02 May Opportunity Knocks
One of the principal reasons that I find Donald Trump’s “experiments in economics” so frustrating is that there is soooooo much at stake. I know the working class is struggling. I know that “globalization” didn’t keep all the promises that were made on its behalf. I know things couldn’t really go on as they were indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean the right idea was to toss out nearly three hundred years of commercial and economic experience and start all over.
I have, elsewhere, explained what I think happened to the working class and why tariffs won’t fix it. As for globalization, the biggest problem there can be summed up in three little letters: CCP. As Melcher and I warned for more than a quarter century, letting the Chinese Communists play in our sandbox with no restrictions would do little more than ruin the sandbox. Instead of us imposing our values on them – as Bill Clinton insisted we would – they imposed their values on us. And now we’re in a helluva pickle.
That much I am happy to concede.
Unfortunately, blowing up the sandbox now, along with all the bags of replacement sand, isn’t likely to fix things. Indeed, it could make them much, much worse.
Let me explain.
Just over three years ago, I penned a long, rambling, melancholy piece on my demographic cohort – Gen-X – and the cultural nihilism from which it has long suffered. Specifically, I wrote:
Long story short (if that’s even possible now), the hedonism of the ‘60s gave way to the misery of the ‘70s and the ‘80s – divorce, out-of-wedlock births, emotional, physical, and mental illnesses derived from lack of emotional and spiritual contact, AIDS, and so on. In brief, the new revolution, like the old revolution, gave way to nihilism and despair. And because of its nature as an explicitly anti-family enterprise, this revolution visited the bulk of that despair on the children it produced, i.e. Generation-X.
Not long afterward, I wrote another piece on generational cohorts and argued that we Gen-Xers still had a chance to save our kids from our nihilism and turn them into a revolutionary cohort, the generation that broke free from the ‘60s-inspired cultural malaise and reclaimed something of their heritage as Americans. I put it this way:
[T]he Baby Boom generation was optimistic but hopelessly naïve. Generation-X was timid, defensive, and very much “broken.” The Millennial Generation – also known as the “Baby Boom echo” because it is comprised primarily of the children of Baby Boomers – was, like its parents’ generation, optimistic and naïve, although much more the latter than the former. They bought the cultural revolution’s more fantastical ideas hook, line, and sinker. Finally, there is Generation-Z, Gen-X’s kids, whose attitudes are not yet fully formed and whose destiny is still undetermined….
The good news is that [because] Generation-Z is not yet fully formed in its attitudes and destiny…there is still hope for it to break the cycle and not adopt the softness and resignation of its parents’ generation. There are signs that Gen-Z is doing just this, breaking the cycle on its own, fighting back and adopting more traditional, pre-Boomer social attitudes….
If this opportunity is missed, another likely won’t be available for another 25 years or more.
The news has been mixed since I wrote those words, but the evidence of late has indicated that there is indeed hope for Gen-Z after all. About six weeks ago, Ezra Klein – a left-wing columnist at The New York Times and the co-founder of Vox, the “young-adult” news site – looked at the numbers from last November and noted the following in an interview with David Shor, a Democratic consultant and data specialist:
Democrats are losing working-class voters. They’re seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish. They’re losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party….
Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters.
I do think that, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority became a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. They thought that this was a last gasp of something and that if Donald Trump couldn’t run up his numbers among seniors and you had millennials and Gen Z really coming into voting power, that would be the end of this Republican Party.
That is just completely false, and it might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
Klein is hardly alone in noticing. Young voters’ shift rightward has been documented repeatedly. It is a real and largely unprecedented phenomenon. Or at least it was real last November.
Right now, Gen-Zers are bothered by the status quo on two fronts. First, they hate the Left’s control of the culture and what it’s doing to them. They loathe obsessive identity politics and wanton censorship. They feel the crush of the Left’s nihilism profoundly. They want meaning and positivity in their lives. Young men especially are turning back to religion – and often the most traditional religious traditions they can find. This is good news for all of us, not just the Republican Party.
The second thing that rightly bothers Gen-Z voters is that they’ve largely been locked out of the “American dream.” They have mountains of student debt. Often, they pay that debt back working jobs that don’t require a college degree. They were lied to about the benefits of a degree and taught poorly by political activists masquerading as professors. They see home ownership as a fantasy and feel they’ve been taken advantage of financially by the Baby Boomers – largely because they have been.
The Democratic Party isn’t going to be able to address either of these Gen-Z complaints at any point in the foreseeable future. It’s a broken party, clinging to the vestiges of an ideology that once enabled it to bully all others into submission. It offers nothing to young voters, either culturally or economically.
At the same time, however, it doesn’t have to offer anything if Donald Trump blows up the global economy. They don’t need to promise anything economically if the country enters a profound or protracted recession because of Donald Trump’s trade policies.
The other day, the president was asked about tariffs causing empty store shelves, and he dismissed the question blithely, saying, “Maybe children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” I could easily get on board with the idea that American consumers are too consumer-ish and don’t need all the crap they buy. Unfortunately, that’s not Donald Trump’s call to make. Here he sounds more than a little like Bernie Sanders, who, a decade ago on the presidential campaign trail, scolded Americans that “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” You – and Donald Trump – may well note that Bernie Sanders didn’t win that or any other campaign he ever ran for president.
In the end, people are going to remember who was in office when they felt economic pain, and they’re going to punish his party. That’s just how the world works.
It would be a crying shame if this administration squandered the opportunity to connect with young voters because of economic stubbornness. And that shame would be amplified infinitely at this specific moment, when the nation appears on the precipice of a cultural and political realignment.
Twenty-five years is too long to wait for another chance.
