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Overall, the 2019 European elections were a disappointment for the leaders of the populist right

the far right collectively recorded a net gain of only 13 members in the 751-seat European Parliament.

Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority.

a rising proportion of Millennials and Gen Zers identify themselves as left-leaning or centrist.

Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.

A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left

Recent national elections point to the same leftward trend among younger voters.

Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are more than a third as likely to be poor.

In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality

All of this has contributed to a growing generational economic divide

As in urban areas of the United States, rising costs for housing further squeeze the young’s spending power

The short-run trend is therefore that the old will dominate in European politics. In 2017, for the first time, more than half of the voters in the elections for the German Bundestag were over 50

So why aren’t European young people as receptive to tax-and-redistribute ideas as their American counterparts? Perhaps because they know, from experience, that those policies can’t immediately fix what ails their countries.

in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration.

it is worth taking a closer look at the Danish parliamentary elections held in June. The anti-immigration Danish People’s Party plummeted to 8.7 percent from 21.1 percent in 2015. But that was not because voters were frightened by anti-immigration policies. It was because the big center-left and center-right parties co-opted the far right’s agenda

In the 1990s, it was Denmark’s Social Democrats who adopted “Third Way” social and economic policies, sometime before Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. The Danes may once again be taking the lead. Sweden’s governing center-left party has already followed the Danish example by toughening its migration stance.

Postelection surveys show that the CDU is now losing nearly four times as many voters to the Greens as to the AfD. Significantly, the Greens take pride in being the only party to have consistently defended Angela Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy without ifs or buts.

generalizations about European politics are hard to mak

In the U.S., the GDP per capita of the highest-income state (Massachusetts) is roughly twice that of the poorest (Mississippi). In the EU, by contrast, citizens of Luxembourg are more than nine times as rich as Romanians.

There is also much less common history. Growing up in the Soviet Union has left older Estonians, for example, with very different views from older Spaniards, who grew up under Francisco Franco

For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels

the younger groups on both sides of the former Iron Curtain seem to be converging on some issues, such as their support for democracy and EU integration. Yet this convergence is not visible on all issues.

For younger voters in the EU’s original member states, ethnic and religious variables are much less important in defining citizenship than for their parents. For Central and eastern Europeans, however, where your forebears came from still matters. Indeed, young Hungarians and Croatians tend to associate ancestry with nationality even more than older generations do.

A reverse dynamic is visible in Austria. In 2017, 30 percent of those ages 29 and under voted for the nationalist-right Freedom Party in the parliamentary elections. In May, having been hit by a scandal, the party came in third with the same age group (17 percent), far behind the Greens (28 percent) and the Social Democrats (22 percent).

most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.

he politics of the future in Europe seems unlikely to resemble the politics of generational division in America. The continent is divided in many respects, but it does not face a “generation war.” The gap between the generations seems narrower, the political opportunity to mobilize younger voters less enticing.

The German Greens started out in the 1980s as part of the antinuclear and pacifist movements. They were clearly to the left of the SPD. But in recent years they have moved decidedly to the center ground. Last year Winfried Kretschmann, the Green prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, and conceivably a future German chancellor, published a book with the surprising subtitle For a New Definition of Conservatism. Kretschmann cites Edmund Burke as an inspiration, arguing that the father of conservative thought favored gradual change over revolution.

I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics

the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years

By virtue of having “adulted” more successfully than millennials — marrying, homebuying and having kids earlier and in larger numbers — Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young

the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton-to-Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them

On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced

Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that’s lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age.

and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials

There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions.

The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.

To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.

Clinton's 55-36 margin among those ages 18 to 29 is also significantly worse than late polls suggested it would be.

the race was really decided in a handful of close states — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in particular. And sure enough, Clinton did even worse among young people in those states, according to exit polls.

Digging into the numbers, however, Mook has a point. The national exit poll shows Clinton underperformed Barack Obama's 2012 share of the vote by one point with those between the ages of 30 and 44 and by three points with those ages 45 to 64. She actually overperformed him by one point with those over 65.

The story is similar in Pennsylvania. Clinton won those under 30 years old 52 to 43 after Obama won them 63 to 35, and in Florida, where Clinton won them 54 to 46 versus Obama's 66 to 32. It was closer in Michigan, where Clinton won the 57 to 34 versus Obama's 63 to 35

So if you accept the exit polls, it's clear Clinton did significantly worse among young people, and it was more than enough to make the difference in the states that mattered.

it's also worth noting here just how much young people hated Trump. Harvard showed just 22 percent of young likely voters had a favorable opinion of Trump, while 76 percent had an unfavorable one. Basically every poll showed something similar.

it seemed their distaste for Trump was leading them to coalesce around the lesser of two evils. In the end, it just doesn't appear to have happened as much as Clinton needed it to. In short: Robby Mook was right.

“Millennials have been hearing for 20 years” that climate change would be an issue for their generation to deal with, he told me. “And I would say, thanks, we’re here now. This is us taking over the issue that, decades ago, people said would be ours to deal with. This is what the next generation of the issue looks like.”

“This is an investment,” she said. “For every dollar we spend on infrastructure, we get more than a dollar back for that investment. For every dollar we collect in taxes, we get less than a dollar back.”

