Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil.

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centered on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalized economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

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Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash.

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money sloshing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

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While the two groups have always co-existed, socialized, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practicing the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — skeptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies program; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows program; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . .

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness.

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Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilization.

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear.

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralizing the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realization that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

In reality, generation gaps are very rare. The UK’s last experience of one was during the Sixties, when the “cultural revolution” that consumed Western Europe and North America led to an explosion of books and articles trying to make sense of the apparent gulf between the generation that won the war and the kids growing up in the peace.

In my years researching generational conflict, I have cautioned against overheated claims that we are living through a period of strife between younger and older people: for instance, the argument that the Baby Boomers have taken more than their “fair share” of society’s wealth and are bleeding young people dry with their triple-locked pensions, or that the Sixties generation are to blame for climate change, with their record of hedonistic consumerism and careless globe-trotting. I was firmly opposed to the Covid-19 lockdowns, and wrote considerably about their deleterious impact on young people. But I could never buy the line that these restrictions were designed to protect the old at the expense of the young. It wasn’t Grandma in charge of health policy, after all, but that mewling, toddler-esque Gen X-er, Matt Hancock.

Yet as we stagger through the unfolding permacrisis of the 2020s, I perceive a true generation gap emerging — possibly as seismic as the Sixties upheaval. This goes far beyond the everyday friction that exists between different generations, as young people struggle to find their place in the world and older people struggle to guide them in a reality that is constantly changing. It is about the gap in which we all find ourselves, between the “normal” we grew up with and the chaos that we find ourselves navigating now. This is not the “new normal” confidently predicted by those who thought lockdowns would change the way we worked forever: in many ways, what is striking is how much it feels like the “old normal”, as if the lockdown experience has been memory-holed. But we know, deep down, that something quite fundamental is changing.

Generation gaps, such as those evident in the period between the First and Second World Wars and during the Sixties, emerge when there is a distinct and rapid shift in the social order. Such occurrences throw established norms, values, conventions and institutions into disarray, without a consensus about what new form of order should replace them. Those in authority find themselves contested, while newer potential forms of authority jostle tetchily for position. Caught in the eye of the storm are young people coming into adulthood, who are trying to make sense of themselves and their place in a society that is palpably at odds with itself.

The tensions involved in integrating young people into the social world during periods of rapid change have long been a staple of “generation question” in the social sciences. An insightful collection published in 1963 brought together contributions from the sociologists Talcott Parsons and S.N. Eisenstadt, psychologists Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, Kenneth Keniston and others, in a properly interdisciplinary discussion of what Karl Mannheim, back in the Twenties, had termed “the problem of generations”. Mannheim observed how periods of accelerated social change give rise to distinctive forms of generational consciousness, in which people on the cusp of adulthood develop a very different orientation to the world than that of their elders. This temporal dislocation can result in a schism between the generations, as young people, being closer to the problems of their time, “are dramatically aware of a process of de-stabilisation and take sides in it”, while “the older generation cling to the re-orientation that had been the drama of their youth”.

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Friction between generations is therefore both the product of wider social and cultural conflict, and helps to cause it. Here, “generation gaps” mark a break in continuous time, forcing an abrupt re-evaluation of how we understand our society and what we can take for granted. And as every parent of teenagers will be sharply aware, the conflicts don’t stop at the front door. Because generations also operate at a family level, these tensions invariably also arise from, and bleed into, conflicts between parents and children. Back in 1940, the sociologist Kingsley Davis identified “the rate of social change” as one of the key variables in the production of “parent-youth conflict”. Within “a fast-changing social order”, he explained, “the time-interval between generations, ordinarily but a mere moment in the life of a social system, becomes historically significant, thereby creating a hiatus between one generation and the next”.

It is this sense of “hiatus” that seems to characterise the historical moment that we are currently experiencing. After decades of stasis, in which the collapse of communism led Fukuyama to contend that history had reached its “end”, we seem to have entered a period of dramatically destabilising social change. From international conflicts escalating abroad to the “culture wars” ripping Western nations apart at home, the old order is clearly unravelling, but what comes next is far from decided. The historian Robert Wohl described the First World War generation as “wanderers between two worlds” — a century on, to some extent, it feels like we are walking in their shoes.

Of course, we are living in very different circumstances. But even if our present culture wars don’t claim the physical casualties of a military conflict, we shouldn’t underestimate their destructive trajectory, or the level of destabilisation revealed by vicious battles over questions such as “what is a woman?” Nor should we deny that young people, as in any conflict, are on the front line — either propelled there by dramatic idealism and a desire for change, or deployed as cannon fodder by the elites running the show.

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But there are some important ways we can make this less bloody. First, we should be very clear that young people are socialised into, and come to live by, ideas that are not their own. The spotlight has recently fallen on the aggressive promotion of contested statements about gender ideology, racialised thinking, and climate emergencies by schools and universities, leading to concerns about the blurring of the line between education and indoctrination. It would be naïve to think that kids coming home fluent in the language of LGBTQIA+, or distraught that forest fires herald the imminent end of the world, are divining an enlightened new reality of their own accord. These ideas are being taught, rather than conceived.

Yet as young people grow into adulthood, they do start thinking for themselves. They are not passive recipients of indoctrination, but alive to both the internal contradictions and wider criticisms of the things they have been brought up to believe. The positioning of student activists as the “voice of a generation”, whether for better or for worse, misses the fact that, as Kathleen Stock has argued, many university students “tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other.” Precisely because they are growing into adulthood during a period of cultural strife, young people from all walks of life are absorbing a range of ideas and making them their own.

A second bulwark against outright generational conflict is the existence of some friction between the generations. For all the Zeitgeist pushes young people to reject the advice and guidance of their elders, they are crying out for it — not least as something to argue against. Children have always pushed boundaries, in order to work themselves out; yet parents and teachers are increasingly warned that boundaries threaten a child’s self-esteem and identity, and that what they should be doing instead is affirming how children feel about themselves. Though presented as an act of compassion and understanding, the culture of affirmation is better understood as the rationalisation of neglect. Shying away from their responsibility to guide their children, adults place the full burden of their children’s fleeting choices upon their immature shoulders. It’s easy to flatter ourselves that we are being nicer, kinder adults by avoiding confrontation, but confrontation is sometimes exactly what the young need from us.

