His speech spoke to the unbreakable sense of unity and purpose that defined the Greatest Generation, but it was also indicative of how Americans conceived of their politics and government. Throughout the modern era, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, politics was fundamentally about conflict over the material conditions of life: the organisation of production, the focus of investment, the contest of classes and interests — these were always up for grabs. Indeed, in his soaring inaugural speech 10 years earlier, FDR was eminently grateful that, despite the depths of the country’s Depression-era troubles, they nonetheless concerned “thank God, only material things”.

But then something happened not long after the Roosevelt era. In the post-war years, as the children of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, grew up and came of age amid an unprecedented level of mass middle-class affluence, a different conception of politics took hold. By the Sixties, issues relating to self-expression and cultural recognition became more important than economic questions. Ronald Inglehart, the late political scientist and founder of the World Values Survey, saw this shift reflected in survey data and called it “post-materialism”: a seismic break with the practical orientation of generations that gave rise to culture war as the new paradigm of American politics.

It began on the Left with the emergence of the counterculture and the various political and lifestyle movements associated with it. By the decade’s end, though, the Right under the leadership of Richard Nixon and Phyllis Schlafly eventually caught on and began to mobilise voters primarily on the basis of their own conservative moral, symbolic and affective attachments as a means of fighting the counterculture.

This was something new in US history. Up to this point, the main cleavages in each era were grounded in differences over competing models of political economy. Hamiltonian nationalism against Jeffersonian agrarianism; the Southern slaveocracy against Northern industrialisation; New Deal liberals against small government conservatives. This is not to say that earlier Americans were not moralistic: they pursued moral and material progress together, often channelling their deeply held moral convictions into larger projects of material economic transformation. Other cleavages either arose from economic divisions (racial inequities stemmed from the legacy of slavery — an economic institution) or were secondary to it (Prohibition, for instance, borne of lifestyle differences between Protestant and Catholics, may have been prominent in its day but it never superseded the centrality of the economic divides).

Every decade since the Sixties witnessed a reversal of this logic, whereby moral and cultural issues largely determined whether one was on the Right or Left, even more than policy differences over taxes or regulation. By the Nineties, even as the two parties claimed to be fighting over the size of government, the motivations underlying vicious partisan feuds became rooted more in irrepressible cultural antagonisms. This was evident in the strange, outsized significance placed on the personal foibles of Bill Clinton by his conservative enemies, who treated the first Boomer president and his feminist wife Hillary as the ultimate embodiments of the Sixties ethos, even as he shared their programme of free-market globalisation. In effect, the culture war amounted to the de-politicisation of the economic and the ultra-politicisation of the personal: the persistent polarising power of social issues such as abortion, guns and battles over school curricula — as factories were leaving the Midwest and widespread economic inequality was taking off — can be understood in light of this paradigm.

These trends reached their fullest expression in the latter half of the 2010s, after the failures of both the post-racial aspirations of the Obama era and the lopsided recovery from the Great Recession laid bare the exhaustion of the status quo on both the mainstream Left and Right. The election of Donald Trump has been interpreted as a revolt of conservative America and as an escalation of the culture war. And while that was the ultimate result of his presidency, his first campaign for the White House was actually, in many ways, a repudiation of the logic of the culture war and a bold reassertion of materialist politics.

After all, underneath the vulgar and bombastic Trump-style that debuted on the day of the escalator ride, there was a pointed critique of globalisation and the outlines of an alternative political economy. Candidate Trump criticised free trade and financialisaton while his bromides on immigration, though needlessly crude and provocative, could be read as a blueprint — not for a white ethnostate — but for a system of greater labour market security that could materially benefit working-class Americans of all races. Even on wedge issues, Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, rejected the dogmatism of social conservatives in his party: he happily held up a Pride flag and said he didn’t care where Caitlyn Jenner went to the bathroom; he also had little time for the abortion issue, pointing out that Planned Parenthood did “very good work for millions of women”. As if mocking the pieties of the GOP, Trump said: “I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?” It seemed for a moment as if Trump would attempt the politically impossible: to reduce the salience of intractable moral issues while refocusing America’s energies on rebuilding its decaying towns and cities, perhaps even presiding over an industrial renaissance while punishing Wall Street plutocrats — just like Roosevelt did.

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By Michael Lind

However, upon entering office, the promise of a genuine materialist revolution evaporated. President Trump made two tacit bargains, one with conservative elites and another with liberal ones. To please Republicans, he governed like a conventional Reagan-Bush conservative on economics as well as culture: he passed Paul Ryan’s tax cuts for the benefit of multinationals, who used the money for buybacks (and made only the most halting progress on trade); he then assented to the hard-line demands of social conservatives such as Mike Pence, reinforcing the rigidity of the culture war.

With liberals, the bargain was more subtle but no less cynical: by upping the intensity of his culture-war antics and abandoning the heterodox economic positions he ran on, he provided his foes with cheap fodder for their own media circus, galvanising the “Resistance”, giving “rocket fuel” to the New York Times, and handing the Democrats victory in 2018 and 2020. (Had he taxed the rich or expanded healthcare, he would have confounded the Democrats — maybe won a second term.) In exchange, the President got to sit back, act out, not put in the work of governing, and still endlessly occupy the spotlight.

Nowhere is Trump’s collusion with the Swamp he was supposed to drain more glaring than in his failure to settle the immigration issue: he passed over the chance for comprehensive reform when his party had full control of Congress and refused to endorse the policy of mandatory E-Verify, which would have worked a thousand times better than a symbolic wall (which, by the way, was also not built). Beneath all of Trump’s bravado and slogans, he essentially sustained the open borders status quo which enriched both red and blue-state elites — not to mention his own family business — and passed it on to Joe Biden.

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Hillary Clinton still doesn't get it

By Ashley Frawley

With another election looming next year, the compelling economic critique that Trump introduced seven years ago has vanished; and in line with the purely symbolic thrust of post-materialism, Trump himself — having been detached from any specific, discernible policies — has become a symbol that signifies nothing tangible; he’s a mere trigger for the emotions of both supporters and detractors. The unending psychodrama of the Trump indictments has taken up all the attention of the media and political classes while saying nothing about economics, trade, immigration or anything else of substance. Where America could be debating the best way to re-industrialise the Midwest or the most efficient means to fund infrastructure, it is lost in a sea of legal trivia about misplaced documents and hare-brained conspiracy theories about stolen elections. Republican efforts to make Hunter Biden the centre of the national psychodrama are just as illustrative of America’s decline as a serious country.

While ordinary Americans are still concerned with bread-and-butter issues and consistently remain moderate on most culture-war issues, their bipartisan leadership has succumbed to post-materialism, which is, at the end of the day, an elite disease. One may be tempted to hope that, since Inglehart first recorded its symptoms among Left-wing Boomers over 40 years ago, the post-materialist mind virus will eventually die out with that decadent generation. However, worryingly, the very same symptoms are even more visible among Millennials and Gen Zs. In fact, it’s come full circle, with the countercultural Right now openly proclaiming its desire to imitate the post-materialist sensibilities of the Sixties: the result is that young conservatives, no less than their progressive enemies, are just as incapable of thinking in practical economic or institutional terms and now only covet the immaterial “cultural power” that they believe is their due.

Here, the unfortunate tale of Nate Hochman is most telling. Once heralded as a champion of the young Right, he was disgraced and fired from Ron DeSantis’s campaign after he was revealed to be the maker of a bizarre video that appeared to feature an obscure Nazi symbol. As today’s young Americans become the first generation ever that’s set to be materially worse off than their parents, this rising star didn’t die on the hill of any grand policy or programme that might have been too radical for his superiors to contemplate; instead, he was felled by his attachment to a set of aesthetics, demonstrating how the next generation of American elites is effectively trapped in a self-referential world of symbols and memes that is everyday more removed from reality. This is post-materialism in a nutshell; and it is why America can’t have nice things and — if this is what the future looks like — why America will never have nice things again.

