Youth Is Wasted on the (Privileged) Young

Oscar Wilde almost but not quite nailed it

Ah, the wisdom and idealism of our highly privileged young people!

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One of the media themes of Election Night 2024 was the great importance of the “youth vote”—which supposedly would carry Kamala Harris over the finish line. But there were qualifications. On NBC, the gang rhapsodized over the “long lines” of students at polling places in university towns. It was blithely assumed that every person in those lines intended to vote for Harris. Viewers were breathlessly informed by Kristen Welker that celebrities including Jennifer Garner were working the lines, encouraging the boys and girls to stick it out.

On the other hand, however, the “young white males” whom the Trump campaign had targeted were contemptuously dismissed as a non-factor in the election. These were “low propensity voters,” sneered former North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp. The panelists smirked and chuckled at the idea that some guy named Joe Rogan had the power to mobilize them.

Those smirks and chuckles faded and died as the night wore on.

My takeaway from this and subsequent events is that Democrats, who are in the habit of singing hosannahs to the wisdom and virtue of youth, have only a segment of youth in mind: the most privileged and insufferable segment. At the Democratic National Committee meeting held to elect a new party chair, the choice fell on Ken Martin, the head of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a cookie-cutter leftie. But what really pulled my focus was the selection of David Hogg as an at-large vice chair.

Hogg, you may recall, parlayed his involvement in the Parkland high school shooting into a career as a political activist focusing on gun control. He quickly proved himself to be an insufferable twit on the model of Greta Thunberg, much given to puerile invective in the style of a college dorm room bull session. The net effect of his activism has been to superglue the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights. Every time he opens his mouth a dozen or two dozen more AR-15s rocket off the shelves. Now, at the age of twenty-four, he’s the Democratic Party’s choice to connect with the “youth vote.”

You can see why the Dems think that Hogg’s their guy. There’s a natural tendency among young people to be dogmatic, intolerant, judgmental, entitled, convinced that history began with them. Hogg’s the exemplar of that attitude. But sooner or later, reality bites—and the sooner it bites, the better. Adversity, disappointment, the realization that you’re not so special and that the world doesn’t owe you a living, are the experiences that transform a petulant adolescent into a responsible adult. But the youth vote, as the Dems conceive of it, is a refutation of that home truth.

It’s true that the age-old system of reality checks operates but fitfully in this time of mass affluence and entitlement. There are plenty of adults among us who’ve embraced victimhood, blaming their failures and shortcomings on vast social and economic forces beyond their control. This is the basic teaching of postmodern progressivism, and it produces nothing but gloom. But even so, the majority of Americans eventually come to terms with the realities of life.

There will be many people who reject this analysis, arguing that po-mo progressivism has it right: Amerikka is a hellhole of racism, misogyny, predatory capitalism, etc. To them I would reply that if you take a good long look at the youth of America, you’ll find that the most unhappy, entitled, dogmatic, intolerant, insufferable young people in America are precisely the most privileged young people in America. Of course they are—because privilege postpones contact with reality. And nothing signals privilege like access to higher education.

Campus antisemitism, branded as anti-Zionism, is a manifestation of that sense of privilege. The pro-Palestinian student activists responsible for campus disruption and violence claim a right to harass and assault Jews, scream and rant and call for genocide, disrupt classes, occupy and trash university buildings, and in general behave like Nazi stormtroopers. When criticized or opposed, they become indignant. How dare anyone obstruct them in the pursuit of their goal: a Jew-free Palestine stretching “from the river to the sea”? They actually believe that the authorities are under an obligation to underwrite their vicious activism. When a bunch of these goons took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, their spokeswoman demanded “humanitarian aid” in the form of free food and water:

Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic, I mean, it’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.

That’s what passes for the idealism of youth nowadays on the campuses of American universities. Pardon me for a moment while I dry my tears.

It’s pleasant to report that Mr. Cosmic Justice is on the case. In their ungovernable rage, anti-Zionist student activists turned on the Democratic Party when it became clear to them that the Biden Administration was insufficiently committed to the support of genocidal Palestinian nationalism. And on Election Night 2024, a large cohort of American youth, those “low propensity” young white males, heeded Joe Rogan rather than AOC and threw their support to Donald Trump.

So along with college-educated white women and a diminished BIPOC cohort, highly privileged young people are all that the Democratic Party have left. And they constitute a doubtful asset: Support that comes from a place of privilege and entitlement carries a high price tag.