Should we really be surprised that young people are
rejecting the economic status quo? :
Why young Americans are giving up on capitalism
by Sarah Kendzior
Imagine that you’re twenty years old. You were born in 1996. You were five years
old on 9/11. For as long as you can remember, the United States has been at war.
When you are twelve, in 2008, the global economy collapses. After years of
bluster and bravado from President George W. Bush, who encouraged consumerism as
a response to terror, it seems your country was weaker than you thought.
The bottom falls out fast.
In America, the bottom falls out fast. The adults who take care of you struggle
to take care of themselves. Perhaps your parent loses a job. Perhaps your family
loses its home.
In 2009, politicians claim the recession is over, but your hardship is not.
Wages are stagnant or falling. The costs of health care, child care, and tuition
continue to rise exponentially. Full-time jobs turn into contract positions,
while benefits are slashed. Middle-class jobs are replaced with low-paying
service work. The expectations of American life your parents had when you were
born, that a “long boom” will bring about unparalleled prosperity, crumble away.
Baby boomers tell you there is a way out: a college education has always been
the key to a good job. But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The college
graduates you know are drowning in student debt, working for minimum wage, or
toiling in unpaid internships. Prestigious jobs are increasingly clustered in
cities where rent has tripled or quadrupled in a decade’s time. You cannot
afford to move, and you cannot afford to stay. Outside these cities, newly
abandoned malls join long abandoned factories. You inhabit a landscape of ruin.
There is nothing left for you.
Every now and then, people revolt. When you are fifteen, Occupy Wall Street
captivates the nation’s attention, drawing attention to corporate greed and lost
opportunity. Within a year, the movement fades, and its members do things like
set up “boutique activist consultancies.”
When you are seventeen, the Fight for 15 workers movement manages to make higher
minimum wage a mainstream proposition, but the solutions politicians pose are
incremental. No one seems to grasp the urgency of the crisis. Even President
Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat , the type of politician who’s supposed to
understand poverty , declares that the economy has recovered.
You wonder when the economic recovery will reach your family. You have been
wondering for eight years.
In 2016, pundits declare your hardship an aberration: unemployment is a low 4.7
percent! At first you think it’s a mistake, until you realize the government
counts everyone working part-time or gig jobs or making salaries below the
poverty line as “employed.” That is what employment looks like in America. It is
not personal fulfillment or a path to a future. It is futility, and it is
forever. Survival is the new American Dream.
Is it any wonder over half of 18- to 29-year-olds in America say they do not
support capitalism?
Capitalism
According to an April 2016 Harvard University poll, support for capitalism is at
a historic low. 51 percent of Americans in this age cohort reject it, while 42
percent support it. 33 percent say they support socialism. The Harvard poll
echoes a 2012 Pew survey, in which 46 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds had a
positive view of capitalism, and 47 percent a negative one. While older
generations had a slightly more positive take on capitalism , topping out at 52
percent for the oldest cohort, citizens over 65, youth had a markedly different
take on socialism. 49 percent viewed it positively, compared to just 13 percent
of those 65 or older.
Does this mean the youth of America are getting ready to hand over private
property to the state and round up the kulaks? No. As many of those who reported
on the Harvard survey noted, the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” were never
defined. After meeting with survey takers, John Della Volpe, the director of the
Harvard poll, told the Washington Post that respondents did not reject
capitalism inherently as a concept. “The way in which capitalism is practiced
today, in the minds of young people, that’s what they’re rejecting,” he said.
Capitalism, in other words, holds less appeal in an era when the invisible hand
feels like a death grip. Americans under 20 have had little to no adult
experience in a pre-Great Recession economy. Things older generations took for
granted , promotions, wages that grow over time, a 40-hour work week, unions,
benefits, pensions, mutual loyalty between employers and employees, are
increasingly rare.
As a consequence, these basic tenets of American work life, won by labour
movements in the early half of the twentieth century, are now deemed “radical.”
In this context, Bernie Sanders, whose policies echo those of New Deal
Democrats, can be deemed a “socialist” leading a “revolution”. His platform
seems revolutionary only because American work life has become so corrupt, and
the pursuit of basic stability so insurmountable, that modest ambitions, a
salary that covers your bills, the ability to own a home or go to college
without enormous debt, are now fantasies or luxuries.
Policies like a $15 per hour minimum wage, brought to mainstream attention not
by Sanders, but by striking fast food workers years before, are not radical, but
a pragmatic corrective to decades of wage depreciation. The minimum wage, which
peaked in 1968, would have reached $21.72 in 2012 had it kept pace with
inflation. Expectations of American life are formed on the premise that
self-sufficiency is possible, but nearly half of Americans do not have $400 to
their name. The gap between the rhetoric of “economic recovery” and “low
unemployment” and the reality of how most Americans live is what makes Sanders
seem unconventional: he describes widespread economic hardship many leaders
rationalize or deny. Voters are not only rejecting the status quo, but how the
status quo is depicted by media and politicians , the illusion that the economy
is strong, and that suffering is the exception, not the rule.
We live in an era where heated rhetorical battles are fought over terms that
have lost clear meaning. In an attempt to placate an angry populace, all three
major candidates, Sanders, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton, have at various
times positioned themselves as “anti-establishment”: a dubious description of
two career politicians and a billionaire tycoon. “Neoliberal” has gone from a
term that describes an advocate of specific economic and political policies to
an insult hurled indiscriminately on social media.
Thanks to Trump, the word “fascist” has reentered the American political
vocabulary, with some playing down Trump’s brutal and unlawful policies on the
grounds that they do not precisely emulate foreign fascist leaders of the past.
Meanwhile, Trump castigates Clinton for not using the term “radical Islam.” This
sparring over labels illustrates the depths of our ideological confusion.
Ideologies
It is in this rhetorical morass that the debate over whether young Americans
support “socialism” or “capitalism” takes place. Omitted from most coverage of
the Harvard poll was the fact that youth were asked not only about socialism and
capitalism but four other categories. “Which of the following, if any, do you
support?” the questionnaire inquired, giving the options of socialism,
capitalism, progressivism, patriotism, feminism, and social justice activism.
None of the terms were defined. Respondents could choose more than one.
“Socialism,” at 33 percent, actually received the lowest support. “Patriotism”
received the highest support, at 57 percent, while the three remaining
categories were each supported by roughly half the respondents.
What do these category-based questions really tell us, then, about the
allegiance of youth to ideologies? Nothing. The real answers are found in
questions about policies. When asked whether they support the idea that “Basic
necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should
provide to those unable to afford them,” 47 percent of all respondents said
“yes.” Does this indicate support for socialism? Not necessarily. It indicates
that respondents grew up in an America where a large number of their countrymen
have struggled to afford food and shelter, and they want the suffering to stop.
You do not need a survey to ascertain the plight of American youth. You can look
at their bank accounts, at the jobs they have, at the jobs their parents have
lost, at the debt they hold, at the opportunities they covet but are denied. You
do not need jargon or ideology to form a case against the status quo. The
clearest indictment of the status quo is the status quo itself.
Published in Foreign Policy |