“I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth,” Truss said, pressing her foot on the accelerator. “Our community wants this rapid growth to slow down,” said Miller, stamping on the brake. “We will make it easier to build homes,” Truss said, bearing down on the great furnace bellows of British growth. “The next local plan must cut new house-building levels in half,” Miller countered, pouring cold water on the few weak, fading embers that remain. Truss might as well have slapped on the rouge, minced onto the conference hall stage as a pantomime dame and invited the audience to proclaim “It’s behind you!” to identify members of the anti-growth coalition.

In her speech, Truss listed opposition parties, militant unions, think tanks with vested interests, talking heads, “Brexit deniers” and environmental activists as constituent parts of the anti-growth coalition. If that’s what makes up the anti-growth coalition, all of these interests are certainly very powerful; our economic growth rate has been woeful for the last decade and a half. But one might note these groups — also the stock bogeymen of the Tory faithful — haven’t held the keys to Downing Street for the last 12 years. They certainly play a role, but it’s easy to paint a target on your political enemies. It’s far harder to paint a target on your friends and allies.

The awkward truth left unsaid is that the anti-growth coalition contains more than just members from the “the other side”. Truss failed to mention that some of its most powerful members were in that very conference hall: the Conservative activist base, voter coalition and, yes, even Tory MPs. Miller is just a timely and particularly diametric example, but a quick search will find example, after example, after example, after example, after example, after example of Tory MPs opposing growth — from houses to solar panel installations to new supermarkets — in the face of local opposition from prospective Conservative voters.

They pose in front of derelict industrial wastelands saved from “inappropriate development” with elderly, homeowning activists holding Conservative campaign signs, all grinning like Alsatians. And the Tory councillors are no better. If anything, it’s even easier to find councillor, after councillor, after councillor, after councillor proudly claiming ownership of blocking developments. The so-called talking heads from think tanks that Truss identified often ponder on panels why Britain’s growth rate has been anaemic for so long, all pensively stating “it’s a complex, multifaceted issue” relating to obscure legislative frameworks or some other skills policy minutiae.

But there’s no great mystery. We haven’t grown because we refuse to build infrastructure and housing in our most productive regions and cities, strangling the supply of workers to well-paying, productive jobs, and increasing operational costs. The nation that once produced great Victorian engineers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s calibre has lost its nerve and taste for economic progress.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

It’s easy to assume that big, dark, and powerful forces are behind our economic malaise. It’s far harder to imagine that the cause is perfectly normal, average and decent fellow countrymen and women — motivated by only good intentions — objecting to planning proposals just because they want to stop some construction dust for a few months, or prevent something as nebulous as the “character” of their local area changing. These small-c conservatives represent millions of grains of sand in the national gears of growth — and they’re courted by politicians of all flavours seeking votes at the intersection of our political incentive structures. But courted most successfully, if Truss were to look in the mirror, by the Conservative Party.

One of the great unsolved problems in politics is the natural conflict between wealth, political power and economic dynamism. Wealth building is a fundamentally good thing for society, for it provides security, stability and facilitates increases in living standards. But with growth in wealth inevitably comes political power, which is then invariably used to moat and defend the ownership of wealth, even if that means strangling off economic growth through barriers to entry, oligopolistic profits and economic rents.

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These will all be quietly introduced under the well-meaning guise of protecting consumers and the environment, or ensuring product quality (protecting the “unique character of the local area”). In the housebuilding sector, only large players with an army of planning system navigators and the capital to weather cost of operation can survive. A 2016 House of Lords report concluded that the sector “has all the characteristics of an oligopoly”, because of the barriers to entry erected by the wealth and power structures of middle Britain. “It is rational for private enterprise to optimise profits rather than volume, limiting their uncertainty in a market characterised by constant Government intervention and cyclical risk,” the report added. There’s your anti-growth coalition right there, Prime Minister.

It’s not that Truss has no allies. Save for the party leader’s speech, the main stage is never where the best ideas are found at party conferences. Scrubbed of interesting content and commentary that might accidentally “commit news”, cabinet minister speeches are best avoided. The few conference events that did have a “buzz” were all on the subject of planning reform — for everything from housing to new reservoirs. Veterans of many failed campaigns, the movement for change is becoming much wiser and more targeted. It doesn’t matter how big your porcelain hammer is when you hit it against the concrete wall of reform, the thinkers now realise — the hammer will always shatter.

Key to reform — and the defeat of the real anti-growth coalition — is a complete rewiring of incentive structures. A crusade against the largest, most influential voter block in the country will never win. So instead of playing tug-of-war with them, tug the rope sideways. Buy them into reform with beautifully designed buildings, and include their often legitimate concerns from day one in consultations. And — just as Nye Bevan joked was necessary when pushing through the creation of the NHS against stiff opposition from doctors — stuff their mouths with gold.

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Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

Let them enrich themselves by voting for densification with policies such as Street Votes, giving them the value of planning uplift to their own properties. Simplify the structure of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy — initiatives that try to get funding for schools, hospitals, roads and local amenities from new developments, but that fail through their complexity and lack of scale and ambition. Make people believe that by backing a development, they will benefit personally. And for heaven’s sake, follow through with that promise. Yes, it’s offensive to offer these privileged, wealthy people even more carrots — but it will be worth it for the transformative benefits of structural reform.

Finally, realise that some incentive structures are already there for you to exploit. The Secretary of State could get building started in Labour-dominated cities tomorrow. There would be no primary or secondary legislation requirements. All the powers to do this exist today. If the Conservative Party is worried about losing the city suburbs — and it should be — one way to slow the tide of Labour-inclined, priced-out city-dwelling families into the suburbs is to enable them to live in Labour-held, city constituencies by building more.

Going up against the anti-growth coalition will be “difficult, but it is necessary”, Truss said. “We cannot give in to the voices of decline. We cannot give in to those who say Britain can’t grow faster. We cannot give in to those who say we can’t do better.” The only problem is, she was saying it to everyone else, not her own party.

I first joined the party around 2011, 18-years-old and full of belief in the values that I think have delivered so much for my family, and the country at large. The right of individuals to choose how to spend their own money. The power of liberalised markets to deliver improvements in living standards. The importance of our national institutions. Empowering individuals to live their life on their terms. My belief in these values has not changed.

What has changed is the Conservative Party. While its leadership candidates would happily agree with these aspirational principles, to be a young Conservative today feels like being a Judas goat, leading its own generation towards destitution. It’s not just me — my circle of young party members didn’t have a positive word to say when we found out the choice was between the two continuity Johnson cabinet candidates.

I want to light a fire under the arse of the party. I want to grab it by the lapels and shout with the moral fury of a cri de cœur: “You cannot continue like this”. A country must build for its future, not relentlessly indulge its present. To continue as we are, offering crumbs to the young while ceaselessly gifting jam to the Baby Boomer generation, simply because it wins elections in the short term, is not just bad for our party’s electoral prospects in the coming decades. It is fundamentally unpatriotic and unconservative.

Acting against conservative principles has consequences. Thank goodness, the leadership debate has finally noticed Britain’s appalling growth record over the past decade and a half — a period that awkwardly coincides with 12 years of Tory rule. The leadership candidates even openly admitted in the BBC leadership debate that the party’s economic management has failed to make Britain any better off. We are no richer than we were before the financial crisis. The march of economic progress — the increases in real earnings and upgrades in living standards that defined postwar Britain — has stalled.

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By Philip Cowley

“We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times, with other outlets, peddling a particular type of economic policy for 20 years. It hasn’t delivered growth,” said Liz Truss. She’s right. If we don’t change course, we could well see the United Kingdom fall behind the per capita GDP of Poland in little more than a decade. The former Soviet satellite state had to play catch up after it was forced to run an uncompetitive and sclerotic command economy for the best part of five decades. What excuse does Britain — the birthplace of free trade, and of the industrial revolution — have for its lacklustre economic performance?

