I hope readers will indulge me in yet another careful reading of a thematically and in some ways informationally important article. These pieces often wind up saying as much about conventional and/or official thinking as they do about the topic. The object lesson today is The Rough Years That Turned Gen Z Into America’s Most Disillusioned Voters in the Wall Street Journal.
Mind you, the generational cohort focus already obscures more than it reveals. Class mobility has collapsed in America. Members of the top 1% and top 10% have more in common with each other than with the members of the marketing-designated age category. And if you read the Wall Street Journal article carefully, you can see it focuses on the experiences of the non-elite, which it politely does not call the masses. The article includes polling data, which would hopefully would include some in wealthier cohorts.
But the vignettes are all of under 30 year olds with modest jobs. The lead vignette is about Kali Gaddie, who had her plans upended when Covid hit in her senior year of college. She is now earning under $35,000 a year as an office manager in Atlanta (the article does not describe if she had higher aspirations and if so what they were). The article depicts her main personal interest as TikTok, where she has thousands of followers. The Journal notes:
Now, that’s at risk of being taken away too. All of this has left her dejected and increasingly skeptical of politicians.
The other featured characters are
Noemi Peña, employed in a juice bar in Tucson
Corey Darby, who last his first job as a newbie recruiter due to the pandemic and had it take a full year to land another recruiter position at $55,000 a year
William Broadwater in Waynesburg, Pa, who had wanted to be a machinist, had a key test cancelled during Covid, then landed at a convenience store before becoming an HVAC technician and getting training as an electrician. But his erratic income means he still lives with his parents
Audrey Lippert, who works part time at her campus Starbucks for $14.65 an hour: “She can’t fathom achieving the milestones her parents have.”
Matt Best, who lost a year of work due to the pandemic, voted for Trump in 2020 but won’t again due to 1/6 but is also opposed to Biden by reason of his age and favors RFJ, Jr.
The story quotes two other named individuals to demonstrate that they get their news from non-traditional sources, such as Joe Rogan.
These charts present the main point of the piece:
Needless to say, that translates into a dim view of government and the mainstream media.
Nowhere does the article mention climate change as a cause for dejection among the young, including the better off. I know people a generation behind me who struggled over the decision to have kids: “Do I want to bring them into a world that could be coming apart societally? Do I want to contribute to more consumption by having offspring?” I’d imagine that that concern is even more prevalent among young adults.
We’ll highlight some of the critical finds in the article, such as the confirmation that TikTok is very important to the young. The proposed ban is providing them with yet more confirmation that the government does not care about their needs. The story dances around the idea that the bill to ban or force the sale of TikTok might be significantly about censorship, to curb their ability to confirm with each other how bad things are, as in how authority has failed them. Of course, since we live in the best of all possible worlds, any such thinking must be the result of Chinese trouble-making, as opposed to their experience.
The article focuses on economic data, like average wages and unemployment levels, and attempts to use that to understand why Gen Z voters are in “To hell with all of them” mode. But the effort to ‘splain why the young are dispirited come off, unintentionally, like “Let them eat statistics.” The story, unintendedly emulating macroeconomic models, depicts the sour mood among the young as the result of shocks, most of all the pandemic. It does not consider the deteriorating baseline, both in terms of real incomes and social stability. To illustrate:
The pessimistic mood contrasts with what in many ways are relatively healthy economic circumstances. Many millennials—those born between 1981 and 1996—started careers around the 2007-09 recession. Gen Z workers are entering the labor market during a historically strong stretch.
For the last year, the unemployment rate for those in their late teens and early 20s has averaged near its lowest in at least a half-century, according to the Labor Department. Student debt has fallen as a share of income, with the Biden administration canceling $138 billion in federal student loans. More under-35-year-olds own homes than before the pandemic. Young people have been hit by inflation, but by some measures, less than other age groups, according to a survey of consumers by the University of Michigan.
Young people say there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Among adults under 30, credit card and auto loan delinquencies are increasing. Savings have dwindled since reaching pandemic highs.
Rent has more than doubled since 2000, far outpacing the growth of incomes over the same period, according to Moody’s Analytics. More young people spend 30% or more of their income on rent than any other age group.
A Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month found more than three-quarters of voters under 30 think the country is moving in the wrong direction—a greater share than any other age group. Nearly one-third of voters under 30 have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump, a higher number than all older voters. Sixty-three percent of young voters think neither party adequately represents them.
For instance, the deterioration of average worker buying power over time has been profound. One reader described how at a modestly paid, starter working class job in the 1960s, he was able to save enough to buy a car in not that many weeks (as I recall, 12 or 16). Lambert, whose first real job was in a mill, earned enough to rent an apartment within walking distance of work, eat at a higher than cat food and spaghetti level, and enjoy regular entertainment, including buying lots of books and going not infrequently to Grateful Dead concerts. Lambert confirms was living modestly but not anxious about being able to make ends meet, in part because he was confident he could always get another job.
Another factor lost in the comparatively narrow time window (odd given the use of generational cohorts) is the way social bonds and communities have eroded over time, and how those bonds once were meaningful part of social safety nets. My mother was born shortly before the Great Depression. Her parents lost all of the money they had in three different banks, save a 3% recovery from one, and their house. Yet she said that the Depression was not that bad, that people really pulled together to help each other.
That impulse is sorely missing today. From the very top of the piece, about office manager Kali Gaddie:
Kali Gaddie was a college senior when the pandemic abruptly upended her life plans—and made her part of a big and deeply unhappy political force that figures to play a huge role in the 2024 election season….“You would think that there’s a plan B or a safety net,” she said. “But there’s actually not.”
So even though the article stumbles upon the shallowness of formal support or enough not-to-hard-to-find backups as a key, perhaps central, element in why young people are disheartened, it then fails to follow up on the finding, perhaps because the reporters are too deeply indoctrinated to question neoliberalism.
For instance, job stability and average job tenures are vastly lower than they once were. Career churn has a cost. Losing a job or even getting a new one is a high stress event.
Similarly, the fact that jobs are generally available does not translate into a worker necessarily being able to find similar or better pay and other workplace conditions elsewhere.
Nor does the article consider that employers, particularly in modest or middle-wage jobs, are on the whole much more indifferent to their staffs’ emotional well-being. Intensive employer supervision and productivity demands are demeaning.