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We must remember this as we seek to address our new generation gap — our sense that the world is shifting. In times of both chaos and stasis, society is always a mess of people with diverse ideas, experiences, and personalities; life in communities does not conform to the shrill dichotomies of the online culture wars, and our physical, everyday interactions counter the relentless cultural pessimism of the current political moment. In the midst of a punishing cost-of-living crisis, escalating international tensions, crumbling infrastructure, a health service on its knees, and an education system fatally wounded by its lockdown-imposed gap year, we are surrounded by people trying to make things work. Exhausted doctors, nurses, care workers and teachers demonstrate levels of professionalism and commitment that never make the news; railway staff fighting replacement by machines act as a daily reminder of why people do the job better. Parents carry on having arguments with their kids, showing that they care enough to be unpopular.

Life in the hiatus goes on; and if it feels that we are biding our time until the next disaster strikes, maybe that’s no bad thing. It reminds our children that this strange temporal dislocation is a storm that we will all have to weather — and that this new generation gap is not unbridgeable, provided we remember to keep a foot in both the old world and the new.

Two explanations are offered for this trend. The first has its roots in 2010. Since then, this theory holds, we have seen the end of Education Maintenance Allowance, the doubling of student fees, the growing inaccessibility of the housing market to those without inherited wealth, and, of course, Brexit. The under-50s neither voted for this Tory policy platform nor stand to benefit from it. They are unlikely to reward a party that appears to want to prolong their insecurity; their refusal to drift Right with age, then, is a result of their material conditions.

The second explanation is longer term and comes down to shifting values. Its roots are much deeper, dating back to the battle for Hampstead during the general Election of 1966, when the north London constituency returned a Labour MP for the first time. “In an earlier era, it would have been unthinkable that Labour could win so middle-class a seat,” writes the geo-demographic expert Richard Webber in The Predictive Postcode. In the 50 years since, “there has been a huge growth in the size, confidence, and influence of this particular geo-demographic group. A radical minority, once fabled for its eccentric habits — shopping at Habitat, reading Private Eye, wearing sandals, eating muesli, and supporting human rights — … has now come to dominate large swathes of inner London.”

The academic study of values looks at the underlying motivations and unmet psychological needs which drive individuals across societies. A range of different models exist, but all identify a similar long-term pattern: as economies grow and education levels rise, the values of the population edge towards some variation of “post-materialism”. This term was coined by Ronald Inglehart, founder of the World Values Survey, to describe the tendency to prioritise principles such as self-expression and personal autonomy over financial considerations. The 1966 Hampstead result was an early indicator of post-materialist values taking root in the UK, and since then, they have become far more widespread.

What does this shift mean in practice? Those with post-materialist values often place ethics and inner fulfilment ahead of more obvious economic interests at the ballot box. Their values are expressed through concerns about equality, freedom of speech and the environment; through a dedication to larger-than-self causes and to internationalist or universalist ideas about national borders; and through a tendency to agree with statements along the lines of “ideas are more important than money”.

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The idea here is not simply that everyone who reaches a certain level of resource security will immediately move towards post-materialism. People’s values are rooted in both psychology and life experiences, and they change only slowly, over time. A pensioner raised in an era of poverty and rationing may see politics in terms of protecting and conserving resources, despite now having the material security of home ownership. Conversely, a graduate who has spent their formative years in social circles which emphasise ethics and freedom of expression will usually retain these values, even as they struggle to pay the rent.

Even so, post-materialists now comprise a large part of the electorate — rising, according an IPPR paper from the early 2010s, from 19% of the population in 1973 to 38% in 2012. This has created a headache for all mainstream politicians, but especially for those on the Right. Of course, post-materialists are not all social justice activists, nor are they all explicitly Left-wing; they may not even be that exercised about party politics. But progressive parties do represent a far more natural home for them, and so Right-of-centre movements have to work harder to win their votes.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party appeared to acknowledge this. And while few post-materialists will have had much love for the coalition government, there was a concerted effort in to keep them on board. Mainly this came down to tone, but it was also clear in specific policies, such as support for gay marriage.

The Leave vote in 2016 changed this. The Tories realised they could use the large and highly visible presence of post-materialists as populist leverage. They could aim their guns at liberal elites or “woke” youngsters and build a new voter coalition, containing everyone who felt abandoned or confused by the post-materialist shift. Strategists such as Dominic Cummings reasoned that post-materialists were an electoral minority, and an inefficiently distributed one at that, prone to congregating in cities. There was little to be lost by antagonising them. Indeed, getting a reaction was part of the point.

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This plan had no immediately obvious downsides from a Conservative perspective. And it was easy for them to exploit it thanks to the antics of some on the progressive Left, who were often happy to take the bait. Their success was such that the average post-materialist will have spent the past decade feeling that their values were in decline rather than in ascent.

But this Faustian strategy could not last. To begin with, post-materialist values are becoming increasingly common, and so attacking them will bring diminishing returns in the long term. The harder the attacks, the more ground the Conservatives will ultimately have to row back on. If they have nothing positive to say to post-materialists, then they are building in their own obsolescence.

Moreover, there will have been a significant group of more cautious post-materialists who, up until a few years ago, were willing to vote for a liberal or One Nation iteration of Toryism. The loss of these voters since 2016 appears to have been treated by the Conservatives as collateral damage. But this means they have had to lean even more heavily on Leave voters and other groups who, while culturally at odds with post-materialists on issues such as crime, will have been just as horrified by raucous lockdown breaches followed by a Budget which caused the economy to collapse.

The plot against the post-materialists, then, now seems to be reaching its endgame, and many are doubling down. Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith’s recent call on voters to buy own-brand beans is a perfect illustration: it speaks to the most basic concerns about resource protection and scarcity, and ignores the big picture altogether.

Ultimately, the rise of post-materialism is a gradual, organic process, taking place in most developed countries as societies become more materially comfortable. This is not to say it doesn’t come with challenges. Helen Lewis’s excellent radio series, The New Gurus, illustrated that a society where everyone is in search of meaning rather than money carries perils of its own — and may not always be an especially nice place to live. But this doesn’t mean the rise of post-materialism is an elite plot or an institutional “capture”, as figures on the populist Right such as Matthew Goodwin have interpreted it. Nor is it a mass surrender to “Marxism” or “paganism”, contrary to what some of the speakers at the recent National Conservatism Conference reportedly believe.

