The Young Left Is a Third Party - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...603232
politics culture progressive young leftist age generation Generation Z
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Americans 55 and up account for less than one-third of the population, but they own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s the highest level of elderly wealth concentration on record. The reason is simple: To an unprecedented degree, older Americans own the most valuable real estate and investment portfolios. They’ve captured more than 80 percent of stock-market growth since the end of the Great Recession.
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under the age of 40, for their part, are historically well educated, historically peaceful, and historically law-abiding
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“In the U.S, as in the U.K. and in much of Europe, 2008 was the end of the end of history,” says Keir Milburn, the author of Generation Left, a book on young left-wing movements. “The last decade in the U.K. has been the worst decade for wage growth for 220 years. In the U.S., this generation is the first in a century that expects to have lower lifetime earnings than their parents. It has created an epochal shift.”
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Young Americans demanding more power, control, and justice have veered sharply to the left. This lurch was first evident in the two elections of Barack Obama, when he won the youth vote by huge margins
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Obama won about 60 percent of voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primary. Bernie Sanders won more than 70 percent of under-30 voters in the 2016 primary, which pushed Hillary Clinton to the left and dragged issues like Medicare for All and free college from the fringe to the mainstream of political debate.
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Joe Biden polled at 2 percent among voters under 30, within the margin of error of zero. Nationally, he is in single digits among Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Yet Biden is the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, thanks to his huge advantage among old voters and black voters, who are considerably more moderate than younger Democrats.
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Bernie Sanders, by contrast, leads all candidates among voters under 30 and polls just 5 percent among voters over 65
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justice: Social justice, sought through a reappraisal of power relationships in social and corporate life, and economic justice, sought through the redistribution of income from the rich to the less fortunate.
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age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party. 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c
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It might be most useful to think about 2cyoung progressives as a third party trapped in a two-party system.
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they are a powerful movement politically domiciled within a larger coalition of moderate older minorities and educated suburbanites, who don’t always know what to do with their rambunctious bunkmates.
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age divides young leftists from both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party’s front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation.
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This group’s support for Medicare for All, free college, and student-debt relief is sometimes likened to a “give me free stuff” movement.
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every movement wants free stuff, if by free stuff one means “stuff given preferential treatment in the tax code.” By this definition, Medicare is free stuff, and investment income is free stuff, and suburban home values propped up by the mortgage-interest deduction are free stuff. The free stuff in the tax code today benefits Americans with income and wealth—a population that is disproportionately old.
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Medicare for All might be politically infeasible, but it is, taken literally, a request that the federal government extend to the entire population the insurance benefits now exclusively reserved for the elderly. That’s not hatred or resentment; it sounds more like justice.
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across ethnicities, many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that can be characterized as “political correctness” or “socialism.”
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While Medicare for All often polls well, its public support is exquisitely sensitive to framing. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the net favorability of eliminating private insurance or requiring most Americans to pay more in taxes—both part of the Sanders plan—is negative-23 points.
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Gen X is firmly pro-capitalist and Baby Boomers, who came of age during the Cold War, prefer capitalism over socialism by a two-to-one margin.
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Social Security and Medicare are, essentially, socialism for the old, but that’s not the same as converting them into Berniecrats.)
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“This is only the halfway point of an epochal change in Western politics following the Great Recession,” Keir Milburn says. The far right has responded with calls for xenophobic nationalism to preserve national identity, while the left has responded with calls for social democracy to restore socioeconomic justice
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the far right is ascendant, but they have no answer to the future because they’ve given up on the future. The young left has identified that the future of adulthood no longer feels viable to many people, and it’s putting together a different vision.”