The article spends a great deal of time contemplating what this means in terms of voter behavior. It is revealing here that it hews to standard tropes. Nowhere is it willing to consider that neither party has been terribly attentive to the concrete material conditions of the fallen middle class and lower class. But from that would follow an uncomfortable corollary, that a political system set up to strip mine ordinary worker (albeit gradually over time) via medical industry grifting, a hypertrophied, underperforming arms industry, skyrocketing higher education costs, and real estate rentierism might not be appetizing to voters on the receiving end. They lead with TikTok as an illustration of warped priorities:
Young adults in Generation …worry they’ll never make enough money to attain the security previous generations have achieved, citing their delayed launch into adulthood, an impenetrable housing market and loads of student debt.
And they’re fed up with policymakers from both parties.
Washington is moving closer to passing legislation that would ban or force the sale of TikTok, a platform beloved by millions of young people in the U.S…
“It’s funny how they quickly pass this bill about this TikTok situation. What about schools that are getting shot up? We’re not going to pass a bill about that?” Gaddie asked. “No, we’re going to worry about TikTok and that just shows you where their head is…. I feel like they don’t really care about what’s going on with humanity.”
That seemed promising but then we get hackneyed concerns, such as social media as an amplifier of worry:
Gen Z’s widespread gloominess is manifesting in unparalleled skepticism of Washington and a feeling of despair that leaders of either party can help. Young Americans’ entire political memories are subsumed by intense partisanship and warnings about the looming end of everything from U.S. democracy to the planet. When the darkest days of the pandemic started to end, inflation reached 40-year highs. The right to an abortion was overturned. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East raged.
All of the turmoil is being broadcast—sometimes with almost apocalyptic language or graphic video—on social media.
Dissatisfaction is pushing some young voters to third-party candidates in this year’s presidential race and causing others to consider staying home on Election Day or leaving the top of the ticket blank.
However, despite the hand-wringing about the profound unhappiness among the young, the picture the Journal paints is actually very reassuring to the elites. Despite the ever-growing concentration of income and wealth at the top, they have done a effective job of subjugating the poors via atomization and economic insecurity. The Journal, and here this rings true, depicts the young as too demoralized to get angry and take concerted action to force change.
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The paragraph dealing with Lambert’s job experience has lost its ending.
Aargh, version control problems and then I was off the grid. Fixed.
Great aticle but Generation X results are at least as informative. Being “firmly in the middle” of this often not-that-well-delineated cohort, I see a slightly different story.
I don’t want to make a big fuss centred on me or peers of mine, but observant users of the internet will have noted that the “online wars” almost always pit boomers against Millennials/Gen Z. There is little mention of Gen X. My question is Why? I have peers who got “all the good cards in a game like Monopoly” (and I was one). But some of us have come to understand (the hard way) that high levels of social mobility statistically means that whilst you certainly can go from nothing to President of the USA, it’s a zero sum game and you can just as easily fall back to square one on the snakes and ladders (in USA I believe it is called something a bit different) board.
Maybe we need to read some stuff from 200 years ago concerning “if you have no foreknoweldge as to your place in society, what kind of income distribution would you want?”
Likely because the later ones consider anything their parents age or older as “boomers”.
Take for example the gaming term “boomer shooter”. It is used to refer to first person shooters mimicking the original Doom game and like. Only thing is that Doom came out in 1993.
First of all, thanks for replying. The gaming reference is certainly something I didn’t know and I must now go and look up.
I am furious at some of my peers who, pretty much accidentally, used a natural affinity for STEM areas to get into medicine. Now they own loads of houses and would be, according to Adam Smith, “rentiers” (or, if you want to be ruder, “parasites”). The problem is that these are not “bad” people – they accept and welcome that I’m gay, yada yada. But if you can’t and won’t read the typical NC article about monetary sovereignty and how life is about REAL resources, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. :-(
‘Boomer shooter’ has nothing to do with age. It has to do with style, being a 90s inspired experience which focuses on level design and gunplay over any pretense of story or refined production values. The boom is from the focus on pure gameplay, eg Doom II having one of the definitive video game shotguns.
No, “boomer” purely refers to it as being made by and enjoyed by old people. Boomer is a catch all term for anyone old, including gen x or even millennial (used ironically here)
Except in this case it absolutely doesn’t. The boom is the focus on pure gunplay and violence, especially gibs.
This is a huge sub-genre these days, and it’s far from ‘old’ (really, middle-aged) people buying them. There’s a big market for something that isn’t formulaic Call of Duty, a battle royale, or an extraction shooter.
I don’t know anything about these games, but if I was any older, I would be a Baby Boomer, which describes that generation born during the postwar economic boom of 1947-1964, like my parents. The youngest Boomers are in their 60s and like most Americans are probably suffering economically unless someone wants to believe that the entire top 10% are Boomers.
The key is class, not age. Plenty of Boomers are homeless or eating cat food especially as many have lost most of those cushy pensions. The Federal Pension Guarantee Corporation does not make you whole. It merely guarantees that some portion of it will offered. This decay I have been seeing my entire adult life, meaning that my adulthood has been one of decline in everything. Obvious decline that can be found even in the rigged, and they are rigged, official federal statistics, in the scenes empty buildings, discarded humans on the streets, in every institution in whatever areas you care to name. Religion, the arts, science, education, charities, infrastructure, government, and businesses, all are diseased, dying corpses compared to sixty years ago.
Could we (re)create the system of higher education such as California, not to mention the rest of the country, had? Could we do the Apollo Program today as was done in the 1960s. Fight HIV/AIDS more or less successfully in the 1980s? Smallpox in the 1970s? Create the internet itself? Medicare? The Interstate Highway System? The Golden Gate Bridge? Hell, do we even have the social, religious, and governmental wherewithal to do something on the scale of the Civil Rights Movement? Any of the many, many great projects, movements, institutions, even the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries? Anyone who says so is blind, a fool, or a liar. Maybe this pernicious ideology of Neoliberalism makes one stupid.
Maybe, if we try really freaking hard and with some luck, we could resurrect the American Plan, a Second American Plan to replace the fifty years of looting done to the literal centuries of creation. The first plan lasted about 130-140 years. I suspect the second one would take decades as well. I would like to see its start before I die, but prying the grip of the vampiric Elites from their position of control is going be difficult isn’t?
Thank you. I am guilty of buying into the “boomer vs young people” online fight.
You said it’s about Class. 100% agree.
Well said, every word. I one hundred percent agree it’s class.