“What people in Britain desperately need now is change,” Truss added. She is, at least, challenging the orthodoxy that has led us to this juncture. But, like a plague doctor from 1769, while her diagnosis might be right, her cure is the equivalent of stripping at midnight during a full moon and standing in a barrel of eels. I lean heavily to the Right on economics — I should be delighted by Truss’s promises of immediate tax cuts to the tune of £30bn per annum. She’s proposed a reversal of the manifesto-breaching National Insurance hike, cancelling the planned 6p rise in corporation tax, and a two-year suspension of the green levy — a particularly eye-catching and juicy policy with energy bills soaring. Sunak, meanwhile, has pledged to cut the basic rate of income tax to 16% by 2029.

In one sense, less taxation is exactly what I want to see from a Conservative government, not least with my own marginal rate reaching beyond an eye-watering 60%. Cutting taxes is the fillet steak of red meat Thatcherism, is it not? While Truss may be claiming the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as her own with her tax cuts proposals, what the proposals forget is that Thatcher was cautious on tax cuts until the hard work — of eliminating the economy’s structural weaknesses — was done. In fact, taxation as a share of GDP continued rising into the early Thatcher years, only consistently falling after 1985, six years into the Conservative government.

In the Seventies, the structural weaknesses were all-powerful unions obstructing industry reform and undead, state-owned businesses kept going only through public subsidy. Modern Britain has its own equivalent of this economic drag anchor: the cost of housing and its root cause — the utterly dysfunctional planning system.

That planning system is designed not around growth, progress or even necessity. Rather, it is almost exclusively geared towards securing the lifestyle and preferences of those who already own — and who overwhelmingly oppose development. The result is laughably predictable: a severe supply shortage of homes and rocketing prices that far outstrip languid growth in earnings. Astonishingly, property listing website Zoopla found last year that one in five homes “earned” more in a year than the average UK salary. So much for the dignity of work.

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We cannot expect anything other than a sclerotic economy if we throttle the supply of workers in our most productive regions through high housing costs. One study found that by restricting access to workers through planning regulation, aggregate economic growth in the United States was a third lower than it could have been between 1964 and 2009. The cost may even be higher for the United Kingdom. Choking off all development is not small-c conservative protection of the “local character” of our neighbourhoods. It is nation-wrecking.

London, host to some of the most productive financial and legal services in the world, is now home to house prices 14 times greater than median incomes. Between the war and 2000, this multiple never rose above six. In Oxford and Cambridge, home to countless high-productivity businesses associated with the crown jewels of British higher education, the multiple exceeds 12. There is a clear economic incentive for young people to steer well clear of the country’s most productive jobs. That means lower growth, lower living standards, higher taxes, and worse public services.

And here lies the national practical joke: who supports this incredibly restrictive, nationalised and closed planning market? The party that liberally peppers its speeches with saccharine praise for privatised, lightly-regulated, liberalised markets. And what is the closed, state-regulated planning market that benefits existing players? A huge government subsidy. Again, anathema to Tory orthodoxy.

“The best way to achieve economic growth is cutting taxes and bureaucracy, and boosting private sector investment and innovation,” said Rishi Sunak, also at the BBC television debate. Yes! Reforming the planning bureaucracy fits hand in glove with the rhetoric. Yet neither candidate will touch the planning system with a barge pole, let alone seek a mandate from the membership to reform it, because it is an electoral livewire. Any attempt at change swiftly results in enormous electoral backlash, as proven by the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, followed immediately by dilution, if not abandonment of reform.

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Without seeking a mandate for change from the party, attempts at change will always fall flat. David Cameron’s leadership campaign back in 2005 featured an open, public insistence that the party had to transform to ever win power again. “When I say change, I’m not talking about some slick rebranding exercise: what I’m talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election… we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we’re comfortable with modern Britain,” Cameron said at his 2005 conference speech, widely seen as the turning point that put him on the path to victory.

Cameron challenged his party to accept the social liberalism of modern Britain or face electoral oblivion. By making this a core theme of his campaign, and by winning, he was able to move forward and drag the party with him. I see no equivalent pitch coming from either candidate on what should be the most salient issue of the day. Sunak is actually proudly stating he’ll give residents even more power to block housing near them. How is someone in their early thirties, in a rented flat, with no prospect of owning their own home, whose wages haven’t risen in more than a decade, to interpret that, other than as utter contempt for how the country works against them?

It cannot even be claimed that this inequity is in the party’s long-term interests. If multiple generations are locked out of homeownership, they will not vote Conservative. Why should they?

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By JAMES SEAN DICKSON

My message to the party leadership is very simple: you are not discharging the duty of society to care for and improve the lives of its young. How am I, as a young Conservative, meant to defend our party’s record? How can I, when it is directly lowering my standard of living in order to subsidise already well-off, retired and home-owning Baby Boomers — whose incomes, for the first time in history, exceed working age incomes?

And while housing is the worst part of a sorry national picture, the intergenerational war on the young doesn’t stop there. Working age benefits fall while pensioners enjoy the comfort of the triple lock policy. Usurious rates of interest are applied to student debt. Taxes are at their highest level since the war, paying for increased NHS spending that primarily benefits the elderly. To be young today is to be relentlessly milked for extractive, gerontocratic tastes.

It has become a common trope: the young, imperious politico announces their resignation on social media with an image of a cut-up party membership card. Why don’t I do the same, given my contemptuous descriptions of the party’s record in government? I’m clinging on by my fingertips, still believing in “our” values. Truss or Sunak need to actually implement these values, instead of just paying lip service to them, to get my vote.

Right now, I’m planning to simply scrawl “build more bloody houses” on my ballot paper in a thick marker pen. The young, renting staffer opening the envelope to record the vote, whose wages haven’t risen in a decade, is unlikely to disagree with the proposition.

Think back to the early Eighties. We face many of the same pains, again under a Conservative-majority government: Moscow is in the news for all the wrong reasons; high inflation; low growth; widespread industrial action. Britain is a country ill-at-ease, uncertain of its next destination.

The surgeon back then had no uncertainty over what medicine needed to be administered, what operation was required. The 1979 election was a referendum over the direction of the country: more of the same pain, or an operation that, despite its risks, might just jolt the country back to life?

And while you could describe both Conservative prime ministers by their characterful hair alone — Margaret Thatcher: powerful, unyielding, strong; Boris Johnson: chaotic, untidy, silly — there the similarities quickly come to an end. This hasn’t stopped the Johnson cabinet claiming the Thatcher legacy as its own. Hear Rishi Sunak’s speeches and you would assume the Government was on a Lawsonian crusade against high taxes.

The reality is precisely the opposite: taxes are about to reach their highest level since the Second World War, 12 years after the tax-cutting Tories re-entered Number 10. In 1979, the party swept into government with a clear diagnosis and a comprehensive treatment plan, defined by its ambition to bring down inflation, get Britain back on track, and consign the “sick man of Europe” label to the dustbin.

Today, however, after three consecutive Tory prime ministers, the party seems tired and unsure of what the whole point of being in government is, beyond holding power for its own sake. The by-election results from Wakefield and Tiverton will all but confirm this, covering two completely different demographics and geographies. The likely defeats will be a symptom of the lack of a narrative that holds the Government together — unlike Thatcher’s crusade against inflation, excessive union power, and unfree markets delivering poor outcomes to consumers.

Ostensibly, Levelling Up is the Government’s mission. But with limited cash or ideological rigour underpinning the policy, claims of ambition, drive and determination ring hollow. It didn’t seem this way two-and-a-half years ago, when the party jettisoned austerity and set sail for new ideological waters. What was remarkable, and remarked upon heavily after the 2019 landslide win, was how far the Tories had reached into former Labour heartlands. Wakefield itself is a prime example of one of these “Red Wall” constituencies. For the first time in generations, it bought into a Tory aspirational narrative. These areas were going to get better, and the Conservatives were going to be the party to make that happen.

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But what wasn’t sufficiently remarked upon at the time was the extent to which this victory was achieved without the youth of Britain’s cities. Instead, it was achieved with a deep dependence on older voters, with over two-thirds of people in their seventies and over voting Tory.

