The Youth of Today

Late December is usually marked in the media by year-end reviews, best-of lists and other filler prepared months ago, but occasionally it also provides space for more ruminative pieces that echo the zeitgeist. One that captured the attention this time round was John Burn-Murdoch's article in the Financial Times that used his trademark colourful charts to show that millenials in the UK and US were failing to become more conservative as they aged. While there is undeniably a trend here, I have a number of problems with the treatment, and the way that the idea has been taken up elsewhere in the media. Burn-Murdoch starts with a dodgy quotation, and even highlights its questionable origin: "“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden. Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative."

In fact, the frequently re-worded epigram originates with the French historian and statesman Francois Guizot, who was specifically addressing the relative attractions of republicanism and the constitutional monarchism he himself favoured. The original form is: "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head". Guizot was insisting that republicanism was a temporary aberration triggered by absolutism, whose historical role was to pave the way for a constitutional monarchy and the synthesis of conservative and liberal traditions. This was indeed the theme of one of his historical works, the Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles I à Charles II. As that subject should make clear, Guizot did not anticipate a recurrence of the pattern in every generation but a final settlement (revolution here meaning a return to order). The maturation he was speaking of was not that of the individual but of society as a whole - and the implication that France was merely adolescent in the eighteenth century reflected the belief that it had only then reached eligntenment - but his choice of the personal metaphor would make the idea eternal. 

The phrases's subsequent career in the service of reaction, and the attempts to find antecedents in John Adams and Edmund Burke, reflected first the expansion of democracy and then the emergence of socialism. In other words, it gets wheeled out when there is a threat to the established order and its purpose is to dismiss that threat by implying immaturity and a lack of realism. In Burn-Murdoch's case, the purpose is to justify the "rule" of the drift from liberal to conservative sentiments over an individual lifetime. But the idea that the older you get the less radical you become is not one that is proven by events, even if there is a clear correlation with political affiliation. Obvious examples in recent years would be the preference of older voters for the radical departures and risks of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the US. Going further back, the 18-24 year-old vote in UK general elections leapt from 24% for the Conservatives in 1974 to 42% in 1979 (higher than Labour), but this obviously cannot be explained by those slow-working material factors associated with a shift to the right such as home-ownership or parenthood.

The correlation of age and party affiliation is not fixed but reflects the way that parties mould themselves to societal groups that they think are more likely to be motivated to vote. Boris Johnson's "Fuck business" was a good example of his appreciation that the coalition he required to win in 2019 would necessarily include many social conservatives suspicious of big capital and resentful of the City of London. Likewise, Margaret Thatcher may have played many reactionary tunes in 1979, from union-bashing to fears of being "swamped" by immigrants, but she also appealed to the young and aspirational and associated their interests with her capital-friendly plans for deregulation and "freedom". It's easy to forget now, but one of the characteristics of the broader labour movement in the 70s was its age and over-familiarity, which contributed to the sense of exhaustion and the desire for change. Trade union leaders were mostly old and the Labour Party was still dominated by the wartime generation (Callaghan, Healey, Foot etc). Indeed, the left-right struggles of the time, from the GLC to Bennism, very clearly had a generational dimension to them. Labour looked, and presented itself as, the party of the old.

Burn-Murdoch doesn't believe the divergence from the "well-established rule" (which obviously can't be a rule after all) is due to either an age effect (the divergence is the disproof) or a period effect (the Tories current unpopularity). Rather he sees it as a cohort effect, i.e. "that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these". He highlights two factors: the turn to the left on economics and redistribution after the 2008 financial crisis, and the difficulty young people find in getting on the housing ladder. In subsequent discussions on Twitter, he noted that home-ownership is probably only having a marginal effect, which suggests the post-2008 shift in sentiment is more significant, but he also added another element to the mix: "to me this suggests the culture war politics of the last few years (predominantly an Anglophone phenomenon, actively disdained by many European countries) may be playing a bigger role than economics (similar experience in most countries)".

