Hi, my name's Tom. Welcome back to my
channel and, following the very warm
reception you gave my Society of the
Spectacle videos, a slightly more overtly
political analysis-y video today in
which I'm going to talk about two terms
which have been very much on my mind of
late:
the first being "millennial socialism" and
the second being "centrist dads". See, a few
months back, I was scrolling on Facebook
(something I try not to make too
much of a habit of) and, unsurprisingly
for that website, I was served with an
advert. This advert featured a
contemporary reimagining of Alexander
Rodchenko's famous design in which the
actor Lilya Brik jubilantly shouts the
word "Books!". The reworking I was served had substituted out Brik for a clearly 21st
century photo of a young woman in a
beanie hat and, in place of the word
books, was simply the word "socialism". I
was intrigued and, clicking the advert,
was taken to the website of the
"classically liberal" UK magazine The
Economist and to an article which led with
the headlines 'Millennial socialism: A
new kind of left-wing doctrine is
emerging. It is not the answer to
capitalism's problems'. Now, even if you
only put my videos on in the background
while doing the cooking—or, as one
commenter once admitted, use them as a
sleeping aid—you'll probably have
established by now that I'm both a
millennial and some form of socialist.
But, even if I wasn't, anyone who hasn't
noticed the rise in recent years of
young people in the UK, America and
likely elsewhere aligning themselves
with the politics of the left simply
hasn't been paying attention. Maybe I
hadn't been reading the right blogs
then or watching the correct YouTube
videos because, as far as I could recall,
this was the first time that I'd seen
these two words placed together in such
a way. I'd seen the connection made
between the unique challenges faced by
millennials and an interest in socialism
as a solution to them but I hadn't really
thought of the form of socialism being
embraced as all that different to those
that gone before;
a little more technological maybe but
still fundamentally rooted in redistributing power and wealth away from
elites and towards the working class.
Now, The Economist, of course, wasn't
trying to sketch out the contours of
some kind of generationally-unique form
of socialism. The prepending of the
adjective "millennial" here served, instead,
simply to invoke the various cultural
codes that have built up around
millennials. In the popular imaginary,
millennials are self-centered, incapable
of thinking beyond the immediate future
and downright unwilling to grow up. The
rhetorical gambit with framing
contemporary socialism as uniquely
millennial, then, is to suggest that it too
is naive, misinformed, childish even.
Generally speaking, I try to be cautious
of this kind of generational analysis
when it comes to politics and political
movements anyway. I know I made a video
about "millennialism" as seen through the
eyes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt a
while back but too often have I seen
fairly well-off millennials use the
severe economic and social challenges
faced by their generation on aggregate
as a way of presenting themselves as
equally oppressed. And, though a less
crisis-ridden housing market meant that
many working-class baby boomers were
able to purchase houses for a portion of
their wage that would be unthinkable now,
it's always seemed reductive to present
any entire generation as privileged or
to elide the very real existence of
left-wing boomers. Finally, our society
seems to love a binary and so
such discourses tend to entirely forget
the existence of Generation X or
Generation Z. Nevertheless, I couldn't
help but feel that maybe there was
something to this, particularly if we
view the specter of "millennial socialism"
alongside a (slightly dated) meme which
appeared on left-wing Twitter in the UK
a few years back: that of the "centrist
dad". The "centrist dad" meme essentially
worked on the same principle to that of
"millennial socialism" but
for a different audience. In popular
culture, dads might be lovable, they
might be incredible role models, they
might be the most doting of parents; they
are rarely, however, cool. And, at risk of
destroying a joke through trying to
explain it, the rhetorical flourish here
was that centrism, particularly when
exhibited by those who would like to
think of themselves as liberal or even
left-wing, was uncool. Then alongside this
was an intentionally gendered coding
which called out the often condescending
approach that centrists use to get
their points across, particularly to
those on their left. It likened it to
"mansplaining" the world from a position
of privilege, invoking the spirit of
Homer Simpson condescendingly sighing "oh
Lisa" in response to Lisa making an
incredibly well-informed and salient
point. Such a spirit has not been
entirely absent in the current debates
between candidates for the Democratic
nomination for President of the United
States with John Delaney, Joe Biden and
others basically running on the slogan
"careful now". The centrist dad meme
however is, like its millennial socialist
counterpart, primarily a rhetorical
device; not all centrists are dads and
vice versa. Neither this, nor millennial
socialism, then, are genuine attempts to
construct a serious analysis of
contemporary politics along generational
lines. Nevertheless, I've not been able to
shift the notion that they might provide
some insight. They didn't emerge from
nowhere, right? At least someone at some
point felt as though they reflected a
real experience they'd had. And so, I
wanted to explore them a little bit
further, to do a light bit of what we
might call discourse analysis and to
consider what we're really talking about
when we talk about "millennial socialism"
or "centrist dad"-ism.
So, as I discussed in my video on
millennials as seen through the eyes of
Tina Fey and Robert Carlock's Unbreakable
Kimmy Schmitt, the term 'millennial' was
first coined by William Strauss and Neil
Howe in their 1991 book Generations: The
History of America's Future.