Can the Right tempt young and middle-aged voters back into the fold? Policies which improve childcare provisions, fix the housing market, or create economic stability could, hypothetically, make a difference. There are few people so concerned about inner fulfilment as to not care about paying the mortgage. But if you look at the age gap data, what is striking is that the voting divide really kicked in after 2015, when the Tories began to signal at every opportunity that they were not just opposed to liberal and post-material ideas, but, in many cases, that they actively hated them.

From Suella Braverman talking about an “invasion” of migrants to Lee Anderson backing the death penalty, the Tories have used language and taken positions which have damaged their brand far more than the sum of their individual policies ever could. Starting to back policies which advance the interests of younger voters would of course be a start. But if the Tories continue to go to war with the values which many younger voters hold, then this “lost generation” will be the first of many.

Both conflicts are being shaped by new economic realities, principally a largely sluggish world economy that is, particularly in Western democracies, further hamstrung by a growing push for “Net Zero”. The adoption of green “de-growth” philosophy impacts both on the youth of the West, who face a consciously scaled-down quality of life, as well as a new generation in developing countries desperate for growth.

In high-income countries, the youngest generations already face fewer opportunities than their parents and grandparents. Slow growth and lack of opportunity mean they can look forward to a future characterised by a greater economic insecurity, poorer living conditions, less chance of owning a home or car, or even eating well. Such attitudes are exacerbated by the relentless hysteria poured out by the green movement and its media minions. Indeed, according to one recent survey, a majority of young people around the world see the planet as essentially doomed by climate change.

Perhaps as a result, when it comes to politics, many new voters seem comfortable rallying around polarising and extreme figures. In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders amassed more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. In France, meanwhile, Le Monde described this “political de-socialisation” as having fuelled support for the likes of both the Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-Rightist Marine Le Pen.

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But alienation, rather than radicalisation, is a more fitting description of the emerging Western generation. The biggest problem lies not in lack of jobs or even skills, but a population that is increasingly “unengaged”.

Nor is this merely confined to the West. Evidence of a “great resignation” is also emerging in East Asia. In Japan, young adults, according to David Pilling, are “pioneering a new sort of high-quality, low-energy, low-growth existence”. In China, meanwhile, the children of largely upwardly mobile parents face an increasingly fraught economic future. Xi Jinping may hope for a generation that will follow the path of devoted Stalinist Stakhonovites or Maoist Red Guards, but confronts a generation more concerned with 20% unemployment and limited options than ideological fervour. As in Japan and the West, China now sees a generation — including an increasingly underemployed surplus of educated people — who eschew their parents’ work ethic, embracing instead a desire to “lay flat” as they essentially avoid the congestion and stresses of urban life. 

Combined with rapid demographic decline in East Asia, Europe and the United States, the mass disengagement of the young will make building a stronger world economy an even greater challenge. The remarkable economic boom of the past century sparked a population explosion — 75% of the world’s population growth was born in the last century. Yet, birth rates are now dropping, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see declines.

And as workforces shrink, growth will suffer, as has been the case throughout modern history. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to around a third of the level in 1970, and seems destined to fall even more. Nearly 70% of US counties have seen declines in their under-25 populations, a trend particularly marked in big coastal metropolitan regions.

China faces a similar dilemma, with its senior population expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. The transition will be made particularly tough by a welfare state that is underdeveloped, and whose ranks of retirees are soaring: the Chinese retirement age is 60 for men, and just 50 for women.

Further reading

Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

All this sets up what may be the biggest generational conflict of all — between the still-youthful developing world and the ageing high-income countries. Demographic decline and slow growth in high-income economies threaten to undermine the future of developing countries, notably in Africa. By 2050, UN projections suggest that nearly 55% of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high. However, during the following 50 years, that share is projected to account for all growth as populations plummet elsewhere. With workforces shrinking in China, East Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by upwards of 700 million. And with this “youth bulge” across the developing world not expected to peak until later this decade, Africa could well be, as the Brookings Institution suggests, “our last hope” in the West to forestall demographic and economic decline.

Essentially, high-income countries face a choice. They will feel enormous pressure to restrain imports from places such as sub-Saharan Africa to keep their own economies running and the pension system solvent. In the US, more than 40% of boomers have no significant retirement savings and the successor generations appear even more bereft. Without an East Asia-style boom, the only option for the developing world’s youth will be more migration to the West, both legal and illegal, which is expected to average 2.2 million annually through 2050.

This would represent such a surge that Europe, in particular, would be ill-equipped to prevent, let alone assimilate. Indeed, often despite promises to the contrary, immigration, legal and illegal, is at record levels in Britain and Germany, and remains at historically high levels in France. In response, despite crushing labour shortages, many countries — including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, and Germany itself — have tightened their immigration controls. The resulting migrant populations of unemployed and underemployed people have created social unrest in Europe’s cities, much as we have seen in America.

Some, such as Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, consider such demographic shifts to be “no bad thing”: “We need a breather. A stable, sagacious society that has lost its adolescent restlessness and settled into middle age sounds appealing.” Yet this view ignores the ramifications of a generational conflict that seems certain to intensify as both young people in high-income countries as well as those in the developing world face a potentially frustrating future. Like the generational conflicts both within societies and between them, the global demographic crisis is just beginning. And in the meantime, the West’s adolescent restlessness can’t simply be wished away.

Amid such hysteria it’s unclear whether we should be encouraging the patter of tiny feet or reducing the reproduction of ginormous carbon footprints. What is clear, however, is that none of this hyperbolic claims-making is really about demography — a complicated and specialist discipline based on the statistical study of human populations. It’s more about doomography — a fatalistic cultural trend that relies on elementary maths about big and small numbers to give a clever-looking veneer to sublimated anxieties about social and economic problems.

In my research field of generational conflict, for example, tensions over housing, pensions, cultural values and a range of other issues are routinely treated as problems arising from having more older people than younger people. This evades the nuanced discussions that need to be addressed in their own terms: inciting kids to “mug Grandma” for her pensioner perks will do nothing to help today’s workers gain a better standard of living now.

