What’s up with millennials?  Why do many appear to be enthralled with socialism?  Recently, these questions have been raised more than a few times.  Some polls seem to support the charge.  I tepidly weigh into the accusation knowing the limits of cloaking an entire generation in the same linen.  No doubt, at least publicly, socialism is experiencing a revival with new fans among late teens and twenty-somethings.

Generalizations, Generalizations, Generalizations

Right away, let’s draw back a bit by recognizing that assigning a trait to a large group of people is fraught with imprecision.  Of late, we’ve been into “generationism” since the heyday of the baby-boomers.  We stamp all the people of a given age – usually in ten year increments – with the same cookie-cutter traits.  It’s what you do when you want to boost your own opinions with extra peer company, or turn life into a cartoon.

The Boomers (born between ’46 and ’64) are forever associated with hippies (counterculture), peace (anti-War), free love (sexual license), rock n’ roll, and mind expansion (drugs).  A label was applied  that has only been made more deeply affixed by Hollywood types like Steven Spielberg as they rise up the ladder of cultural influencers.

Most recently, out he comes with The Post with a favorite bromide of today’s Boomers-of-influence: Nixon-hate and crusading journalists as the angels of truth.  Are we to be endlessly inundated with stories of Nixon in the same company with the Boston Strangler?  Are we to be forever afflicted with communication majors channeling Woodward and Bernstein?  I’m a boomer and find it quite tiring.

That’s the thing with this form of simplism on parade.  Once the image gets implanted, and reinforced thereafter, we get impressionable and educationally debased youth in subsequent years (dare I say “generations”) attracted to, and try living up to, a fabrication.  The boomer Left may have been trounced in ’72 when they championed McGovern, but they succeeded in occupying the cultural commanding heights to define for everybody the period and everyone in it.

We’er in stereotype territory now.   For now, all Boomers are crammed into and onto John Kesey’s bus, the quintessence of the myth.

The story about this birth cohort is more complicated than the Lefty-brewed legend.  Today, boomers are more likely to be conservative than liberal according to a 2015 Gallup survey. (3)  Who would have thunk it?  From DeadHeads to Reagan Republicans?  Some certainly made a transition.  Others didn’t have to move.  Remember, George W. Bush and Donald Trump are boomers.

A similar story is probably true with the millennials.  There exists a conservative streak within them.  Indeed, some studies show them to be more conservative than previous contingents when in high school and college. (4)  Could it be that the media-saavy Lefty element within the cohort hijacked the power to etch everyone in it?  It’s something worth pondering.

Socialism and the millennials

Still, two glaring stats stare in the face: millennials overwhelmingly support gay marriage (74%) and pot legalization (71%).  (4)  Apparently, buggery as the conjugal act for marriage and a mom strolling an infant through a park with engulfing pot smoke aren’t disturbing scenarios for three-quarters in the poll.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since being young carries with it a near biological imperative to incessantly ask the question, “Why not?”  It’s the universal adolescent response to the parental “No”.

By so doing, they push the bounds of acceptability to the next level.  Some of it survives as greater sexual license and pot legalization, while other excesses wait for another day.  Another day will arrive that further inches out the limits.  The process then continues.  And it all stems from the adolescent predilection for “Why not?”

Adolescents don’t get it, human nature that is.  If the reasoning requires more than 2 sentences, they huff and roll their eyes.  They haven’t been around long enough for the grind of personal experience to wear on them.  As such, the concept of human nature – if it occurs to them at all – is about as understood as retirement planning.  How can they appreciate something [human nature] if they can’t acknowledge its existence?  Holes like this in their understanding makes it easy to embrace inanities –  such as 40 or so genders or marriage encompassing same-sex carnal affection.   After all, why not?

The stats, coupled with the naiveté,  might be a troubling sign of an enthusiasm for the refashioning of social mores to the dictates of juvenile reasoning, while extending it into early adulthood and the Bernie campaign.  The old morality is an impediment and socialism and Bernie provide the wrecking ball.  There’s ample room in the juvenile vision for embellishing the powers of the state to blast through the last vestiges of the parental “no”.