It is easy to imagine that the cities, London in particular, have always been bastions of falafel-eating, Birkenstock-wearing liberals — impregnable Red fortresses owned by the Labour Party since time immemorial. Yet that is to forget that Thatcher’s majorities were achieved with the enthusiastic support of the cities. In London, a full two-thirds of the seats were won by the Conservative party in 1983, compared with only 29% in 2019. By contrast, the 2019 victory was underpinned not by a vision of growth and ambition, but by home-owning pensioners in ex-industrial and ex-mining regions who didn’t usually vote Conservative for cultural reasons, but finally snapped and voted for their own interests.

The traditional diagnosis for the cities turning against the Conservatives is that this split has happened over social and cultural values. Cities are predominantly young, and the young reject the current social and cultural values of the Conservative Party: values typified by the placement of Nadine Dorries as culture secretary, initiatives such as the Rwanda refugee resettlement policy led by home secretary, Priti Patel, and, of course, Brexit.

While this is certainly a significant part of the picture, what is rarely accounted for is the wholesale fiscal and monetary contempt the modern Tory Party has for anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner. Faced with the highest tax burden since the war, the highest inflation in decades, and ever-shifting student loan repayment terms — faced with plummeting rates of homeownership and sky-high house prices that have more than sextupled the time it takes for someone in their late-twenties to save a deposit — why should anyone under-40 vote for the Conservative Party?

And for retirees? As much jam as they want. Pensioner incomes now even exceed working incomes, after tax and housing costs, for the first time in history. The United Kingdom is choosing not to reward those who are building for the future. Instead, the spoils of the Treasury are being diverted to the mediocrity of the already satisfied, whose biggest ambition is driving their Honda Jazz to the local garden centre to buy a plastic lawn they won’t have to bother mowing.

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, at an archetypal and electoral level, the urban yuppie seemed the core demographic of the Conservative Party: young chaps with floppy hair in pinstripe suits striding confidently through the City with ears glued to a mobile telephone the size of a small dog, shouting “Buy buy buy!” These aspirational workers could not have been more enthusiastic for the Thatcherite deregulation of the financial markets and the Lawson tax-cutting budgets.

What changed? Simply put, the core value of the Conservative Party is not deregulation, low taxation or free markets. The core value is power.

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By Jacob Furedi

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Being in government means weilding the ability to shape the country in your image and, just as important, prevent the opposition from shaping it in theirs. But what happens if access to power is shaped not by the distribution of “winners and losers” in society, where pressure builds up over time in living conditions to shift voting behaviour, but by the sheer size of a demographic cohort?

The clue is in the name — baby boomers. The huge increase in post-war births resulted in a great demographic bulge. There are millions more baby boomers than in the following and preceding population cohorts. This has granted baby boomers the advantage of a vast, unified voting bloc. This bloc of voters, owing to their similar age, wealth and health needs, are all likely to have comparable public spending and policy priorities.

With this voting power comes responsibility. But like a Labrador with access to an unlimited supply of sausages, the boomer cohort has not been able to help itself — and has gorged itself until it can barely walk. The triple lock on pensions; ring-fenced NHS and social care spending; low taxation on asset wealth owned by the old, combined with high taxation on income, predominantly earned by the young; avoidance of housing reform. And austerity? That was for the young only.

“The facts of life are Conservative,” said Thatcher. And broadly, it holds true. People like to limit the rate of change in their communities. And once people have built assets, they want to see them protected, and taxed lightly, if at all. But what if people can’t even build an asset base in the first place, because of a combination of planning gridlock and loose monetary policy shooting house prices into the stratosphere? What if they remain vagabonds, moving from rental flat to rental flat, not gaining a sense of community to care about, enrich and protect?

Think back to the ambition of the Right to Buy policy. The politics of enabling homeownership to a generation of striving workers wasn’t lost on the party then. It was a central policy of the government: an opportunity for the aspirant individual to buy into the national project. The party has since betrayed its own orthodoxies for political convenience and power. But through this it has set a potentially terminal trap for itself. If the facts of life are no longer conservative, how can the party build a winning coalition? As the boomer demographic declines, all the party will be left with is a generation of resentful, asset-poor millennials who haven’t seen income growth in decades.

The next election is already looming over this parliament, and the need for a radical policy agenda to challenge this inequality is glaring. Young people already overwhelmingly vote against the Conservative Party, which barely mustered a fifth of the 18-29 vote share in 2019, a year in which it won a landslide victory. Labour already can already rely on this demographic. All that’s left for Labour to go after — which means favourable policies, subsidy and controversy avoidance — is the predominantly Conservative boomer vote. Politics by traffic jam. Pork barrel politics divided by age, not by constituency.

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By Robert Saunders

Despite this grim outlook, green shoots of ideological rebellion are emerging within Conservative circles. Innovative policy solutions such as Policy Exchange’s Street Votes proposal are being laid down. The party may also seek to focus on building in the cities over the more politically controversial areas with housing shortages in more rural areas. The political risk here is much diminished. What will the heavily Labour city constituencies do if they hate development — vote more heavily against the party that doesn’t hold their seat?

Others in the party are also questioning treasury orthodoxy on investment spending. Abandoned to the Brownites in the 2010s, a perfectly reasonable conservative case can be made for state-spending on infrastructure to lower taxes in the long run because of higher economic growth. The party of business cannot be blind to the fact that businesses require investment to grow and become profitable. If this idea was good enough for Ronald Reagan’s Right-leaning government, it can be good enough for the Tories today.

For now, however, these remain fringe ideas within the party. The discontent is there, and it’s growing, driven by high prices, a decade of stagnant growth and limited policy innovation. If it’s to move forward, the party needs to admit to itself the scale of the ideological tangle it’s got itself into. The national pallor of the late Seventies forced a brave, ideological character to emerge in the form of Thatcher.

Today, after 12 long, tiring years in power, no such figure has emerged. And that doesn’t look like changing. Whether the Wakefield and Tiverton by-elections will serve as a second trigger for leadership challenges is unclear, even with the year-long immunity from a confidence vote that is assured by the 1922 Committee rules. It would only take a rule change from the committee to see Johnson fall. Either way, today’s polls surely mark the beginning of the end of the Johnson era.

Who will follow is anyone’s guess, though it seems likely they will disappoint. After all, which Tory will be brave enough to challenge, let alone destroy, the boomer-led satisfaction with national mediocrity?

Those she went on dates with frequently turned out to be married, or single and committed to a polyamorous lifestyle. Most, like her, weren’t aiming for a conventional monogamous relationship. One man, around her age, had recently left his wife and two daughters to live in a bedsit and sleep with as many “girlfriends” as he could muster. Rana, a 47-year-old who tells men up front that she is only interested in having lovers, and will never again embrace monogamy, says that every last one of them has joyously accepted her terms.

Once, boomers’ sex lives were seen as an embarrassing topic; now, they’re exciting, worthy of attention from HBO, even. The remake of Sex and the City, And Just Like That, in which original cast members are now in their 50s, starts this week, and it has been heralded by some as the best instalment yet. “Let me tell you,” said star Sarah Jessica Parker in a recent interview, “there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.” As the series will make abundantly clear, sexual glamour is no longer the preserve of the young, although that’s partly thanks to technologies that keep people looking younger longer. Porn has also helped shift the relationship between age and sexiness, certainly for women, thanks to the rise of the Milf category.

Long a feature of the intellectual elite, the rich and the landed, sexual libertinism among the middle-aged is hardly new. It is newer for the middle classes, though, who became, in the West, less monogamous after World War Two. John Updike, in the Sixties, became known for a set of novels in which bored and angry married people, of varying degrees of affluence, took to sleeping with other people, including their friends’ wives and husbands. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote wryly in Couples (1968), set in 1963. (Working class morality before the Seventies was likely to preclude sexual and marital high-jinxery.)

