Are the young really radical?

1 November 2021

Daniel Esson

(Image courtesy of Unsplash)

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of InQuire Media

It’s probably safe to assume that everybody reading this broadly falls into ‘generation Z’, or ‘zoomers’, for the more online of us. Many older people seem to view our generation, and our direct generational elders, the millennials, as particularly politically engaged and radical, though often phrased more disparagingly. However, as is always the case, such broad generalisations about massive groups of people are often baseless.

To even speak of political engagement in such broad terms is itself slightly divorced from reality. It should go without saying that, even among our relatively political generation, serious political engagement is the franchise of a minority. University educated people are broadly more likely to be interested in politics, and much more likely to be culturally liberal and/or left-wing. The students in any given year who leave secondary school and don’t go to university, are therefore largely nowhere near as politically engaged and active as their contemporaries who do. Then, why is there a perception that the young are so political?

Graduates disproportionately dominate what can be loosely termed the ‘elite’ – middle class professions – journalism, finance, and all creative and cultural industries. These are the professions which broadly shape public discourse through the media, education, political activism and the like. In modern Britain, due to the mass expansion of higher education in the past two decades, the most influential university graduates are essentially either millennials or zoomers. Herein lies the reason why many older people view the young as disproportionately political and radical: important cultural institutions, from journalism to the arts, are largely steered by relatively young, very liberal, university graduates. So even if most people around our age couldn’t care less about socio-cultural issues and politics, those who do tend to have real decision-making power.

But what actually is the character of the politics of the young? It’s fairly apparent that of the politically engaged minority of our generation, the majority consider themselves to be left-wing. Young right-wingers are relatively hard to come by, but not as hard as you’d think.

Among young self-identified leftists, formerly obscure sectarian labels such as libertarian socialist or anarcho-communist are commonplace, often congealing into a united mass of political ideals, miles from the views of the ordinary people in whose interest they claim to struggle, with only differences of aesthetics between tendencies. In an 1868 letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, Marx stated that the radical sects of his time prided themselves not on their unity with the working class, but ‘in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes’ them from that class. The same could be said of the far less organised radicals of today, who pride themselves not on their support from the public, but on how much more enlightened they are than the public.

Among todays’ ostensible radicals, ideological emphasis is seldom placed upon matters which generations of leftists past would expect. The focus of supposed radical leftism today is on social and cultural matters such as identity and representation; issues regarding the structure and ownership of industry, the nature of the economy and how best to change it, are often paid only lip-service, croutons drowned in the soup of liberal individualism. When there is such broad agreement on the left about the social and cultural matters which are deemed most important - those of identity - then the aforementioned political labels themselves become just that: markers of identity, more of personal political branding than of ideological meaning.

There are obviously some reasons to be hopeful about the politicisation of the young. People of our age are acutely aware of the environmental catastrophe which faces us, and which threatens to be humanity’s final challenge. Opposition to neoliberalism and its detrimental consequences is widespread; when the state is essentially in the pocket of property developers and banks, wages have been until recently stagnant, the cost of living is skyrocketing, and public services are battered within an inch of functionality, it’s hard to find young people who don’t want some kind of serious economic change. However, when the left which claims the right to change society and the economy is almost totally bereft of relation to those who really can change society – workers - and their priorities, it’s hard to see how vague anti-capitalist sentiment can translate itself into real world change.

Perhaps this is symptomatic of the exceptionalism with which every generation tends to view itself, but the politics of our age cohort seem uniquely paradoxical. The middle class and the wealthy, with the most to lose, are often the most radical. The workers exploited most are often the least politically engaged. To be a radical is to be a conformist, and the emergent establishment consider themselves anti-establishment. The language of movements considering themselves radical and transformative has been seamlessly co-opted by international mega-corporations. It seems that everything is on the cards, and that all is to play for, but those who claim the responsibility of change are unknowingly trapped in the confines of the system they seek to overturn.