Aug 13, Year 1 of Publication
I've heard all my life, "Manners are what we choose to do to make other people comfortable." Manners show consideration for others and self respect. And manners were the key to the bloodless coup of our entire society by the youngest generation ever to be given widespread societal power.
And they've wielded it remarkably well.
Their commitment to polite statesmanship is widely attributed as the main factor in the House switch of'38 and the Senate sweep of'42. And having gained control of both houses, they began sending laws to the president that were a great benefit to the common citizen.
But let's leave aside the effects for a while and take a look at how they got to that commitment and how it brought about the electoral surprises that swept them into power in business years before it swept them into the highest offices in the land.
Because the Swinger Generation was given positions of authority in businesses across the nation and elsewhere at astonishingly young ages, and their story merits some examination. And it started with a simple frustration.
The Swinger kids, as they were at the time, looked around them at the wreckage of online discourse and the minefield of mass media, and they realized that our words are weapons. If they used words as weapons, they faced the constant threat of having words used as weapons against them. So, they gave up using weapons as words and started using them as tools to smooth their way. And they found a lost secret: being polite opened doors for them.
People respond favorably when you are polite. While some take advantage of this, and while they had to learn to be firm while being polite, they still had favorable responses from most people. And they realized that verbal weaponry is like being around a gunslinger. Better to be polite as though everyone were armed with more than words.
Some Zoomers scoffed at them for being polite, insisting, "I don't have to be polite." But the Swingers had an answer to this: "Yes. You don't have to be polite. There is nothing forcing you to be polite. It's your right not to be polite. But, you don't have to have power, either." And they applied this response frequently. Because they understood something that had eluded a few previous generations, for the most part: Power arises from duties fulfilled. If you avoid all duties, you have no power.
Rather, the Swingers took upon themselves the duties of others and the influence of being polite when they didn't have to. They looked around them and criticized the waste and destruction of generations before them, and then they did what nobody else was doing: they started cleaning up the mess they hadn't made. They built things, washed things, repaired things, with their own resources and with what others could be convinced to contribute, and they made a better world, not because they were better than previous generations, but because they didn't want to live in the kind of world they were given.
So they put their selfish desires to work for those around them, and they became the invisible hand that made a better world for us.
And it also looked good on their résumés. So employers started favoring them, not just because they had less bargaining power but also because they were a bargain at a higher price than they were available for. In this way, they ended up in positions of authority in their companies, and that led to an increase in the preference for Swinger job candidates.
After the hiring increases started, the second thing that happened was a surprise electoral bloc. No generation before them has voted so soundly together, and they didn't vote for anyone the political commentators expected. Whatever they had an option, they supported and voted for fresh new voices who were not promising empty words but working, before they'd even started running for office, toward a better world. And while this was a great boon for the party of fear, it was a wake-up call to their opponents. And the Swingers made more bold moves that got political attention. They did it in an understated way, though, so it took a year before the establishment took notice. They had already shown a great capacity for convincing instead of arguing, during the period before their first election, but now they continued, exercising their political voice not in protesting but in tabling. These sessions of public discourse, informal forum sessions, allowed ideas to take deep root in individuals. They weren't flashy like advertisements, but the people they did reach overwhelmingly gained a report understanding of issues discussed, if they were not convinced outright of the positions of others. And their soft, polite discussions led many stalwart opponents to at least consider more than one aspect of an issue at the table, which gave all parties a more nuanced grasp of the consequences of any position being taken by one of them.
This nuance became a trademark of the generation, and it allowed them to practice statesmanship, a skill that served them remarkably well when older members of the generation became eligible for House seats.
The party of fear ran again on fear, but the country had moved to the side of understanding. And the opposition ran a swinger candidate in every race. The results were astounding. The majority of open seats went to these young candidates, because they showed themselves so controlled and calm during the debates, and they ran the cleanest campaigns in forty years.
Again, these people weren't better than the rest of us; they just didn't believe in the value of slinging mud, getting angry at opponents, or spreading uncertainty where understanding could be had instead.
And five years later, when they were eligible for senate seats, every party either ran younger candidates or scraped together a few for the most contested seats. And they won an unprecedented number of the seats again. And with the election reforms their House counterparts had won, there were more parties in the running.
Now, we were really off to the races, as a society.
I know you've all heard about this, but this was actually the tipping point for the avalanche. Now in control of both houses of Congress, and in spite of the panic it caused in their various party hierarchies, the Swingers met with each other and had frank discussions about the direction the country was taking. They talked about many topics, but one that kept coming up, from multiple parties of origin, was injustices. So, the Swinger representatives looked at the laws and the court records, and they asked themselves and each other, "What laws have escaped their boundaries? What laws have been overused or used against the people the were written to protect?" And they started sending the president bills of repeal for the worst laws on the books. They started trimming bloated bills from the legal code. And the ordinary citizens, even people from opposed parts of the political landscape, started praising these officials.
And they kept praising them, getting louder and louder, until the only sensible course was to nominate them for the presidency. I've already talked about that victory, but again, it's not the point of this article. I'm a historian. I'm more interested in the story leading to events than in the events, themselves, so I'll leave the discussion of that to others.
Instead, I'll leave you with my core observation: The Swingers gained prominence in the political world because they were willing to abandon immediate gains for long-term trajectories of improvement. Wherever we see people following this example, they do well overall, if not in the short term. Wherever we see people vying for cheap points, we get ugly blights on the face of history, similar to what society endured during the Teens and Twenties.
I, for one, am glad that we live in a post-swing world. We live in a society where most of the lawyers are old men and young New Yorkers. It's hard to say how people endured when the pendulum was on the harsh end of its swing.