The British general election of December 12, 2019 was a heavy defeat for the Labour Party, dealing a hammerblow to the project of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies. But it was also a generational rout. Despite losing fifty-nine seats overall, Corbyn’s party still comfortably bested the Conservatives with every demographic cohort under the age of forty-five: according to Lord Ashcroft’s exit poll, by 57 to 19 percent among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, by 55 to 23 percent among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds, and by 45 percent to 30 percent among thirty-five- to forty-four-year-olds.

It was voters old enough to remember when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 who opted for her party, by ever-widening margins as one ascended the demographic scale, with a staggering gulf among pensioners — 62 to 18 percent in favor of the Conservatives. The strongest rejection of Thatcher’s legacy came from those who had only ever known the world she made.

As Keir Milburn has argued, this generational chasm, by no means peculiar to Britain, is best seen as a variation on class politics rather than a substitute for it. Younger people — including those who are now fast approaching middle age — have had a radically different experience of housing and employment markets, amplified by the crash of 2008. In the British context, this encouraged them to identify with Corbynism, even as it faced its electoral nemesis.