Unlike the rhetorical devices discussed
a moment ago, Strauss and Howe's work does
attempt to construct a serious
socio-historical method based on
generational groupings. It posits that
history progresses in cycles of roughly
20 years in which one generation, with an
entirely different view of how the world
should be than the previous one,
struggles to up turn the status quo
while the older generation seeks to
maintain it. Eventually, the members of
the younger generation come to dominate
society and such an upturning occurs.
This newly-dominant generation may now
have the opportunity to reshape the
world in its own image, yet it won't be
long before its own children begin to
question the assumptions upon which such
reshaping relies. Strauss and Howe's
interpretation of history has been
heavily critiqued by academic historians.
James Bowman in the Times Literary
Supplement described it as akin to
'astrology' in its overly-deterministic
view of history which assumes that
everything that has happened was always
going to happen and thus ignorance to
the often accidental and avoidable
unfolding of events. At a historical
juncture like the present, however, such
a retelling of history can be somewhat
endearing. We are clearly going through a
period of great political upheaval; the
Overton Window—that is the gamut of
ideas which are currently being
discussed in mainstream political
discourse and on mainstream platforms—is
much wider than it has been in a long,
long time. There's a very real chance that
the Democratic nominee for President of
the United States will support some kind
of universal health care. In the UK, to
support the nationalization of key
industries is no longer entirely
beyond the pale. On the other hand, the
leaders of the mainstream right-wing
parties in both countries are pretty
much out and out white supremacists. A
few years ago such a scenario would have
been unthinkable. And, as Bowman's
allusion to astrology suggests, amid such
chaos, Strauss and Howe's generational
analysis can be reassuring, suggesting
that all of this has happened before and
will yet happen again without the world
exploding. To suggest that the 'resurgent
left', as The Economist puts it, is solely
a result of some kind of natural
recurring cycle, however, is to ignore the
fact that many of the key policy
proposals offered by Bernie Sanders,
Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
et al. are responses to historically-specific
material problems. In order to
understand why there has been such an
upswing in support for left-wing politics
and why this appears to be generational,
then, we need to consider both what
material circumstances might have
brought about such an upswing and why
some might have had different political
responses to them than others.
In seeking to consider where this insurgency of the
mainstream by left-wing politics might
have come from, it's perhaps not all that
shocking that I'm going to suggest we
begin by looking at the economic crisis
of 2008. The collapse of the financial
sector sent shockwaves through the
capitalist system and had many who
previously might have considered it, in
Mark Fisher's terms, 'the only viable
political and economic system' briefly
questioning its fundamental tenets. Yet
brief is the correct term here for, in truth,
what radical suggestions were presented
at that point were given fairly little
airing in mainstream discourse and
quickly withered away on the fringes of
popular debate. Bailout packages were
drawn up in financial capitals across
the world and order was restored.
Nevertheless, in a recent article for the
Financial Times, David McWilliams
wondered whether it was 'worth
considering whether the efforts of the
US
Federal Reserve [...] to avoid 1930s-style
debt deflation ended up spawning a new
generation of socialists'. It is beyond my
expertise or the time constraints of
this video to go too deeply into the
specifics but McWilliams argues that the
various bailout packages implemented
across the world in 2008 largely sought
to avert the total collapse of the
mortgage industry; the positive side
effect of this being that it kept a lot
of people from losing their homes who
otherwise might have. The subsequent
introduction of quantitative easing—in
which, to simplify in the extreme, "extra"
money is injected into the economy in
order to encourage spending—, however,
actually increased the value of property.
Thus, if you didn't own and weren't able
to afford a house before the crash, you
certainly weren't going to be able to
afford one afterwards. And, with more
tenants looking to rent, up when rents too.
McWilliams' argument is therefore that
the present rise in mainstream support
for left-wing politics is the chickens
of those bailout packages coming home to
roost. One might be able to see how such
a scenario could lead to a generational
divide. It's not all about housing but, to
stick with that as an example, it clearly
leads to a situation in which someone
who might have been able to buy a home
prior to 2008 might not be able to now.