The psychological tic for a kinder-and-gentler socialism gets the  reinforcement of the lefty myth-making machine redolent in their media and the 12-16 years of their schooling’s curriculum.

I risk generalizing an anecdote but the parallel is too obvious.  According to Forbes (7/27/2017 issue), Shane Smith’s Vice Media website is popular among millennials.  It’s online offerings include such juicy tidbits as a story that includes masturbation as one way to juice up your life while taking the “Dry January” sobriety pledge.    The home page includes other offerings such as “Can a Gay Veteran Latina Sheriff Get Texas to Vote?”, “Vinny from ‘Jersey Shore’ is a secret climate change nerd”, and “Anti-Muslim bomb plotters can’t stack jury with Trump voters, judge rules”.  I don’t know about  Vinny’s acumen for meteorology, but I suspect the large number of millennial clicks shows Vice hitting the ideological sweet spot of a sizable base of twenty-somethings … while Vinny is caught up in facile, chic thought. (13)

The cultural messaging is compounded by the same boomer mandarins of pop culture, like Spielberg and a good chunk of the teaching profession.  An underlying and unspoken theme throughout is the view of the state as the guarantor of a person’s highest “potential” – presently “potential” being synonymous with “license”.  It’s the core premise of progressivism from its 19th century birth to the present day, and an unspoken lefty assumption in discussions weightier than Facebook gossip.

The goal is ambitious and requires a reformulation of America’s traditional social and political organization.  Many founding ideas were seen as obstacles to be skirted along the way to an empowered state plowing a path to personal actualization.  Josh Lerner, Harvard Econ professor, put it aptly when he recently wrote,

“They [progressives] thought that the state should not be constrained by republican measures to prevent too much action, but rather be guided by the best of modern science (natural and social) and capable of acting in whatever ways were necessary.”  (5)

Their’s is not a limited-government vision, or one firmly planted in popular sovereignty.  It’s the elevation of a new aristocracy, not one fixed to family of birth but to the possession of paper credentials.  The credentialing is in the form of diplomas, degrees, and certificates that are distributed through the K-16 schools.

It is there that we find the implantation of the hidden notion of state-sponsored personal actualization.  The outlook of the 19th century progressives is the unspoken assumption in our schools’ History texts.  It’s the stuff of teachers’ training and education.  It’s the thing lurking in the mental background of most people, let alone many millennials.

The compatibility of progressivism with socialism was immediately acknowledged by many of its early purveyors.  John Dewey, the renowned progressive education philosopher,  could move seamlessly from the American Socialist Party to the Progressive Party.  While rigid class dialectics and violent revolution would repel him and others from the communism of Karl Marx, the rejection of classical individualism and natural law would leave them swimming in the same political soup with their more violent brethren.  These early practitioners knew, and lived, the inherent amity between the two.

The cognitive ground has been prepared for many of a generation to unthinkingly express fondness for something only vaguely understood.  To them, socialism is synonymous with “cooperation”.  Cooperation is the antidote to an allegedly toxic individualism.

It’s ironic, though, that the individualism of self-reliance is derided  while the individualism of expansive moral license gets pride-of-place.  Square that circle.

The outlook isn’t leavened by personal experience of government evils or of overpowering international events bringing to light socialism’s failures – the Cold War being another topic to snooze though in History class – or of the consequences of vice.  It’s easy for socialism to occupy that space in the mind where warm and fuzzy “togetherness” is located and faces no competition from anything more real.

Pop media and curriculum as accomplices

Socialism’s identification with “togetherness” had the schools as an accomplice for about 4 decades.  Furthermore, the schools as accomplice also had an accomplice in the popular media.  In this way, the whole crowd of adolescents-to-teens is covered, from valedictorian to dropout.

