“Like Saturn,” Jacques Mallet du Pan famously said, “the Revolution devours its children.”
If there is a political revolution coming in the West, it may well be the old who are devoured. Take this month’s humiliation of British Prime Minister Theresa May. Many a liberal/leftist was giddy to learn that nearly 70 percent of eligible youngsters showed up to whack the Tories. “The young punish the old for Brexit,” liberal columnist Nick Cohen tweeted.
American liberals and leftists see similar possibilities here. Young people tend to be more liberal than their elders but some conservatives have noticed that America’s young adults view President Trump with a special kind of disdain.
Even before the rise of Trump, some conservatives were worried about a generation gap. (“Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate,” David Frum wrote, in 2009. “If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.”)
Young voters have already pushed the Democrats left on such issues as healthcare. At least 112 Democrats in Congress have signed on to a single payer bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to cite just one example.
The calculations aren’t zero-sum. There’s nothing in principle that says that expanding Medicare to young folks means taking care away from old folks. But conservatives have taught the Left that there is a historic tension between costs and care. The liberal axes are already falling: Under the Obama administration, Medicare officials began testing “value-based purchasing” models designed to curb, if not trim, costs; those poor elders who relied on Medicaid for long-term care have it even worse and live under the dispensation of HMOs (now called, delightfully, “managed care“).
But there’s a far more direct — if far more hidden — way in which the Left and the liberals are hoping to tax the old: by taxing the rich, which amounts to the same thing.
Last year, the Guardian issued a shocking study. It found that, for the first time in the history of this republic, young adults are poorer than retirees. In fact, between 1979 and 2010, disposable income grew by 28 percent for Americans between the ages of 65 and 69, and 25 percent for those 70 or older. For those between the ages of 25 and 29, disposable income fell by 9 percent, the Guardian found.
Other groups have found similar data points on what you might call the millennial misery index. There are world-historic implications here. We haven’t begun to digest their significance.
One conclusion we can draw: From now on, when we argue about “redistribution” in this country we won’t just be talking about taking from the rich to give to the poor. We’ll also be talking about taking from the old to give to the young.
One of the surprising things about the rising generation is not how angry they are, but how angry they could be: Kids born in the late 1980s and early 1990s reached voting age after the election of 2000 threw their democracy into chaos, and when Sept. 11, 2001, turned their safe and secure world upside down. Since then, they’ve borne the brunt of two major wars (with a few “advisory” sideshows thrown in) and the collapse of the world economy. We haven’t even touched on the opioid crisis, the rebirth of white supremacy, or the new normal of mass shooting drills in public schools. (In any other context, you might even call it “American carnage.”)
It’s a myth, of course, to suggest that conservatives don’t care about social welfare. But, now as ever, it might be a good time for conservatives to listen to young adults and to be ready with a few real answers of their own.
Saturn did indeed eat some of his children, but he couldn’t swallow them all and he wound up spending eternity in torment. Sometimes, it’s the parents who are on the Revolution’s menu.
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington, DC. He tweets from @billcaphill.
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