I was born in 1962 and all I’ve seen my entire adult life is the decay you mentioned starting in the Reagan years. All of the generational conflicts are media constructs to keep us divided and are quite arbitrary. If Boomers are the children of soldiers who came back from World War II, can I be a Boomer if my dad was three years old in 1945? The majority of the Boomer era people I know did not have any kind of life resembling the media stereotypes especially factory workers whose bodies were ruined early, their factories shut down and their pensions whittled down by the larger companies that gobbled up theirs.
I worked in libraries almost all of my working years and the last library I worked for long enough to retire from. My pension is just good enough to make me a card carrying member of the precariat (sp?)
If there has to be a generation classification for someone like me, it’s more along the lines of Generation Jones (1960-1964) with none of the benefits of Boomers but all the crap that everyone else got. A canary in the coal mine as it were.
And FWIW, the US name for the game is Chutes and Ladders.
Does this really exist in the US? I never heard of it until adulthood.
From the board game publisher Milton Bradley:
https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=milton%20bradley%20chutes%20ladders
Chutes and Ladders. We had this board game for our kids 50 years ago when we were in California. Been around a lot time before that, I think.
I am age 72. Born in ’51. I played Chutes and Ladders when I was a young kid.
Thanks for the memories! And for a very informative article.
“Maybe we need to read some stuff from 200 years ago concerning ‘if you have no foreknoweldge as to your place in society, what kind of income distribution would you want?'”
Could find some stuff a little more recent: “veil of ignorance“
Thank you Henry. Alas Long Covid means that most days I am afflicted by the notorious brain fog. I have had almost 40 years to get to grips with the fact that my heart is “close to collapse”. However losing my mental faculties is orders of magnitude worse. I don’t typically go into detail and don’t need sympathy but I’m grateful when someone corrects me with a reference that 10 years ago when I co-authored the seminal textbook in my field I’d have had at my fingertips.
I remember when I used to lecture medical students about the Veil of Ignorance. To forget it now is……not nice.
Very sorry to hear this. That would terrify me. Wish you the best.
So very thankful. Whilst I am not “part of the usual” cohorts (dementia/alzheimers) I voraciously read NC articles that shed light on new neurological issues they’ve found as sequelae of Covid.
I probably should stay away from that stuff but my health academic background compels me to read it. Of about 10 physicians (ranging from GPs to specialists) only one actually said “yep you’ve got Long Covid”. But then added (as per, I strongly suspect , having given a presentation to their board, NICE) “there is nothing we can do for you” .
Thanks for nothing. Bitter? Yes but we Brits have kinda been conditioned into thinking that the dreadful effects of the “USA Hellhole” of insurance is something we never have to worry about. The real story is thst we’re just as familyblogged…. Just in different ways. Plus I know people who work in fields like oncology. Those “excess deaths” in last few years. A feature, not a bug.
This all reminds also of a game that is a combination of the matchstick game and a building blocks game where you try to build as high as possible and remove blocks without it collapsing.
That pessimism graph is quite something, and thinking back i suspect it kinda lines up with the attitudes in (western) Europe as well.
If you open a history book covering just about any turbulent period, the first opening lines usually discuss the deteriorating economic prospects of the populations, the fecklessness of the ruling class towards their concerns, and the resulting political tension arising. Lower pay, pressure on housing conditions, loss of social status or political influence. This article reads a lot like the opening pages of a chapter on the Reformation or the Ancien régime.
You have just described the last few years of the UK. I wish this were not the case but I firmly believe we are on a path that you describe.
Yeah. Peter Turchin draws the same conclusion from historical data – popular immiseration (life gets harder for the masses), “elite overproduction “ (too many elites chasing too few positions; the spend their time competing with each other rather than governing); and finally a fiscal crisis. He came up with this in the early 2000s I think, ran some numbers, and concluded that the 2020s were going to be full of turmoil and political violence. I don’t think he is all that happy about having been proved right.
May have hoped that someone would heed the warning.
But most likely those in power, or gunning for power, just saw it as a reason to crank up the hustle.
Historian Walter Scheidel wrote a book in 2017 titled “The Great Leveler”.
I read it a few years ago.
As I recall, Scheidel suggested that income inequality increases in a society until some forcing event occurs that causes a reset.
As I remember, the forcing events Scheidel highlighted were 1. A plague that kills much of the population, making labor more prized, 2. A world war that kills many people and also destroys some governments favorable to the elite, 3. A revolution (see 1917 Russia) and 4. a financial collapse (see USA Great Depression).
Again, as I recall from the book, in general, history does not indicate that societies peacefully lessen inequality on their own, societies/elite governments have to have their hand forced.
In the USA and UK, we are seeing “grow the economic pie” still being promoted despite strains on many resources such as energy.
Perhaps historians such as Timothy Morgan in the UK and Walter Scheidel provide better guidance than the class of economists favored by academia, government, the media and the elite..
I read Scheidel’s book and I couldn’t shake the nagging suspicion that his intended message was, “you can’t do anything about inequality without bringing on disaster, so best just endure it.”
To which I say, “nuts.”
I’ll get this book, thanks.
From some of my scant research on digital surveillance era, it’s occurred to me that one of the lesser-spoken-about-but-absolutely-essential goals of it is a form of elite social insurance: to minimize the chances those who can avail of its analytic tools will fall prey to such forced levelings.
Think about how much effort within recent modernity has been undertaken to put elites beyond the reach of both the aleatory leveling events of history (say, western-based global biosurveillance tied to financial schemes to ensure their continuing enrichment during a pandemic), and even the smaller forms of redress that might have a smaller leveling effect (think mandatory arbitration in place of fuller legal remedies). The model here is cybernetics: turning the world into and then treating it as a bounded domain that elite managers alone are outside of, unreachable, but positioned to control. The root of the word “cybernetics” (kubernetes) comes from Greek, meaning to “captain” or “steer.” The ultimate power it aims for is the “kill switch” – whether for an individual car or product, or for the whole financial trading system if that’s what’s needed to preserve the current status quo of power.
The possibility of reversibility in power relations is the final frontier, in other words. The deployment of surveillance systems ultimately aims at maintaining the current ones by whatever means can be produced.
sounds like were about to hit a grand slam!
1. covid was the dress rehearsal…
2. ww3 is all but happening currently we just have yet to realize it
3. if only….
4. any day now especially given commercial real estate, the housing crisis and inflation. oh and the effects of AI!
Something happened to the end of this paragraph:
Yes, so sorry, version control problems and then I was out for a while: “… because he was confident he could always get another job.”
My wife and I were talking about this very thing on our walk yesterday. Her situation in the mid 70’s was lots of jobs, lose one, find another easily.
