Generation Left

Keir Milburn

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509532261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Increasingly age appears to be the key dividing line in contemporary politics. Young people across the globe are embracing left-wing ideas and supporting figures such as Corbyn and Sanders. Where has this 'Generation Left' come from? How can it change the world?

This compelling book by Keir Milburn traces the story of Generation Left. Emerging in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, it has now entered the electoral arena and found itself vying for dominance with ageing right-leaning voters and a 'Third Way' political elite unable to accept the new realities.

By offering a new concept of political generations, Milburn unveils the ideas, attitudes and direction of Generation Left and explains how the age gap can be bridged by reinventing youth and adulthood. This book is essential reading for anyone, young or old, who is interested in addressing the multiple crises of our time.

1
Re: Generations

Something remarkable has happened over the last few years. Age has emerged as the key dividing line in politics. Young people are much more likely to vote Left and hold left-wing views, while older generations are more likely to vote Right and hold conservative social, and increasingly political, views. This pattern isn’t universal, but it holds true across the US, the UK and much of Western Europe. The scale of the divide is unprecedented, and although it’s begun to attract attention, its political significance has been overlooked. Much existing analysis has simply accepted existing conceptions of what political generations are and how they are formed. Those ideas might have suited the generation gap of the 1960s and 1970s, when they were developed, but they don’t fit the current situation. Our generation gap has its own characteristics and needs a new concept of political generations to capture them. We need to understand how the young are reshaping the Left to accord with their experiences and desires. A generation moving left is producing a new generation of Left ideas and practices. It’s a phenomenon that’s currently among the most important in the world to grasp.

This book traces the emergence of Generation Left through two international waves of development: the protest wave of 2011 and the electoral turn in the years that followed. At first glance these waves seem contradictory, but the continuities show a generation in continuing development. The economic crisis of 2008 is the key event of our time. It has crystallized and accelerated the ongoing generational divide in life chances. As young people, among others, found their conditions of life increasingly intolerable, they began a process of identifying and rejecting the structural constraints placed upon them. Generational dynamics of political inheritance and supersession are determining this process. We find ourselves living in one of those rare moments when history opens up. We face exhilarating possibilities but also terrifying threats. The rise of the Far Right and the consequences of climate change loom over our time like a nightmare. Yet the potential for a decisive move towards equality and freedom is greater than at any time in the past 40 years. The outcome of the political battles fought now will likely set the direction for the decades to come. The stakes for Generation Left really couldn’t be higher.

Youth Turn Left

Through the summer of 2017 the phrase ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, chanted to the tune of the White Stripes song ‘Seven Nation Army’, echoed around high streets, pubs and music festivals up and down the UK. It was the sonic embodiment of the UK’s political generation gap in all its anomalies. The dramatic increase in youth support for the Labour Party in the June general election that year became encapsulated in the unlikely figure of Jeremy Corbyn, a mildmannered 68-year-old leftist, and recently elected party leader. The emergence of age as the key indicator of voting intention in the UK has been sudden and emphatic. On election day Labour had a 54 per cent lead over the Conservatives among 18- to 24-year-olds while the Conservatives led Labour by 35 points among the over 65s.¹ In a much-repeated statistic the polling firm YouGov showed the likelihood of voting Conservative went up 9 per cent for every 10 years older you were. There was an amazing 97 percentage point gap in voting intention between youngest and oldest voters. This division was not only historically unprecedented, it had also opened up quickly. At the 2010 general election the gap had been just 15 points.²

In the US, the political generation gap was seen most clearly during the race to be Democratic Party candidate for the 2016 Presidential election. Senator Bernie Sanders, at the time the only member of Congress to self-identify as a socialist, surprised everyone by taking his opponent Hillary Clinton to the wire. Not only was the Sanders campaign driven by the activism and votes of young people, but astoundingly, considering the prospect of the first female US president, the biggest cleavage in voting intentions fell not on gender, race or class, but on age. The numbers are stark. Sanders gained 72 per cent of 17- to 29-year-old votes while Clinton received just 28 per cent. At the other end of the age scale the division was almost exactly reversed, with Clinton gaining 71 per cent of the over 65 vote, while Sanders got just 27 per cent. So dominant was Sanders among the youth that he gained more under 30 votes than both Clinton and Trump combined.³