Those that remained at their desk through the 12-year gauntlet were shaped by the curriculum with media reinforcement.  Parents moved into the realm of background noise.  Those voluntarily or involuntarily exiting prior to commencement at least got the banalities through pop media spin.

It’s a form of comprehensive mind-shaping.  The pop culture molding is found in more than tv shows like The Big Bang, and even the older Sex in the City, Friends, etc.  It’s the DNA of modern commercials.  One prominent theme can be summarized as girls, girls, girls, and more girls: girls as John Wayne wannabes, girls as Einstein, girls as Thomas Edison, girls as John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame), girls as Bruce Lee, girls as Richard Petty.

The NFL and MLB are equally enthused about casting girls into their sponsored activities.

What’s with all the girl-mania?  Well, honestly, all I have is a suspicion.  I reckon that it has much to do with the incessant equation of “disparity” with “oppression”.  A statistical difference between the sexes is presumed to be prima facie evidence of “prejudice”.  Fewer girls as  race car drivers must be due to the heavy foot of misogynistic social pressure.  A weak hypothesis to be sure, but it certainly and instantly is transformed into fact in minds weaned on nothing else.  For the young, the message’s constant drumbeat must be proof of a “reality” that demands vast cultural reversal.  Thus we have all the pop media brandishing of girl-mania as the corrective.

Repeat the story often enough and a view of reality begins to anchor.  Prior to the crusade, physical and athletic roles were assigned to men and boys, reflecting the understanding that estrogen isn’t an athletic enhancing substance.  Testosterone works better.  Don’t let the fact that boys have more of it stand in the way of the brave new world of unrelenting equality.  Ours is an age of make-believe, but not realized as make-believe.  For the poor millennial, it’s the only storyline they’ve ever known.  Nurture trumps nature anytime in the deep synapses of their brains.

The stage is set for the resurrection of socialism.  Once our hypothetical social contrivances are blamed, no better opportunity for state aggrandizement can be evinced than to turn over preexistant disparities to the civil courts, law enforcement, and innumerable taxpayer-funded programs and their administrators.

Not be outdone in the zeitgeist category, the private sector jumps in with both feet.

What the media-industrial-complex has accomplished, the schools bolster with teachers, curriculum, and textbooks.  The classroom becomes the place for taking the hasty supposition and enveloping it with a facade of reasonableness.  Girls and women are injected wherever possible, even if it means a displacement of eminent men.  Out goes Henry Bessemer to make room for Mary Wollstonecraft in World History texts.

History and Civics instruction makes it easy for the under-aged to dispense with obstacles to the disparity-free nirvana, such as the Constitution.   Let’s just have the thing “evolve”.  It’s meaning must be allowed to change with the times, thus placing a premium on mixing interpretation with social engineering.  The old framework is effectively interpreted out of existence.

The treatment is common in many widely used Civics and History texts.  For instance, one of the hot sellers in McDougal Littel’s stable of textbooks for high school U.S. History classes is The Americans.

It devotes an entire chapter to the “The Living Constitution”.  You know, “living” as in “organism” as in “evolution”.  The authors play up the Constitution not for its steadfast adherence to universal truths.  Universal truths be damned.  The document’s virtue, they insist, lies in its ability to meander with contemporary fads of thought.

I’m not certain if that is a virtue or a vice.  Hitler’s dictatorship relied on an “evolving” interpretation of the emergency provisions of the Weimar Constitution (Article 48).  No need to waste time and effort writing another one; just clear the path to the better world by interpreting the present one out of the way.  Instantaneously, a constitution becomes a non-constitution.  Problem solved.

Is this the meaning of “education” that comes from patronizing pundits and self-satisfied millennials as they applaud themselves for being the “most educated generation in history”?  Pew Research backs up the assertion … in a superficial sense.  More millennials – men and woman – are getting bachelor’s degrees than ever before. (7)

“Education” connotes improvement is some sense.  Where’s the improvement?  For some college graduates, they got it.  For many others, maybe the bulk, I’m not so certain.

