As I’ve said, that’s certainly one axis, and probably a major one.
But there are plenty of home-grown jerks in this country who want to take the place over for themselves. And similarly in other countries. And plenty of fatcats who seem to think they can bankroll and / or cheerlead such a takeover then profit from controlling it. I suspect they’re right about the first half of that idea, but wrong about the second. Lastly, there’s plenty of money to be made as an enabler or an amplifier of these ideas. And where’s there’s a source of money, there are always folks eager to grab some of that action for themselves without looking too closely at what the collateral costs to others might be.
Whether the better metaphor is Pandora’s box or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we have collectively unleashed strange, novel, and powerful forces upon our societies’ collective psyches. And the feedback loop is now in an amplifying mode. And perhaps even a self-sustaining amplifying mode. Society’s house is on fire.
It’s not clear to me that it’s only younger people. I think it’s more like ignorant people, of which younger people are a plurality of.
This is insightful. I think that our country in this century has done a terrible job at providing satisfying careers to people. (Just looking at median income vs mean income shows the problem.) It’s unsurprising that some people will start to question the system, including fundamentals like capitalism and democracy. And our enemies our taking advantage of that.
There are a whole lot of wumaos and Kremlin trolls, for sure, but even without them, the sentiment pops up on its own pretty naturally. I recall someone in Taiwan saying to a crowd, “You can’t eat democracy.” For many voters, democracy is a pretty abstract concept compared to being able to make ends meet financially.
Even in the USA, many would take a $230,000/year income in return for ending democracy.
IMHO this only explains part of what happened. If it was just about race, Kamala Harris would be POTUS right now. I think what happened is that the racism has been combined with actual, as opposed to lip service only, anti-intellectualism. Just compare the top officials appointed Bush Jr and Trump. My guess is John Bolton, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, etc., would be right at home on this board having a non-political intellectual discussion. RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, etc., almost certainly wouldn’t. The Republicans started a de facto embrace of anti-intellectualism. That was enough to win over minority anti-intellectuals who would otherswise have been unreachable using a “racism only” approach. Those minority anti-intellectuals were enough to push Trump to a victory that McCain and Romney were unable to achieve.
In other words, it wasn’t the base that changed, it was the top. The tail is still the tail, and the dog is still the dog, but now (since around 2015) the tail is wagging the dog.
I’d be OK with announcing “we are going to be parents”, or, what I used, “X is pregnant, and we are excited”, but I am a nerd… a little scientific rigour is not a bad thing.
After all, she held the babies (x2) each for nine months, my part in that was somewhat limited to a few minutes of fun, nine months of care for her, several hours of sheer terror during labor and then a world of shit and nappys.
I definitely did that part, but my actual role in the conception… was the sperm.
I’m not arguing that; what I’m skeptical of is the time frame and the messaging.
For example, it seems to be primarily Millennials/Gen-Z arguing this stuff, and further, they’re dragging out stuft that wasn’t even true for Gen-X, and presenting it as if it’s some sort of received truth, and then claiming the system doesn’t work because it’s not working that way for them.
For example, there’s a lot of anger about not being able to support a family, own a home, and save for retirement on one salary. Or about being young and out of college and having to scrape and save and live with roommates, etc… rather than own their own place and live like they want. They get awfully defensive when you point out that NONE of that was attainable for their parents’ generation (Gen-X), not even if you were a tech guy coming out of college in the height of the tech boom.
It’s like those are talking points coming from elsewhere, and they’re latching onto them and repeating them. Just like all the talk about “corporations” being the root of all evil, and then when quizzed about what a “corporation” is, they can’t define it, and get really defensive when you point out that what they’re talking about are the hugest of the huge multinational conglomerates, and that most companies/business are much, much smaller and much more local.
I’m not saying that the economic woes aren’t real, or that their concerns aren’t valid, but that their perceived root causes seem to me anyway, not to be grassroots stuff or even the same old stuff, but new and suspicious.
I think this moment in history is very similar to the period just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet model was untenable and western actors pushed propaganda that highlighted that fact and sought to exacerbate the fissures that were opening up. Now, it’s clear that the American model is also untenable and there are outside actors seeking to exacerbate the problem.
Even then, there are unrealistic expectations that I suspect are due to foreign actors pushing a narrative.
I mean, I’m Gen-X, and my parents were/are Silent Generation/Boomers, and while we did have a house and all that on one salary, it was a very different sort of lifestyle. We had one car, one TV, no cell phones, no cable TV, a newspaper subscription, and maybe a magazine or two, and that was it. Everything else went toward clothes, food and gasoline. And my dad worked for a big insurance company and was pretty successful. Even then, we hardly ever ate out. The only reason my folks could afford a house was the VA loan my dad qualified for based on his military service.
Meanwhile, these people online are expecting to graduate college, get married, and be able to buy a house, have their own relatively late model personal cars, streaming subscriptions, cell phones, lattes from Starbucks, and eat out, drink craft beer, etc… What they’re expecting and sour about not being able to achieve is a set of things that even my grandparents couldn’t quite achieve, not even in the post-war boom with a good blue-collar job.
So I feel like there’s someone pushing that particular set of aspirational goals as a disruptive thing, because nobody above a certain age thinks that would be remotely reasonable, and nobody around here would even push that as a result.
Repeating talking points without being able to say anything sensible about what’s behind them is totally the mark of someone soaking in propaganda. Rush Limbaugh was the master who (re-)taught the world how to profitably sell claptrap.
