If You're Z, Here's What You See
Time Is Running Out
I’m going to catch up this week with some entries that don’t follow my usual sequencing, things that are on my mind.
My college’s commencement this year was different, to say the least. We moved to a location far from campus to avoid having to break up a Gaza-related encampment, and then a very large proportion of the graduating seniors strenuously protested against the college’s administration, with some faculty on stage endorsing their protest.
I don’t want to focus on the immediate issue behind this protest, or even the protest as such. I’ve talked a lot about Gaza, Palestine and Israel in the past few months. Instead, I’m thinking about why this generation of young people in general seem to be weighing whether they will vote in large numbers this November despite the fact that many of them seem committed to social and political views that ought to lead them to strongly oppose Donald Trump and the GOP. (As indeed they did in 2022, 2020 and 2018.) Some observers believe that this generation’s sympathies for Palestinian statehood are leading them into a completely irrational opposition to Biden’s re-election or a fallacious view that both parties are the same, that at the very least, the issue of Israel-Palestine is only one “special interest” that a rational voter should be able to put into perspective.
I quite agree that they should do so. I actually think many people in their early 20s and late teens already have done so. I think disquiet with American policy on Israel is only a kind of visible indicator of a much vaster, more diffuse sort of generational disaffection with formal politics that the older leadership of the Democratic Party and their older generational supporters are fundamentally incapable of speaking to or grasping.
We keep hearing from liberal and centrist pundits who are trying to sound the alarm against incipient fascism while also trying to explain that the economy is quite good, that Biden has done a lot of good things, that overall the government is on the right track. This is not unlike the message that Hillary Clinton and the Obamas both offered at the Democratic convention in 2016: we go high, they go low; America’s best days are ahead; our fundamentals are good and all the work is around the edges, on the particulars, addressable through sound governance and competent technocracy. Plainly that was not a winning message then. It is even less a winning message now, at least for younger Americans. Because that is not the America in which they are coming of age. It is not the America they see. That much unites younger people who skew more moderate to conservative (men especially) and younger people who skew moderate to progressive.
What do they see, both in terms of the evidence of everyday experience and the more complicated structure of feeling and affect that they are working through?
That the picture of employment that many economists tout as positive, as better than in most other OECD countries, doesn’t look positive to them even if they presently have a job. Peter Coy in the New York Times recently verified that recent graduates aren’t wrong when they report that job-hunting is going very badly for many of them. Moreover, many of the applicants are now dealing with the use of poorly-functioning AI screens by human resources departments that are sifting out many qualified or excellent candidates. They’re also dealing with an ever-more-expansive and longer-running scourge of employers who have learned to offer part-time work at disadvantageous terms in order to keep new employees from qualifying for benefits or moving up the salary scale.
It’s not just the immediate difficulties that are haunting younger Americans. What they see is an overall picture that looks like downward mobility in several key respects. First and perhaps most importantly, most lines of work that defined the lives of their parents and grandparents do not seem secure into even the short-term future. Many of those careers are ending or are being significantly constricted. Many of them now offer much smaller intakes with intensely tight competition, and virtually no employing organization, profit or non-profit, seems to have any long-term stability or seems to have any loyalty to the employees it is bringing on board. The autonomy of the professions is vanishing even when there’s an ongoing need for their expertise. The young don’t see a future that rewards putting your time in, paying your dues, working hard to get noticed and acknowledged. They see a shifting landscape of shifty employers who are plundering the economy and society in the short-term and have no interest at all in building value over time or in investing in a high-quality workforce. They see a “gig economy” that is not about opportunity or honest hustle but is instead about sham and shame, about getting what you can while you can with little hope of transition into something more comfortable and stable later on.
Many of the young are facing extremely difficult environments when it comes to housing. All the places they want to be, that their ambitions or aspirations require them to be, are more expensive than they can afford even if they find roommates and are willing to live in a space no bigger than the dorm rooms they’ve just left. The cost of living is generally against them right now and few of them have much faith that this will change any time soon or that their work will allow them to move into a better living situation and have better things. So much of life now is also running on a meter: public goods are much more scarce, especially far away from the biggest cities. We’ve shifted away from a strong distinction between leisure and labor, so work in many cases may invade every waking moment and require young people to maintain a presence on social media or be available online.
Health care is in worse and worse shape every day. Major systems are failing; others are consolidating and creating long waits for appointments. Young people can often delay or defer access to health care, but they feel the precarity of its constriction just as much as anybody else—and have no reason to believe that the world’s most expensive health care system with some of the world’s worst outcomes will get any better in the years to come. At least some of the youngest generation of adults are also seeing the other side of “deaths of despair”: parents and grandparents whose life expectancy is going down, whose caretaking needs are going up, and who have fewer and fewer resources to transfer to their children and grandchildren on death.