Or for me, in 1971, I was able to buy my first car–a 2 year old Triumph Spitfire, on a part time job. Living at home, but still, a 2 year old car?
1970 was the peak of “first wave” US oil production.
The US suppressed oil and gold prices until the early 70s, and they were massively repriced during the 1970s. This, and the fact that Baby Boom kids were starting to form families, caused serious inflationary pressures in the US.
You caught a US economy peak there.
Most people re victims. This was sold by republicans favorite past president Ronald Reagan.It should have been called trickle up instead of trickle down.
I called it “trickle out” on the grounds that that money never trickled down to the plebs but the wealthy trickled that money out of the country to places like the Cayman Islands. The whole idea of trickle down anyway was insulting. It was saying that give the wealthy more money and perhaps a few more crumbs might fall to the floor for the plebs to grub up. Lambert some time ago featured a video showing how most people knew what it was all about-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5x1sSjfknM (2:47 mins)
Or from the ’40s (my dad’s era): “Feed the donkeys and the birds will eat”.
Trickle down brings to mind something other than water, as Skid Row referred to in Riot Act.
No, surely money gushed up, and the odd drop, never enough to be described as a trickle, drizzled down.
“should have been called trickle up instead of trickle down”
How true. I like Turchin’s “wealth pump.” And the “aquifer” has been drawn down to almost empty. That’s why the monopolizing/financializing efforts are concentrated on essentials: something to eat; water to drink; a roof over your head.
But for the sake of the Great Invisible Hand, keep gas prices low. That’s what keeps the money flowing in wealth pumps like Applebees’ and Hyatt.
trickle down by reagan was peanuts, not endorsing it, it was terrible.
but bill clintons free trade was sold as trickle down for billions of poor people world wide. and today the poor world wide, are poorer than ever.
In fact, the global poor have made unbelievable income gains since 1990. It’s the American middle class that have suffered from free trade.
‘From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014. However, between 2014 and 2019, the pace of poverty reduction slowed to 0.6 percentage points per year, which is the slowest rate seen in the past three decades. Within the 24-year period, most of the poverty reduction was observed in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as South Asia.’
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty
Rent has more than doubled since 2000, far outpacing the growth of incomes over the same period, according to Moody’s Analytics.
This.
That’s it.
I was at a city council meeting last night and at issue was what to do with an old school building in a neighborhood where home prices are skyrocketing now that a new school has been built . One person after another got up to propose “affordable housing” but none of those making the proposals would be the ones living there, since pretty much everyone in the room was over 50, already had their own homes and had been beneficiaries of those rising prices (including myself). And everyone assumed the public property would be sold to a developer in order to create this “affordable housing”. It all came across as virtue signaling/guilty conscience more than anything.
Because I feel the need to be the skunk at the picnic, I pointed out that no one had defined what was “affordable”, and that historically it meant spending not much more than 25% of your take home income on rent. For working class people making $20/hr, that translates to rent at about $750/month, and I noted that there were no units anywhere in that range, that you could not expect private developers to create truly affordable housing out of the goodness of their hearts, and that if the city really wanted to have affordable housing so city employees could afford to live in the city in which they work, the city would have to build, manage and maintain the property themselves – they’d need to own it to really keep the rent prices down. This is something I’m very much in favor of, but I appear to be in a small minority in that regard.
The other troubling tendency I see lately is businesses buying up property to use for employee housing. I do think it is done with good intentions for the most part – service workers simply can’t afford the going rents. I’ve seen ski areas buy up hotels to use for housing, and maybe since those jobs are seasonal, that might make some sense given that employees are likely planning to move on after the season anyway. I know that was the case during my ski bum days. But I’ve also heard of a local restaurant buying up a house for its kitchen workers to live in. This is not a seasonal job, and while it might be a nice gesture so workers can live closer to work, I’m assuming it also means that if you quit or get fired, you also lose your housing at the same time as your job. That can’t help with the precarity.
A hundred or so years ago, we tried that already and eventually decided it was not a good idea to have people shopping at the company store. Now everything old (and bad) is new again!
Take us on out, Mr. Ford – Sixteen Tons
Thank you sir, that took me back. Listened to it countless times growing up. DJs would often chase it with this one from Jimmy Dean.
I try to make your point about the necessity for all levels of government to take up once more their responsibility (abandoned 30 or more years ago in Canada since neoliberalism ate policymakers brains) to build low income housing in the Globe and Mail comments section about the housing/homelessness crisis. “The market” will NEVER build sufficient low income housing — the empirical evidence is in and is incontrovertible. There simply isn’t any money in it.
As you can probably imagine I feel rather like Cassandra.
“… I’m assuming it also means that if you quit or get fired, you also lose your housing at the same time as your job. That can’t help with the precarity…”
It’s worse than that. It would make for even more edgy, angry people who are hyper-competitive. I see it like a nightmare version of a reality show, everybody trying not to be eliminated out of the house.
Shutting down TikTok does not need money, ergo it can be passed instantaneously. This is true of other legislation that does not need to be funded like anti-abortion and “anti semitic” legislation. NAFTA and bringing China into the WTO did not cost any money did it? Ditto for almost any legislation that the Corporations demand that enable rentierism, monopoly market enablement, pharma profiteering. The list is endless. This is one serious advantage the 0.1% have over the Left. Almost anything the Left wants done costs money but everything the 0.1% desires, they do with their tax cuts. Since tax cuts “pay for themselves over time”, the politicians do not need to worry much about “increasing the deficit”. We are inching slowly towards a day when non-pacific means will be used to restore parity. Long way to go yet.
Culture war
My son and I went to the DMV just the other day so that he could get his driving permit. In NYS you can register to vote or if under 18 “pre-register” so when you turn 18 you’re automatically all set to vote. My 16 year old son is a political junky like I was at his age, but he squarely and without hesitation picked Independent or No Party on the form even after I reminded him that you had to belong to a part in NYS to participate in primaries.
My hope would be that all the TikTokkers and independents vote 3d party. That would send a nice message.
Participation in primaries was exposed as a sham in 2016, when the DNC was exposed in collusion with Clinton to favor her victory over youth-favored Sanders, then again in 2020, when a call from Obama had everyone except Warren and Sanders suddenly drop out to endorse Biden.
The party chooses the candidates. If they are feeling generous, they let you choose Coke or Pepsi.
Good on your kid. I hope he gets out there and fucks those cheating bastards up real good
The Democratic Party primaries are sham primaries.