But the picture of suburban, middle-class libertinism has changed. In the Sixties, the typical practitioner was younger, bored and miserable: the average age of couples getting married was lower, and women had fewer opportunities. But this stereotype has been replaced by a breed of boisterously exploratory 50-somethings in unashamed pursuit of personal fulfilment. This is partly because most moral strictures around sexuality have been eroded — including the final taboo of fidelity, which can now be dressed up as “ethical non-monogamy”, a phrase that now recurs on dating apps.

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We have the progressive young to thank for this: Sietzke, a 57-year-old divorcee with four lovers, tells me that “people my sons’ age” — they are 25 and 28 — have “also helped by making it easier to bring these things up, to talk about them openly”. But “ethical non-monogamy” actually leaves some young people, especially women, frustrated or worse in their quest to find someone to settle down with; it’s actually well-to-do older people who seem to be reaping the sexual fruits. Some of these are bitter: STI rates in the over-50s doubled between 2002 and 2012, and have kept steadily rising.

And so we are at a strange pass. As the olds are merrily fucking, rates of sexual activity in the young have dropped. The preoccupation with being ‘correct’ is perhaps to blame, as well as the sheer barrage of terminology evident on all apps, but particularly on Feeld, the “dating app for couples and singles”, which describes itself as “a space where you can explore your identity” and “start connecting with open-minded humans”. Scrolling through an account, I struggled to understand what the men were saying. “A Dom [dominant] looking for FWB [friends with benefits], etc etc, I don’t prefer ONS [one night stands]…” wrote one. Another, defined as a “Man Queer”, introduced himself thus: “Playfights, cuddling, kissing, lake swimming are all good things. Maybe you want to do them? Say hi, make me feel pretty J.” A pan-sexual 29-year old’s “interests” were “crossdressing, pegging, cum play, lingerie, eye contact”.

The men might have been lovely people, but the way they presented themselves romantically was alien and didactic, even to me, a fairly liberal 39-year-old. The rise of these highly specific demands come, I suspect, from the infiltration of an identitarian politics into the bedroom — one that prizes kink and the erosion of boundaries as ‘inclusive’. Living on the internet has also given many young people a sense of entitlement to instant, bespoke results. Schooled in getting exactly what they want, they’re met with the confounding reality that humans are messier and needier than is convenient.

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Back in the over-50s pool, there seems to be less taxonomising of self and kinks, and those who have had children seem less phased by the complications of having ‘lovers’ rather than either casual hook-ups or a conventional relationship. Many are simply going for broke, hoovering up what sensual pleasures they can — because they can. “As you get older — it’s sort of an Eastern idea — you sort of think, all you’ve got is now, which is much more valuable than a future I really think,” says Sietzke. In other words, age is a freeing agent. “There’s a liberation that comes from being older,” says Rana. ”You know life doesn’t last forever, so there’s an added incentive to give anything a try.”

Rana also points to the fact that being “financially independent” helps. Young people, understandably, are more likely to be focused on the future, and with getting on the housing ladder out of reach for most of them, especially those in the south, the quest for a partner is also a strategy for accruing financial stability and property — and a basis for having children. After her divorce, in her early 50s, Sietzke recalls being constantly told by well-meaning folk that she would meet someone again. It irritated her. “Finding someone is such a construct — someone? What do they mean by that?”

When you’ve had marriage and kids, this perspective makes sense. But for the millennials yet to pull off financial stability and a family, the old, unsexy quest for ‘someone’ may feel more natural. Libertinism is perfect when your traditional romantic life, and its fruits (children), are behind you. Those with the desire for a family and a home in front of them may feel that the joys of free love are not theirs to enjoy. Yet.

The only problem is, as Bobby Duffy argues in his new book, it’s simply not true. Duffy’s research shows that on key social issues such as climate change, the attitudes of younger and older people in the UK are fairly well-aligned. When you analyse the data, as he has, it turns out that people don’t fit the generational stereotypes that have been assigned to them.

For example, when it comes to ideas about gender roles, attitudes have changed across every generation. Back in 1983, the view that a woman’s place was in the home was shared by four in ten British people; by 2018, fewer than one in ten held this view. It is not generational identity that determines such attitudes, but changes in the wider social and cultural context that frame them.

This will not surprise researchers who have spent years investigating the existence of generational conflict in the UK and US, only to find the evidence elusive. Policies designed to promote “intergenerational equity” in public spending are largely top-down constructions designed to justify the rationing of welfare resources. Meanwhile, even studies of generational differences, with regard to attitudes or behaviours, tend to be far more nuanced than newspaper headlines about “Millennials” or “Gen Z” imply.

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With all the nonsense talked about generations, it’s tempting to dismiss the “tired stereotypes” that Duffy rightly criticises. But that would ignore why they retain both an appeal and some value in making sense of the times we live in.

Generations have long operated as “concepts of existence” that help us to understand ourselves in relation to the world. Laura L. Nash, writing in 1978, traced generational thought back to its Greek origins, where it was as a relative concept marking “allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest”.

From around the late 18th century, economic and political modernisation encouraged Europeans to regard themselves as part of history; both as a product of the times in which they were born and having a role to play in shaping their historical moment. Being part of the “younger” or “older” generation became symbolically attached to wider ideas about progress, the future and the past — with conflict between the “old” and “new” sometimes expressed in generational terms. By the mid-19th century, Ivan Turgenev used Fathers and Sons to depict the social changes sweeping across Russia as a clash between the conventions of the past and aspirations for the future, personified in members of the older and younger generations.

Generations, then, have a strongly cultural dimension — and, as a result, can influence the way we think about the world around us. This was the central argument presented by the sociologist Karl Mannheim in the Twenties, whose influential essay The Problem of Generations drew on philosophical, historical and sociological thought to understand the impact of wider social events on the development of consciousness.

Mannheim’s theory of “social generations” was based on the understanding that periods of accelerated social change could provoke a distinct kind of consciousness within those coming of age during that time, born out of their “fresh contact” with the “accumulated cultural heritage”. Following this approach, we can see how some of the “generation labels” used today capture a shift between old and new worlds, precipitated by significant historical events.

From the “Generation of 1914”, symbolically associated with the trauma of the First World War, to the “Baby Boomers”, apparently embodying the cultural upheavals of the Sixties, a certain section of youth came to symbolise the Zeitgeist. This didn’t mean, of course, that they represented their entire birth cohort, whose experience was more profoundly framed by class, ethnicity, and where they grew up. War poets and hippies spoke to a moment in time, not a personality type.

Over the past decade, however, wild stereotyping about “selfish” Boomers and “entitled” Millennials abounds, alongside a crude determinism that casts the so-called “Covid generation” as forever victimised by the pandemic. Imagined in this way, generations become mere ciphers for wider cultural attitudes and prejudices that our society is grappling with. This is a problem, both for our understanding of generations as “concepts of existence”, and our perception of the people forced into such boxes by their birthdate.

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Mannheim would have been horrified by the crass way in which “social generations” have become weaponised. While he theorised a relationship between wider social events and generational consciousness, he rejected the idea that generations were mere products of their time. Generational consciousness is a dynamic process, whereby “new participants” encounter the cultural heritage and shape it in their own way. The transmission of the past, through older generations embodying that heritage, was crucial for the development and renewal of society.

For generations aren’t only abstract concepts — they are embodied in people. These people are our parents, children, teachers, colleagues and fellow citizens; people upon whom we rely for understanding our world and making our own place in it, and depend for love, care, and solidarity. Research such as Duffy’s is a valuable reminder of why evidence of generational conflict is hard to find: people don’t see themselves as representatives of a particular perspective, but as individuals with their own views and experiences; they don’t regard their elders or youngers as a threat but as a relationship to be nurtured, with clashes of opinion forming part of that human experience.

Mannheim understood this when he spoke of the importance of social renewal through the “continuous emergence of new participants in the cultural process”. The continuity of generational transmission — that one dies, and is born, every minute — reduces the level of friction that might otherwise result from having to induct a whole group of people into the cultural process all at once.