Nevertheless, I'm not an economist and
this is already well beyond my expertise
so I think it'd be naive (or arrogant) of
me to suggest I could provide a solely
material rationale for our proposed
"millennial socialist" - "centrist dad"
schism. Instead, I think it might be more
useful to view this divide through an
affective lens, to think about how the
financial crisis and it's aftermath
might have changed the way that many
people think about capitalism and why
others might be less keen to do so. So, I
mentioned earlier that there is a
tendency in discussing friction between
millennials and baby boomers to almost
entirely forget the intermediary
generation; so-called Generation
X. And this is notable here because, it seems
to me, that many of the most prominent
centrist commentators and politicians
are not baby boomers but, instead, Gen
Xers. In the current race for the
presidential nomination with the
President of the United States, for
instance, Joe Biden may be an out-and-out
boomer but Kamala Harris and John Delaney
fall very much on the border between
boomers and gen-x while Beto O'Rourke
and Cory Booker are pretty firmly in the
latter camp. That isn't to say all (or even
most) centrists are Gen Xers but, and I'm
aware this isn't a particularly academic
way of going about things, it does seem
that many of the strongest advocates for
a more tempered response to rising
inequality, the climate emergency and the
rise of the far-right
are of this group. Looking over the
historical experience of those born
between the early 1960s and the early
1980s, I think we can begin to understand
why this might be the case. This is a
generation that came of age during the
Cold War during which capitalism was
presented as one and the same as
freedom—whatever that means—with the specter of
Soviet Communism presented as the only
and terrible alternative. With the fall
of the Berlin Wall came what Francis
Fukuyama anointed 'the end of history' and
the 'unabashed victory of economic and
political liberalism'. With capitalism
victorious, the so-called Third Way
politics of Bill Clinton in the US,
Tony Blair in the UK and Gerard
Schroeder in Germany compelled
mainstream left-wing political parties
across much of the world to end any and
all pursuit of major systemic change in
favour of a more "pragmatic" approach
which sought to promote progressive
social policies within a neoliberal,
free-market economic system. In my recent
episode of What the Theory on the work
of Michel Foucault, I discussed his
suggestion that any given historical
moment is subject to an 'épistémè' which
Foucault defines as 'something like a
world-view, a slice of history common to
all branches
of knowledge, which imposes on each one
the same norms and postulates, a general
stage of reason, a certain structure of
thought that the [people] of a particular
period cannot escape'. The épistémè in
which generation X would have developed
their political point of view, then, was
one in which mainstream politics was
becoming ever more certain that
neoliberal capitalism was here to stay
and that all was left to do was to
manage it, maybe give it a good
talking-to every once in a while but
certainly never consider any major
restructuring of it. As I said a moment
ago, I don't mean to argue here that
everyone who lived through such an era
would have swallowed its assumptions
whole in this way; again,
just as not all Millennials are
socialists, not all Gen Xers are
centrists. Yet, if your individual
experience of living in such an era, such
an épistémè,
allows you to gain a considerable
amount of economic, social and cultural
capital or maybe experience social
mobility, perhaps to the point where
you're now running for office or have a
considerable media platform, then you're
likely to think of it pretty favorably
and perhaps to be unwilling to see the
world through any other lens. In the wake
of the financial crisis, we've seen this
épistémè of managerial, technocratic
progressivism lose its grip on society
at large. Neoliberalism, even in its
"Third Way" form, has experienced what
Jurgen Habermas
refers to as a 'legitimation crisis' in
which a political system is seen to 'no
longer provide the economic-political
system with ideological resources, but
instead confront it with exorbitant
demands'. Whether it results in them
advocating for Green New Deals or Border
Walls and Brexit, a change in material
conditions has led to people seeking out
new lenses through which to understand
politics and the world; the reason being
that, when faced with the present levels
of inequality, the climate emergency or
corporations so powerful they can treat
governments with contempt,
the old form of centrist liberalism can
provide no useful understanding nor any
convincing solutions. And yet, if "Third
Way" neoliberalism has been bred into you
your entire existence and, if your entire
conception of the world and sense of
self-worth is built on the foundations
of that worldview, then to abandon it is
almost unthinkable, you can imagine that
one's brain would simply refuse to
process that information. So, it becomes
easier to view our present state of
political dissensus as a blip, a
societal temper tantrum and to talk
down oh so condescendingly to anyone who
suggests otherwise. In truth, a purely
generational analysis of the state of
political debate in the present,
whether predicated on "millennial
socialists", "centrist dads" or even "Gen X
centrists" is highly flawed. Yet I think
one can derive at least some sense of why
we may be so prone to trying to explain
things this way in the present by
recognizing quite how much the financial
crisis and it's aftermath has changed
the basic assumptions of our political
discourse. There may be little that is
particularly "millennial" about the
so-called "Millennial socialism" in terms
of it being embraced by one generation
any more than any other. However there
is more than one meaning of the word
millennium. The term was once used by
Christians to describe the return of
Christ to earth the which point he would
supposedly rule for 1000 years and has
since come to stand in for a great
moment in the near future where
everything will change, perhaps
positively perhaps otherwise. The
financial crisis itself, then, was a
millennium of sorts and that the
implosion of the entire capitalist
system and its current ailing afterlife
should have given birth to a millennial
socialism which offers a genuine, hope-filled
alternative in that sense should
be no surprise. On the whole, the
political right has recognized this
and largely abandoned their own attempts
to hold the
scorched earth of what was once called
the political centre. The real generational
divide on the left is less to do with
age and more between those who have
woken up to this fact and those who are
still clinging on to the now largely-
irrelevant maxims of the past. Thank you
very much for watching this video. Pretty
different to some of the stuff I've done
before, or maybe I'm thinking that it's
more different than it actually is. I
hope you've enjoyed it though. Let me
know what you think down below, if you
want to see more things like this (or
less, that's also useful to know if
you're just like "get on with the theory
videos"). And, yeah, if you've enjoyed this
and you're new round here then please do
consider subscribing, a thumbs up on the
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check out my Patreon, that's always much
appreciated, there's a little group of us
that are starting to gather around that
now and it's really nice. With all that out
of the way, however, thank you so much for
watching once again and have a great
week!
