‘Right Here, Right Now’
Raised on Cold War reality and analog grit, Generation X — the bridge generation — says it’s finally time to take the wheel...and redraw the map.
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by Scott McKay
May 22, 2026
I’m a Gen Xer, and I’m unapologetic about it. I’m a big proponent of the Gen X culture and life experience. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and frankly, I think it’s time for the boomers to get the hell out of the way and let my people take over and lead. We’ll do a better job.
Mostly because we’re the bridge generation. We saw the worst and best of the last century, and we were of age when this century began. We’re the generation that grew up with paper and adapted to digital. We’re the ones who are comfortable with both. We grew up outside, drinking from water hoses, riding bikes around the neighborhood without helicopter parents, and profited by the experience.
And we experienced some of the most amazing wonders the world has ever seen.
The greatest of those, arguably, was the fall of the Soviet Union. Unlike the pampered generations that came behind us, my generation grew up in mortal fear of a nuclear war with the Soviets. One of our formative cultural experiences, for example, was when Red Dawn came out in 1984. It was a movie based on an exceptionally plausible scenario whereby the Iron Curtain expanded well into the Western hemisphere and the USA was largely cut off from our allies, and the commies invaded.
Only to get thrown back by Patrick Swayze, Powers Boothe, Charlie Sheen, and some other badasses.
I mention Red Dawn because a few years ago I was having a drink in a bar owned by a friend of mine who is my age, and she and I were talking about that movie while she was tending the bar, and some airheaded college kid with a mouth larger than his brain popped off about how utterly stupid a movie it was because the Russians never had any imperial designs on the Western hemisphere.
Pam looked at me as if to say, “Be nice,” and I laughed. I didn’t say anything. I ignored the kid, which was probably the worst insult I could have paid him.
Anyway, if you didn’t live through those late stages of the Cold War, when it had become clear to everyone just how much communism sucks and how important it was that it go away, then your historical context for pretty much everything that came after simply doesn’t exist.
That’s Gen X’s most redeeming quality. We do have that context.
Which brings me to a song I keep coming back to. It’s by a one-hit-wonder band called Jesus Jones — I actually got their CD when it came out, and all of the other songs but this one were not just forgotten but forgettable — which captured the spirit of the time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Soviet Union vanished, and all its captive satrapies became free. If you weren’t around to experience that time, you’ll never get the chill up your spine that those of us who saw the commies fall do when we hear this thing…
Why do I bring up “Right Here, Right Now”?
Because that feeling is back.
OK, fine, it’s not exactly the Romanians having a go at Ceaușescu and his wife, or the Berliners taking pick-axes to the wall. But if you can’t get some major enjoyment over state legislators all over the South being set free to do something to enforce their political will — in Texas and Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee — then you’re with the Ceaușescu.
Come on. We know you are.
There has always been a large amount of hypocrisy in the way the Left has insisted on interpreting the Voting Rights Act, and that hasn’t been missed by the vast majority of Southerners.
After all, the South is overwhelmingly Republican. Southern voters would generally rather hunt Democrats with dogs than give them power over us, and in the instances where exceptions have been made to that norm — John Bel Edwards’ awful two terms as Louisiana’s governor, Doug Jones’s abortive mini-term in the Senate from Alabama, the two communists elected to the Senate in Georgia amid a disgraceful GOP crack-up there — we’ve gotten proof as to why.
Southern Democrats have been the worst possible people to wield political power since before the Civil War. That northern and western (as in California, Oregon, and Washington) Democrats have begun to eclipse them in negative effect is only a function of power; the South is red, and where Democrats manage to win office, political reality bites them pretty hard.
But that wasn’t always true. The South used to be monochromatically blue. And when it was, it was hideously, unjustly racist. Democrats used political power to victimize black people whom Democrats had previously enslaved. Then, when it was obvious that it couldn’t be done any longer, Democrats found a different way to hold black people in bondage — destroy the nuclear family in black communities, replace industry and enterprise with government dependency, and build a political plantation where the agricultural version once stood.
Part of that experiment was to put the South under a microscope and deny Southern legislatures the freedom to draw legislative, congressional, and other maps as they saw fit — as legislatures in other parts of the country saw fit. And this was justified in the days of George Wallace and Ross Barnett, perhaps.