The dynamic nature of this interaction, in which young and old continually learn from each other, allows society, as a whole, to retain the “elasticity of mind” that would ossify if we weren’t continually having to engage in a process of “social remembering”. Although times of accelerated change do provoke tensions, it is the conversation between the generations that allows us to weather the storm; retaining our historical memory while adapting to new events and understandings.

The upheaval provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has made this conversation more important than ever. As we emerge from the shock, we may well see a particular kind of generational consciousness emerge, as young people begin to process and express the meaning of the “new normal” in a way that is quite different from those of us who came of age in different times.

The experience of being able to take nothing for granted — from being able to see your friends to sitting the career-defining exams you have spent years working towards — has occurred at a formative phase of life for them. What many of us may have experienced as just a few weeks or months of boredom, before resuming the pattern of our lives, meant something quite different to children for whom established rites of passage were simply stripped away, and cannot be revisited.

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Perhaps most significant, the effective collapse of educational assessment has brought pre-existing anxieties about the value of knowledge starkly to the fore. Put bluntly: if a cohort that has received less education than a previous one gains better grades as a result, what value do we attach to the accumulated cultural heritage in the first place? If the rules of life can so swiftly be rewritten because of an “unprecedented” situation, what do we expect our children to learn from history?

These are uncomfortable questions, to which there are no easy answers. Nobody can predict the form that a new generational consciousness may take. But we can at least take seriously our role in social remembering: ensuring that the younger generation have more to work with than a blank slate. That means, first and foremost, reckoning with our responsibility to educate young people about the past, and entering into a genuinely open discussion about what we have learned from the hiatus of the past couple of years.

Most of the discussion about the problem of education during the pandemic has focused on the failure of schools and universities to take responsibility for keeping the lessons going. But there is a far deeper issue, to do with our defensiveness, as adults, about the norms and values that we grew up with ourselves, and what we want to transmit to our children. The risk is that, in attempting to move on from the pandemic, we will deceive ourselves that we have little of worth to say to youngsters whose experience has been so novel and distinct.

But like every generation before them, today’s young need to understand the world as it was, before they can make it into the world they want it to be. They cannot do that on their own. That is why the conceit that generations exist in separate, polarised boxes is such a problem. It denies young people access to the tools used by those before them to made sense of their lives, and the resulting sense of mutual incomprehension makes conflict more likely.

It is fashionable to argue that our responsibility to the young requires greater thinking about the future — but it requires an equal commitment to the knowledge we have gained from the past.

The latest study to show this, drawing upon literally thousands of surveys and distilled into a report from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, makes for a troubling read, just as Americans prepare to vote in their 59th presidential election.

Not only do we see satisfaction with democracy falling over the period covered by the dataset (1973 to 2020), it’s also the case that each generation is less satisfied than its predecessor. Thus the oldest group surveyed — people born between 1918 and 1944 (like Joe Biden) — are the happiest, while right at the bottom of the scale are the miserable Millennials (1981-1996).

While the scale of the decline doesn’t look too precipitous, in some parts of the world it is much steeper, and nowhere more so than in the English-speaking countries. There, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, satisfaction levels plunge down through the generations from almost 80% to a shade over 50%.

There’s no denying the depth of this crisis, and degree of youth dissatisfaction with democracy is something we need to take very seriously indeed. But perhaps the problem isn’t with democracy — it’s with the youth.

I’m not saying they’ve got nothing to complain about. They’ve been saddled with student debt, the housing crisis and a rapidly warming planet. (Then again, 40 years ago there was the prospect of nuclear war to worry about, plus 3 million on the dole and university was for the few not the many.)

So it may be that the word “democracy” is being read as a shorthand for politics in general, the government of the day or the capitalist system. That would be a less alarming interpretation — but if you dig deeper into these surveys it becomes clear that the disenchantment isn’t just with the state of the world, it’s with the principle of democracy itself.

For instance, a 2018 report from the the Onward think tank found that significantly more young people than old thought that “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament” is a “good way to run the country”. At the time, I wrote that this finding should be interpreted in the context of Theresa May’s failing premiership and the Brexit logjam. That said, the same survey found that 35% of under-35s thought that having the army rule the country is a good idea compared to only 15% of over-65s. That looks pretty authoritarian to me.

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The political scientist Yascha Mounk has documented similar trends in several countries, including significantly higher levels of younger voters who thought that having a democratic system was “bad” or “very bad”. It should be said that we’re still talking about a minority — just over 15% in the UK (for people born in the 1980s). However, this compares to much small percentages for earlier generations.

The same research shows growing radicalisation among young people, with increasing numbers identifying with the extreme Left or radical Right. This isn’t only a symptom of their disenchantment with democracy, it might also indicate where they’re getting their anti-democratic ideas from.

The radical Left has never liked the democracy we’ve got. It is, they claim, a sham system manipulated by the interests of capital (or some other favourite bugbear like “whiteness” or the “patriarchy”). Hence slogans like “don’t vote, it only encourages them” and “use your cross, crucify a politician”.

Various alternatives have been proposed. The dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t quite so fashionable these days — and certainly not since the proles were cancelled for voting Leave; but there are alternatives to this alternative. For instance, the participatory anarchism of the Occupy movement. Then there was whatever Russell Brand was going on about before he decided that voting wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

Last year, one of the “demands” made by Extinction Rebellion (XR) is that “Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.” A Citizens’ Assembly, by the way, is an overgrown focus group — only with the power to bypass elected parliaments. The “electoral system”, says XR, is “incapable of making the long-term decisions needed to deal with the climate and ecological emergency”.

The city of Seattle played host to another radical experiment this year, as part of the BLM protests. Back in June, the police withdrew from several blocks allowing protestors to establish the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. This territory was governed through consensus decision-making and bottom-up initiatives like the construction of a community vegetable garden. A number of shootings later, the police moved back in and the CHAZ was dismantled.

There is plenty of anti-democratic posturing on the radical Right, too — and not just from the outright fascists. Other flavours include neo-feudalism, various kinds of theocracy and ultra-libertarian set-ups where there’s no voting because there’s no government.

These are fringe movements, and their ideas irrelevant to mainstream politics — or at least, they were. What’s changed is that the democratic West now faces serious competition from authoritarian regimes around the world. Gone are the days when the superiority of the free world could be demonstrated in terms of its material achievements. Just look at China with its awe-inspiring hi-tech infrastructure! Gaze in wonder as dazzling cities emerge from the deserts of the Gulf! Cower in fear as Vladimir Putin rebuilds the Russian empire! The autocracies are on the front foot; the West is in retreat.

Covid has only encouraged this dangerous inferiority complex, so that while Europe and America are still struggling, China crushed its outbreak with ruthless efficiency.

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Yet China is not the only country to have crushed the curve, and some of the most effective responses were mounted by democratic nations like Taiwan, Germany and New Zealand. Alternatively, it may be that the Swedish approach is ultimately proven to be the correct one. It’s too early to tell, but the truth will out — thanks to the accountability and transparency of the democratic system. Democracies get things wrong all the time, but they have the capacity to learn from their mistakes and change accordingly.

And China’s achievements may not be all they seem. Back in the days of the (first) Cold War it often looked like the Soviets were pulling ahead — for instance in the space race — and there were plenty of useful idiots in the West willing to take their propaganda at face value, while ignoring the essential rottenness of the system. Today’s useful idiots are doing exactly the same in regard to China and the other glittering dictatorships, and while it may take decades for the rot to finally bring down the system, it will happen because, in the absence of timely reform, it always does.

The case for democracy is as compelling as it ever was, but it has to be made afresh. We cannot assume that each new generation will simply absorb the lessons of history. Furthermore, democrats must confront the Left’s utopian fantasies and Right’s worship of power and wealth for its own sake.

Yet while this is a fight that should be led from the centre, I wonder if our liberals and moderates are up to the job. Indeed, I worry that it is the centrists, from unreconstructed free marketeers to progressive enthusiasts for a European superstate, who are a bigger threat to democracy than the radicals are.