The Republican Party primaries have been real primaries.
Not always. In 2000, South Carolina’s Republican party refused to open 1/5 of the polling places, and failed to give many voters a 24 hour notice they were required to (after a lawsuit). The two losing candidates, John McCain and Alan Keyes, both called for an investigation. George W. Bush responded, “If anyone has any complaints, let them take it up with the state party chairman.” Said chairman was Bush supporter Henry McMaster.
Participate in NY primaries? What primaries? There aren’t any offices without incumbents anymore. The current governor, the republican from upstate, was selected by the giant conman democrat who preceded her and was forcibly removed form office. An incumbent is born. No elections for them. No primaries either.
Lets cut SUNY more, and also make sure more of the conman’s political appointees rise through the ranks to completely suck the former institution dry. Great intro into politics in NYS
Well, Adam1, your argument probably wasn’t made any easier by the fact that — thanks to the 2020 Cuomo ballot-access “reforms” — New York may wind up the only state with just Brandon and the Orange Man on the ballot for President:
https://ballot-access.org/2023/10/03/new-york-media-utterly-fails-to-report-that-new-york-is-now-likely-to-be-the-only-state-in-the-nation-in-the-2024-presidential-race-with-a-democratic-republican-monopoly/
Right up there with…
Cosby and Hitler – Whose Line Is It Anyway?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANi6fUV9W8
While I can’t argue with the charts, people seem to forget Vietnam. I grew up in the 50’s and by the mid 60’s can remember a lot of kids my age who were anything but happy about their government shipping them off to fight lord knows who lord knows where. This was no battle about genocide and extraordinary cruelty to a whole people; it was about something to do with if not here then there. Huh? It’s true, probably an equal number of kids went off with stars and stripes in their eyes, but a lot of young people were pretty pessimistic about their government and their future and some were starting to question whether “commies” were really the bogymen claimed. The feeling of being cannon fodder for an image rather than a reality was non trivial. And right on the heels of Johnson who for all his good, was also sending us off to the slaughter, came worse: we didn’t call him Tricky Dick, or “Would you buy a used car from this guy?” for nothing.
And depending on where you lived, it was not all that easy to make a decent living without qualifications that very few people had, especially if you were trying to raise a family. I remember talking to older people with fairly menial jobs (living pay-check to pay-check) who were anything but happy with their prospects and for good reason.
True, compared to today we were living in a golden age made golden more by lack of government capacity to monitor our every move and make us exploitable (welcome and encourage precarity) than anything else, but we did have a sense that bad was only going to get worse and that didn’t help. That horrible horrible obnoxious “Brady Bunch” TV program and it’s ilk was proof positive that the good life of milk and honey and American pie was being sold rather than lived as reality.
Couldn’t agree more strongly. If our eyes were opened to not just see but perceive, we understood what John Kay and Steppenwolf were saying:
Thanks for this piece of bittersweet nostalgia. I unexpectedly landed a job as a waterfront counselor at one of a cluster of Scout camps for NYC boys very close to Bethel and Yasgur’s farm (summer of ‘72 iirc ) – I had just turned 17 and had dutifully registered with Selective Service (the draft). My belongings from home included my nylon guitar (“Cheesebox”) and my 6 D cell Panasonic turntable (w/ ‘hot-wired’ 8” speaker. ;^), and 3 favorite LPs – Hendrix (Band of Gypsies), Stones (Get your Ya-Ya’s Out (live @ Altamont)), and Steppenwolf’s Monster. Had to buy fresh copies when I got back home- worn to bits they were. End of the innocence……..
When I was a child in Scotland we used to get US comic imports. Archie Andrews and his pals lived in what I saw as a 60’s paradise – beautiful girl-friends, sports cars and rock ‘n roll. I still sort of long for all that, but of course it was just a comic.
The Stones record was recorded in New York.
Might also be simple exacerbation by demographics— we have 2X as many folks on earth as we did in the 60’s- 70’s– simple extrapolation of how many are ‘adulting’ and striving to exist into an age of AI, decreasing jobs, and with Trump, overt bellicose belligerence – in your face words and actions that re not terribly upbeat or positive, or indicate much of a plan about the very obvious plights in which we are navigating A Life.
My dad used to toast at weddings— “someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to…”
Perceptions matter, but for many, there is an actual lacking of one two or three of these blessings.
Correction: “If not there then here”
The draft at that time did coalesce into a group, weather they liked it or not. It’s why they got rid of the draft. They didn’t want that to happen again. Get Off My Lawn….
The precarity began another type of acceleration phase in the 1970s.
Thanks for this article. I can’t help but observe that in the first chart optimism across all ages peaked around 2002-03 and has been in steady decline ever since.
That correlates very nicely with the complete financialization of the US economy, which was capped off right after the dot com bubble burst. I recall that period as the beginning of “zero percent” financing and Greenspan blowing a housing bubble with the resultant epic fail of 2007-09.
Throw in the Glass-Steagal repeal which was one of Clinton’s final acts along with the GOP Congress in 2000 IIRC. That probably had a lag effect before it started kicking in.
As far as TikTok goes, I expect the government to lose here as it is not that hard to jailbreak a phone, or come up with some other technical workaround such as hosting TikTok on a Chinese server and VPN. Young people are better at this than the old. Perhaps it will end up killing the “walled garden” model and backfiring much as the idiotic sanctions on Russia have.
ChrisFromGA: Thanks for these reminders. I also was trying to “periodize” these young people. What has happened in the last 30 years that has made their lives miserable?
You mention the Clinton administration.
I was thinking of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which allowed the Western elites unlimited chances to loot and pillage. See: Russia, Yeltsin, Jeffrey Sachs’s remarkable moral change.
The lack of a counterweight–given that unions in the U S of A were also being destroyed by 1991– means that these young people have spent their whole lives in a degraded and rapacious system. Just think of what a mess health insurance is for them.
The question with the under-30s is always the same: It was the same when I was among the under-30s in the 1970s. Will they vote in the elections? It’s fine for commenters to say something like “nonvoters are the biggest political party in the US of A,” but that’s not who is controlling power in Washington and New York these days (or ever).
What’s happened in those 30 years in the US: lots of things, but 1) an acceleration of the internal structural readjustment related both to the nature of employment and the requirements for making yourself eligible for it, is near the top of my list. The nature of employment has become much more tenuous, and the requirements of “professionalization” in many job sectors have have driven a process of further indebtedness and hoop-jumping just to keep pace, let alone to advance.