Worse, the doomographic mindset evades the very question it pretends to focus on: why have we become turned off reproduction? While acknowledging the problem of demographic determinism, it is surely right to think that a slowdown in population growth represents something significant and potentially troubling, and to consider its potential causes. Sociologically, one trend that stands out, certainly in Western societies, is the discomfort we have with the idea of renewing ourselves.

The study of generations involves engaging with reproduction on three levels: biological, social and cultural. Biological reproduction is common to all species, but for humans, having a baby usually involves the prior decision that this is something you want to do. It’s a personal choice, assisted by modern reproductive technologies but not given by these — birth rates tend to fall as societies develop, regardless of access to contraception or abortion. But like all choices, having a baby is framed by prevailing social and cultural dynamics and relationships. At its most basic, if having a child is seen as a key component of a meaningful life, people will couple up and get on with it; if becoming a parent is regarded as a troublesome burden, couples — or one half of a couple — are likely to dither, delay or decide that it’s all too much bother. And they do so in a context where their peers are wrestling with the same anguished choices.

It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the prevailing sentiment of cultural pessimism in Western societies makes the 2020s an inhospitable time for a baby boom. Yet the narrow instrumentalism of doomographic thinking leads to wishful thinking as well as apocalyptic prophesying. For instance, attempts to explain why young people delay, or avoid, having children as a consequence of purely economic factors often lead to reductive claims about the prohibitive cost of housing or childcare. Now, these factors certainly make it more difficult to start and sustain a family, and policy should address them — but our ancestors managed to create us despite having much less wealth. Focusing only on the factors that frame individual decisions also misses the bigger question, of what drives societies to reproduce themselves in the first place.

Into this confused debate, a major report launched last week by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) — 8 Billion Lives: Infinite Possibilities — was breathlessly upbeat. The report notes that while “climate change, pandemics, conflicts, mass displacement, economic uncertainty and other issues fuel concerns about over and under-population”, in reality, “human reproduction is neither the problem nor the solution”. On paper, I agree with every word of the above — except that I’ve followed the work of UNFPA for years, and I’m suspicious.

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Why the West should have more kids

By Paul Morland

The UN’s report seems to mark an abrupt shift in rhetoric from the organisation that, at the turn of the century, was at the forefront of promoting fears about overpopulation (1999: 6 Billion – A Time for Choices) and the impact of population growth on the environment (2001: Footprints and Milestones — Population and Environmental Change). Though UNFPA has long been careful to acknowledge “the violations that can occur when family planning is used as a tool for ‘population control’”, this has gone hand in hand with its own promotion of “empowerment and autonomous family planning” as a way of controlling the size and shape of populations (2022: Seeing the Unseen — The Case for Action in the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy).

Look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that many of these sentiments have not simply vanished. Instead, UNFPA’s current foregrounding of gender equality, bodily autonomy, and sexual and reproductive health and rights is both a continuation of the “progressive” language of population control that it has been developing for years and a new twist in the doomographic tale. What matters now, says UNFPA, is that nation states stop worrying about reproducing themselves, and instead open themselves up to the possibilities afforded by open borders and the movement of labour. In other words, we should push forth with “solving” the number problems of richer countries by taking workers from poorer nations, and provide more childcare so that all women can work as well.

When the report was launched in Brussels, at an event organised by Friends of Europe, Dubravka Šuica, Vice-President of the European Commission for Democracy and Demography, spoke of the need to protect the rights of women and girls in a world of eight billion, commenting further that “demography transcends borders”. All of which, again, sounds very lovely. But is declining fertility really something that should merely be shrugged off? Where is the future orientation in a society that doesn’t see the need to reproduce? Demography may “transcend borders”, but a society in which children are conceptualised primarily as future workers of wherever they end up is not one that is conducive to actual people having babies.

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How far will the eco-fascists go?

By Mary Harrington

This is where the problems of cultural and social reproduction reveal themselves. At the heart of the culture wars consuming many Western societies is a conflict over the relationship between the past and the future. One side sees a generational continuity rooted in the norms and values that have grown up over time and looks to reproduce the relationships and institutions that have given life meaning: hence the tendency to focus on attachments to family, community and nation, and the reaction against disruptive globalising trends. The other side sees a future that can only be made possible by “freeing” people from history, often through the aggressive promotion of a “year zero” ideal that imagines we can cauterise our relationship with the past and start all over again. The cultural legacy of modernity is disclaimed as “problematic”, economic development is decried as “destructive”, and even the sexed body is presented as an impediment to individual self-realisation.

The polarised character of this conflict of course hides a more nuanced reality. The generational transaction has never been a pitched battle between the past and the future: those who derive meaning from the past do not actually live there, nations are always changing, and values and attitudes evolve as society moves on. But the very fact that we are engaged in debates about the problem of who we are and were means that the foundation for reproducing ourselves starts to look rather shaky.

All this insecurity has been sharpened and accelerated by the response to the pandemic, where initial, official excitement about the construction of a “new normal” revealed a nose-pinching distaste for the “old normal” that has been shaped over generations. It turned out, of course, that replacing our battered old society with some kind of disembodied techno-utopia was neither possible nor desirable: the “new normal” is a more fragmented, fractious, unstable and expensive version of what we had before.

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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The Tories deserve to lose Tiverton

By Tanya Gold

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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Inside Wakefield's corrupt election

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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Did Boris kill conservatism?

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?

But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Lockdown loneliness is here to stay

By Jennie Bristow

Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Prince Charles has finally won

By Will Lloyd

Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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The great climate change fallacy

By Tom Chivers

As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

Judging by the stream of recent headlines, petitions and open letters, parents of 12 to 15-year-olds could soon be heading for a showdown over the “right to be vaccinated against Covid”. The UK’s Chief Medical Officers this week announced a plan to offer them jabs — despite the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice that the direct benefits for healthy children were too marginal.

And while parents will be required to give their consent for their child to be vaccinated, a child will be able to override their parents’ refusal providing he or she is deemed to have “enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment” (otherwise known as being Gillick competent).

Covid-19 has always been a crisis in search of a culture war, and the response to this announcement has been no exception. When such luminaries as Gillian McKeith and Laurence Fox, and groups with titles such as Family Defence League and Lawyers for Liberty, start advising parental resistance, you know it’s about more than the scientific specifics of just one jab. Suddenly it is about personal freedom, the rejection of state interference in family life and the principle that a parent should decide what is right for their child. It is about where you stand politically and how you want to be perceived.

