SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ah, To Be Young And In Hate
America’s New Radicals Attack a System That Ignores Them
“Enraged young people,” The New York Times worries aloud, are kicking off the dust of phony democracy, in which “the job of a citizen was limited to occasional trips to the polling places to vote” while decision-making remains in the claws of a rarified elite of overpaid corporate executives and their corrupt pet politicians.
“From South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street,” the paper continues, “these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over. They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.”
The rage of the young is real. It is justified. It is just beginning to play out.
The political class thinks it can ignore the people it purports to represent. They’re right–but not forever. A reckoning is at hand. Forty years of elections without politics will cost them.
Americans’ pent-up demand for a forum to express their disgust is so vast that they are embracing slapdash movements like Occupy Wall Street, which reverses the traditional tactic of organizing for a demonstration. People are protesting first, then organizing, then coming up with demands. They have no other choice. With no organized Left in the U.S., disaffected people are being forced to build resistance from the ground up.
Who can blame young adults for rejecting the system? The political issue people care most about–jobs and the economy–prompts no real action from the political elite. Even their lip service is half-assed. Liberals know “green jobs” can’t replace 14 million lost jobs; conservatives aren’t stupid enough to think tax cuts for the rich will help them pay this month’s bills.
The politicians’ only real action is counterproductive; austerity and bank bailouts that hurt the economy. Is the government evil or incompetent? Does it matter?
Here in the United States, no one should be surprised that young adults are among the nation’s angriest and most alienated citizens. No other group has been as systematically ignored by the mainstream political class as the young. What’s shocking is that it took so long for them to take to the streets.
Every other age groups get government benefits. The elderly get a prescription drug plan. Even Republicans who want to slash Medicaid and Medicare take pains to promise seniors that their benefits will be grandfathered in. Kids get taken care of too. They get free public education. ObamaCare’s first step was to facilitate coverage for children under 18.
Young adults get debt.
The troubles of young adults get no play in Washington. Pundits don’t bother to debate issues that concerns people in their 20s and 30s. Recent college graduates, staggering under soaring student loan debt, are getting crushed by 80 percent unemployment–and no one even pretends to care. Young Americans tell pollsters that their top concerns are divorce, which leaves kids impoverished, and global warming. Like jobs, these issues aren’t on anyone’s agenda.
This pot has been boiling for decades.
In 1996 I published “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids,” a manifesto decrying the political system’s neglect and exploitation of Generation X, my age cohort, which followed the Baby Boomers.
We were in our 20s and low 30s at the time.
Un- and underemployment, the insanity of a job market that requires kids to take out mortgage-sized loans to attend college just to be considered for a low-paid entry-level gig in a cube farm, the financial and emotional toll of disintegrating families, and our fear that the natural world was being destroyed left many of my peers feeling resentful and left out–like arriving at a party after the last beer was gone.
Today the oldest Gen Xers are turning 50. Life will always be harder for us than it was for the Boomers. If I had to write “Latchkey Kids” for today’s recent college grads, it would be bleaker still. Today’s kids–demographers call them Gen Y–have it significantly worse than we did.
Like us, today’s young adults get no play from the politicians.
The debts of today’s Gen Yers are bigger ($26,000 in average student loans, up from $10,000 in 1985). Their incomes are smaller. Their sense of betrayal, having gone all in for Obama, is deeper.
Young adults turned out big for Obama in 2008, but he didn’t deliver for them. They noticed: The One’s approval rating has plunged from 75 percent among voters ages 18-29 when he took office in January 2009 to 45 percent in September.
Politicians like Obama ignore young adults, especially those with college degrees, at their–and the system’s–peril. Now, however, more is at stake than Obama and the Democrats’ 2012 election prospects. The entire economic, social and political order faces collapse; young people may choose revolution rather than accept a life of poverty in a state dedicated only to feeding the bank accounts of the superrich.
As Crane Brinton pointed out in his seminal book “The Anatomy of Revolution,” an important predictor of revolution is downward mobility among strivers, young adults whose education and ambition would traditionally have led to a brighter future.