Agree with ChrisFromGA about financialization as well, which also has to be near the top of any list. The unmooring of the FIRE sector from any restraint in the areas of “financial innovation” has been convulsive in ways no healthy society would permit.
im not an under 30, but 35, and my entire life has pretty much been a shit show although i have some fond memories of the 90s and early 00s economically (as a queer, not at all socially!). 2002 was a recession btw, hit NY hard due to 9/11, and affected my family significantly. 2008 was the death blow…
anyway. who is there even to vote for? our only way out at this point is revolution or collapse. sure, some of the third party candidates (cornel west being my fav out of the bunch) are palatable but they will never be allowed to win.
Keep in mind, these are going to be the “boots on the ground” in any WWIII. Good luck with that, O great leaders.
You know, Ukraine has got me wondering. Wouldn’t make more sense to round up the cynical and underemployed 45-60 year olds and send them off to the front? Not the elites, of course, just the slackers and complainers. That would be much healthier for our demographic pyramid, and it would free up jobs and houses for the kids.
You are compassionate for cynical and underemployed 18 to 29-year-olds but not cynical and underemployed 45 to 60-year-olds? And if they’re underemployed, what jobs are going to be freed up? And you’re complaining about complaining, and in the NC comments section of all place? And no, I’m not in either age range.
Better idea: Let the rich fight their own wars
I bet they’d be over much more quickly.
And it should thin the ranks of the sociopathic rich.
Win-win!
zuckerberg vs musk cage fight style!
It’s the weird contradictions in real estate that broke me over these last ten years as a millenial to start being sympathetic to socialists. Though oddly it was Libya collapsing into civil war that broke my former warhawk attitude permanently. I despise the American empire and its arrogant leadership.
I hate how even modest reform is forcefully cast aside. The wealthy and aging ignoring the growing crisis of income inequality.
So, maybe the nation gets some kindof FDR figure along some self correction in all of society. It will take a while but I can be patient.
Or that self correction isn’t going to happen and the country has about fifteen years to go into revolution. Otherwise, the nation degrades into a neufeudal hellhole.
“Fifteen years”? wow, and optimist. I don’t give it near that long. Look to this election. Whichever side loses, do you think they will accept the result?
I don’t think so.
And then what?
15 is far to generous. and nobody is coming to save us. have you seen the air and ocean surface temp charts lately? trigger warning, might create an existential sense of dread and doom.
if we make it five years without widespread political violence ill be impressed.
“Members of the top 1% and top 10% have more in common with each other than with the members of the marketing-designated age category…”
Those categories indeed can diminsh people’s experiences and keeps narratives from delving into intergenerational community building outside of the family or without corporate oversight.
That hinders sustainable organizing.
I keep that in mind as these terms have become a short-hand for describing people.
“ However, despite the hand-wringing about the profound unhappiness among the young, the picture the Journal paints is actually very reassuring to the elites. Despite the ever-growing concentration of income and wealth at the top, they have done an effective job of subjugating the poors via atomization and economic insecurity. The Journal, and here this rings true, depicts the young as too demoralized to get angry and take concerted action to force change.”
Not a perfect analogy, but wasn’t this similarly the view of the Russian aristocracy circa 1916? Everything’s fine right up to the point it isn’t.
People entering the job force in the 90s (the Gen X marketing category) were called slackers and cynics.
The world of temp work, the precursor of gig work, expanded during that period.
Every decade, especially since my “favorite” year 1971, seems to have another rung or two from the ladder removed.
I eschew these generation labels, in part because I can’t keep track of them. While I think older generations often view younger ones with dismissive attitudes (“well, when we were young, …”), it seems to me that people under 25 today have never really known a life free of truly existential FUD (save of course, the children of the 1%). My parents were children of the Depression and WW2, but survived with some general optimism about life’s possibilities. And prior to about 2000, my life was not burdened with what Yves and others describe for young people today: mountains of debt, shitty job prospects, zero political influence, monetization and commercialized tracking of every aspect of their public and “private” life. Add to that the government’s pathetic handling of COVID, the recognition of impending catastrophe of environmental degradation, and I think that what young people have grown up with is different.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but even during bad stints in my life, I always had the sense that, “well, things will get better”. Because in the past, they had. Vietnam War protests made a difference. Reductions in nuclear stockpiles were agreed to.The national press was not a band of celebrity stenographers. Things like education, job training, health care, were viewed not as profit centers but as worthy public investments. And with some planning and savings, buying a house, getting married, having children, having a life, were all feasible. But young people today have known none of this: for them, things have gotten, and continue to get, steadily worse. Their real opportunities continue to contract. And now Congress intends to ban their refuge of TikTok. In the name of national security.
From my perspective of limited insight, absent Hudson and Desai’s essential reforms of the Fed, taxation, clipping Wall Street’s wings, resurrection of real industry, etc., it would seem that nothing short of violent revolution or dollar collapse will reverse the status quo. Members of the PMC (and I have to certainly count my past self in these ranks), because their heads are still well above the economic water line, will always vote to continue the current system, with marginal tweaking. They don’t seem to grasp (or perhaps think it benign) what the forest of deep corruption has created: the decline of the quality of life for the majority of people in the US.
To those still reading, please excuse the long harangue. These days, I am ever the more frustrated.
Everything I understand about the future certainly changed in 2004 when I first read a NY Times article about Climate, and I knew given capitalism, we’re all screwed. It’s been downhill ever since.
Oh, and that reminds me, under Obama it was all supposed to be different. Maybe this is what extinguished hope looks like? To see the great Hope president elected when you’re younger, and to learn it’s all a lie, then getting Trump, and then a Pandemic. And then Biden. Ouch.
That really is hopeless. All the while the costs of everything go up, and up. If you never got established, you have no hope whatsoever. Graduating in debt, education disrupted by a Pandemic mishandled, getting sick often.
Speaking to the choir, brother. amen.
Since there’s so much sneering among the pols about the youth being addicted to TikTok, it would be super ironic if this thing they’re passing actually motivated them to do something. Don’t ask me what the “something” would be, but when all you’re offering is bread and circuses, you can’t take away the circus when people can’t afford the bread.
A small privileged group of humans living a past legacy of self fulfilling prophecy/narrative is confornted by reality …
“The story dances around the idea that the bill to ban or force the sale of TikTok might be significantly about censorship, to curb their ability to confirm with each other how bad things are, as in how authority has failed them…”
This actually hints at something interesting about TikTok. Didn’t they have complaints from their users at one time that the algorithm favored good-looking people in nice homes?