I’ll be honest: I do not want to be standing alongside Laurence Fox. I know which “side” of this debate I am meant to be on — which one suits both my political persuasions and my parenting style. And it is that, more than any in-depth medical knowledge, which tempts me to declare myself fine with my own children overriding my consent (were it not for the fact that this in itself constitutes a form of giving consent — the eternal paradox of liberal parenting).

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By Tom Chivers

I find the idea of a child ending up in mediation with their own parents over the right to be vaccinated not just unlikely, but bizarre (the idea of slammed doors, mealtime sulks, plaintive cries of “but EVERYONE else has had one!”). Yet for others, the anxiety is real, with schools being inundated with letters from parents fearful that vaccinations will take place behind their backs.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but ever since I was allowed — just allowed! — to take my firstborn home from the hospital, I’ve been sceptical about the idea that parents know best.

Parental decisions are informed not just by love, but politics. We know this, though we tend to tell ourselves it is those other parents — those of the opposing political tribe — who are getting it wrong. This inconsistency is particularly glaring in current debates on the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. There are parents who support social transition, the prescription of puberty blockers and/or the use of binders, and parents who don’t — with both sides insisting they are motivated by an understanding of their child inaccessible to anyone else. In accounts of raising trans children, or opposing a child’s desire to transition, “I know what’s best for my child” merges with “any loving parent in my position would make the same choice” (or, at the sharp end, “any parent who would not make the same choice obviously wants their child dead”).

It is uncomfortable to admit that your love, and what is in the “best interests of the child”, is tainted by your own background, self-image, friendship groups and even personal traumas. Yet I know mine is, even when I think I’m right. Indeed, it is by watching the Covid vaccination debate play out that I’ve felt, more than ever, how much more attractive it is to cling to our slogans rather than admit how little we know.

I have my own self-defeating list of things that I, as a parent, should and should not be allowed to do. Not allowed: smacking children; restricting access to contraception and abortion (providing safeguarding checks are made); vetoing access to good sex education (I decide what “good” is). Allowed: vetoing access to dodgy sex education (I decide what “dodgy” is); intervening where a treatment constitutes self-harm (I decide what “self-harm” is).

I know this is provisional and shaky, riven with qualifications, making the bodies of my children (and yours) a testing ground for my politics. I do think there are areas — such as the administration of physical punishment, or the use of breast binders — where it is possible to make a more objective case for harm being done, but the template of “parents’ rights” is unhelpful. With the proposed Covid vaccinations, the situation is different still; the play-off is not between potential losses and gains for one’s own child, but potential gains for other people, perhaps even yourself.

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America's divisions will never be masked

By Douglas Murray

Here we have an example where the primary beneficiaries of a treatment may not be — indeed, most probably are not — those receiving it. As a result, the simplistic concept of individuals, or their parents, knowing what’s best for them falls apart. Writing in The Independent, Victoria Richards argues in favour of “competent” children making the final decision on vaccination using the principle of “knowing best”:

“Some children under the age of 15 will be deemed “Gilick competent”, some won’t… Parents or carers know their children best — so chances are, you know which camp your child would likely fall into. If you’re a parent who’s vaccine-hesitant, I can understand why you might feel upset – even angry — about such a scenario. But what I really feel is that we should trust our kids; many of whom are mature, intelligent and information-savvy well before the age of 12.”

I think my children are mature, intelligent and information-savvy; the trouble is, I don’t think the debate over having a Covid jab is a test of these qualities. This is a complex situation, hijacked by narratives about state control, science and freedom. It is also one in which moral pressure is being exerted on children, one that might come from schools, but which could also come from parents who want their children to be vaccinated. Coercing children — however subtly — to do something with their bodies which isn’t primarily for their benefit is questionable. But so, too, is making that body the site for spurious, abstract arguments about liberty and parental infallibility. Neither side is coming off well.

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Richards goes on to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice”: “We can’t very well teach our children that they have the right to say “no” to unwanted physical contact one minute, and then demand they kiss an aged aunt the next… And if we are teaching our kids that their bodies (rightly) belong to them, then that should go for whatever it is they decide about the vaccine, too.”

But this is a reversal of our usual message regarding consent, because the focus is on the right to say “yes”, not “no”. There’s something telling in the way that liberal leanings push us towards making the dominant message “you have the right to override your parents if they say no”, rather than “you have the right to override them if they say yes”. It smacks — just a little — of an uncomfortable political division on consent, whereby some of us only want to focus on the giving rather than the withholding. For all the accusations of illiberal moral panic one might throw at those raising alarm about the vaccine, “my body, my choice” is a slogan that would seem to me to apply better to the children saying no for themselves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself veering, ever so slightly, Laurence Fox-wards.

I am not going to fight with my children over the vaccine; they want to have one and I will not stop them. But there are bigger questions to ask, not just about what influence parents should have, but what we are using our children for. Children have been asked to make significant, necessary sacrifices for adults; it is not necessary to use them to fight our own culture wars.

Some will call this progress — in sanitation, diet, medicine — as if more is always better. But the cost of this “progress” is rarely factored in.

£12 billion every year is the latest pledge to fix health and social care, mostly for the elderly. But what are we doing with all these extra years?

It depends, of course. Some will work longer; some will have more time with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Others will be warehoused in care homes, living out their twilight years amid the background smell of stale urine, bored ridged between monthly visits from their guilty children. Many are not like this, but a great deal of them still are. My mother has made us promise we will take her to Dignitas long before it comes to this — and that when we bring her ashes back from Switzerland it will be in a Harrods bag, not a Tesco one. This, apparently, is dignity in dying.

Social care has come a long way since it was conceived in alms houses provided by the church: through Victorian workhouses, state-funded provision in the twentieth century and, more recently, to profit-making private companies. As our population gets older, so the need for such services grows ever larger. It is commendable that the Government is seeking to address the growing cost of social care, albeit through a tax levy that falls disproportionately on the working poor and the young. But the one thing that we are not talking about — and our silence is becoming ruinously expensive — is what a good life, and indeed a good death, looks like.

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To put it another way, without a sense of what human life is for, and what its basic natural or even theological rhythms might be, we fall back on the idea that more is always better. Without some sort of agreed understanding that human life exists within fundamental limits, society will inevitably find itself unsustainable.

