Progressive millennials are old now

With middle age comes power, but the torch of cool is passing to younger right-wingers

Generations are sort of fake. But only sort of.

I was born in 1981, at the leading edge of the Millennial cohort. In the 1990s, I went to an old-school sleepaway camp that was founded way back in 1919.

The camp was structured around 20 small bunk houses and a “senior lodge” where the fifteen-year-olds slept. During my first summer there, only 17 of the 20 bunks were actually used. By my sixth year, the three vacant bunks had been reactivated, an additional building had been converted into a bunk, and there were plans to expand the senior lodge. That’s because there really was a demographic bulge of people born in the mid-to-late 1980s that followed a trough of people born in the late-1970s. That ebbing and flowing of population dynamics reflected the dearth of children born during the Great Depression and World War II, and the large baby boom that followed the war.

These generations have distinctive life experiences.

I voted for Al Gore in 2000 (he lost) and then for John Kerry in 2004 (he also lost). But if you’re a little bit younger than me — which is significantly more common than being exactly my age — your political coming of age was Bush’s disastrous second term and Obama’s exciting victory. On all the big issues of your young adulthood, the public either agreed with the progressive view all along (Social Security privatization in 2005, Medicare privatization in 2011) or else swiftly came to agree with the left (Iraq by 2006, marriage equality by 2012). At the same time, your formative economic experience was entering the labor market during deeply depressed conditions. You didn’t have my good fortune to be already employed (and relatively cheap to keep on the payroll) in 2007 and 2008. You didn’t have even my brief exposure to the full employment labor market of 1999.

Economists talk about labor market “scarring” as a result of prolonged unemployment or underemployment, especially early in your career. But I think there’s also political scarring. I don’t think “capitalism is a failed system” is the correct inference to draw from the persistent labor market weakness of 2007-2015, but I see why it’s an inference one might draw, especially for someone who grew up seeing conservative ideas on foreign policy and gay rights failing and falling into discredit.

By 2025, of course, I’m a middle-aged dad. And the big cohort of people slightly younger than me with very progressive views are also pretty old.

That’s part of the Zohran Mamdani story. The left-wing young millennials of the Obama era are old now, old enough to hold state senate seats and run for mayor. Old enough to run political consulting firms. Old enough to be influential in media. I don’t think you should over-read the ability to win a primary in a blue city to mean millennial socialists are about to win elections in swing states. But they have the numbers and enough social, economic, and political clout to win races in safe blue terrain. In a world where most seats are not swing seats, that’s a really big deal.

And yet, constitutive of the progressive millennial worldview is a sense of world-historic inevitability, a belief that, as Obama liked to say, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. You could look at a bad election result like 2010 or 2014 and at the age splits, and see any setback as merely temporary — time was on progressives’ side.

But I think a lot of what millennials have found disconcerting since the 2014 election is the realization that this sense of historic inevitability is wrong.