There is something deeply wrong with young people in this country.
There’s something bizarre going on in the New York City mayoral election. People don’t actually love Zohran Mamdani’s policies, but he’s likely to win anyway.
A poll released on Tuesday found 58% of respondents feared that making buses free could make them into roaming homeless shelters, while 33% believe all fares should be eliminated. Thus, by a 25% margin, people believe that Mamdani’s free bus idea is incredibly stupid.
His proposal to get rid of the city’s gifted and talented program is wildly unpopular. 64% of the same voters who are giving a plurality of their vote to Mamdani believe that gifted and talented programs should be expanded. Only 21% believe that it should be scaled back in early grades.
When it comes to repealing bail reform laws and returning to the bail system before 2019, 55% want to go back to the system before “no cash bail.” Only 29% support the current program, which is what Mamdani backs.
Mamdani’s policies are not that popular among voters.
So why is he popular?
- He’s running against lousy competition. Andrew Cuomo is a particularly bad candidate.
- Generation Z. Generation Z is the most Left generation by a country mile. It is not close. They are far to the left of the general population on every single issue. The bizarre idea on the Right that Generation Z is going to carry us forward into a conservative future is not supported by any hard evidence.
In the latest Suffolk poll on the New York City mayoral race, in which Mamdani is leading Cuomo 44% to 34%, Mamdani trails among all voters age 45+; among voters aged 35 to 44, he runs ahead by about 23 points against Cuomo, but among voters who are 18 to 34, Mamdani leads by a whopping 61 points.
That means he has support in the high 70s among people 18 to 34 voting in New York City, according to that poll. And this is not a rarity. Polls of young people show that they are wildly to the left of their forebears on virtually every single issue right now.
What is going wrong? Why are young people like this now?
There’s always been an explanation that young people are naïve; they don’t pay taxes; they’re not ushered into an actual real life where they’re participating in the normal institutions of daily activity. Thus, they can kind of live in “airy fairy” land, where everything is handed to them on a silver platter.
There’s truth to that. We have delayed adulthood for young people all the way into their thirties.
But there’s something else going on, too: Young people have been told that they never have to enter adulthood. They have been told that everything ought to be handed to them, and that when things are not handed to them, it’s because they themselves have some sort of deep, abiding illness, or society itself is victimizing them in some way.
All the things that would normally usher you into a more mature view of life — getting married, having kids, holding a job, and paying taxes — are things Generation Z is apparently not interested in doing and doesn’t believe that they will ever do.
This is not because Gen Z is some sort of truly victimized generation in all the history of all the humans on all the planet. The idea that American Generation Z is somehow the greatest victimhood class we’ve ever had is insane and bizarre. In fact, more Generation Z people hold degrees than millennials and Gen Xers did at their age. Generation Z will be the largest and richest generation in American history within just ten years.
So what’s going wrong? What exactly is happening?
We have to understand that there is a radical thing that is happening with young people — on both the Left and the Right.
On the Left, there is a grievance culture that is resulting in revolutionary thinking, and on the Right, a grievance culture that is resulting in a different kind of revolutionary thinking. There’s some horseshoe theory going on, and these two revolutionary movements can sometimes hold hands.
You see it in a crystallized fashion with the Mamdani campaign. Canary Mission, which is a nonprofit that examines political issues from a right-leaning perspective, examined the impact of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has had an outsized impact on the Democratic Party.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a charter member of the DSA. Mamdani is a DSA guy. The DSA is the jet fuel for the modern Democratic Party. This is not a Left-leaning, mildly progressive movement; this is a truly revolutionary movement.
How does that kind of movement take over the Democratic Party? Where does it come from? The answer is that it’s been inculcated by the Boomers for generations. The Boomers and the Millennials are responsible for their children. If your child ends up being a radical, it’s difficult to say that you had nothing to do with it.
The Boomers and the Millennials decided to inculcate a brand of vague anti-Americanism that then metastasized into a very virulent, cancerous form of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism.
This is why whenever I hear parents talk about their kids and they say, “I’m just giving them the tools to think; I’m not telling them what to think, what values to hold,” that’s bad parenting.
You should be telling your kids what values to hold. That is the most important thing you should be doing as a parent: becoming part of that chain that Edmund Burke talks about between the past and the future, maintaining the wisdom of generations, and passing that on to your kids.
If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job as a parent. Instead, parents have been farming out their kids to universities filled with radicals, who then teach the kids radical politics.
We tell an entire generation of people that they are victims of a system that has made them the most wealthy, prosperous, and free people in the history of planet Earth. And then we sell them the soap that if you grant power to one of these people, one of these revolutionaries, they will fix all of their problems.
There are a lot of politicians willing to sell that soap.
The left-wing version of the grievance campaign is that America is an awful, terribly racist place that has aggrieved Third World minorities and cracked down on gays and lesbians and therefore must be brought low by the revolutionaries, that capitalism has brought us all to this horrible fate.
On the Right, there is an equal and opposite movement. It is growing in power. It is not taking over the Republican Party yet, but it’s attempting to. And that right-wing movement is saying the same thing, except the victims are white Christian males, and the idea would be that white Christian males have been brought low by the system, and that therefore the only corrective action is a complete revolution against capitalism, meritocracy, and all the rest.
In the seed of both of these movements, there is a grain of truth. There is truth to the idea that America, historically speaking, was not good to black people, and historically speaking, was not good to certain classes of immigrants. But it’s a flaw in the system, not a feature of the system.
The same thing is true on the Right. When people say white Christian males have been put under the boot by the system, there’s certainly truth to the idea that there is discriminatory policy — both socially and in governmental policy — that has discriminated against white Christian males over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years. There’s truth to that.
But the idea that such actions are emblematic of the constitutional system or meritocracy or capitalism, and the only solution is some sort of dictatorship of the white Christian male proletariat overthrowing constitutional norms and boundaries, going after minorities, is just as revolutionary from the opposite point of view.
The vast majority of Americans are normies. The vast majority of Americans like meritocracy. The vast majority of Americans believe in the traditional American dream, meaning economic progress for them and for their children, meaning the capacity to build community and church and life in freedom. The vast majority of Americans like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The vast majority of Americans like America.
But if you let the radical revolutionary vanguard take over your party with some sort of benighted idea that you must unite with the radicals in order to achieve victory, you’re not going to achieve victory. And the victory that you achieve will be pyrrhic, because you will have sacrificed what you actually care about to people who hate that very thing.
If this were really working out great for the young, why are they so depressed? Why are they so upset? Why are they so anxious? Why aren’t they getting married or reproducing?
Inculcating a victimhood grievance mentality in an entire generation of people doesn’t just inhibit the working of the country, it makes those people miserable as well.
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