Millennials are bucking trends, becoming an increasingly progressive voting bloc and rewriting the long-held rules of politics, writes Isabella Higgins.
Millennials are bucking trends, becoming an increasingly progressive voting bloc and rewriting the long-held rules of politics, writes Isabella Higgins.
Quite easily explained: older generations accumulated wealth as they got older, so the central message of the right “I got mine, fuck you” (paraphrased) resonated more with them.
Newer generations only accumulate debt.
Exactly.
Even greedy millennials who are very low on the whole “wanting for others to be well, not just myself” kind of feeling and personal principles are themselves experiencing how it is to be born under the boot and realizing one is destined to be under it until the day one dies, and that feels bad, it feels unfair, it makes you want to “fuck this shit up”.
It’s not that millennials are inherently better or worse than other age groups, it’s that they’re far more likely than older generations to be familiar with being relentlessly victimize by present day society, through no fault of their own and merely due to something they were born with (specifically the “when they were born”).
Basically far more of them know how it feels to be born poor in a society that gives you almost zero chances to climb up from that no matter how capable you are and how hard you work, than previous generations.
You know which countries had Communist revolutions? The kind with lots and lots of poor people with zero chance of improving their lot, such as Czarist Russia.
It was a baby boomer/greatest generation thing. The generation that served in ww2 benefitted greatly from massive programs to aid returning veterans, thus fueling both education, home ownership, and post-war consumerism. They were able to pass that onto the generation that came after, the baby boomers.
By the time the youngest baby boomers became adults the systems that allowed them and their parents to accumulate wealth began to be dismantled. Neoliberalism didnt happen in a day. It took years to fully tear the old system apart and years before the effect would be fully felt and visible. By then the older people cannot associate the ‘now’ with the events of several years ago, and younger people have never experienced the things that their parents did.
In short. The version of capitalism that WW2 veterans in the West lived with after the war ‘worked’ for them, while Communist regimes, most of which were built on exploited colonial holdings, or war torn nations that were never developed to begin with… Eastern Europe was much poorer than Western Europe even before WW2, and after WW2 they were both poor and bombed to hell and back. Vietnam was a French colony and the Vietnamese were fighting the French for liberation before they got taken over by the Japanese, who the Vietnamese also fought, before fighting the French and the Americans afterward. China was the USSR of the East… and also extremely underdeveloped.
This means seeing authoritarianism and poverty in ‘Communist’ regimes while seeing wealth in the US, Canada, the UK, and France after ww2 (which were built heavily on US aid and some where never bombed, like the US and Canada… and France adopted a fuckload of government intervention that fueled their growth) was something that people of that time would associate with those regimes, making it easier for them to think that the socialism there is what caused the poverty when in reality that was simply their starting position and not the end result.
The shit we are seeing now is basically disproving all of it. Russia has been ‘capitalist’ for 35 years now and they are still heavily underdeveloped in addition to being more authoritarian than it was under certain soviet regimes. Shit that was affordable and easy in the West, even in bad economic times, is now becoming prohibitively expensive. Food production is still extremely high and food waste is incredible… but food prices are continuing to get worse and worse.
Also for those who care to look at things from an actual historic perspective, it is becoming apparent that the reason why shit was good in the past was not due to endless economic growth but social policy and legislation.
Building more houses and apartments is pointless. There are too many apartments and too many houses. They are expensive because housing turned from making places to live to a speculative market. This is why Canadian cities are unlivable now.
Id say, in addition to your very valid point, that this generation is the first to have this level of access to the un-skewed plight of those able enough to voice or show their situation. The Internet, social media, direct messaging around the world, is giving a very cold view of the world to an increasing number (as the older generations die out and new generations are becoming more cynical and media literate or aware) and it is highlighting how the gears of the world, too large enough to visualise on your own, actually turn and for whom they turn.
This is important to emphasise. Older generations were, generally, in more of a bubble, it wasn’t easy to spread word with the same reach and authority as national mass media before the Internet.
Similar situation with other communication advances, like the telegraph, which allowed news of the world and the people around a country to learn and co-ordinate much better than before.
Exactly. Boomers had the privilege of owning a home, building up savings, got pensions, and got to retire early. Gen x got most of those privileges, except maybe pensions… now millenials are pouring all their savings just to own a home, and social security is unlikely to exist by “retirement”. And gen alpha are going be entering adult hood with 50 year mortgages? Gee, wonder why the young population is questioning the economic system.