The young are facing existential crises that older Americans seem far less alarmed by, perhaps because older Americans anticipate being dead when those crises come into full flower. The youngest generation of adults have reasonable expectations of having to cope with massive disruptions at a global scale from climate change in their middle age. They are facing a world where liberalism seems deeply in peril and the likelihood of major global or regional wars is increasing. They’ve had a demonstration of the dangers of a global pandemic and the weaknesses of existing international and national systems for responding to a pandemic. In the United States, they are seeing infrastructure fall apart, despite a big “infrastructure bill”, and seeing how impossible major new public works projects seem to be. They are seeing wealth inequality widen inexorably and a smaller and smaller class of ultra-billionaires more brazenly claim oligarchic power over the rest of society. They are watching badly functioning, poorly conceptualized AI products rampage through their lives while “disruption” continues to tear through institutions and economies. The oldest group of young people in their late 20s may have seen their families thrown into wrenching financial crisis between 2007 and 2009, and few of those young people today think that the problems that caused that crisis have been addressed. Many of them no longer think that science and technology in and of themselves will provide solutions for major problems, and the pace of overall scientific discovery and technological change seems to have slowed. Many of the young—quite reasonably—do not believe that “progress”, by any measure, is likely.
And what do they see when they look to the people in charge? They see the last generation of people to have ongoing careers in stable industries condescending to them and telling them that the economy is actually really good and sharing bad business writing about how hard it is to manage Generation Z with their ridiculous expectations and woke pretentions. They see the generation older than that, the Baby Boomers, completely forgetting all the subsidies and public support that vaulted that elder generation into their position of relative wealth and comfort. They see a substantial group of political leaders and civic actors who are incompetent clowns and revolting demagogues who evade responsibility and consequence at every turn and realize that all the things they’ve been told about honesty, probity, and talent are more and more false every day, that you can get ahead in life as a corrupt liar with no appreciable skills of any kind.
And they see a Democratic Party leadership who tells them that they are (again!) facing the threat of an American fascism. That is just one more existential terror to add to their load, even as they’re told that it’s their job to stop it by turning out and voting. Like they did in 2018, 2020, and 2022. A leadership that is apparently aware of those existential stakes and yet insisted on rigging a primary election that pushed a highly unpopular, uncharismatic and unresponsive leader forward, that insisted on re-enacting an election that was a traumatic nightmare for most of the country. Yes, Biden has governed well in the sense of basic competency and management in an everyday sense, but he is not speaking at all to this vast terrain of fear, alienation and melancholy, to the futures that young Americans are facing. There is no vision on offer, just a random dog’s breakfast of technocratic responses and balancing acts. In a time where there should be a President out there speaking to publics with great vigor, leading people through a series of crises that are spiritual, cultural and economic all at once, who is both speaking of hope and actually building the infrastructure for hope to be material and real, we have instead a drip-drip-drip of limited and highly controlled appearances, surrounded by a hazy senescent emotional failure to understand that 2024 is not 1978.
I think most of what I say here has been true since 2016, and was becoming true more or less from 2010 onward. Until 2020, I think many young people hoped they were living through a temporary bad patch, that things would get better, and perhaps most importantly, that their situation would be fully acknowledged and addressed in plain, honest and useful ways. Instead, the slow exit from the pandemic has not only made the real conditions of their lives worse, but any plain talk about those conditions has become a more and more remote thing in the public sphere and especially from the political leadership that most ardently wants their vote and their support. If the moment comes where their dismay and disaffection bursts into sustained anger, it is going to make Gaza encampments of this spring seem like nothing at all—not the least because that anger will not just be on elite campuses or in blue cities. I think, I believe there is still time for the people who want a better and more hopeful political outcome that turns on strong participation by young voters in the coming election to speak directly to the world that they see and the disappointments they feel. To acknowledge the shortcomings of political and civic leadership in the 21st Century. To begin to concretely sketch out a vision of a better future. I personally do not think that Joe Biden has it in him to do any of that, nor do many of the otherwise highly competent managers that populate much of his administration. I would be delighted to be surprised. I do think the Democratic Party has within its ranks and its rolodexes people who could accomplish that within the months between now and November, but time is running out.
The alternative is to keep shuttling between condescension, belittlement, and incremental gestures that have no rooting in an overall vision, an approach that the present Democratic Party takes to all its potential core constituencies except the one constituency that is much smaller and more hostile than the elder Democrats perpetually assume, which is the older white male “swing voter” that once upon a time was called a “Reagan Democrat”. Democrats in Biden’s generation are in political terms like an amputee: that one group is their phantom limb, and they’ve never accepted its loss. One of these years it’s not going to be enough to do all that and then sound the alarm about the fascists at the door. If they really don’t want it to be this year, they’ve got to make some new moves.