In April 2016 a leading US polling expert, John Della Volpe, declared that the Bernie Sanders campaign was not just ‘moving a party to the left’ but ‘moving a generation to the left’. ‘Whether or not he’s winning or losing,’ explained Della Volpe, ‘he’s impacting the way in which a generation – the largest generation in the history of America – thinks about politics.’⁴ It was a conclusion reached via that year’s iteration of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ annual poll of young people, which showed the uptake of a whole series of opinions associated with left-wing views. Foremost among these were the changing attitudes towards the idea of socialism, with 33 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds looking favourably on that word while a majority rejected capitalism.⁵ By contrast a 2015 poll showed that those over 65, and so raised during the Cold War era, had very different views, with 59 per cent favouring capitalism and only 15 per cent declaring a favourable attitude towards socialism.⁶

It’s likely, however, that Della Volpe is overstating the role of the Sanders campaign. Such moments act as trigger points, registering and accelerating trends that are already underway. In the US this acceleration is most easily seen through the post-Sanders growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing organization whose members run on Democratic Party slates. In June 2016 the DSA had just 6,500 members; by September 2018 this had risen to 50,000, while the average age of members had dropped from 68 in 2013 to 33 in 2017. Then came the victory of 28-year-old DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat 18-year incumbent Joe Crowley in the 2018 Democratic Party primary for a New York seat at Congress. This astonishing victory, which was overwhelmingly driven by young voters, reflected a wave of left-wing primary and election victories around the country. By September 2018, 48 per cent of Democrat-supporting ‘Millennials’ (aged 22–37) were now calling themselves either socialist or democratic socialist.⁷ It’s a story repeated internationally. Youth support has been key to a wave of left-wing electoral projects in a variety of countries, from SYRIZA in Greece to Podemos in Spain. The near-simultaneity of the shift across different national contexts should indicate an underlying cause that goes beyond national political systems.

This hasn’t been the only political upheaval in recent years. The ultimate shock of 2016 was the election of Donald Trump, and in the contest between Trump and Clinton the political cleavage amongst age cohorts was much less distinct. While Clinton beat Trump among younger voters, she saw a large decline from the level of youth vote gained by Obama. The youth who were enthused by the leftism of Sanders were left cold by Clinton’s neoliberal centrism. But while younger generations are deserting the centre, they aren’t moving universally to the Left. In Eastern European countries, such as Hungary and Poland, a national swing to the Right and Far Right has been mirrored, not countered, by the votes of the youth. So how do we account for this general, but not universal, move to the Left among the young?

Generation Snowflake or Generation Screwed?

Our attempt to understand the young’s new propensity for left-wing politics doesn’t start from a blank page. There are already two incompatible narratives surrounding what gets called the ‘Millennial’ generation. The first casts Millennials as ‘Generation Snowflake’, who vote Left because they can’t face the harsh realities of life. This right-wing narrative, which dominates in the mass media, often takes on preposterous dimensions. Millennials have taken the blame for everything, from the decline of the napkin industry to the fall of the nuclear family. The central assertion casts Millennials as over-entitled, indeed the most entitled generation in history, making unreasonable demands for a lifestyle they won’t work for. This story is supplemented by the image of them as preening narcissists pushing themselves forwards for unearned recognition and reward. It’s a narrative codified in books such as Not Everyone Gets a Trophy by Bruce Tulgan, and Generation Me by Jean Twenge.⁸ Millennials, the argument goes, have been coddled into precious snowflakes who can’t accept a challenge to their views. These same clichés are repeated ad infinitum by the commentators and talking heads of the media. Only such bludgeoning repetition could raise the ‘safe space’ policies of small student groups into the vital political problem of our times.

Yet alongside this story sits another description of Millennials in which, far from being coddled, they are being royally screwed over. In the UK Millennials are likely to be the first generation for hundreds of years who will earn less than the two generations who came before. This isn’t just a prediction. It’s already evident. By 2016 the average Millennial working through their twenties had already earnt £8,000 less than the average of the preceding generation.⁹ The huge increase in house prices through the 1990s and 2000s was of benefit primarily to older generations. Declining wages, which have hit the young much more severely, along with post-crisis tightening of borrowing conditions, have put home ownership well ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1 Re: Generations
• 2 Generation Left (Behind)
• 3 Generation Explosion
• 4 The Electoral Turn
• 5 Reinventing Adulthood
• End User License Agreement