The boomers have also presided over a period of unparalleled monetary inflation. They chose not to take hard decisions. Being an xer, I can totally relate to the concept of being trapped. The boomers are sitting on gazzilions of dollars of inflated wealth and god knows how much power that goes with it. It is not so much the lack of power that bothers me, but the conflict between playing by the rules defined by the boomers and the new hope of post materialism.
I think the xers and yers will remain conflicted generations.
The previous paragraph covers the issue of conflict between boomers and young generations, touching on the controlling forces of boomers conflicting with newer ideologies. So I think they meant to say that the x and y generations will remain in conflict with the boomers until the boomers grow too old to hold their power.
The problem I have with the invocation of post-materialism specifically to support this argument is that if post-materialism were manifest in the youngest generations, we'd have a lot of empowered voting and office-running youth overthrowing the boomer establishment. Post-materialists value freedom of speech and people collectively having power in political decisions more than they value material goods and even national order. Post-materialists would be fighting tooth and nail and leveraging every advantage they have against a corrupt, centralized material-obsessed authority.
A powerful post-materialist youth would leverage technology to empower their voices directly through the voting system and the lawmaking process. They would enable an open-source voting system with access to vote online and with publicly published by-vote data that associates votes to a generated unique key. When you voted, you would be given that key and then your association to that key would be destroyed. Thus, you'd be able to verify your vote was cast correctly and we could all verify voting data validity. The open-source voting system would ensure that there were no holes in this process.
A powerful post-materialist youth would reform lawmaking such that all bills had a single specific agenda with no riders (i.e., hidden pieces covering separate topics not covered in the abstract). They would ensure that every person could easily search for all the bills in consideration that covered topics they cared about and that the government actively marketed this data to the public.
A powerful post-materialist youth would have a crowd-sourced information platform for politics that tightly integrated with the searchable, taggable data. Think Reddit+Wikipedia for politics. With this there could be a wiki page for every issue and bill in discussion and a "subreddit" for every party and political action group to organize through.
A powerful post-materialist youth would develop these solutions and steamroll them into the status quo long before the boomers retired.
Maddox is highlighting that youth have not been exerting strong post-materialist influence in politics and joining a growing quorum of people saying, "Do more, care more, and you can actually shift ideologies and power structures to better align with your ideals."
The missing element to making this mainstream is a technology-focused social approach to reforming the voting system such that it is possible for the average working and school-going youth to develop and grow their understanding of the issues affecting all those that they care about by connecting them to those same people.
I think mainstream culture is a bigger impediment to the changes you describe than voting system reform. But I certainly would like to see the kind of changes you describe.
I think the xers and yers will remain conflicted generations.