But by 2000, those days were gone, and by and large, the voters who produced Wallace and Barnett were also gone. It was 35 or 40 years later, and the voters of 1965 — Democrats, let’s remember — were mostly dead. Their children and grandchildren were increasingly, if not mostly, Republicans who had grown up rooting for Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Dale Ellis, danced to Michael Jackson, laughed along with Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, and stopped caring about race.
The South became more Republican as it became less racist. The South that existed in 2003 was, in most ways, the epitome of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had asked for in his 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech.
And yet, those kids and grandkids were punished for the sins of those Democrat voters in the days of Barnett and Wallace. Now the great-grandkids are being punished for those sins.
Northern states run by Democrats can draw utterly predatory district maps, gerrymandered to the hilt as a means of oppressing their Republican voters, but Southern states run by Republicans haven’t been free to do likewise — because of the ancient sins of… Democrats. The effect being that Democrats have been able to insist on representation in states where the majority of the population is utterly offended by them.
That this is an utterly absurd reality is hard to objectively question. And the results it produces are likewise utterly absurd. To inflict a Bennie Thompson on Mississippi or a Steve Cohen on Tennessee isn’t an expression of “civil rights.” It’s more like an insurgency.
All the while being calumnized as mid-20th-century racists by leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which it turns out was bankrolling the discredited, obsolete grifters purporting to continue the Democrats’ old racist-supremacist army of the last century. I’ve never met a Klansman. I’d struggle to maintain a straight face if I did. As a Catholic, I’d have almost as big a bone to pick with him as my black friends would. I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow myself to be painted with that brush — particularly when I know it’s being done as a pure expression of bad faith by people who destroy everything they touch.
You’re going to inflict Jasmine Crockett or Hank Johnson or James Clyburn on me and call me the racist? Go to hell.
Absurdity has only so much staying power, though. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, the absurdity is falling away very quickly in state capitals across the South, where legislators now recognize they’ve been given an opportunity to exorcise the long-standing demons inflicted on them by the courts.
And when I say demons, I’m not kidding. Look at what happened in Nashville (if the video doesn’t work on this page, be sure to click through and watch it)…
What’s so hilarious about the screaming in Tennessee is that it’s Cohen’s district being done away with.
Steve Cohen isn’t even remotely black. If the black residents of Memphis really, really cared about the color of their congressional representation, that could (and probably should) have been addressed long before now.
Tennessee is just the most current case. Louisiana cranks up its redistricting effort today. South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama are getting started in a hurry. Texas and Florida are already finished.
This effort is likely to flip a dozen House seats in deep red states, and it’s going to eliminate some of the worst members of Congress. It’s already gotten rid of Crockett; that action by the Texas legislature can only be seen as a heroic contribution to American political hygiene.
And the Left seems ready for civil war.
Over Cleo Fields and Steve Cohen.
Yes, absurdity eventually wanes. But it is resilient. The Soviet communism that fell when I was a college kid returned as climate activism, race communism, and cultural Marxism throughout the West all those years later — and those are the people screeching “Racism” in defense of a pasty-faced obnoxious Jewish guy from Memphis who’s hated all across Tennessee.
But thanks to the Supreme Court, we’re forced to abide much less of this. And that should send the kinds of chills up your spine Jesus Jones sang about all those years ago.
— Scott McKay is a truly brilliant contributing editor at The American Spectator, where this essay first appeared.
As a Boomer myself, I had to listen to similar diatribes about how lost, dumb, and pointless my life and all of the things I liked were by members of the Greatest Generation. Nevertheless, I strongly agree with the general premise of the article and have often wondered how or why so many people who firmly believe it's still 1970 have become entrenched in power. While experience is a valuable asset, looking to the Janet Yellins, Hillary Clintons, Jerome Powells and others of that ilk for leadership or new ideas is absurd. I myself have retired from medicine and no longer try to give advice to my son the doctor who has done brilliantly. I really wish all of the politician fossils desperately seeking relevance would step out of the way. The country and the world would certainly benefit.
Wow! Perfectly stated. If only more left leaners would have enough humility to see Truth when it is so clear.