It appears that millennials are good at getting credentials, but what does the paper represent?  It represents a society that values paper, even though the paper may not reflect superior knowledge, wisdom, or skill.  It might be more indicative of perseverance in hoop-jumping, and along the way getting some partisan rhetoric deeply ingrained, K through PhD.

Looking at the college end of the education track, fields that might not lend themselves to ideological infection – most majors outside of the humanities and the Social Sciences – are popular among millennials.  Don’t be so sanguine with this happenstance.  The general ed requirements for all  students have gone through a metamorphosis.  For instance, the Western Civilization course is no longer a centerpiece.  Even History majors can avoid the course, or its equivalent, entirely. (10)

Instead, balkanized and hyper-opinionated offerings by theme, region, and period populate the course catalog.  The old Western Civ 2-semester survey course is eligible for the endangered species list.  There’s few avenues for a comprehensive, serious treatment of the civilizational basis for the international order.  Without Adam Smith and Blackstone, where would GATT and Interpol be?  For the modern professoriate, the question is shrugged off with the admonition, “All cultures are alike”.  For the college millennial, they won’t know any better because many don’t know anything else.

Education?  What education?

Once in the grip of an identity-  and oppression-laced curriculum, not much will be expected of the matriculant.  College is easier to slide through than ever before.  The more-than-average student devotes less time in preparation for class and less is assigned once in class.  College isn’t what it used to be. (11)

The preconditions are present for the younger tranche of the population to cuddle with the notion of the omnicompetent state.  The ubiquity and intensity of a singular message takes its toll.

And there’s more.

Modern life

The allies in the mind-shaping effort are manic interconnectivity, re-urbanization, and a media octopus (maybe a centipede is a more appropriate metaphor) of many venues but homogeneous in outlook, at least for the young enthusiast in pop fashion.  The nexus is a womb of mind formation.

The cellphone is a wondrous thing.  About the size of a modern voltmeter, it connects you to the universe of friends, friends, and more friends, and an ocean of info/entertainment.  The possibilities are endless.   Why need a wife if a holographic projection of a sex kitten will do the trick?

Frivolity begins to replace deep thought.  The scene of being alone in a study with a great book is swamped by Facebook strategies to keep you glued to the screen.  Old email can’t keep up.  Add Twitter and Instagram to Facebook and you have the nuclear triad of avant-garde social engagement.  They are instantaneous, awesome, and addictive.  Who has time for old Aristotle, Augustine, or Nietzsche?  Who has any interest in such things when Mary and Jim’s cavorting in Soho nightclubs awaits?

Pop thought goes viral with interconnectivity as the accelerant.  But beyond the dabbling in gossip and personal lives, there’s no there there.  All that remains of anything resembling serious thought is the fuzzy progressive platitudes from an incoherent public school education.  But who cares?  Aren’t we having fun?

All the digital linkages work best in the cities.  It’s there, in its density of cell towers, that a car with a dashboard-turned-tablet works best.  Furthermore, who needs a pickup for hedge clippings for residences without landscaping?  Cement doesn’t need trimming.  The whole transportation thing can be boiled down to the occasional use of a Prius, or anything that can scoot in a bike lane.

For the professional and single millennial, the college dorm life can be simulated in the gentrified neighborhoods of our inner cities.  It can be communal, while according easy access to choice seats for Miranda’s “Hamilton”.  Professional millennials and hangers-on are congregating in these precincts in increasing numbers.  (12)

Renting a brownstone in a gentrified neighborhood with your buds has an appeal for a youth weaned on The Big Bang.

So long as the city maintains a protective cocoon of cops, firemen, EMT’s, parks, jogging/biking paths, roads, and abundant entertainment and utilities, who cares about the Second Amendment, self-reliance, debates about the role of government, and any thought of the government’s immense capacity to eviscerate the soul?   They’re comfortable with the government as a surrogate mommy and daddy.  Combined with little understanding of its ability to do harm, urban lifestyles reinforce a coddling view of government.  The hardy individualist of the farm and suburban diy’er is replaced by the weekend hiker and wine soirée enthusiast.