The idea of growth, of always seeking more, is built into the very nature of capitalism, as it is within liberal progressivism. In a secular society, meaning tends to get replaced by the idea of more; or rather, more becomes the meaning.

It is not a coincidence that just as we are pouring billions into end-of-life care, the fantastically wealthy are seeking their own way of outwitting ageing and death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now throwing his fortune at some comically ludicrous “eternal life” start-up that seeks to keep him alive forever. “Man plans, God laughs”, as the old Jewish proverb puts it. It’s not just that Bezos can’t succeed in this ridiculous vanity project, but that we shouldn’t want him too. Death, after all, gives life its purpose.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being.

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This means that there is no way of solving the social care crisis in purely economic terms. Because one cannot address a metaphysical question through economic policy. Indeed, the very basic question of what human life is for is one that politicians, still less economists, no longer feel they have any use for.

The first stage to recover a basic metaphysical scaffolding would be to reclaim something of that story in which death has some sort of wider significance, rather than being viewed as just some anticlimactic end. Because if having more — going on longer — is the meaning of life in a secular society, then death is inevitably and always some sort of failure. Whereas we would once have said of the dead that they have passed into glory, we now hear the medics apologise that “there was nothing that we could do”. Death was once — potentially, at least — an expression of some ultimate triumph. Now it is the bitter failure of our technology. And whatever we spend on it, no amount of money will overcome this gap.

Death, then, is the political issue we are not talking about. Even after the pandemic, when the daily death figures were broadcast on every news broadcast, we continue to say little about death other than making the uncritical assumption it is always to be avoided.

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And so we are sleepwalking into a state of affairs in which the young will resent the elderly for the burden they place upon them. Of course, we should support the generous funding for social care. What we ought to be challenging is whether the medical technologies that are keeping us alive for ever longer complement our understanding of what human existence is for.

But I see little appetite for that. In a secular society, we have few intellectual or cultural resources to challenge the pervasiveness of more-ism. And to live deeper, more meaningful lives is not the same as living longer ones.

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.

Oh well, whatever, never mind. The video did the job. Nirvana’s record label DGC chose “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as an introduction to their Nevermind album, believing that the more straightforwardly catchy “Lithium” and “In Bloom” had bigger hit potential, but they miscalculated. When the band were on tour that autumn, they would return to their hotel rooms after a show, turn on MTV and invariably find their own faces staring back at them. Radio stations that deemed it too harsh for daytime airplay were bombarded by requests and ended up rotating it so heavily that it was six months before DGC could release a follow-up single. Nirvana’s talking-point performances on Top of the Pops (passive-aggressive) and The Word (aggressive-aggressive) helped make the song a UK sensation, too.

For all Nevermind’s front-to-back brilliance, it wouldn’t have been a multi-platinum, industry-changing phenomenon if not for that one song. Soon, it was being covered by Tori Amos, parodied by Weird Al Yankovic and sampled by rappers and dance producers. Cobain said two years later that “it’s almost an embarrassment to play it… Everyone has focussed on that song so much.”

Smart observers intuited that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was more than just a popular song. Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times called Nevermind “the awakening voice of a new generation”. Cobain himself suggest in the album’s press release: “Maybe what we need is a new generation gap.” Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X preceded Nevermind by six months but the most popular term at the time was “baby busters”: bust follows boom. A year later, The Atlantic dedicated 11,000 words to selling the doomed concept of “Thirteeners,” i.e. the thirteenth generation of Americans since 1776. The writers dismissed this generation’s music as “a rock-and-roll endgame of harsh sounds, goin’-nowhere melodies, and clumsy poetry”.

Whatever they were called, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” spoke to them loud and clear, specifically the countercultural wing that could be seen in films like Slacker and Singles. “These three individuals represent their generation,” said Jonathan Poneman from Nirvana’s first label Sub Pop. “This band not only delivers the goods, they manage to capture the time.” In the video’s surly, murky rebuke to the mega-budget gloss of early 90s MTV, the fans aren’t just an audience; they’re a tribe. Dressed much the same as the three performers, they eliminate the gap, physically and metaphorically, with the climactic stage invasion. Kim Thayil of Nirvana’s Seattle contemporaries Soundgarden identified the video’s implicit message: “There you guys are, here we are, and we’re you.”

But what was the song actually saying to them? Cobain liked explaining his lyrics even less than he enjoyed writing them. He would scrawl multiple drafts in notebooks and piece them together at the last minute. “A lot of the time I write a song and when someone asks me about it I’ll make up an explanation on the spot because… I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time,” he told the NME. In the case of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, only a few lines of chorus from the demo and live debut in April 1991 remained in the studio version a few weeks later.

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Another abandoned line never made it out of his notebook: “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?” Cobain might have been thinking of himself and his girlfriend between May and November 1990. Tobi Vail was a fiercely bright 21-year-old whose feminist zines and band, Bikini Kill, were at the helm of the Riot Grrrl movement. She’s most likely the woman who’s “over-bored and self-assured” in Teen Spirit’s first verse. They both lived in Olympia, Washington, a college town which epitomised the first wave of political correctness, for good and ill.

Later, Cobain’s wife Courtney Love railed against its groupthink in Hole’s song Olympia: “We look the same, we talk the same, we even fuck the same.” One night, Cobain, Vail and her future Bikini Kill bandmate Kathleen Hanna got drunk and defaced an anti-abortion centre. When they got home, Hanna wrote on the wall: “KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT.” Not realising that it was a teasing joke (Teen Spirit was Vail’s favourite deodorant brand), Cobain asked Hanna if he could use it in a song.

Cobain said of the song that he was “disgusted” by his generation, and himself, “for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.” Vail made a feminist out of Cobain but he couldn’t sign up to all of the Olympia orthodoxies, especially the proscription against major labels. In one interview in October 1991, he made “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sound like a blunt rallying cry: “The generation’s apathy is getting out of hand. I’m pleading to the kids, Wake up!” But in another, he claimed he was “also making fun of being anally politically correct.”

