“The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world, before passing it on to us.” That was John F. Carter, in the Atlantic Monthly. It was September 1920, and Carter was channeling what he thought to be a post-WWI rage within young Americans over their inheritance of “this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up.”
Carter’s century-old lament is reminder that pessimism about the prospects for America’s youth is nothing new. Which is useful considering Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column from last week. In it, Noonan concluded that “Since at least the turn of the century our young people have been told, endlessly – in school, in media – that they will never have a nice life. The rising seas will drown them, a racist, misogynistic culture will abuse them, the economy can no longer make a place for them. If it is relentlessly drilled into you that you’ll never have a satisfying and constructive life, and you are 22 years old and your brain isn’t even fully developed yet, you just might think it wholly legitimate that you indulge your fury and strike at those who have thwarted you.”
Noonan could perhaps be persuaded that she’s excusing victimhood. Seriously, we should all be so lucky to be born in the richest, most opportunity-laden country on earth. Furthermore, we have endless evidence of young people before and after the 21st century dawned (many of them the Silicon Valley types whom Noonan sadly disdains) ignoring nonsensical notions about an economy that “can no longer make a place for them” (whatever that means…), yet Noonan seems to be defining a large cohort by the actions of the microscopic few, all while generalizing their reaction to the bad cards supposedly dealt them. She’s not the first.
Consider pollster Pat Caddell’s (1950-2019) data from the 1970s that “a majority of Americans thought that their children’s lives would be worse than their own.” Does anyone remember Generation X, you know the 1990s college grads who’d been reduced to living in their parents’ basements because their shirt folding jobs at the Gap didn’t pay the rent? They made movies about those poor GenXers including “Reality Bites,” “Singles,” and most famously, “Slacker.” GenX wound up authoring the rise of the internet.
Then it was the turn of the Millennials to be the generation with no future. In a 2014 National Review story titled “Generation Vexed,” Kevin Williamson said the Millennials were “hosed,” that instead of a prosperous future they “are going to end up paying radically higher taxes to support the major federal entitlements.” That same year, Robert Samuelson (1945-2025) wrote about the Millennials and his “anxiety about their future. Will jobs be there? Will they be stable?” Jumping on the bandwagon, in 2019 Noonan’s Journal colleague Joseph Sternberg published The Theft of the Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. Those poor Millennials are now the richest generation in the history of the richest nation in the history of the world.
Again, there’s nothing new about young people being told their future is bleak. Happily, the broad actions of the young signal they're not internalizing the pessismism. Which is correct. They’re not victims contra their conservative sympathizers. And there’s no excusing murder or attempts at it, no matter your American situation.
Which means if old or young find themselves blaming the sick actions of America’s youth (or their own) on “the media,” or “government schools,” or some other other, they’re off track. While there are awful circumstances endured by some young Americans, none have anything to do with them being American.
