Understanding the New Socialist Generation

Originally posted by willial: ↑

his is Victor Davis Hanson writing about why so many of America’s youth are increasing embracing socialism. The system of organisation that delivers equality of poverty at the point of a gun and has already led the the death of over 100 million; not counting the latest from Venezuela.
While this is about America, the parallels are not too far from Australia:
One force multiplier of socialist unrest has been an absence of upward mobility, coupled with a superficial sense of being educated. Today’s college graduate may feel that while his education has led to few marketable skills, it has at least taught him the innate inequalities of American capitalism which, in his eyes, explain better than his poor choices why he is degreed but otherwise poor and in debt. College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans, and many despair of ever repaying the huge sums spent to collect noncompetitive degrees.
and:
Many young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry that they were unable to afford a home, a new car, or other nice things, or start a family in their “woke” urban neighborhoods during a decade of muted economic growth (2008–17) and high unemployment. In college, they were not warned about the dangers of statism and collectivism, nor given the skills to look at the world empirically. The combination of nonmarketable degrees and skills with burdensome debt helped alter an entire generation’s customs, habits, and thinking.
One more:
Popular culture and contemporary politics have more or less institutionalized a model of citizenship quite unlike previous visions that were based on the autonomous family. The new American archetype apparently is a single, urban youth, presumably well-educated and glib but dependent on government subsidies and suffering from arrested development. His environment stresses the attractions of government dependency and the alleged lack of upward mobility through the private sector. This view is expansively depicted as the liberation of an everywoman or everyman through cradle-to-grave government reliance—a person thus in little need of marriage, religion, or community and family support.
And finally:
Socialist revolutions do not sprout organically in so-called good times. Instead they are the children of wars, depressions, and natural and manmade upheavals. They are facilitated by “never let a crisis go to waste” opportunism—turmoil during which socialist activists emerge as prophets to condemn systems of free enterprise and constitutional government. Leaders like Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, or Leon Trotsky rarely rise from among the poor. They often have just enough education to connect their own unhappiness with cosmic forces but not enough to explain their own unhappiness in ways that transcend their own self-obsessions.

Expand

"Many young people claim to be socialists but are instead simply angry that they were unable to afford a home, a new car, or other nice things, or start a family ...". ........

Cheers @willial. I think the above quote says it all really, and this has been consistent across generations. Its not a modern phenomenon but the age-old criticism of the young against the older generations. Young people see the possessions of the older generations as something they want and have.a right to and think that its wrong that they can't have it all "now". So a system that offers ultimate sharing of all the goods of a long life of learning and accumulating becomes very attractive to the impatient mind of youth.

Yet an equal proportion see the means of gaining what the elders have and so strive for material accumulation earlier and this provides the basis for a more right side philosophy. Material gain through intelligent efforts and sacrifice to accumulate rewards and the individual, rather than the collective, effort become the guiding principle.

I've noted these thinking processes in my own life and in many of my cohort. In my youth as a labourer I voted Labs because my parents did and because of my work. I became a Lib voter when I became an insurance rep, was won over by Hawke when I had children to feed and a mortgage to pay and lost all hope in democracy during the Howard years --- realising that political parties were the death of democracy. Hence I now live with jaded cynicism and critical analysis.

I think we all look to our own needs first depending on our social relationships and what we perceive as what will serve our immediate beliefs. Beliefs change if we evolve, while some evolve more quickly than others and some never truly do, we develop our needs into our voting intentions.

These are only my own thoughts and I don't expect anyone to agree with me. Moreover I don't expect that I'm right because of my experience of realising my own errors and fallacious beliefs throughout my life. I write these down purely for the purpose of discussion. These days I'm much closer to the Menzies ideals and policies, which have become centrist due to the shifting sands of the infertile and sterilised desert that is demagogic politics today.