Meanwhile,the ticket to material success is tertiary education,which comes with anxiety-inducing levels of debt,especially in the US and Britain,but increasingly here,too. Wages are relatively stagnant. For Millennials who have young children or are thinking about having them,this must seem dauntingly costly. The end result is a sense of widening inequality along the lines of asset ownership,debt levels,and ultimately age. In short,a system stacked against the interests of the young,with an additional legacy of environmental destruction. If that’s what they see,why would they vote for that?
These younger voters are probably more sympathetic to social liberalism than its economic variety. But the trouble for conservative parties is that this is precisely the liberalism they are less inclined to offer. If conservatives are losing young voters on economics,they certainly won’t win them back with culture wars. Put simply,the Coalition (and its fellow travellers) tends to zig whenever younger voters are zagging. And when this happens repeatedly over a long time,we shouldn’t be surprised when voting conservative becomes unthinkable.
It’s easy to see how the Greens – who older voters will simply deem radical – begin to look viable and even sensible to the younger cohort. The Greens now out-poll the Coalition among Gen Z voters,not as a self-conscious act of resistance,but because that seems the more natural vote to cast. They address younger concerns directly,making economic policy and environmental responsibility the same task,rather than opposing forces. And not unhelpfully,the Greens have never been in government,so their policies can never have failed in the way parties of government must.
So,for example,in the face of a rental crisis,when the Greens propose a rental freeze,the fact that this would distort the market,and violate every canon of liberal economics,holds considerably less purchase. The benefit is obvious and immediate,while the dangers are theoretical and delayed. And what’s the problem with breaking the rules of an economic worldview to which you feel no particular fealty?
This is new. It is not the traditional journey from a young idealism to a more weathered,even slightly jaded pragmatism. It is not a politics,relatively lightly held,that changes with the natural evolution of life circumstances. It’s not the story of someone wanting to make the world a better place,only to decide that once they have mortgages and children that the more mundane things really do matter,and that survival and comfort will do. I suspect this stems from a deeper conviction that the system is broken.
It is,in its way,more revolutionary. But actually it represents a serious danger to conservative parties precisely because it is pragmatic:because it is about a disillusionment with concrete circumstances,and a sense that the guardians of liberalism – at least in one form – can no longer presume to have the licence to dictate solutions.
Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.
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