The lyric itself is too cryptic to confirm or deny either meaning. It’s unclear who is singing, who he’s addressing and how sincere he is. And there’s no call to arms equivalent to the one on Nevermind’s “Territorial Pissings”: “Gotta find a way, a better way!” But it’s the tortured ambivalence that makes it so dynamic. In the final 90 seconds, Cobain goes from a passive demotic shrug (I guess, oh well, whatever) to a vomiting howl (“A denial!”). The singer re-edited the video himself to make it end on a shot of his screaming face. The song ricochets between resignation and rebellion, pride and self-loathing, conviction and doubt. “Every other line is either a disclaimer or a contradiction,” Cobain told Siren magazine.

“That ambiguity or confusion, that’s the whole thing,” producer Butch Vig told Rolling Stone. “What the kids are attracted to in the music is that he’s not necessarily a spokesman for a generation… he doesn’t necessarily know what he wants but he’s pissed… I don’t know exactly what ‘Teen Spirit’ means, but you know it means something and it’s intense as hell.”

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Who were the people who saw themselves in that song and video? At the time, Cobain’s generation numbered 88.5 million Americans. When Time profiled that cohort in July 1990, the magazine didn’t even have a name for it but the characteristics were already established. Scarred by divorce, haunted by AIDS and lack of opportunities, alienated by leaders and movements, and burdened by a knapsack of seemingly insoluble inherited problems, they were cynical, disaffected, unfocussed and agonisingly self-aware. Time’s poll found that 53% were anxious about the future. “I envision ourselves as a lurking generation, waiting in the shadows, quietly figuring out our plan,” said one 19-year-old interviewee. “Maybe that’s why nobody notices us.”

Generational stereotypes and the people who promote them should be taken with a pinch of salt — not everybody born between 1965 and 1980 was working a McJob and listening to grunge — but you can see why “Smells Like Teen Spirit” struck a chord. Other Gen X anthems like Radiohead’s “Creep” (“I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo”) and Beck’s “Loser” (“I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”) tipped the balance towards self-disgust, while Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” (“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”) had the angry energy but not the self-doubt. Only Nirvana had the whole messy package.

A song that hits one generation’s bullseye does not necessarily live to delight another. “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, however, has long been one of the most streamed songs of the 1990s, passing the one-billion mark on YouTube in 2019 and Spotify this summer. A dramatic orchestral cover version by Malia J opens the new Marvel movie Black Widow. There are visceral reasons for the song’s longevity — the riff, the beat, the voice — but clearly the message, such as it is, is not padlocked to a single era.

So what makes a song a generational anthem? There is no clear definition but it must involve some combination of enormous popularity and a sense that the singer is speaking for their audience and peers, not just themselves. They tend to emerge when the oldest members of the cohort are in their teens or twenties. Broadly speaking, there are two modes. One is defiantly empowering, like the Who’s “My Generation” (1965), Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (1967), the New Radicals’” You Get What You Give” (1998) or Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” (2015). Problems are identified alongside the promise that they can be overcome with communal self-belief.

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The other mode is acutely ambiguous, even when the power of the music occludes that ambiguity. Pulp’s “Common People” (1995), MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” (2007) and Lorde’s “Royals” (2013) are about restricted options and conflicting desires. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (1966), Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” (1971) and the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” (2018) pose questions without answers.

The continuity is striking. From boomers to Generation Z, there is always a sense, as in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, that the generation knows it has been dealt a bad hand but doesn’t yet know how to play it. In this year’s “Brutal”, Olivia Rodrigo, the teenage pop star du jour, snaps: “And I’m so sick of 17 / Where’s my fucking teenage dream? / If someone tells me one more time / ‘Enjoy your youth,’ I’m gonna cry.” Here we are now, entertain us.

Generational discourse is driven by caricatures of difference — Gen X don’t care, millennials care too much, boomers used to care but got rich and smug, and so on — but these songs suggest that the mentality of youth is rather more consistent. The keen awareness of inherited problems yet no confidence in finding solutions. The contradictory impulses. The pinballing between anger and ennui. The anxiety and confusion of trying to establish an identity. Something must be done with this rotten, disappointing world but what? In 1991, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” made those feelings synonymous with Generation X. Thirty years later, it is clear that they are evergreen.

Puerile as he was, he was witty and audacious. Eminent Victorians, his most famous book, might have been unfair to its subjects but it was entertaining and original, and tore through staid post-Edwardian propriety. Bertrand Russell, who was in prison for his pacifist activities when he read the book, wrote to a friend that he had been laughing so merrily that a warden had had to remind him that prisons were places of punishment. Strachey’s portrayal of the Victorians as being rather foolish and hypocritical helped young Britons to believe in progress more than tradition, and not to be bound by reverence for the past. As World War One thinned their ranks, the older people who had got them into such a mess seemed especially deserving of criticism.

Boomers, the debut book of the brilliant American critic and commentator Helen Andrews, takes a similar form to Eminent Victorians. Notable representatives of the titular generation, including Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin and Camille Paglia, are dissected. Like the Victorians, boomers steered the West through a time of great technological and societal change, taking in the Space Race and the internet age, as well as rock n’ roll and the sexual revolution. The history of their time, as Strachey wrote of the Victorians, could “fill innumerable volumes.” By examining certain “characteristic specimens”, however, Andrews can illuminate important tendencies.

An editor gave Andrews the idea for the book, she writes, because, “You’re like Strachey. You’re an essayist, and you’re mean.” I don’t know if “mean” is the right word but Andrews has certainly displayed lemony wit, from her early years writing at “The Cigarette Smoking Blog” to her erudite and iconoclastic essays for journals like First Things and the American Conservative, where she is now editor. You can never guess what Andrews is going to write about — it might be the suffragettes, or Zimbabwe, or the films of Paul Schrader — but you bet that it will be challenging and entertaining. No one is better placed to fuse insights with insults.

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Whereas Strachey insisted that he wrote “without ulterior intentions” — in much the same style that a liar will loudly preface a mistruth with “to be honest” — Andrews is openly critical. Unlike Strachey’s subjects, her targets are less than sacred (Jobs was, perhaps, but his reputation has taken a bit of a posthumous beating). Millennials, never mind Generation Z, have not been raised to respect their elders. “Boomers” are a running joke, the target of a million irreverential memes. What Andrews hopes to accomplish, though, is not just to puncture inflated reputations but to explain where people went wrong, and how to avoid making similar mistakes.

