The Making of Millennial Socialism
Jacobin has been a flagship publication of “millennial socialism,” a phenomenon that began gathering force around 2010 and first fought its way into the political arena through the 2016 Bernie campaign. How did this generational movement come to be? And where does it go now?
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“Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” This iconic 1960s phrase was coined by Jack Weinberg, a leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. In Weinberg’s telling, he almost thoughtlessly tossed the line off during an interview with a reporter whose questioning implied that student activists were just a bunch of Communist dupes. “I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over thirty,” Weinberg recalled. “It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.” But the phrase took on a life of its own and became something of a slogan for “the ’60s” as a whole — youthful rebellion against a stultifying mass consumer society built by colorless middle-aged men in gray flannel suits. Against Weinberg’s intentions, it became an enduring call to arms in the battle between generations.
As a civil rights, free speech, and antiwar activist, Weinberg was a paradigmatic example of a New Left militant. What made the New Left new was its ostensible break with the Old Left of the 1930s and ’40s. There were good reasons for making this distinction. The Old Left was grounded in working-class, often immigrant, social milieus that found organizational expression in the Socialist and Communist parties as well as the trade unions. Nascent New Leftists were brought up after World War II, in a rapidly changing society defined by the growth of higher education, the burgeoning shift from industrial to service work, and the dissolution of ethnic proletarian communities. As a result, the New Left evinced a strong concern with movements and demands that hadn’t yet emerged in the New Deal period, and it had a fundamental commitment to “participatory democracy” that the Old Left did not share.
It’s not surprising, then, that New Leftists had a powerful sense of generational identity. The Port Huron Statement’s introduction is titled “Agenda for a Generation.” Its memorable first line, penned by a twenty-two-year-old Tom Hayden, is “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” An Old Left manifesto would not have begun with an admission that it did not necessarily speak for an oppressed proletariat.
Despite real generational differences, however, there was never a bright line separating the Old and New Lefts from each other. Historian Maurice Isserman, in his classic study If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, writes that he “gradually came to understand that the early New Left had emerged from the Old Left in ways that made it difficult to perceive exactly where the one ended and the other began.”
Take Weinberg, for example. The first political organization he joined at Berkeley was CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE was one of the leading civil rights organizations of the 1960s, but it was decidedly a product of the Old Left. Established in the 1940s, its founders included black radicals like James Farmer and Pauli Murray, a Socialist and an ex-Communist (Lovestone faction), respectively. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the flagship organization of the student New Left, was originally founded as the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth section of the League for Industrial Democracy — which, in turn, was founded by Socialist Party activists in 1905 as the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The place where the Port Huron Statement was adopted, the FDR Four Freedoms Camp, was owned by the Michigan state labor federation. The list goes on. While it would be a mistake to collapse the Old and New Lefts into each other, there was an important degree of continuity across these key generations of the twentieth-century US left.
Generational thinking and analysis can have real value, so long as it is not used to essentialize entire cohorts of people. Of course, it is far more common to see pundits, pontificators, and the very lucrative generational consulting industry do precisely that. We’re all familiar with the headlines: “Millennials Are Killing Casual Dining Chains!” “Baby Boomers Don’t Care About Climate Change!” Nobody seems to focus on what middle child Generation X thinks, sadly. It all adds up to a mountain of half-baked clichés and stereotypes that do far more to muddy our understanding of what distinguishes generations — and, just as important, what they have in common — than it does to clarify it.
Cohort Effects
Bobby Duffy’s The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think is a refreshing exception to the lazy drift of too much generational analysis. Duffy has no time for the simplistic and misleading commentary that often passes for generational analysis in popular discourse. He deftly demonstrates why breathless talk of generational conflict makes us lose sight of the many things that bind the generations together, and he identifies the things that really divide them — namely the “growing economic, housing, and health inequalities” pulling the young and old into separate and unequal worlds. In doing so, he shows us that there is little to be gained by pitting generations against one another. He also sheds light on why so many of my generation, the so-called millennials born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, were perfectly primed for an interest in socialist politics.