In February Martin Wolf theorized in The Financial Times that the Arab Spring rebellions in Egypt and Tunisia owed their success to demographics; those countries have more young people than old ones. On the other hand “middle-aged and elderly rig political and economic life for their benefit in the U.K. [he could also have said the U.S.]: hence the way in which policies on housing or education finance are weighted against the young.”
Right here and right now, though, the young and the old are on the same side. Though the young are getting screwed the hardest, almost everyone else is getting screwed too. And with 80 percent unemployment, the young have a lot of free time to rise up.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
You claim the game is fixed. Prove it. Your word is insufficient proof. If you can’t, then my claim stands.
You lost, and you know you lost or you wouldn’t bother with the lame adhomimen attacks- especially in threads where I haven’t even made comments addressed to you.
It’s not a mere attempt to fix the game. It is in place.
I call those who lie, liars. I call those who shill on the shilling. If you don’t like being called on it, don’t do it. I expected careful thought from you, you seem to have the equipment.
No, vera, it doesn’t count.
The doing away with recountable paper ballots is an ATTEMPT by the right to cheat, sure, but its not a GUARANTEE of anything. They can only cheat when the election is close, after all.
And frankly, if the left got its nose out of the air, got its shit together, and started playing the game by the rules it actually plays by, there wouldn’t be an election close enough for the lack of paper ballots to matter. Ever.
The fact that the right attempted to fix the system is insufficient to back up your claim that the system is fixed; as you demonstrate you know by your immediately jumping to the ad hominem “shill” claim; trotted out only by people who know their arguments have lost.
Shame, really. I expected better from you.
Whimsical: “I haven’t noticed the rules are fixed because I don’t think they are.”
Ah-ha. Doing away with recountable paper ballots does not count (for a tiny example)? You just lost the last shred of credibility with me. Shilling for the status quo… Does status quo pay well?
Ugh.
No, there is the framework for establishing a fascist theocracy in this country. They aren’t actually in charge- yet.
They are, however, salivating at the thought of an attempt to up-end the board, as it will give them just the excuse they are looking for to put themselves in charge in perpetuity.
Which, in and of itself is reason not to give them that opportunity, especially since they are still eminently beatable, if the left stops keeping its nose in the air and actually gets its shit together.
PS:
3) American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
ISBN 0743284461
There already IS a well established “Fascist Theocracy” in this country and it won’t go away by putting down the heads and playing by the “Fascist Theocrat” rules.
See 1) The Nazi Hydra in America, ISBN 9780930852436
2) Understanding the F-Word, ISBN 9780595186402
Well, here’s the thing, Ted: if you up-end the board, your opponent is going to pick the game you play next; and I promise you, after a few rounds of “Fascist Theocracy”, you’re going to be longing for the good old days of mere “Monopoly”.
Such a shame, especially when the game isn’t anywhere near as lost as you think it is.
This isn’t chess, it’s perverted monopoly in which you’re not given any money to start with but you still have to pay rent and luxury tax.
The game sucks. Damn straight I want a new one.
Vera-
No, I haven’t noticed the rules are fixed because I don’t think they are. What I _have_ noticed is a growing attitude on the part of the left that they are too “good”, too “pure” to have to play by the rules- that the system should just work the way they think it should work rather than the way it actually works – without them doing anything.
This is typified by attacking the messenger whenever someone suggests that changing the way they play the game will get them better results. See: Falco.
It may make them feel better, but like most of their actions, it isn’t particularly helpful in getting them what they want.
Vera,
Two thoughts:
1. Every populist movement (by definition) has to draw in enough of the masses to cause change. We’ll never see Universal Health Care brought into bein by one person putting a gun to one CEO’s head.
2. A general strike by unions might not have enough people numerically, but it’s the only group I can think of that has, um, “pre-event acceptability” to pull such a move. Unions going on strike, the masses can (and will) accept as legitimate, and, possibly, support either tacitly or by also joining in, regardless of union status.
That’s the point at which it will become a legitimate threat to the current Powers. But right now, it’s still people having a good time in a park (look, they brought a baby to dance, isn’t that adowable!!!1!) with a little protest thrown in.