paso to capitalize on its growing status as
a leading trade community.”
But as the Democratic Party has
moved left, O’Rourke’s and Castro’sbelieved before the parties reinvented
themselves has been proved wrong.
Gen X politicians could help check the
hubris of the present—if only they would
now defend what they once believed.A
C C O R D I N G T O social scientists,
events that occur while people are
entering adulthood have a disproportion-
ate influence on their political views. That
doesn’t mean everyone who comes of age
around the same time interprets those
events in the same way. Rather, particular
eras create particular intra generational
arguments. Think about the way Baby
Boomers have spent their political careers
debating the legacy of the Vietnam War.
The fight that has defined Genera-
tion X is between conservatives who
came of age idolizing Ronald Reagan and
liberals who came of age embracing Bill
Clinton’s response to him. As ideological
children of Reagan, who granted legal
status to nearly 3 million un documented
immigrants, Cruz, Walker, and Rubio
expressed sympathy for immigration
before the 2016 election season. Cruz
argued for doubling the cap on the num-
ber of immigrants America could admit
every year; Walker supported a path to
citizen ship for undocumented immi-
grants; and Rubio helped write a 2013
Senate bill to create a path to citizenship.
Then, in 2015, Donald Trump—who,
as a political neophyte, was largely
un constrained by traditional Republi-
can views on immigration—jumped to
the top of the polls in the Republican
presidential race by denigrating Mexi-
can immigrants and demanding a wall
to keep un documented immigrants out.
Finding themselves on the wrong side
of a tectonic shift in the GOP, his Gen X
competitors jettisoned their earlier
views. Asked in a 2015 debate why he no
longer supported a path to citizenship for
un documented immigrants—a position,
the moderator noted, that he had held
“from 2002 until as recently as 2013”—
Walker responded that he had “listened
to the American people.” Rubio said that
although he had helped draft the 2013
Senate bill that provided a path to citizen-
ship, he hadn’t expected it to become law.
Cruz claimed that an amendment he’d
supported to dramatically increase the
number of H-1B visas for foreign workers
had been a ploy to sabotage the passage
of any immigration bill at all.
DISPATCHES • POLITICS