Most generational commentary relies on a simplified and exaggerated version of a concept called “cohort effects.” As Duffy describes it, cohort effects can show how a generation has specific “attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors because they were socialized in different conditions from those of other generations, and thus they remain distinct from other cohorts even as they age.” Analyzing cohort effects can be very useful, but an overreliance on them can easily lead you astray. Like an individual, a cohort may in fact carry certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with them from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. But it’s rare for a generation, like an individual, to stay the same from one decade to the next. I listened to Bloc Party and the Rapture a lot in 2005, but I don’t anymore (I’m forty now, and very predictably “getting into jazz”). Duffy’s book clearly shows how relying solely on cohort effects to analyze generations “misses out on two-thirds of our understanding of societal change.”
Those other two-thirds are “period effects” and “life-cycle effects.” Period effects happen when some sort of major event, especially one that is socially traumatic, affects everyone in the society and changes attitudes and behaviors in a fairly consistent way. Examples should come easily to mind: the September 11 attacks, or the COVID-19 pandemic. Life-cycle effects are changes that happen as people get older and experience the big events that mark the signposts of life in a society: graduation, leaving home, marriage, children, sickness, and the one that eventually comes for us all, death. If the study of generations is to have any truly useful value, all three of these dimensions — cohort, period, and life-cycle effects — must be brought together into a synthetic analysis. People don’t fit into the same clothes as they age, and they tend not to think or do the same things over time, either.
The mode of analysis Duffy sets out in The Generation Myth helps us understand why you are holding this very magazine in your hands right now, dear reader. Jacobin has been the flagship publication of “millennial socialism,” a phenomenon that began gathering force around 2010, fought its way into the political arena through the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and found sustained expression through the growth of Democratic Socialists of America, the election to office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, and campaigns to unionize Starbucks and other leading employers in the neoliberal economy. People born in the late twentieth century experienced a perfect storm of cohort, period, and life-cycle effects that made millennials more open to socialism than any previous generation in American history.
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, I lived through a string of events that led me to question many of the predicates of American society: the stolen 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 attacks, the fraudulent invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crash, and the deep global recession that followed it. Most of this happened under a Republican president, George W. Bush, who so offensively embodied the right-wing synthesis of God and mammon that millions swore off ever voting GOP. The Iraq War taught us to be critical of the uses of American power in the world, and the Great Recession was so scarring that it discredited capitalist economics.
Amid destroyed jobs and foreclosed mortgages, a generation on the cusp of adulthood had to put its plans for the future on indefinite hiatus. This is what Duffy calls the “delayed adulthood” so many experienced, a result of awful circumstances that members of older generations mistook for immaturity. This is the main thing that set millennials apart from their predecessors, which Duffy rightly attributes to a set of conditions that those predecessors, in most cases, did not have to confront: “extended education, wage stagnation, precarious employment, increased debt, and soaring housing costs.” Plenty of millennials surely blamed themselves for these problems, but others did not. A substantial proportion began to demand a greater degree of collective support and solidarity to live a decent life. When baby boomer Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 and 2020, young people flocked to his banner. His coalition was a living refutation of intergenerational warfare, and he dominated among the youngest voters across every conceivable line of difference.
Of course, Sanders is not the president. He may have prevailed among millennials and the rising Generation Z, but the other side of the coin was his unpopularity among voters his own age. They flocked instead to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, and they tend to vote in far greater numbers than the under-forty set. The Left’s popularity among the youngest cohorts is a source of hope, but it is no guarantee of future success. Plunged into the midlife maelstrom, millennials may well shed their youthful enthusiasm for socialism as they trade Urban Outfitters for the Old Navy toddler section.
Caveats notwithstanding, millennials do not seem to be inexorably moving toward greater political conservatism. Voters in their late thirties are notably less conservative than their forebears were at the same age. While events and time may work to pull them rightward, this generation’s formative political experiences may have been so intense as to keep them mostly on the left through middle age and into retirement. Generation Z is at least as left-leaning as millennials were at their age, if not more so, and a clear left-right split between voters on either side of forty-five seems to be developing in the electorate.
It would be foolish to declare on this basis that the Left owns the future of American politics. The annals of punditry are littered with false predictions of looming generational majorities for one party or the other. But, contrary to the subtitle of Duffy’s excellent book, when you’re born might well be an increasingly important dimension of American politics.