17 New Horizons
Much public commentary in the early twenty-first century concerned the “millennials,” the new generation that had come of age in the new millennium. Commentators, demographers, and political prognosticators continue to ask what the new generation will bring. Pollsters have found certain features that distinguish the millennials from older Americans. They are, the pollsters say, more diverse, more liberal, less religious, and wracked by economic insecurity.
Millennial attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage reflect one of the most dramatic changes in popular attitudes toward recent years. After decades of advocacy, attitudes over the past two decades have shifted rapidly.
Even as anti-immigrant initiatives like California’s Proposition 187 (1994) and Arizona’s SB1070 (2010) reflected the anxieties of many, younger Americans proved far more comfortable with immigration and diversity–which makes sense, given that they are the most diverse American generation in living memory. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society liberalized immigration laws, the demographics of the United States have been transformed. In 2012, nearly one-quarter of all Americans were immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. Half came from Latin America. The ongoing “Hispanicization” of the United States and the ever shrinking proportion of non-Hispanic whites have been the most talked about trends among demographic observers. By 2013, 17% of the nation was Hispanic. In 2014, Latinos surpassed non-Latino whites to became the largest ethnic group in California. In Texas, the image of a white cowboy hardly captures the demographics of a “minority-majority” state in which Hispanic Texans will soon become the largest ethnic group. For the nearly 1.5 million people of Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, for instance, where a majority of residents speak Spanish at home, a full three-fourths of the population is bilingual. Political commentators often wonder what political transformations these populations will bring about when they come of age and begin voting in larger numbers.
Younger Americans are also more concerned about the environment and climate change, and yet, on that front, little has changed. In the 1970s and 1980s, experts substantiated the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. Eventually, the most influential of these panels, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in 1995 that there was a “discernable human influence on global climate.” This conclusion, though stated conservatively, was by that point essentially a scientific consensus. By 2007, the IPCC considered the evidence “unequivocal” and warned that “unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt.”
Climate change became a permanent and major topic of public discussion and policy in the twenty-first century. Fueled by popular coverage, most notably, perhaps, the do