Anti-civilisation chef Pete Evans claims to know how people lived before the Neolithic Revolution. The rest of us just can’t be so certain. Even so, there’s one prehistoric guess we’d all probably make: younger people have been confounding older people from society’s very dawn.
We can imagine the Paleo elder feel the pain of her 35-year-old frame surge as the Paleo youth took down an elk with some new-fangled haft. To convey her confusion, her shame and disgust, she may have said, “ug.” This sentiment survives the millennia and us older Anthropocenes find new ways to say “ug” of the young.
Ug is an easy choice at present. Western youth appears to be making three primary political choices, at least two of which we are bound to find reprehensible. First, they choose no interest in democracy. Second, they follow around avowedly socialist leaders in great number. Finally, they park themselves behind right and so-called identitarian “causes” and switch the troublesome need for analysis with phrases like “triggered snowflake” and a racism barely concealed.
[Razer: nevermind sugar, Paleo pushers need to quit bullshit, before it kills kids]
Ahead of the runoff vote, the first presidential election in France demonstrated all three trends. Turnout for an election, widely described in English-language press as a crucial plot point for democracy, was lower than the last. The preferred candidates for persons between the ages of 18 and 24 were Melenchon, whom centrists call far-left, and Le Pen, whom most respectable people call a monster. The allegiances of an age group about to become the largest in Western democracies are (a) I don’t give a shit (b) I’ll give this communism thing a go and (c) I don’t like foreigners.
We can say “ug” all we will and attribute this clear trend to youthful folly. We can say “young people just don’t think”, which helps us not to think about the failure of the median voter theory in which most of us implicitly believe. I can’t say that I am not sickened by the mood of the young alt-right; I am tempted to yell that they are stupid to explain the reality of their diminished opportunity with the fiction that “others” have stolen it. You may feel the same about those many Millennials who have begun to embrace socialism or those who can’t be arsed to vote. You may not, however, reasonably hope that any of them will just grow out of it. Young people might be a little bit flighty, but they haven’t been this committed to showing it within democracy in my lifetime. (I was born after May ’68.)
We older folk have a faith in centrism that young people just don’t share. We believe that political compromise is not only possible, but the only guarantee of good government. We have largely grown to maturity in conditions that did deliver us reasonable jobs, cheap educations and the possibility of both owning a home and raising children. Why would we think badly of Blair or of Clinton or of any champion of the Third Way who promised that we could have “social inclusion” even as, in many cases, our private debt increased?
Like it or not, young people can smell the techniques and sense the effects of neoliberalism. Even the young racists and the non-voters detect something whiffy about the “globalisation” we older Western folks have come to know as consonant with prosperity and peace. There is no ongoing boom for these people. They do not see that a world of borderless trade will deliver much to them, because it has not. I cannot imagine how politically perplexed I might feel if I had attended schools that had promised me a ribbon for any small victory then prompted me to dream big. Then, landed me into an era of stark wealth inequality unmatched since the Great Depression.
After Brexit, we old folks said that there was no explicit link between poverty and the desire to leave the EU. After the US election, we old folks said that there was no good reason for impoverished Americans to select what appeared like a new economic regime. We said that this was the simple result of intolerance — as though intolerance doesn’t itself prosper in particular economic conditions. We, surely, cannot ignore the connection between a young voter’s experience of joblessness and their politics after the French presidential result.
[Rundle: and the next president of France will be …]
The explicitly left and youthful interest in Melenchon is not down, as has been reported, to a video game in which the candidate robs Christine Lagarde. He is not attracting young voters simply because they are naive. Le Pen does not attract young voters simply because they are racist. If these kids are not broke, they’re certainly staring down a future of wages that are stagnant-to-none. They cannot afford the austerity that a Macron type might hold as a solution. Both Le Pen and Mélenchon had promised better social services and labour conditions.
Centrism, which has largely meant neoliberalism with better manners, is not a future possibility in which young people can believe.
The world has changed, as it has had the habit of doing since someone first killed an elk. Our long elk boom is over and it is inevitable that young people will find new political weapons to target their survival. Ug.
Hope the yoof start flexing some political muscle locally pretty soon, they’re getting carved up on almost anything that matters.
I hope the majority of Baby Boomers and Gen X join us!
The way we have all been taking for mugs over gas exports is just indicative of the contempt our political elites hold us.
One good thing–as the newspapers and commercial TV stations die traditional, mass media campaigns are losing their potency. Parties will need boots on the ground and that means appealing to large volunteer bases, not cashed-up donors.
I’m with you Michael.
Some of us are on board, Michael, but as my 71 year old baby boomer Mum says, nothing will change unless we can wake the rest up.
“We believe that political compromise is not only possible, but the only guarantee of good government.”
