Why Are Young People so Progressive?
And why aren't they becoming more conservative with age?
For a lot of folks reading that headline, they might think the answer is a no-brainer. Social media, liberal indoctrination at schools, the libtard Main Stream Media, and hatred of “righteousness” are probably the things I hear older, more conservative people complain about the most.
But all of these things fall short of a good explanation, not just because they aren’t true, but because they all make one terrible assumption. These arguments all rely on the idea that anyone who disagrees with the holder of these views must be incapable of thinking for themselves. If a person hears progressive information, they aren’t capable of disputing it, and will inevitably become a brainwashed commie.
I could go through point by point and disprove all of these assertions. I could even highlight how a conspiracy gets birthed in the darkest corners of the internet, finds its way to a blogger, then on to talk radio or Tucker Carlson, and then becomes the collective MAGA consciousness (Will Sommer is probably the best at this if you want to see the receipts). But, I don’t really want to do this, and I don’t think you really want me to do this either. The truth is that every ideology has its brainwashed loyal soldiers, not just political ideologies. Rather than try to adjudicate a “both sides” squabble, I want to offer a different, more reasonable explanation—one which doesn’t rely on the sanctimonious notion that anyone who looks at the world differently is just too dumb to question what charlatans tell them. These people definitely exist, but the humans I meet generally tend to be too smart for this explanation to be true writ large.
Instead, I have been thinking about the way the changing macroeconomic order has, or may have, created a world ripe for progressivism.
For at least as long as I’ve been alive there has been a common argument about progressive politics, used so often it became something akin to a political proverb. “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old you don’t have a brain.” It reflects the idea that young people always become more conservative once they get jobs and kids and mortgages and churches and PTAs and stuff. I’m not a political historian, so I don’t know how true this axiom is, or whether it really applied to any generation besides that which grew up in the 60s and 70s. But, since it is such accepted wisdom, I’m gonna suppose that it is correct. Or, rather, that it was correct.
Now, as Millennials begin to enter their 40s, there is no indication they are en masse becoming more conservative. Surely some are, but as a generation they remain far more progressive than their older cohorts. Why is this? My argument is that it isn’t necessarily about the kids themselves, but it’s about the new and vastly different world the kids grew up in. This is not, by any means, the only explanation—I wrote a book about why the distinctly American brand of Christianity is also causing a rejection of both conservatism and Christianity by young folks—but the more I think about it, the more I am drawn to the idea of this new economic world also playing a major factor.
What is so new and different about the macroeconomic order of things?
In short, for the first time in the history of humanity, humans have produced enough to go around.
The best argument for this comes from Brad DeLong’s new book Slouching Towards Utopia. DeLong is way smarter than I am, and he goes into quite a lot of detail about the macroeconomic environment I am discussing. The short synopsis of his book is that the snails pace of technological advancement for most of human history meant that being human was pretty much a miserable endeavor. Then, in about 1870, there was a sudden boom in technological advancement. From 1870 to 2010 technological progress was greater than in the entire known 8,000 year history of civilization combined. Because of these technological advancements the economic pie became, for the first time in our species history, large enough for every human to have a slice.
The more I think about this argument, the more I find myself circling back to political psychology. I have only read part of DeLong’s book so far, but I don’t think the interaction of human psychology and politics is an area he really explores. I think that humans finally having enough to go around is leading to more progressivism in the developed world.
For most of human history there simply was not sufficient technology to sustain all human life. Survival of the fittest was the only way humanity really knew how to operate. Taking enough for me meant in all likelihood that there just wasn’t enough left for you. The world was defined and dominated by takers—empires and dynasties that took what they needed for their people, and didn’t bother if the others starved to death. In 1870 it all changed. The world began to be defined by makers and soon there was enough made for everyone.
“Enough” is a pretty simple economic concept. Measure the amount of stuff a human needs to live a decent life, then multiply it by the population.
Stuff x Population = Enough
Because this is a singular point in development it must also be a singular point in time. There isn’t great global economic data until recent years, and even this is insufficient because measuring output from developing countries is hard to do. But I wonder if the political psychology of Millennials and Gen Z give us the answer.
Think about it this way: at some point in the developmental years of Millennials, humanity reached “enough”, and the necessity to take what I need before you take it ceased to exist. Macroeconomic conditions in the United States meant that Americans could were now free from the “Devil of Malthus”, as DeLong puts it, and getting what I need no long entailed the possibility that you would not have what you need.
I don’t know exactly when this happened. I would say it had not happened in the 60s or 70s. 1964 is when Lyndon Johnson started the war on poverty and dreamt up his “Great Society”, so it certainly seemed like there wasn’t enough during this time. The stagflation of the 70s had people really panicked that they wouldn’t be able to get enough—something that ended up making inflation worse. Maybe enough didn’t even happen in the 80s because the threat of the Soviet Union made people feel like there was not enough.
Before enough, macroeconomic events changed the world dramatically. What the United States looked like after stagflation and after the fall of the Soviet Union was quite different than it looked before them. But then, at some point in this time period, humanity—at least Americans—reached enough. Millennials and Gen Z have had their development stifled by more major crises than just about any other generation. The Dot Com bubble bursting, 9/11 and the war on terror, the 2008 financial collapse, the European debt crisis, the collective defunding of public pensions and higher education, the growing mental health crisis, the Covid pandemic, and January 6th. Granted, none of these were as large in scale as WWII or the Great Depression, but the United States is going on a run of over two decades playing a game called “how bad can we screw young people?”
At the other end of each of these events, life looked pretty much the same as it did going into them. That isn’t the case for any other past crisis. Perhaps this deserves a book of its own, but I don’t want to make this post quite that long so I won’t go into detail for each past crisis. The short of it is that the world was much different coming out of various historic crises, but beginning sometime after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world passed through successive crisis and didn’t really look a whole lot different from the beginning of each crisis. Public Policy in the United States is still more or less just arguing about marginal changes to the tax, regulatory, and legal framework developed in the 80s.
I think this is evidence that during this timeframe is when technological advancements had finally helped Americans reach enough. The world didn’t have to look different because people didn’t have to fight each other to get enough.
Perhaps this created a collective change in psychology that heavily impacted the developmental years of Millennials and Gen Z. We were the first generation to not have to worry about whether there might be enough—of course there would be, for our entire formative lives there always had been. I wonder if it is this psychological development that explains why Millennials and Gen Z are not getting less progressive as they age?
Realizing that America had enough opened up the door, for the first time, to focusing on making sure everybody had access to the economic surplus. Throughout so much of history the door was locked and guarded by the elite. Even in democracies, like the first 200ish years of the United States, the dominant political forces were deployed to help make sure the elite maintained their eliteness. But this is no longer a necessity. With enough to go around, why not spread it around? Why not reshape policy and redeploy political forces to help spread around the excess that has been accumulated since the United States reached enough a few decades back?
Younger Americans are not becoming more conservative with age because hearts and brains no longer have to conflict—we have enough. Now, hearts and brains can work together, and doing so can get everyone access to the enough that has been created. Perhaps this also explains the correlation between education and progressivism as well. Brains now strengthen the cause of the heart rather than fight against it.
Younger Americans are not becoming more conservative because they don’t need to be. They can have enough, and still get enough for others. I am beginning to think this collective psychological realization is what has made the rising generations so much different than those that came before them; and why they remain quite progressive, even as they begin to reach middle age.
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