The mystery of Millennial politics

[TeacherinExile]

(02-20-2017, 12:59 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 12:15 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(02-20-2017, 11:59 AM)TeacherinExile Wrote:

(02-19-2017, 01:28 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: I don't normally read articles on The Daily Beast, but as I was grazing headlines today, this one caught my eye: "The Screwed Generation Turns Socialist" 

The thrust of the article was about making distinctions among the generations with some supporting data.  It even gave a nod to Strauss & Howe.  The nascent embrace of socialism by Millennials has been revealed in previous surveys.  What truly riveted my attention toward the end of the article was its reference to the Millennials' less-than-steadfast commitment to liberal democracy, as I have seen that tendency corroborated by another academic study recently:

...Yet even given these factors, Republicans have their work cut out for them as the generational wheel turns. Certainly, to be remotely competitive, they must abandon socially conservative ideas that offend most Millennials. The GOP’s best chance lies with making capitalism work for this group, sustaining upward mobility and expanding property ownership. If we see the creation of a vast generation of property serfs with little opportunity for advancement, America’s future is almost certain to be redder, a lot less market-oriented, and perhaps a lot more authoritarian than previous generations have ever contemplated.

For those who gave The Fourth Turning a close reading, Strauss & Howe vaguely alluded to just such a prospect.  And, of course, the writer here means "redder" not as in red state, but as in cue the music and strike up "The Internationale."

Read further at this link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...alist.html

And as a follow-up to this post, especially as it relates to Millennial attitudes toward liberal democracy, and a detectable rising support for authoritarian alternatives:

"How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’"

Here are a few excerpts from the New York Times article published shortly after the election:

Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline...

...Support for autocratic alternatives is rising, too. Drawing on data from the European and World Values Surveys, the researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule [Hooah!] would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995.

That trend is particularly strong among young people. For instance, in a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same generational divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.

In the United States, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election by running as an antisystem outsider. And support for antisystem populist parties in Europe, such as the National Front in France, Syriza in Greece and the Five-Star Movement in Italy, is rising.

Of course, this is just one paper. And the researchers’ approach, like all data-driven social science, has limitations. It is only as good as the survey data that underlies it, for instance, and it does not take into account other factors that could be important to overall stability, such as economic growth...

Read further at this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world...cracy.html

---*yawn* Marx said that once capitalism had run it's course the Revolution would commence

Now tell us something we don't know

Actually, the writer of The Daily Beast column betrays a leftist slant to his interpretation, perhaps even wishful thinking.  I was being sarcastic in referring to the socialist hymn "The Internationale."  If you read the study by Yascha Mounk cited in the NYT article, it's a potential authoritarianism of the Right (military takeover) to which he refers.  Americans have little appetite for revolution, historically, notwithstanding our own war for independence.  A small contingent of radicals have tried twice in America to light the fires of socialist revolution in the 20th century, to no avail.  Indeed, they were stepped on (hard) by the powers that be.  The real political momentum now--both here and abroad--lies with right-wing populist movements, not the Far Left.

More to follow...

Here is an interesting rebuttal to the Daily Beast column cited above:

"Sorry Liberals. Millennials Aren’t Communists — Not Even Close"
https://thenationalpulse.com/commentary/...ommunists/

I have suggested before on the previous forum that there is a singular, deft, and bold stroke that either the Democrats or Republicans could have proposed before the last election, a fiscal stimulus that would have accomplished two objectives: 1) provide an immediate boost to GDP growth, perhaps even achieving the elusive "escape velocity" to lift our economy out of its "secular stagnation," and 2) weds a huge segment of the Millennial cohort to the political party brave enough to enact it.