For these people, why not socialism?  If “socialism” seems too provocative of a word, wait, Democratic Party talking points will provide a soothing palliative.

The Embrace of a New Faith – Environmentalism

One of those palliatives is encapsulated in two words: “the environment”.  It has a special meaning beyond the simple natural surroundings.  In the hands of our lefty partisans, the word is defined by a worship of nature, the singular purpose of preservation, economics as human malevolence, and man-caused apocalyptic climate change.  The definition cries out for state-empowered social engineering.  Now we’re into the wheelhouse of the Elizabeth Warrens and Bernie Sanderses of the world.

The millennial was raised in the spectral glow of Earth Day.  The chief organ of propaganda was the schools, with an assist from Hollywood.  Every April these kids were subjected to almost anything labeled “sustainable”: solar powered cookie-baking, solar-powered everything, and recycling, recycling, and more recycling.

After the kids leave the classroom, they can head over to the multiplex for further reinforcement with warm and fuzzy cartoon characters.

It’s not a well-balanced approach to a serious subject.  The treatment pre-ordains a bias that these kids will carry into adulthood.  Complications  and consequences are skipped in favor of immediate activism.

As a veteran teacher of a high school and college classroom (29 years), students are frequently left speechless when confronted with a few basic queries about their recycling activities.  Almost every year a student from the recycling club will approach me with the request to place a recycling box in my room.  Here’s a typical exchange:

Student: Mr. Graf, can we put a box in your classroom?

Teacher: Yes, if you can answer a few basic questions.  First, why recycle paper (or cans, whatever)?

S: It’ll help clean up the earth and reduce the need for dumps.

T: How much does it cost to recycle the stuff?

S: Uh, I don’t know.

T: How much energy and resources like chemicals are required?  Are you creating another environmental problem by having to dispose of new industrial chemicals?

S: Uh, I don’t know.  But the paper will break down into the water table if we throw the stuff into the dump.

T: How do you know that it beaks down like that?  Can dumps be designed to prevent it?  Is the real danger from stuff that doesn’t break down or stuff that does?

S: I don’t know how to answer those questions.

T: If you can’t answer those questions, why are you asking me to do it?

S: Okay Mr. Graf, we’ll go to the next classroom.

The same interrogatory would be at work if a person was asked to buy solar panels.  While at a Lowe’s in California a few years ago, I met a solar panel salesman (a millennial) at a table.  He told me of all the government-financed incentives for the things.  I responded with a few questions.

• How long do the things last before they have to be replaced?
• Is solar power cost effective without the subsidies?  Is there a limit to the amount of energy that can extracted from the sun?
• If I Iower my utility bill with them, how is that paid for?  Who must pay for me to get a cheaper electricity bill?  Is the system like a Ponzi scheme that will crash if everyone did it?
• Would we be better off building more nuclear power plants, investing in clean coal, or designing better fossil fuel plants?  Are we making these more realistic options unlikely by forcing and bribing scarce resources into what might be a dead end?

As before, few credible answers were forthcoming.  What happened to the hippie ideal of “question authority” as these notions were implanted in their young minds?  Is something like a healthy skepticism so alien to them, other than the proverbial hostility to the parental “no”?  It might be too much to ask in the case of people who don’t know enough to be able to ask hard questions.  With Bambi rolling around in your head, disturbing thoughts of consequences and trade-offs won’t arise.

As older consumers and entrepreneurs, they’ll frequent the “sustainable” craft brewery and try to power their enterprises with windmills and the sun.  The customer base for the Prius isn’t a rancher or construction worker.

Corporate America tailors their messaging to the perceived interests of the upcoming band of consumers, people who were nurtured on world citizenship and greenie causes.  Believe me, businesses have heavily invested in market research.  They know how to sell to millennials by knowing what appeals.  In their case, togetherness and environmental purity work well.

In the end, we have more horsepower in the drive for an expansive and coddling state.  The average millennial might be more open to the government molding a “better” human being.