That incidental point about the difference between the anglosphere and continental Europe (where the cohort divergence doesn't appear to be happening) prompted others to suggest that the voting system might have a bearing. According to Rob Ford, "PR also enables voters to combine social liberalism with economic conservatism, but in Anglo-Saxon FPP or AV systems where the dominant right wing party is now socially and economically conservative they can't easily have this combo." This is an example of centrist groupthink. Having conceded that struggles over home ownership cannot account for the recent persistence of leftwing sentiment, and then using the difference of Europe to decouple the post-2008 reaction from that sentiment, we are left with the suggestion that our unreformed electoral system may in fact be misrepresenting the natural order of things: that "well-established rule". But if this were true, why did the young prefer the Conservatives in 1983 when the party was obviously both socially and economically conservative, having overseen the authoritarian turn that led to the 1981 urban riots and engineered a recession in the name of sound money? Was it just the Falklands effect?

One factor in the divergence of millenials that almost all commentators have agreed upon is the secular increase in graduates. Higher education is associated with a tendency towards liberal attitudes, even allowing for the class bias in university access and outcomes in terms of progress to professional careers. For example, the political economist Ben Ansell notes: "So the reason JBM is finding that millennials are not becoming more Conservative as they age (and I’m finding stability among Gen X) is that they are more likely to have degrees, which pushes them to the left and counters the aging effect." But within literally three sentences he admits that there has been a shift left among the young regardless of educational attainment. It could be, he surmises, that "the cultural attitudes of the university-educated class might have spilled over to the non-graduate young, in a way that bodes ill for culture warriors on the right". He offers no mechanism for how this "spilling-over" has taken place, nor does he explain why it didn't operate in previous decades. I can't help sensing the shadow of the rightwing narrative of universities as woke madrasas that are a danger to wider society.

James Marriott in The Times inevitably picked up on this vibe, explaining the difference between anglophone and continental European countries as the product of the Internet and the way that it has spread American progressivism, which reminded me of the fulminations against American cinema that were a staple of press commentary throughout the twentieth century. Marriott's attempts to defend European civilisation are quite comical, largely because of his ignorance of the subject. Thus he can claim that Michel Houellebecq is "mainstream" in France (yes, in the sense that Nigel Farage is mainstream in the UK), and that "To liberal English ears a centrist such as President Macron sounds as if he belongs much further on the right" (in fact, he's considered quite rightwing in France). Quoting Bruno Macaes, Marriott suggests that "Whereas liberalism, with its claim to universal moral principles, can be applied round the world, “woke” ideas, rooted in the specific racial atrocities of US history, are less easily exported." This is a peculiar perversion of the notion of American exceptionalism, and one that has been disproved by historians, such as Domenico Losurdo, who have thoroughly established the worldwide relationship of liberalism to slavery, racism and genocide.

The desire to blame the disaffection of the young on NIMBYism or the Internet or gerontocracy is just avoidance. Capitalism in the West has been failing since the 1970s. Globalisation and the shift to rentierism deferred the admission of this, but at the cost of increasing inequality as domestic wages were driven down in real terms and all generations, not just the young, were pushed into private rented housing. The vogue for a narrative that pits the generations against each other, or seeks to divide society by some cultural or values faultline, is an avoidance of class realities that spawns multiple myths that are easily disproved. Young people are still buying houses in their 20s, it's just that they are the well-off young who already have enough accumulated wealth to afford the deposit and well-paying jobs to service the mortgage. Governments haven't bent over backwards to serve the interests of pensioners ("The UK devotes a smaller percentage of its GDP to state pensions and pensioner benefits than most other advanced economies"). And there is no shortage of Red Wall towns where 1 in 10 identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or other.

Going back to Ben Ansell and his point that leftwing views seem to be prevalent among the young as a whole, one thing he highlights is that the major differences between the generations are about perception, notably in respect of fairness, equality and social mobility: "To the degree there is a ‘British dream’, the mostly retired think it exists and those entering the workforce think it’s a sham". This clearly reflects lifetime experience. The old are reluctant to believe that their cohort's arc (good job opportunities, affordable housing, asset appreciation, cheaper commodities etc) was exceptional: the product of a particularly benign convergence of socio-economic factors. Likewise, the young are reluctant to see the merits of capitalism after the veil was torn away in 2008 and as the payoff of climate change has become obvious. In other words, this is about the history of capitalism, not the atypical mindset of the young. The political implication is not that we need more competent facilitators of capitalism, but that we need politicians capable of looking beyond it. As the reaction to the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies showed, that isn't about to happen. I'd finally note that Francois Guizot became Prime Minister of France in 1847, and went into exile in England in 1848 with the outbreak of revolution.