Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
America is a Better Place When Millennials Get Kicked in the Teeth — Troy Senik
Ron Fournier, playing a familiar dirge at National Journal:
Barack Obama inspired a generation of young Americans to shed their apathy and cynicism to vote in record numbers and transform Washington, where government service would become a noble calling. Or at least that was the 2008 spin.
The reality is pathetically different.
A comprehensive analysis of 18- to 29-year-old Americans—the “millennial generation”—paints the Obama presidency as a squandered opportunity to convert enthusiasm for community service into political commitment.
According to Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, millennials’ lack of trust in American institutions continues to drop, even below historically low numbers recorded a year ago.
Calling it a “squandered opportunity” probably gives Obama too much credit. That interpretation contains an implicit assumption that the president could actually satisfy the idealist fervor that he stirred in young voters. I have my doubts.
The very nature of Obama’s 2008 campaign made the subsequent disillusionment virtually inevitable. Position yourself as everything to everyone and you’re destined to disappoint once you actually have to start making decisions. I place less blame on a candidate willing to engage in that con than on an electorate willing to fall for it. The millennial affinity for Obama had more to do with social posturing than substantive concerns, which made them the easiest of marks.
I’m not overly sanguine about these numbers, which could reflect millennials overcorrecting into nihilism (even the military, for instance, commands trust from less than 50 percent of the cohort in the Harvard numbers). That said, their disillusionment may be the beginning of wisdom. It’s healthy to think of the President of the United States as simply the head of the executive branch rather than some sort of secular priest. It’s healthy to assume that the government’s default position towards the citizenry is antagonistic rather than cooperative. It’s healthy to regard state power as a necessary evil rather than an undiluted good.
Does this presage a millennial turn towards limited government? I don’t know — and I wouldn’t bet that way. But it does at least demonstrate that this fragile, cocooned generation knows it got played. I suppose that’s a tragedy if you think cynicism is the worst thing that can happen to a voter. For those of us who think doe-eyed idealism is the greater liability, however, it seems like the predicate for making millennials more cautious — which is to say better — voters.
Published in General
No, they will blame boomers for their unhappiness. I’m already hearing it. It’s our fault that their lot in life will be to be the recipient of Trillions of dollars of debt and despair. They don’t understand that they have (and will continue) to contribute to this paradigm by voting for the free pony whenever they can. We’ve created a generation of “you made this mess, now you owe me” whiners. And for those who see the light, they are shouted down when they try to encourage their peers to open their eyes.
Me too but I didn’t catch on quite as fast as you Max. It took me 18 more years. I woke up in ’94.
On the other hand, if they ask themselves why the Boomers have left them this mess…
Nor is it bad for the younger generation to get the idea that huge, sucking amounts of debt are bad.
Grim, but maybe not that grim. It could be grimmer.
In Democratic Faith, Patrick Deneen does a good job of showing how utopians cycle between faith and cynicism, and what drives the cycle is the excuse that the previous efforts were somehow impure or hindered by an overwhelming force that can only now be defeated. I think we’re seeing the cycle downward out of faith to cynicism. The only way to break the cycle is to wrench meaning from some ideas of “political struggle” itself. Because conservatism is itself a political movement, this effort is quite difficult. Plus, the urge to find meaning in political struggle is now harder to break with government providing opportunities for personal gain.
I’m generally turned off by the pessimism folks here have expressed (the kind that Krauthammer memorialized in his column on the Nationals), but finding optimism in dashed hopes isn’t a good start for us. Remember that millennials are a generation raised on self-esteem, following rules, and never ever failing at anything. They’re fragile, and they’re now broke (pun most grievously intended). They’re likely to look to authority figures to fix them, since they were the ones who granted the esteem and gave them the rules.
Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
If They do, then I’d be willing to relieve Them of Their student loan debt.
The most worrisome aspect of the Millenial generation that I have observed is their willingness to enforce political correctness. The Gen-X crowd had South Park to keep political correctness at bay and sustain disdain for elites The Millenial generation will not be an ally in the fight for religious freedom, and are all to willing to follow authority figures. We have to watch out for the rise of a charismatic demagogic/fascistic leader, because the Millenial generation will follow. We dodged a bullet when it turned out that Obama and his team had no idea how to govern.
