The emergence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders’ rise from obscurity and the growing interest in democratic socialism have been interpreted as signs that Millennials are shifting leftward. Keir Milburn examines the prognostications from a British perspective. In Generation Left (Polity Press), the University of Leicester political economy professor traces the apparent turn-away from an unthinking embrace of finance capitalism to the Great Recession, a formative reality in the impressionable years of that generational cohort.
Milburn revives a term dormant for many years, “generation gap,” to describe the shift in political direction. It’s an interesting argument: Baby Boomers happened to come of age at a time when regulated capitalism actually was providing an upward ladder and a genuine spread of wealth and economic security. As the ’80s began, the “neoliberal” economics associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher convinced a broad swath of the public that unions and the regulatory state were inherently bad and social safety nets should be thin. For many, including those who should know better, “the only conceivable reality” became “one dominated by ever-intensifying capitalist social relations.”
The earliest wave of Boomers continued to enjoy the benefits left by New Deal and Labour policies in the U.S. and U.K. (while increasingly disdaining their values). But from the ’80s onward, the good times were sustained on quicksand by a new global economy that churned out cheap consumer goods purchased on credit. The Western world (and beyond) became a debtors’ society driven by consumption. The structure nearly collapsed in 2008 as Millennials came of age.
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“Far from being coddled,” as in the stereotype, Millennials “are being royally screwed over,” Milburn writes. The generation gap is an economic one, he insists, as real wages fall and home ownership becomes harder in the face of housing prices that remain inflated.
Generation Left becomes an essay on subjects beyond mere economics, including the way “our current modes of adulthood cause sedimentation” as “habitual lives get turned into concrete.” In other words, the stodginess associated with old age, much less the gravitation toward “conservative” politics, is not inevitable. Milburn cites recent findings in neuroscience about the plasticity of the brain, indicating that mental activity “is affected by lifestyle” and “our habitual levels of intellectual activity and encounters with novel experiences.” Our hardening “into concrete” is abetted by “the modern model of adulthood and ageing” with its “social isolation.”
Milburn might not care for this, but the new findings on the brain’s plasticity reinforce the religious precept that repentance—in its original meaning of turning one’s life in a new direction—can occur even in the 11th hour. Graham Ward’s Theology and Religion (Polity Press) argues that the spiritual is an inescapable dimension of being human. The Oxford divinity professor is aware of the ill-uses of religion. It has been, as Marx memorably wrote, “the opiate of the people” by distributing placebos instead of real medicine. Ward adds that many other forces have had those same results, including the transitory pleasures of “commercial consumerism.” Religion can divide us but also undergird an understanding of our obligations to each other that rises above the purely pragmatic explanations of—say—evolutionary biologists who think our ancestors gained reproductive advantage by being good—even if there’s no evidence that anyone lost advantage by being bad. Ward also takes on neoliberalism whose proponents advocate “economic freedom for those who can afford to be free.”