But I leave this topic with another question: How can better human beings be created by other human beings who aren’t better?  The occupant of a government office isn’t a person free of our failings.  All too often, it’s just another human being with another set of biases and unfounded assumptions, but with the power to make us live a certain way.

So, What are We Left With?

The average millennial is a river fed by many tributaries.  Nothing unique here.  Only this generation has too many tributaries [influences] that push them into the arms of the Democratic Party and lefty causes.  Their media and schooling bias their judgments.   The lifestyle reinforces the predilections.

To be a conservative, defender of traditional marriage, opponent of pot legalization, while possessing a healthy apprehension about environmentalism, a millennial  must be willing to stand upwind in a cultural gale. There are such millennials, which causes me to draw back against over generalization.  Yet, signs are abundant of a lean away from scripture, tradition, limited government, as they entertain a tolerance of more moral license.

Anybody mindful of the trend will have their work cut out for them.  Well, life might do the trick.  Settling down, having kids, mortgage payments, and the approach of the peak earning years may do more to prove the foolishness of those prior decades.  Kids will do a lot to dispel the earlier fantasies.  It might even push many of them into a pew.

Let’s pray for life.

RogerG

Bibliography and references:

1. “This Is Why Millennials Favor Socialism: They realized that the ‘trickle-down economics’ theory didn’t work.”, Sean Vazquez, HuffPost, 4/17/2017,   https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-is-why-millennials-favor-socialism_us_58ed0feae4b0145a227cb8d3
2. “Why So Many Millennials Are Socialists”, Emily Elkins and Joy Pullman, The Federalist, 2/15/2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/15/why-so-many-millennials-are-socialists/
3. “U.S. Baby Boomers More Likely to Identify as Conservative”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup News, 1/29/2015,   http://news.gallup.com/poll/181325/baby-boomers-likely-identify-conservative.aspx
4. “The Conservative Millennial: No Longer a Myth”, Chase Paulson, Capital Research Center, 10/25/2017,   https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-conservative-millennial-no-longer-a-myth/
5. “Understanding The Progressives: And the Transformation of the American Political System”, Josh Lerner, Counterpoint, University of Chicago, http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/archives/winter2011/progressives.html
6. “Education or Indoctrination? The Accuracy of Introductory
   Psychology Textbooks in Covering Controversial Topics
   and Urban Legends About Psychology”, Christopher J. Ferguson,  Jeffrey M. Brown, and Amanda V. Torres, Current Psychology,  ISSN 1046-1310, 2016.
7. “Millennials On Track to be the Most Educated Generation to Date”, Pew Research Center, 3/17/2015,  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/19/how-millennials-compare-with-their-grandparents/ft_millennials-education_031715/
8. “Bachelor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2014-15”, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016,  https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.asp?current=yes
9. “Decline of ‘Western Civ’?”, Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, 5/19/2011,  https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/19/national_association_of_scholars_report_finds_no_mandatory_western_civilization_courses_at_top_universities
10. “THE VANISHING WEST: 1964 – 2010: The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American Undergraduate Curriculum”,
    Media

    National Association of Scholars, May 2011,   https://www.nas.org/images/documents/TheVanishingWest.pdf

11. “A Lack Of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ In College”, NPR staff, NPR, 2/9/2011,  https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift
12. “Why So Many Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Cities”, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 4/4/2017,   https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-everyone-leaving-the-city/521844/
13. “I Tried Out a Bunch of Natural Highs to Make Dry January Less Boring: From floating to masturbation to self-flagellation—there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t contain alcohol and allegedly gets you high”, Justin Caffeir, 1/18/2018, Vice,   https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paqw8b/i-tried-out-a-bunch-of-natural-highs-to-make-dry-january-less-boring.  For the website’s homepage, just strip away the article portion of the address.
14. “America’s Shrinking Middle Class: A Close Look at Changes Within Metropolitan Areas”, Pew Research Center, 5/11/2016,   http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/