This is one reason why I think the fear of Hillary is way overblown. She is too old and not charismatic. I predict right now that Hillary will not be the Democratic presidential nominee.
Not a word connected to Tocqueville?
In other words, I’ve yet to see anyone chime in here about whether there’s a future for civil society, for mediating institutions and similar such organically communal (nongovernmental) groupings, relative to this topic of where (most of) the Millennial consciousness is likely to float.
I say this not to downplay the core importance of the sovereign individual — but at least as I perceive it, the tenor of this discussion is all about statism versus atomistic individualism in the Millennial mindset.
And I would venture that if we keep the conversation restricted in that way (both among ourselves on Ricochet and among non-conservatives we’d like to influence, including Millennials), we’re playing into a trap, and ultimately won’t succeed in capitalizing on any prospective shift(s) in Millennials’ thinking.
And yes, I realize that many civil-society institutions have become culture-war battlegrounds, at risk of being (or already) viewed by numerous Millennials as tainted due to whatever allegations.
Substance, pertinence, and gravity of such taints and allegations notwithstanding, the fact is that the nature and objective of the targeting is statist domination.
And Millennial cynicism here suits the statists.
I’m always surprised how many of the friends that I grew up with (re-connection via Facebook) are still as liberal as they were when I moved away in the early 70’s. Many Un-friended me immediately on finding that I became a right winger and the rest just treat my political opinions like I’m a naughty child. In fact, they are the definition of the Low Information Voter. I’ll reference a story that I would figure most would agree on (IRS abuses, a man deciding one day that he’s a woman and wants to use the ladies room) Crickets…They’ll be dumbfounded. “I’ve never heard of that!” Then they’ll post a photo of their lunch. Sigh.
Like Troy, I’m on the very edge of who can be called a Millenial. (I was born in 83.) But I don’t share Troy’s even modest optimism about the supposed latent individualism of Millenials. Whatever milieu Troy runs in is apparently much different than mine, (perhaps it’s a West Coast thing?) because where he sees “basically…Silicon Valley types” I see a huge drift to something more of the Occupy flavor. Sure, they’re disillusioned with Obama and have lost trust in “governing institutions.” But it doesn’t necessarily necessarily follow they’ve turned anti-state. My impression is that Millenials have cooled on Obama because probably a plurality of them have concluded he’s not radical enough. They supported Obama in 2008, but in 2016 will go for Bernie Sanders. And yes, they’ve lost faith in government. But only because they see the American system as irreparably beholden to corporate power. It’s not that they think Uncle Sam couldn’t ultimately provide us free unlimited education, free healthcare and progressively redistributed wealth in all its forms if we really wanted it. You see, it’s just that the Koch Brothers…..
I’m the same age as you. This refrain is also what I hear from my peers.
Do they understand regulatory capture, or aren’t they interested?
“Who will regulate the regulators?” is not too difficult a question to ask, and the answer is inevitably “Those most interested in the regulation” – in particular, the ones being regulated.
I’m your guys’ age, and find my cohorts at least interested in the idea of regulatory capture, even if they’re reluctant to follow my reasoning on it all the way.
Yeah, more evidence of how corporations are way too powerful. Did you know Republicans want corporations to be able to use their record profits to bulk-purchase votes?
Well, what do we have here?
Hahahahhaahahahahahahaha somehow I’m going to get blamed for this, but if I were hijacking the main image of a post it would be the butt-loving giraffe photo from the PIT thread.
Hmm… Odd…
[Editor redacts self for CoC]
But how is it that the Evil Rethuglican Corporation can co-opt such concentrated regulatory power in the first place? Because the power is there, ripe for the plucking.
If one Evil Corporation doesn’t manipulate concentrated regulatory power for its own ends, another one will. As long as the concentration of power exists, someone will be tempted. It’s an attractive nuisance.
People can usually get that far, I find. Whether they accept that the only way to quell the attractive nuisance is to reduce the regulatory power is another matter. But even if they see reducing the power as one potential option, that’s often an improvement.
See, we just need to make the regulations in such a way the corporations can’t hijack that regulatory power.
Or we could ban lobbying by corporations.
But that violates free speech, you say? No problem, corporations are not people! They don’t have free speech!