Many progressives would consider themselves lucky if they ever get to talk seriously about carbon-capture policy. For now, they have the same goal: making its mix of climate and labor policy as much a part of the mainstream Democratic agenda as health care is.

If the worst-case scenario comes true, are there still things we can do to minimise the pandemic’s impact?Absolutely. We can mobilise more health officials and keep engaging the public, implementing sensible travel controls and ensuring that frontline health workers have ready access to diagnostic tests and are vigilant – that they don’t send anyone who may have been exposed home without testing them, for example

Was an epidemic like that of Covid-19 inevitable?From a biological standpoint an outbreak of a novel pathogen was inevitable, but this one happened in the worst place at the worst time. Wuhan is a big city and a crossroads,

is in people’s minds – even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism.

You have said that time and trust are critical to good epidemic management. What do you mean?The delay between the frontline health workers noticing something unusual, in the form of an emerging disease, and that information travelling up the line to central decision-makers is critical. To illustrate that, a 2018 simulation that the Gates Foundation conducted of a flu pandemic estimated that there would be 28,000 after one month, 10 million after three months, and 33 million after six months. The virus used in that simulation was more contagious and deadly than Covid-19 – though they are both respiratory viruses – but the example shows how all epidemics grow exponentially. So if you can catch an epidemic in the first few weeks, it makes all the difference.

The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.

y (GHS) Index – that scores countries on six dimensions: prevention, detection, response, health system, risk environment and compliance with international standards. No country scores perfectly on all six. China has detected and responded to this epidemic pretty well, though its health system is now stretched beyond capacity, but it is weak on prevention

How well is the US prepared?The US ranks high on the GHS index, but is still unprepared for a severe pandemic, should one happen. Malfunctioning coronavirus tests have frustrated public health labs and delayed outbreak monitoring. Supplies of masks, suits and other protective material for health workers are running low in the midst of a moderately severe flu season.

Since the creation of a much-needed public health emergency preparedness fund in the aftermath of 9/11, its budget and the public health functions it supports have been steadily reduced. This is the mentality that left the world vulnerable to the devastating 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa – that is, close the fire department and cancel the fire insurance as nobody’s house or factory has burned down lately. It’s time we learned that the bugs never stop mutating and crossing over to humans.

What exactly should we be doing faster?Fewer than one in three countries are close to being prepared to confront an epidemic, which leaves the vast majority of the world’s population vulnerable.

the millennial generation (those born since 1980) “has grown much more indifferent.” Less than 1 in 3 hold a similar belief about the importance of democracy.

the New York Times reports that while 43% of older Americans thought it would be illegitimate for the military to take power if civilian government was incompetent, only 19% of millennials agreed.

While millennials may be politically liberal in their policy preferences, they have come of age in a time of political paralysis in democratic institutions, declining civility in democratic dialogue, and dramatically increased anxiety about economic security.

Defenders of democracy and the rule of law must take their case to the American people and remind them of the Founders’ admonition that: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.

Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.

The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.

He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”

To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”

He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education

I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”

56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.

This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”

something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”

Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse

“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”

By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”

Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur

At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.

When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.

Mr. Obama also offered only tepid support to the most important political actor in progressive and Democratic politics: the labor movement.

In fact, he spent the last couple of years of his presidency pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade law vociferously opposed by the labor movement. Under President Obama, union membership has declined to 11.1 percent from 12.3 percent.

Models, it appears, do not substitute for the hard work of organizing and engaging voters in nonpresidential years; models that apparently drove nearly every decision made by the Clinton campaign are no substitute for listening to voters.

On the eve of the 2016 election, the president used the refrain: “We’ve seen America turn recession into recovery” and 15.5 million new jobs. Pointedly, he said, “Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling.”

The public’s reaction was stark from the beginning. People did not believe his view on the economy, and his approval ratings fell in Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2010 and in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2014 — the states that led the working-class move away from the Democrats.

Just as important, however, was the discontent brewing with the Democrats’ own base. Combined, the approximately 40 percent of minority, unmarried female and millennial voters disapproved of how President Obama was handling his job in 2010 and 2014, and many stayed home during the off-year elections. Mitt Romney carried white millennials by 7 percentage points in 2012.

The president will leave office with a rising approval rating near the same league of Ronald Reagan, an economy nearing full employment and real wages tipping up. Yet a majority of voters in the last election said the economy was the top issue in their vote.

We think voters were sending a clear message: They want more than a recovery. They want an economy and government that works for them, and that task is unfinished.

Young people are more optimistic than their rueful elders, especially those in the technology world. They are the anti-Cheneys, competitive but not triumphalist. They think of themselves as global citizens, not interested in exalting America above all other countries.“The 23-year-olds I work with are a little over the conversation about how we were the superpower brought low,” said Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed. “They think that’s an ‘older person conversation.’ They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”

many millennials are paralyzed by all their choices. He quoted Walker Percy’s “The Last Gentleman”: “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

He also noted that, given their image-conscious online life in the public eye, millennials worry about attaching themselves with a click to the wrong clique or hashtag: “It heightens the level of uncertainty, anxiety and risk aversion, to know that you’re only a bad day and half a dozen tweets from being fired.”

the biggest change in America is that “technology’s never had to shoulder the burden of optimism all by itself.”