The Breakup Of The Neoliberal Consensus Among Young People
In the wake of the cold war, western civilization has held a near consensus around some form of neoliberalism. Former Presidents like Clinton, Bush, Chirac and Prime Minister Blair have had disagreements over to what extent capitalism should be implemented, but at the same time hold a common idea that in most areas the free market is better than government intervention. They all agree on this even with two of them on the left and two of them on the right.
Recently, young people all over the world have been straying from this center left to center right paradigm in favor of more radical leftism through a movement led in the U.S. by Bernie Sanders, in the UK by Jeremy Corbyn and in France by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. All three of which are extremely far left politicians as shown by Sanders for not thinking a 90% tax rate is too high, his stated position that bread lines are a good thing, his belief that medicine should be socialized, him having his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, his statement “everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world…they forgot that he educated the kids [and] gave them healthcare” and his support for a ban on fracking which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims would cost Americans 15 million jobs, along with a doubling of gas and energy prices and a $4,000 increase in the cost of living for each family.
This pattern continues with Jeremy Corbyn’s support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, his support for significantly higher taxes than the already exorbitant UK tax rates, his support for the socialization of industries such as mailing and railroads and his blaming of the west as the cause of terrorism.
The most extreme of the three is Melenchon, a communist who promised French voters a 100% tax rate on individuals making more than 400,000 euros a year and famously saying in reference to the many millionaires who have moved out of France, “if there are any who want to go abroad, well, goodbye!”
Even with these far left positions, Sanders got more primary votes from people under thirty than Clinton and Trump combined, young British voters overwhelmingly supported Jeremy Corbyn and young French voters overwhelmingly supported Melenchon.
As author Ben Shapiro points out, “what we have is an entire generation of Westerners brought up to believe that prosperity and freedom are the norm, a given, background noise — and that the next mission for which they should fight is redistributionism.”
The vast majority of people in the west are employed and doing just fine; this movement doesn’t spring from a bad economy, but rather from an existential meaninglessness. Two generations of parents have stopped teaching traditional values in favor of secularism and now, with the meaningfulness of life that used to be fulfilled with religion gone, young people have found meaning in Marxism. This is a dangerous trend that has led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and must be stopped quickly.
