The vicissitudes of the tourism industry drive the economy here. Post-Valentine’s tourism, someone told me, accounted for the traffic jam downtown on Saturday. Meanwhile, housing costs are up. Hotel and apartment block construction is up. But the joke circulating when I arrived 30 years ago still works: There are lots of good jobs around here. I know people who have two or three. Locals are being priced out. People in their 30s still have roommates.
But that’s not just a local problem, writes Eric Levitz. It is why an Economist/YouGov poll found that “60 percent of Democrats younger than 30 support either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.” Younger voters in the U.S. are not alone in wanting left-wing reform. Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain’s Labour party won support from 55 percent of voters under 30 in 2019. Younger voters drove the surprise victory in Irish parliamentary elections this month by leftwing Sinn Féin, becoming “the first party in almost a century other than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael to win the popular vote in an Irish General Election.”
Even at (supposedly) full employment, recent college U.S. graduates find themselves working jobs below their training or unemployed while saddled with loan debt.
Levitz writes:
To see why, consider three remarkable data points from this column by Bloomberg’s Alexandra Tanzi and Katia Dmitrieva: (1) The unemployment rate among recent college graduates in the U.S. is now higher than our country’s overall unemployment rate for the first time in over two decades, (2) More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are working jobs that do not traditionally require a bachelor’s degree (while one in eight are stuck in posts that pay $25,000 or less), and (3) the median income among the bottom half of college graduates is roughly 10 percent lower than it was three decades ago.
Bloomberg illustrates the problem with a chart entitled “Losing Out.” This economy has a glut of aspiring white-collar workers for which there is insufficient demand, Levitz continues:
Put differently: Even as the price of a college diploma has risen nigh-exponentially (thereby forcing the rising generation of college graduates to saddle themselves with onerous debts), the value of such diplomas on the U.S. job market has rapidly depreciated. And there is little reason to believe that this state of affairs will change, no matter how long the present boom is sustained. According to the Labor Department’s estimates, the five fastest-growing occupations in the United States over the next ten years will be solar-panel installers, wind-turbine technicians, home health aides, personal care aides, and occupational therapy assistants. Not a single one of those jobs requires a four-year college diploma. Only occupational therapy assistants need an associate’s degree.
The promise since WWII that a college degree was a ticket to a comfortable middle-class or better life is in tatters. As the stock market boomed in the Clinton years, politicians promoted the “knowledge economy,” as Levitz calls it (the “information economy” promoted under Ronald Reagan). Now, that too has fizzled.
Rising inequality? Pish posh. Not a failure of metastasized capitalism, no. Simply the product of a “skills gap,” not the “middle-class squeeze” Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren warned of in 2004 and lectured on in 2008. Now that squeeze is tighter than ever, the inequality more stark, the environment more unstable, and the promises more obviously hollow.
Arrayed against those lefty kids and flagging democracy is a growing, worldwide movement towards authoritarianism. Time is running out to stop it:
“The system is enabling Trump,” Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who wrote “How Fascism Works,” told Insider.
“There need to be mass protests,” he said. “The Republican Party is betraying democracy, and these are historical times. Someone has got to push back.”
Celebrated by supporters for his consistency, to those who lived through the 1960s Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” rhetoric feels as dated as tie-dye, nehru jackets, and day-glo daisies. But old things have a way of coming back into fashion. Sanders never changed as times did. Half a century later, a new generation seems to wants his revolution. Perhaps Sanders should put supporters in the streets as in the 1960s, not just knocking doors.
Harvard Magazine cites political scientist Pippa Norris on rising authoritarianism:
… as societies have grown more liberal on social issues during the last half-century—more open to diversity and LGBTQ rights, more egalitarian about gender roles and racial equality, more expansive in democratic representation, more secular, more cosmopolitan, more global—that transformation has triggered a deep and intense reaction among traditionalists who feel threatened, marginalized, and left behind. Those traditionalists, whom she identifies as older, whiter, more rural, and less well educated, have tended to turn toward forceful leaders promising to hold back the rising tide.
Stopping that movement towards retrenchment will take out-organizing and out-voting neighbors energized in support of an authoritarian strongman. It will take more than songs and chants and visualization. This is not political theory. For the 60s generation, Vietnam was life and death. Trumpism may be as well.
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