(For anyone coming late to this conversation, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate as a typical Millennial prog.)
Yes, but how, really, would you do that?
It’s not just lobbying, though.
Regulators often find themselves so at sea when drafting the intricate, micro-managing regulations they’re asked to write that they are the one who approach players in the industry for help in crafting regulations. If regulators didn’t do this, they’d have no idea how to write the regulations they’re asked to write. Regulators can’t be omniscient, after all. How can this problem be solved except by asking regulators to micro-manage less?
(Devil’s Advocates are always appreciated.)
I’m not claiming this position is tenable, just that it’s what people actually say. They are happy to propose impossible ideas, prefacing them with the word “just” to deceive themselves into thinking it can be done easily: “just make a law … ”
This applies especially in engineering — I hear engineers say it all the time, usually when talking about what somebody else in another discipline should do to resolve a problem (“just fix it in software”) — but I’m sure it’s also true in public policy: There is no such thing as “just” doing something. If you use “just” before a verb, you probably don’t understand what is actually involved in that verb. I go out of my way to drive this point home with managers and systems engineering greenhorns.
But somebody who has never worked on a complex system, or as part of an organizational structure, simply does not comprehend that making sensible policy is difficult. They have an academic, theoretical, first-order view of the world.
For example, even for something as simple as the minimum wage, they imagine raising this number will simply cause the poor to become richer because they have more money. Or they imagine that requiring people to buy insurance will cause them to have insurance. Or that paying a bounty for wild boar tails will reduce the number of wild boars.
There is no understanding of incentives and dynamics. So we end up with lousy policy and people don’t know why it’s not working.
The problem with teeth-kicking is that the safety nets have been so embiggened and their duration lengthened into late mid-20’s that young people, or young-ish people, still don’t really know what it’s like to have to scrap for themselves. There’s an expectation that something, somebody, somewhere will be there to bail them out.
And they’re right, from their perspective, because that’s always been true. The longer you let someone off the hook for being responsible for their own actions, the longer you have someone not being an adult, and someone who is less likely to make rational decisions based on their long-term interests.
I think Millennials are more confused and adrift than anything else, and no wonder. Conservatives have the only coherent world view, but they have been taught in school that conservatives are not nice people. Nevertheless, at least half of them were raised by conservatives, weren’t they? Now I know that it is easy to dismiss the political ideas of your parents, but on the other hand, as you grow older and experience real life, your parents start to seem wiser. Three of my kids are Millennials. They’ve followed what I think is a typical pattern. The jury is still out on the youngest, but the other two drifted leftward through college, but life experience has pushed them back to their true home. It’s very satisfying to watch.
The best approach is to engage, be positive and don’t get all “grumpy old man” if they don’t convert on the spot. You never stop trying. And if you’re talking but not listening you’re doing it wrong.
Jeez, I sound like a Jehovah’s Witness.
Definitely.
But aren’t JWs rather infamous for their poor evangelical technique? I had figured that was the reason for all the jokes…
But even people whiling away their time in the groves of academe may have worked on complex systems, at least if they’ve studied anything that requires a devotion to systemic craftsmanship (which includes not only science, but fine arts such as music, if it’s done right). They may therefore already have some firsthand experience with situations in which making “sensible policy” (even if it’s only the question of how to solve a difficult problem given limited time) is difficult.
Now it seems to be true that a great many academics are frustrated perfectionists who aren’t sufficiently aware that the difficulties they face in their craft are quite often difficulties inherent in humans’ limited nature, rather than difficulties brought about by their own unique stupidity (although one’s own unique stupidity always remains a possibility). But for this very reason, the argument “It’s not just you, it’s human nature” has something attractive to offer them.
I was also born in 1983 and I concur David Clayton’s analysis. My friends are only disappointed he didn’t install a one party state with open borders.
Millenials, like any other demographic, are not a monolithic block (though we like to think they are). There are senior citizens disappointed in the same thing. For some, once a lefty always a lefty. And for those in this community who were conservative from the day they were born, you do know you’re the exception and not the rule, right?
One prominent “millenial” was certainly disappointed and disillusioned, as expressed in an interview with Piers Morgan (italics mine):
Hope (change) springs eternal, eh? The speaker was Barbara Walters, who is a millenial in the sense that she’s a thousand years old.