Millions of people, including the parents of many older Dopers such as me, succumbed to the onslaught and were radicalized by it. Since those bygone days of 1990ish when he got going, the volume and ubiquity of this garbage has only increased.
See, the narrative didn’t come from nowhere, it came as backlash against the original narrative, that Millennials are lazy, entitled, and poor at managing their own finances. There was a good period of years where every day was some news article and comment after comment slamming Millennials. Those opinions are based on a complete misunderstanding of the economic reality for young people. It can’t really be compared to economies of old, because our economy has been radically transformed since that time. What people are most spending their money on these days is not clothes and gasoline, but rather health care, student loans, and child care. Clothes, lattes, streaming subscriptions and the like are trivial in comparison to basic living expenses. We don’t live in a time when you can just cut back on eating out and then you can afford a house. There are a lot of people not having children because they can’t afford them, in a way the measurably impacts the US birth rate. So I think a lot of young people drink lattes because actual financial and life milestones are out of reach for them.
I don’t know what things were like decades ago. I grew up mostly poor, but fed, in a summer cottage in a trailer park. I was told that as long as I got a college education, I would be fine. The economic situation in 2001, when I started college, was vastly different when I graduated in 2007. I don’t know how you could expect people not to feel a certain way about that. My husband and I married at age 23. We couldn’t afford to start a family until we were 37.
There is a vast body of literature on the subject of what is actually happening, economically, for young people. Here’s just one article.
So really if there’s any “out of nowhere” propaganda happening it’s in the vicious and unwarranted attacks on a population that’s genuinely having a rough go of it.
All that being said, one of the reasons for the radical disparity is that everything is bigger these days and takes up more resources. And our economy is also driven by the sale of cheap disposable goods. Rampant consumerism on a level our predecessors could never have imagined isn’t helping anyone, nor is the fact that homes are a lot bigger than they used to be, and that a lot of homes are being bought out by private equity firms that first time home-buyers can’t compete with.
I think sometimes the resentment of youth comes not from the fact that things are so much worse now but the fact that during the Boomer years they were unusually good. During the Boomer years I think the nuclear household model was tenable for the first time - I think it is increasingly less tenable. Our society in many respects is still structured based on the assumption that only one parent is working and that people have relatives to help out with childcare. This does not reflect current reality. If my son has a child at the same age I did, we’re going to be pushing eighty and likely unable to help him. I suspect soon we’re going to see a return to multi-generational living.
I’m not trying to say that times aren’t hard, but that the past narrative has typically been to look at the politicians in office and say “You need to do something about this”, not “Capitalism has failed and so has democracy.”
That’s the part that seems out of left field to me; our parents underwent bad times- the oil embargo and rampant inflation of the 1970s, and the recessions of the 80s, and so have we, in 2001 and 2008. But at no point was there an undercurrent of “the system has failed”. That’s new.
One factor, which I don’t think is just propaganda, is the increasing income inequity in the U.S. Real incomes for middle-class Americans don’t go as far as they did when you and I were younger.
As far as housing, we also are, in fact, facing a significant crisis when it comes to affordable homes for new home buyers. Housing prices have far outstripped income increases, and a lot of “affordable” houses have been snapped up by private-equity landlords as rental properties. (cite) (cite)
I know a fair number of Millennials, and no, it’s not just an unrealistic expectation of, “I’m out of college, I have a good job, I should be able to buy a house now” – these are people in their 30s, who have been working at reasonably good-paying jobs for years, but are still living with their families, or in an apartment, and are often still paying off student-loan debt. They would love to buy homes, but simply can’t find anything which they can afford.
Does social media leverage this? Absolutely. But it’s not just that younger people getting brainwashed by the media; there’s an element of serious truth to it all, too.
In all fairness, some young people really do have unrealistic expectations. My husband works with a lot of “failure to launch” type kids who feel like it’s pointless to try if they can’t have what they want.
And I personally know a couple of people my age who seem to have decided that since they can’t find the perfect job, they’re just not going to work. Their partners and parents aren’t very happy about this.
People my age did receive a lot of messaging about how we would thrive once we found our passion. Some of us may have gotten the impression that we were owed a job we were passionate about.
I admire writer Cal Newport’s take on this in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. He says quit looking for your passion and figure out how to be really good at the job you have, then leverage that career capital to get the job you want.
I’m the worst person in the world to be relaying this message, because I did find and follow my passion and have always been pretty excited about what I do. I’m one of the lucky few. But I also did pretty much exactly what he said to do - I wanted to work in the non-profit industry so I got a nonprofit job as a customer service rep in a call center - not a very glamorous job but it led to a promotion into their NYC field office, which established the credibility I needed when I applied to graduate school, etc. So yeah I kind of did it that way.
I think that sort of thinking is more prevalent in this age of social media than it used to be. Sort of an extreme case of “Keeping up with the Joneses”, but with a lot of flashy stuff and Potemkin village type stuff. , In a way, it’s because “the Joneses” have become global, instead of your neighbors, and also because there’s more obfuscation and curation involved with social media than with IRL displays of wealth/status.
I asked my wife’s family why they support Trump. Her aunt’s kind of a typical bitter old xenophobe but my wife’s mom, other aunt, and her retired Marine MAGA husband are generally nice, if somewhat clueless people.
I suppose the answer isn’t necessarily logical or has anything to do with whatever hardships they had in life. They simply believe in a narrative that Democrats and Liberals believe in all these awful things that destroy American culture and that Republicans support hard working Americans and that Trump’s unconventional approach is “winning for America”.