What Andrews finds most pitiful about her subjects is the hubris of their attempts to reshape the world. In a tightly argued, cheerfully one-sided opening chapter, she suggests that their liberatory enthusiasm birthed a world of savage economic insecurity, chronic fatherlessness, pill-popping, depression and porn. Rather than being freer, Andrews maintains, many of us are inhibited by poor education, addicted to screens and immiserated by a lack of ownership. Would anybody want to argue that there is not a significant amount of truth to this?

Pop culture is one of Andrews’ biggest targets. Aaron Sorkin, she writes, saw television as a means of mass enlightenment. Camille Paglia saw pop stars and actors as being icons of a chain-breaking sexuality. Andrews, like Richard Hoggart in the innocent 1950s, sees popular culture as a stage for “mass publicists”, promoting “group individualism”. Sorkin, she writes, failed to appreciate that “pseudo-knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.” His characters are archetypal “upper normies”: endlessly scornful of the received wisdom of the masses and sycophantically devoted to the received wisdom of the liberal bourgeoisie. The dangers of this were easy to identify in 2020, where sophisticated opinion held that masks were comically useless in March and essential in May.

Paglia, meanwhile, waxed lyrical about the glamour of pornography as men and women scrolled mindlessly through ever more bizarre sex scenes in search of something they had not grown numb to. She celebrated the provocations of her muse, Madonna, but ended up griping about her “juvenile Instagrams [and] her trashy outfit” as the pop star followed erotically charged attention-seeking to its ignominious endgame. What is sold as freedom can become captivity.

One expects swipes at hippies in a book like this, but Andrews, cleverly, holds her fire when it comes to flower power and the Grateful Dead. It would have been easy to do a line-by-line analysis of “Imagine” but it would also have been cheap. She is far more harsh on hippie ideals infusing corporate and bureaucratic institutions. She is damning, for example, and righteously so, on how the sunny universalism of Silicon Valley has been exploited by hard-nosed Chinese nationalists. Imagine all the people, sharing all the apps. It hasn’t quite worked out. As a spicy Wall Street Journal article put it in March, “Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China. Then Coronavirus Hit.”

Boomers, Andrews writes, thought that they could wield the power of their predecessors without all the nasty bits. Adventuring economists like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, believed that they could teach foreign governments how to run their countries without actually having to subordinate them. Andrews argues, however, that such meddling was not less but more hubristic and presumptuous about the world than that of honest old-fashioned imperialists. It is only a shame that the neoconservatives, who planned short, painless wars to make space for the flowering of liberal democracy and ended up with long, attritive wars making space for snake oil salesmen and ethnic strife, don’t get more of a look-in here.

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Perhaps to the disappointment of Andrews’ editor, Boomers isn’t that mean. Andrews scorns Camille Paglia’s verbose sexual utopianism, for example, yet also salutes her intellect. While her chapter on Steve Jobs laments the overvaluation of the temporal, Andrews seems to quite admire him as a man. This is admirable, and makes her critiques more incisive for being so measured.

When Andrews wants to make a point, though, she makes it mercilessly. A chapter on Al Sharpton assaults the idea that “white flight” was a symptom of prejudice and leaves it twitching. Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”

Unlike Strachey, Andrews writes with moral seriousness and no illusions about the future. Millennials “seem intent on making the boomers’ same mistakes”, fetishising self-expression, oikophobia and iconoclasm. Nonetheless, she sympathises with their predicament, working in jobs beneath the status they would have expected from their education, and without prospects for home ownership until they have paid for that same education. One can disagree with their conclusions but one has to empathise with their discontent.

Boomers, understandably, is longer on diagnosis than prescription. Andrews defends older institutions, but many of those institutions are long dead. Modern technology does serious harm, meanwhile, but it is hard to imagine people getting rid of it.

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Our decadent society has ground to a halt

By Niall Gooch

The least we can be is honest. As this witty, truthful book makes clear, there is no sense in pretending that modern sadness is the result of too little freedom from tradition rather than perversities of technological and cultural innovation. There is no point in elevating identitarian opportunists who exploit without ameliorating demographic tensions. There is no point in blaming dysfunction in developing nations solely on the errors of colonial and not also post-colonial rule. There is no point in Big Tech issuing calls to build without more contemplation of what to build and why. Even the best treatments could be useless if a condition has been misdiagnosed, and Andrews is an excellent diagnostician.

Although all of the social ills described apply equally to Britain, it is interesting that “boomer” discourse cannot be smoothly recreated in a British context. Who would British boomers be? Pink Floyd? Monty Python? Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis? It doesn’t quite work. Hitchens actually wrote one of the earlier, funnier critiques of the boomers himself for Vanity Fair almost 25 years ago, writing: “In the therapy generation, which scripts even its own lenient satires, you are by all means allowed, if not encouraged, to feel guilty. Just as long as you don’t feel responsible.”

In truth, while boomers are often attacked in Britain over the widespread tendency to prize their pensions and unblemished view across the fields over the need for young people to have functioning institutions and affordable homes, they have not the cultural prestige of their American cousins. America, after all, was in the ascendance. It was slightly younger people — born too late for the heydays of Bob Dylan and Beatlemania but early enough to witness Bowie and the Sex Pistols — who left a boomeresque imprint on Britain with New Labour. Caustic online critics in the dark corners of Twitter have dubbed this phenomenon “Britpoppers”, and defined them as people whose political imagination never escaped 1997 and whose cultural imagination is stuck in 2012. The archetypal Britpopper hates “toffs”, “cranks” and “populists” and loves smooth-speaking managerialist, Science(TM) and a limp, Richard Curtisesque conception of British soft power.

What is the point of generational analysis? Of course, not to indict each man and woman born in a specific period. Most people who complain about “boomers” love their grandparents after all. Instead, it is to isolate styles of thinking and behaving — and, where necessary, to reject them.

Further reading

Charting the decline of the American Republic

By Ed West

Of course, everything seems clearer in retrospect — and there is a danger of this generational critique descending into a childish, screw-you-dad petulance. Millennials, such as myself, have to take some responsibility for the world as we advance into our thirties. GenZ is already TikToking their own scornful critiques of us. But being responsible means understanding one’s conditions, and who and what was responsible for them.

We are all both architects and victims of our times, shaping them and being shaped by them simultaneously. Dwelling on blame might be unhelpful. But we must still understand causes and effects.

Now, about those good-for-nothing Generation X-ers…