To advance their vision of technocratic governance and a borderless world, centrists are quite happy to constrain the democracy they claim to be in favour of. Hence the unquestioned support for independent central banks so that “politics” (i.e. democracy) can be kept out of monetary policy; or the binding provisions of free trade agreements so that “politics” (i.e. democracy) doesn’t disrupt big business; or the “four freedoms” of the Single Market, that subordinates “national politics” (i.e. democracy) so that goods, services, capital and people can cross borders unimpeded.

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In 2016, the British people decided they’d had enough. They voted to take back control, which was when the “moderates” showed us their true colours. It wasn’t just the all-out attempt to overturn the result of the referendum, but also the condescension directed at those who’d dared to defy the establishment.

Richard Dawkins was typical of his class in declaring that the “general public” were “not qualified” to take the decision they did. He also appeared to suggest that a test of “reasoning ability or knowledge” should be applied to the franchise. If that’s what he meant, then it’s a challenge to the principle of one person, one vote. But then that’s not such a controversial position these days.

The idea of an epistocracy — i.e. rule by the knowledgeable — goes all the way back to Plato. More recently, the idea that we need a more “rational” alternative to democracy as we know it has come back into vogue thanks to books such as The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007) by Bryan Caplan and Against Democracy (2016) by Jason Brennan. These are not fringe authors; both books were published by Princeton University Press and were extensively and respectfully reviewed.

So democracy is losing the battle of ideas, but more importantly it is also losing the battle of attitudes.

If the process of disenchantment has gone furthest among younger people in Anglo-Saxon countries, then that’s surely no coincidence. Here we have the most individualistic of generations in the most individualistic part of the world. And that gets us to the heart of the matter. The anti-democratic spirit of the age doesn’t come from some desire for self-abasement, rather it’s an expression of colossal self-regard.

This takes many forms, but for the “knowledge class” it’s the fallacy that their kind of knowledge is superior to all others — thus entitling a tenured professor to a bigger say than a shopkeeper or a bus driver. For the central bankers and other assorted technocrats it’s the delusion that only they can steer the ship of state — despite their record of running it aground on multiple occasions. For ideologues of Left, Right and Centre it’s all about purity. If they and their comrades are in sole possession of the truth, then why should they be impeded by the wrongthink of the enemy?

In the 2000s, they were a common sight in English towns and cities. To this day, there’s no consensus as to where the word came from – but it was gleefully adopted as a pejorative term for working class young people, especially those assumed to be ill-educated, welfare-dependent and criminally-inclined. It also referred to a distinctive youth sub-culture – with a dress code heavy on tracksuit bottoms, baseball caps and gold chains.

Though not that different from other street fashions of the decade (or indeed this one), the particular details marked out the wearer as a chav. In some ways, it was an anti-fashion, capable of absorbing upmarket brands (most infamously the Burberry check) and taking them all the way down.

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The style was also a statement, in this case from a group that knew it wasn’t wanted, but which refused to be invisible – or to be excluded from the debt-fuelled ‘good times’ prior to the financial crisis.

Perhaps seeing an unvarnished image of itself, the cultural elite kicked down. Social satirists were merciless in their mockery. By the time the backlash to the backlash set in – for instance, with the publication of Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, in 2011 – it was too late. Chavdom was on its way out.

It’s not that marginalised youngsters have disappeared from our streets, but the distinct sub-culture is dead – swept away not just by the tide of contempt, but also by a generational shift.

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The 2000s were when the Millennials took over – and that was always going to bring about changes. The mimetic nature of a smartphone-centred youth culture leaves less room for the distinct (and, at times, mutually hostile) youth sub-cultures of previous decades. No equivalent of Mods versus Rockers for this lot – or even Oasis versus Blur.

Though class distinctions are far from being absent or unnoticed among today’s young, there’s little appetite to make them more visible than they have to be. Nor does the rebellious impulse to immitate the outsider – and thereby scandalise the olds – express itself along class lines anymore. Indeed, the working class and especially the white working class, has never been less fashionable – whether culturally or politically.

Millennials strike me as being untroubled by middle-class guilt. It’s not that they use the actual words ‘middle class’ with any more enthusiasm than older generations of Brits, but, then, that’s not necessary when you’ve got euphemisms like ‘knowledge worker’, ‘creative industries’ and ‘working with people.’ Being career-orientated is not uncool if it’s a cool career. Ambitious Millennials don’t just want material success, they want it served with a generous topping of personal fulfilment (and don’t forget the peer recognition sprinkles).

In pursuing their goals, ambitious Millennials carry two bits of deeply implanted programming. The first is that this is what you deserve because you’re special – a wizard in a world of Muggles. The second is that, in spite of the above, the competition is fierce, so you’re going to have to work hard to get it.

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But what if you don’t get it? Or what if you do, but the price is just too high? That is the question – one which brings me to Anne Helen Petersen and her remarkable and much-debated Buzzfeed essay ‘How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation’.

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Petersen asks “why am I burned out?” and offers the following answer:

“Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.”

Let’s deal with the obvious objection to this thesis – i.e. in what way is “working all the time” specific to the Millennial generation? A lot of middle-aged people, especially women, would say ‘wait until you’ve got children or ageing relatives or both; wait until you’re combining the responsibilities of home with the duties of middle or senior management – then you’ll know what hard work is!’

Except this would be to miss Petersen’s point, which is that today’s young people are under pressures that the GenXers and Baby Boomers did not face at the same stage in life:

“Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. “

The hollowing out of middle income occupations, the decline in home ownership and differentials in family breakdown mean that there is a ‘coming apart’ of western societies – an ever-widening divide between the upper end and lower end of the income scale, with an ever more uncertain and insecure buffer zone between them. The ‘room at the top’ assumptions of the easy years of capitalism have been replaced with what appears to be a zero-sum game.

To some extent, that’s a delusion, because for all the dysfunctions of ‘late capitalism’ (as it’s optimistically called), living standards now are higher, and personal freedoms greater, than in the post-war golden age. But at the same time the stakes have been raised: comfortable mediocrity, even if attainable, isn’t good enough anymore – your work, and the lifestyle you buy with it, has to be meaningful (or, at least, look that way through a social media lens). Those sort of jobs, though probably more plentiful than at any time in history, are concentrated in fewer places (the global cities in particular) and demand exceeds supply.

Petersen describes an never ending process of “optimisation” that Millennials must go through in order to make it in a hyper-competive economy. This, she says, began in their earliest years:

“Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.”

It’s interesting how many of the coming-of-age dramas of the Millennial era are about young people testing themselves – both in competition against one another and against hostile powers in the outside world. Prime examples include Harry Potter, of course, but also the Hunger Games and Divergent series. I don’t know to what extent, if any, these were created as allegories of the present, but it’s no surprise that themes of specialness, preparation and selection resonate with a Millennial audience. Certainly, there’s a generational gulf between the larking-about of St Trinian’s and Grange Hill and the serious, self-discovery of Hogwarts.

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And it doesn’t end with school. The process of optimisation goes on to higher education (which has been deemed more necessary and made more expensive for Millennials than previous generations). Increasingly, this includes various levels of post-graduate qualification – yet another extractive opportunity for ‘big diploma’. Petersen describes her own progress (and exploitation) through the lower echelons of academia:

“As I continued through grad school, I accumulated more and more debt — debt that I rationalized, like so many of my generation, as the only means to achieve the end goal of 1) a “good” job that would 2) be or sound cool and 3) allow me to follow my ‘passion.’”

*

The post-graduate treadmill is still a minority track for Millennials, but not so the social media treadmill:

“Posting on social media… is a means of narrativizing our own lives… when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s ‘fulfilling,’ balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.”

She says it also about a perceived need for constant self-promotion to potential employers. I’m sure that’s right, but what comes next contains a crucial misunderstanding:

“Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life… to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

It’s certainly a performance, but, with some exceptions, it isn’t “labor” (or “work” as Petersen also describes it). Yes, for certain vocations – writer, artist etc – there is a case for putting examples of what you can do online. But as for putting “every component of your life” online, no one demanded you do that – and most people aren’t interested. If you want to share your experiences with friends and family or a particular interest with likeminded enthusiasts, then that’s great; but if you think of such interactions as “work”, then do something more enjoyable with your time.

