Pity the Incoherent Youngs
Young people, it seems, “have totally incoherent political views” that “don’t make any sense.” How very Millennial.
For instance, “something interesting happens when Millennials start making serious dough. They start getting much more squeamish about giving it away.” Like “69 percent think the government should guarantee health insurance… 55 percent are ‘unwilling to pay more for health insurance in order to help provide coverage to the uninsured.’” Not at all like other, presumably older people.
I mean, “you get the sense, reading the Reason Foundation and Pew studies, that a savvy pollster could trick a young person into supporting basically any economic policy in the world with the right combination of triggers.” Not at all like older people, who totally understand the economy.
It’s like, “Millennials don’t know what socialism is, but they think it sounds nice.” This is not at all like the widespread American disdain for “socialism” in spite of its wide, ongoing support for Social Security and Medicare — because you might think that people don’t realize those are socialist programs.
To be clear, this is all toxic share waste, engineered for Olds to post on Facebook to show how silly The Kids are. (And I suspect that at least one of the people who wrote these pieces knows it!) Millennials are no more or less incoherent about their political beliefs than any other relatively arbitrary generational grouping of Americans clustered together largely for marketing purposes. The fundamental American political right is not to vote, but to be willfully contradictory in your core belief systems, often in the same breath. At worst, this shows that Millennials, if they weren’t a myth, will grow up to be the thing that they, and every other young generation, supposedly fears most — their parents.