That is the only guarantor of good government, compromise that considers the national interest, and it needs to be moderate and centrist. The problem is actually that too many people assert this is currently the case, when none of these things are true.
Centrism is labeled left wing, the successful model of a mixed economy (government and private enterprise with roles) is called socialism, and our so called free-enterprise market economy is actually crony capitalism rigged for the dominance of oligarchs at the expense of the general population.
What all people should demand is real centrism in practice, not the phony labeling that is used to hide the reality of a dysfunctional political and economic system. Moving to the extremes is mistaking rhetoric for reality, and will only make things worse and entrench inequality further.
Using the federal government’s currency-issuing capacity to mobilise real resources into uses that promote societal wellbeing is not extreme. It is sensible. It is the centrists who lack sense and who cling to the false belief that being somewhere in between people who actually stand for something makes you more likely to be correct.
“We older folk have a faith in centrism that young people just don’t share.”
Yeah, don’t include my older than you personage in that. The centre is now, or has become, the place where all the muck just sits and becomes rancid.
I am more convinced that the answer to most of our problems involves revolutionary thinking, at least. I can’t see that it is going to come from our universities, certainly not from our business schools.
It is, I hope, going to come from the young, I just hope they can recognise me as one of their encouragers, and not kill me because I live in the personage of their extant enemy.
Yeah there certainly isn’t an age limit on getting that the world sucks. Helen is pointing to real trends though, very statistically significant levels of ‘they’re all the same’ expressed as abstaining from the vote and voting for minors.
The flipside is there are some comfy normy ‘Millenials’ that think representative parliamentary democracy is adequate, capitalism fundamentally works, that Job isn’t Dead etc. Basically, centrists. We had 2 of them in parliament, even.
Revolutionary thinking isn’t a product of youth, we can be even more set in our ways than people past retirement age.
Will the youths of France rise up and throw off the neoliberal shackles that an older, more comfortable, generation have foisted upon them? No, because even they know they have a lot more to lose than their chains.
They hear Le Pen touting Putin’s leadership, but see a Russian economy on its knees. They hear Melenchon praising the late Hugo Chavez, but see a Venezuelan economy going up in flames. They look at both of these radical French candidates, and see remarkably similar ‘policy’ offerings (sans Le Pen’s racism) – the promise to restore of the people’s sovereignty over France’s government, its borders, its economy, and its relations with the EU and Nato. But they see too here the absence of actual governance programmes, grounded in concrete foundations of sound alternative economic policy, that translate a restoration of popular sovereignty into an internationally competitive, technologically dynamic, economically robust, social democracy. Instead, they hear Macron when he says globalisation isn’t an option, it’s a fact, and they just know that a France that tries to escape the clutches of neoliberalism will tested by global forces to its very core. And these French youths listen to their their hearts and they intuit, deep down, that populist promises ultimately only ever end up delivering scapegoating, kleptocracy and repression. Easy answers to complex problems usually do that sort of thing.
So, it doesn’t matter that France’s youth can’t bear neoliberalism, because in the end – like their elders – they will vote for order rather than chaos, even if that order is brutally unfair and unforgiving. They’ll look at their options and conclude sadly, neoliberalism at least gives them, not collectively but each individually, a chance, a small hope, for happiness no matter how privatised, and being young and optimistic they will – in the majority of instances – grab at that. The alternative is a leap into the vast abyss of unformulated radical economic experimentation that they know France simply cannot afford and a neoliberal global economy simply will not tolerate.
The people will ultimately decide what is to be tolerated. As an unreconstructed Scandinavian socialist, like Bronwyn Bishop, I think the Weatern democracies need a good dose of socialism, perhaps starting in Oz with the removal of two tiered health and education systems. Follow this with a royal commission into the finance industry, a ban on the privatisation of essential services and the building of social housing on a large scale. After all, without secure, affordable housing we are a divided inferior civilisation.
+ 1000. To that I’d add reconfiguring the economic settings so they favour large-scale investment in renewable energy and the gradual winding up and removal of both negative gearing and the CGT discount, among other items.
You’re making the ‘resistance is useless’ argument!
This fails in the long run because neo liberalism inevitably leads to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, as we all know this situation is well advanced. This is not stability, it a prescription for revolution, eventually, sooner or later, when enough people are pissed off enough, if nothing is done, revolution is inevitable. This is the history of the world.
The real question is will our politicians figure this out in time, naturally they will resist change to the status quo which has enriched them so much but will any of them have the sense to realise ‘times up’! They have to get socially innovative and proactive to avert disaster that will ruin us all.
It’s almost as if there were a choice other than between bad & awful for the French on Saturday week.
Seriously, why would the young vote for the Blair clone other than for fear of Le Pen?
AmeriKKKa had the same choice, between a fraud & a warmonger and stayed away in droves.
Lucky Oz with PR, STV & compulsory voting.