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If you think that a laboriously curated online presence makes you stand out to potential employers then you may be underestimating the capacity of social media to make everyone look and sound the same. In all likelihood, you are advertising your conformity, not your individuality. That you may have ‘travelled in’ (i.e. gone on holiday to) south east Asia, or wherever, is of zero fascination to someone sorting through a stack of CVs. There may be some youthful achievements that do catch a recruiter’s eye – musical proficiencies etc – but savvy employers are realising that what these most clearly signify is having pushy parents with money to spare. Ditto academic qualifications not relevant to the job.

What is relevant to the job, however, is how well you perform it. Which is why I was troubled by Petersen’s explanation for the less impressive side of the Millennial work ethic:

“They show up late, they miss shifts, they ghost on jobs. Some people who behave this way may, indeed, just not know how to put their heads down and work. But far more likely is that they’re bad at work because of just how much work they do — especially when it’s performed against a backdrop of financial precariousness.”

If the overwork comes from the job itself, then that is the employer’s fault. But if the distraction is coming from outside the job – and especially the ‘demands’ of maintaining one’s image on social media, then it is the employee and his or her screwed-up sense of priorities that is most immediately to blame. You should never be so focused on “performing the self” that you fail to see where you fit in to the needs of others – especially those to whom you owe an honest day’s work.

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Even in those cases where online activity does contribute to a positive professional reputation, it is highly unlikely to be more important than the reputation you establish by making a decent fist of what you’re actually paid to do. That the gateways to entry-level employment, and thus the chance to prove yourself, are often exploited (through unpaid internships and other abuses) is disgusting, but it doesn’t change the fact that diligence matters.

So, forget Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – the social network that really matters to your career is the one that forms organically whenever people of the same trade meet together to gossip about their colleagues. If you can feel your ears burning, it’s probably because they’re sharing their own direct experience of your performance and treatment of others in the workplace. If your social media self-performance comes up at all, it’ll only be to note the distance between image and reality.

*

In reading Petersen’s account of the Millennial culture of optimisation – “as children, in college, online” – I was struck by the thought that it wasn’t optimisation at all. The dictionary definition of the word is “making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource”. But if it’s true that the process “culminates in the dominant millennial condition” of “burnout” then quite clearly it is not optimal. In fact, I’d describe it as a process of maximisation: helicopter parents filling-up their children’s schedules with organised activity; eternal students racking up academic qualifications; consumers compulsively acquiring ‘experiences’ and regurgitating them online. This is life as a form filling exercise.

Petersen argues that “many of the tasks Millennials find paralysing are one that are impossible to optimise for efficiency”, possibly because “they remain stubbornly analog”. I suspect the real problem is that, unlike the digital interactions that tech companies make so addictive, there’s no electronically-mediated reward, no equivalent to ‘inbox zero’ or the affirming recognition of a ‘like’ or ‘follow’.

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To the Millennial maximiser, the more quantifiable the achievement the better. From course credits to retweets, it’s all about the points – and what do points mean? Prizes! Except that real life, real work, real achievement remains profoundly qualitative. Points do not necessarily translate into prizes. Petersen says that Millennials have internalised the idea that they should be working all the time. I don’t doubt it, but a lot of the effort they’ve actually put in isn’t actually work, not in any useful sense. The ‘points’ that they’ve been chasing are the reward – and often the only reward – of a series of expensive and time-consuming displacement activities.

In taking issue with some aspects of Petersen’s argument, I’m not disagreeing with its central thrust. On the contrary, what she gets wrong serves as further illustration for what she gets right – which, fundamentally, is that Millennials have been sold a lie. In fact, a whole basket of lies.

As she says in the context of student debt, the cost isn’t just financial, but also “the psychological toll of realizing that you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’ – worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization – isn’t”.

Well, quite.

But here’s the bitterest twist in the tale: many of the cool careers that Millennials are so ambitious to break into are with the industries most responsible for misleading them. The media, big tech and academia – these are the deceivers-in-chief. These are the guys peddling the dreams that cost so much for so little return.

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The answer is that they were all born in the same year, 1946. It’s a coincidence that illustrates the enduring power of the Baby Boomers – the post-war generation born between 1945 and 1965. That makes Barack Obama (born 1961) a Boomer too, though one of the younger ones.

The next generation – ie ‘Generation X’, born between 1965 and 1980 – may have to wait some time for its turn in the White House. Even if Trump is not re-elected in 2020, most of the likely alternatives are also Baby Boomers (or even, like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, pre-boomer war babies.

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Therefore, it might not be until 2024 or 2028 that a Gen Xer gets a crack at the Presidency. However, by that time the older members of the generation after X – the ‘Millennials’ born between 1980 and 1995 – will be old enough to run for the top job. This raises the alarming prospect that there will never be a Generation X President of the United States.

Why should that matter? A new book by Matthew Hennessey, deputy op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal explains what’s so special about an often overlooked generation. Entitled Zero Hour for GenX: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials it is reviewed for the American Conservative by Charles F McElwee:

“Hennessey… argues that Generation X is the country’s greatest check on a dystopian technological future. It is Gen Xers who can recall life before Big Tech’s omniscience, restores values extinguished by modern norms, and bridge the gap between Boomers’ lingering hubris and Millennials’ infectious callowness. Theirs is a generation victimized by timing—too young for the halcyon ’90s, profoundly traumatized by 9/11 and the Great Recession, and immobilized by the present turbulent age.”

The tech bit is certainly true. Gen X (to which I belong) was the last generation (in the developed world) to have an analogue childhood. There was no internet, no mobile phones and no social media. As for computer games, those were around, but on steam age storage media – like cassette tapes that would take ages to load (providing the tape didn’t get chewed up by the player and your dad’s computer didn’t crash).

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Of course, it wasn’t just Gen X who lived through the subsequent digital transition – everyone older than us did too (if they were paying attention). But I think it meant more to us because it coincided with our own transition from infancy. We literally matured with the technology.

McElwee says that Gen X grew up with “just the right dose of technology”. I’m not sure about that, but at least we know the difference between the digital and pre-digital worlds. Gen X are the first-generation settlers of cyberspace, with an appreciation of what we’ve gained as a result – and what we’ve lost:

“Baby Boomers, now seniors, seem unconcerned with Big Tech’s grip on society. After all, passively scrolling on an iPad is a leisure, not a burden. Millennials, meanwhile, have surrendered themselves to a pixelated existence. Life has become digital, told in short stories and filtered photos for hidden, dopamine-feeding advertisers.

“…In response to this rapid change, Hennessey believes Generation X must remind society of forgotten behaviors, products, and standards…”

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is disengaged from this issue, nor is every Millennial (and Post-millennial) so glued to their screen as not to notice the outside world. Yet Hennessey is on to something when he says that “the members of Generation X have an awesome responsibility to keep faith with reality”.

Admittedly, this overlooks the central role that television played in warping our ideas of reality, but at least the one-eyed monster – unlike the smartphone – didn’t follow us around. It was possible to head out into the world without a digital tether. And despite the lack of a constant connection to home, school and friends, we generally had more freedom to explore the world than today’s young people. 

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I suspect we also had a greater inclination to use (and abuse) this latitude. Because diversion wasn’t available at the swipe of a screen, we lived with the ever-present threat of pure, undistracted boredom. When we couldn’t escape it, we had to put up with it – an invaluable test for any young mind; and in some cases, a spur to creativity and/or mischief.

So, perhaps, Matthew Hennessey is right. The on-coming wave of Gen X leaders could provide the refresh that our Boomer-dominated political system so desperately needs.

One word of warning though. For all, the nice things that can be said about Gen Xers, the fact is that crime rates peaked just as we reached adolescence / early adulthood. That makes us the most delinquent, and indeed violent, generation in modern history.

Perhaps we should skip to the gentle Millennials after all.