Don’t remember all of the details, but the issue was something along those lines.
Well, that point in the article suggests TikTok being more responsive to user concerns than USA owned social media.
Was it the algo, or was it just people? I think attractive people just catch more eyes, and on an app based on making strong impressiions within the first 5 seconds or so, aesthetics matter a lot!
I believe that was debated in the article.
I haven’t had a chance to search.
But they did a bit more discussion about the progamming.
“Let them eat statistics.”
That’s a very succinct way to describe the attitude of a lot of elites, and something very much in line with Aurelien’s latest essay.
I do wonder if it is directly linked to neoliberal attitudes (although that there’s some sort of indirect linkage is obvious enough). I keep thinking about a story that I read about Hitler’s headquarters from some German general’s account (Blumentritt, I think?): that Hitler and his staff were obsessed with statistics–that, whenever they had to deal with generals unhappy over lack of troops, equipment, and supplies, Hitler could always badger them with statistics from the training programs, war production, and so forth about which he was extremely well supplied with. But reality seldom matched the statistics. The proper response in such situations should be to investigate why the statistics don’t reflect reality. But what stats-obsessed do is to accuse the “reality” (or the people who are in touch with it) of lying.
That is my take on the situation, too. The steep power difference between the top 10% and everyone else, founded on the wealth distribution, does make it seem like it will take a huge dislocation, like violent revolution, to upset it. But if that is not to be a failure that produces something horrible, then there will have to be a period of popular organizing into a self-directing movement that can exercise power. Generating a self-directing mass movement that can exercise power, and not violence, is where people will have to go to be effective in getting what they want. TPTB understand that, and make every effort to redirect, disarm, or coopt any network that looks to become a movement. (Exhibit A would be the direction of the BLM movement into an organization run by corrupt party hacks.) Our handlers seem to be aware that oppositional social networks could form anywhere, and they are telling them selves that they can monitor that.
As one of those millennials whose hand was neither great nor terrible (but no ragrets), I like Yves’ reading of this article. “Let them eat statistics” is definitely a good way to put it, and it leads to the authors (and presumably the target audience) missing a lot. But beyond the dismissiveness of it, I think the article misses something even subtler and deeper.
As I read it, all of the younger people in the article were still focusing on the “milestones” of conventional American life. They expressed more of a fatalism and political surrender centered on the impossibility of that life for most (a couple acquaintances of mine use the term “taking the black-pill?”). And maybe that is where a majority of young Americans are at. What was it Nietzsche said? Something like “I love all those who go under, for that too is a going beyond and a longing for the far shore”?
What that misses though, and you probably won’t even pick up on this via social media (which is still mass media), is the growing minority out there that instead of giving up on life or politics, have been shaken loose from the Old American value system. These people viscerally don’t care about those milestones. And while global warming sucks, even that becomes a “worthy challenge” in a value system that discounts or actively disdains the old ways: material comfort, conspicuous consumption, security, hope, narcissistic ideas of freedom, naive & profligate ideas of progress, folksy complacency in all its forms (racial, small-town, or liberal yuppie), apple-pie, yada-yada.
Individually, it’s miserable to see so many people fall into the slough of despond, especially because if they didn’t, any one of them could theoretically become a good friend, an ally, or a partner. But from the view 10,000 feet up, those same conditions have created a lot of hard people imperceptibly crystallizing into something organized, and rather than giving up, they’ve quietly declared war on Old America’s gods. To me, that’s the interesting story with the real political implications, and I doubt the media will wise up to it until the hurricane is already sweeping them out to sea.
> those same conditions have created a lot of hard people imperceptibly crystallizing into something organized … I doubt the media will wise up to it until the hurricane is already sweeping them out to sea.
What the elites and the media don’t get: the figures and movements they are continually labelling, marginalizing, and tamping down as “extreme” are already watered-down attempts at compromise by the black-pilled minority.
Blocking these channels, these escape valves for creativity and dissent — canceling them, banning them, forcing their sale to (and subsequent assimilation by) the Blob, only cranks up the pressure.
When the day arrives that the disaffected truly get fed up and decide they’ve had enough of the old order’s perfidy — realizing they have nothing to lose by going for the whole rather than accepting crumbs and halfway measures — well! “Extreme”? Hah!
Hey, Powers That Be, keep it up, if you dare — y’all ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
“…is the growing minority out there that instead of giving up on life or politics, have been shaken loose from the Old American value system. These people viscerally don’t care about those milestones…:
Youth were categorized as Gen X then called “slackers” when those sentiments where expressed by them in the late 80s/early 90s. The establishment felt that narrative would get the hamster wheel turning.
That’s true, and there have arguably been hints of it going back to the earliest Americans that could be considered “counter-cultural” in the 19th century. It’s definitely present in every demographic though and probably only generational to the extent the breakdown has continued accelerating in our lifetimes.
Beyond just rejecting the old values though, which fits the slacker stereotype, I think the catch is that there are genuinely new values coalescing in people’s minds. That’s probably why Nietzsche came to my mind and I intentionally mentioned the “Old American gods”.
Even deeper than political sides or upheaval, it’s a genuine schismogenesis. There are obviously huge political implications though and I don’t see how the status quo can buy off the “New Americans” even if they were aware enough to try.
“I don’t see how the status quo can buy off the “New Americans” even if they were aware enough to try…”
Do you mean newborn Americans (babies) or immigrants?
Examining how the two different categories assimilate information is a load to consider at this hour.
But I was also wanting to say, I could have continued commenting on “milestones” of conventional American life” that many younger generation questions. That convention has never been as stable as promoted.
“They Shoot Horses, Dont They?” 1970s film about 1930s.
They called the ’60s version “hippies.”
They called the 70s version “me decade.”
Variations on a theme, however cumulative effects are beginning to show. People see more and more the difference between advertising/branding and reality, even if they feel powerless to stop it.
Not really, though both new generations and newcomers definitely add to the mix. I mean it more in the basic sense of collective identity, like people genuinely ceasing to think of themselves as Americans, but rather something new and different. I definitely don’t know what various identities they’ll adopt. Since the current American context is still the starting point though, at least geographically, you can think of them as New Americans.
Ironically enough, given that it’s Ramadan, the early Muslims after the Hijrah are a great example of it (and the word “hijrah” itself actually means sort of what I’m describing). Or to put it another way, what I’m saying is that forms of non-conformity, which you rightly pointed out have always been around, are simultaneously deepening psychologically and scaling up across the population.
They’re reaching the point they’re not just non-conformity or sub-cultures anymore, but people breaking away from the very idea of America in an existential way. It’s also becoming less passive, as in people will actively push back and suffer out of a deeper need rather than conform to the basic habits that mark someone as an (Old) American.
There’s a lot I wish to add but I think I’ll just make this point:
Many elites seem to think disillusionment with the younger cohort stems from disappearing opportunities, decreasing economic security, a lack of community, etc. The idea is that we’re miserable primarily because of something our generation missed out on. This is, I think, just one side of the coin.
On the flip side is what we have in abundance: violence. The US has been at war for the past 2/3s of my life. I watched two wars start in middle school and then had classmates go off to those same wars a decade latter. I can remember the shock of Columbine and I can remember the shock I felt years later when I realized mass shootings no longer shocked me. There’s the overdoses, suicides, and other deaths of despair. And now add to that the American backed genocide of Palestinians we’re watching unfold in real time.
This is all to say that I don’t think disillusionment really captures the mood of the younger generations. I think its fear, hopelessness, and, ultimately, self-hatred. That last one is born out of the world of violence we live in and the ever increasing feeling that we can do little to change it.
Don’t forget about the steady increase in economic violence directed at the working class in the last two decades, the main driver of poverty.
Increasing poverty, which here includes the deliberate destruction of all the various institutions that a functioning society needs, massive corruption, and abusive policing increases the violence. America has been a violent, well armed society for over four centuries, if we go back to colonial times, but it has been greatly strengthened by all those negative things. We could try to get rid of the guns, if we wanted a civil war, but even if they all magically disappeared, the violence, the suicides and deaths of despair, the sheer rage, would all remain.
The America of the 20th for all its faults was a more peaceful and hopeful society, which feels strange saying so, seeing all wars, riots, and mass protests, but intrinsically it was.
“. . . and enjoy regular entertainment, including buying lots of books and going not infrequently to Grateful Dead concerts
Even during my time (born in 1960, tag-end of boomers), although one usually needed housemates, affordable apartments near where you worked could be found. And most paperback books were anywhere between $.60 and $2.00 (less for me as my first 8 years of employment were bookstores, sometimes combined with record stores like Tower Records). And there were jobs to be found (except in ‘82 and ‘83, the Volker recession… but it was much easier then to get unemployment and food stamps, the gatekeeping was less virulent).
Those Dead shows could be as low as $5.00. But below I’ve pasted the lineups of the first 2 Days on the Green I attended, both in 1974. These were all-day concerts played in Oakland Stadium, on the Oakland Athletics’ baseball field. The price was $18.00:
Day On The Green #1: Grateful Dead, The Beach Boys, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (June 8, 1974).
Day On The Green #2 & 3: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Band, Joe Walsh, Jesse Colin Young (July 13 & 14, 1974)
What would that cost today? Neil Young alone will charge you $150.00 for the cheap seats now.
The other thing about those concerts at that time: we arrived around 10 AM, with blankets, pillows, coolers, and hibachis, with everything needed to cook breakfast and lunch. We set up in left field, cooked breakfast, had hollowed out watermelons full of tequila, plenty of joints, etc. We were not searched at all.
Maybe you can still do things similarly at weekend festivals with camping, but not in the stage area. The freedom from constant “security” measures (security cameras, bag checks and pat-downs, heavy restrictions on what you can bring, no cellphone surveillance) was much less stressful. And of course, that extra freedom pretty much pertained everywhere else.
I think that sometimes we underestimate just how stressful life has become with the prevailing jackbooted approach to just about everything now.
I spoke with someone recently, about COVID, and her daughter is stuck because of just-in-time scheduling, so she can’t take on any additional part time jobs, because you need to be available for the upcoming schedule that you don’t find out about until the Friday before your work week. JIT scheduling wasn’t a thing for service jobs even 10 years ago to this extreme.
a political system set up to strip mine ordinary worker
More on this, please.
I see that we’re just conduits for cash– from preconception through life til ash or bones in the dirt, and that we commoners can be anything more ain’t nothing but lies.
The ruling-caste can take “our democracy” and stuff it.
I have friends in their 20s (not sure what generation that puts them in). The more engaged ones definitely have this attitude. They believe what the scientists are saying about climate change and they are not at all optimistic that the world will do much of anything to address it. Consequently they expect the worst case scenario is the most likely scenario and that things be very bad indeed in 50 years or so. I’ll probably be dead by then but they will live to see it, and if they chose to reproduce now then their children would be living most of their lives in that world.
The whole article (or at least the quoted portions as the archive link doesn’t come up for me) reads like a lot of useful insights from the interviewees along with an interviewer who is resolutely determined not to listen. Don’t these kids know that things are better than they have ever been, based on our cherry-picked statistics that carefully omit things like labor force participation? Look at the GDP growth! Executive bonuses have never been higher! It’s a great time to be alive! Interviewers are unconsciously illustrating the very problem they so resolutely fail to see.
>>>Interviewers are unconsciously illustrating the very problem they so resolutely fail to see.
Unconsciously? Or are they deciding or being told not to see? Most of a regime’s censorship is not done by the regime itself, it is done by individuals and organizations figuring out those lines, and then not crossing them for their survival.
– Bird$ of a Feather Flock Together.
In General, if in you’re 1 of the 26+ million households in the bottom 20% of household income,
or in 1 of the bottom 52+ million of the bottom 40%, …
you are NOT kicking it with those of the top 20%
— at their ski / boat / resort blah blah vacations,
— in their leafy ‘hood$ of security,
— at the same work from home or nice office watering holes.
In fact, during COVID, if you were in 1 of those bottom 60% households,
you probably saw & lived with people struggling with juggling rent to avoid living in the f’ing street,
and juggling to get food & utilities & keep the car running,
and having to go to work & get hacked on & bitched at by the profe$$ional cla$$e$ hiding behind uber,
YOU saw and YOU lived a societal kind of break down!
I say ‘kind of’ because what happened was the people at the top did what they always did!
they took care of themselves, LIED about their bottle cap deep concern, and treated the bottom like shit.
COVID was the SOS, only worse.
and now we need Ivy League $tudie$ of hand wringing and brow furrowing and finger wagging about how millions of young ‘uns would rather watch some stupidity on Tik Tok instead of participating in The Great Sham… hmmmm
unless youre the help ;)