'Generation me'? Generation crisis

With the coronavirus spreading ever faster around the world, it's time to start talking about the crisis generation and what it means for politics.

Growing up in crisis

When was the last time things were overall just generally good? Not perfect, but simply a time when things at least appeared to be getting better. When there was growth, when poverty was declining, when there was some measure of order - when it felt like you didn't have to think about politics and current events quite so incessantly.

This is a question that has been raised a couple times with people I know. Typically the answer does not get more optimistic than the mid-2000s (for those millenials who were too young to remember 9/11), while many might look back further to 2000 or the 90s. At best, that gives us about 15 years since the last time our society felt like it was overall in a good place. 15 years, the UK, Europe and, in some cases, the world, have been shifting from one crisis to another. 15 years is a long time. But for the upcoming generation in particular, for the millennial generation, demonised by so much of the media, 15 years of crisis has been more influential than many still appreciate.

I can remember seeing the first full front page of a Sunday newspaper my parents had just bought, explaining the danger of global warming. Since then, the unfolding environmental disaster has been a regular constant. Sometimes it has been pushed into the back pages but it has not yet gone away. And look where we are today - the ice caps are melting at an increasing rate, threatening more devastating floods, rainfall is becoming more unpredictable, ranging between flooding and drought, and from one side of the world to other, the forests are on fire. The climate emergency is more real than ever.

It can't have been more than a few years after seeing that front page that I remember watching the financial crisis unfold. In the UK, the collapse of Northern Rock was a big part of the experience; a major bank simply failing and the government needing to step in to nationalise it. I wasn't old enough to have a strong understanding of all the economics behind the financial crisis at the time but you don't need an economics degree to see that it's bad when all the numbers are flashing red. We would spend the next few years watching the unemployment numbers climb, businesses fold and a general air of worry enter the public sphere. The worst financial crisis since the 1930s, and now that we ourselves are entering the workforce, it seems entirely obvious that the effects are still with us, that the consequences of those mistakes have yet to be fixed.

From the financial crisis, we slid almost seamlessly into the eurozone debt crisis. It was like 2007/8 was on repeat. The structures and systems that we had been told delivered prosperity were revealed to be under-regulated and too easily exploited. It was the same consequences, the same hardships, the same unconvincing answers.

A few more years and the migration crisis hit. The spillover from wars in Africa and the Middle East had finally hit Europe and hundreds of thousands of people rapidly tried to reach the safety that Europe represents. In spite of outbreaks of goodwill, the popular mood was not welcoming and politicians soon turned to dissuasion and hostility. The image of a drowned child that went round the world opened only a small gap in this policy, a window which quickly closed as the tragedy was forgotten. Having long maintained a moral high ground relative to the infamous refugee policies of countries like Australia, Europe had little comfort to give the refugees arriving on its own doorstep. The scenes of human misery and of loss of life all along our shores become daily occurrences. Eventually, the flow slowed, both naturally and thanks to deals cut with autocratic regimes that neighbour Europe. But the impact was still there and in countries like Greece the camps are far from empty.

Others from my generation will have shared this experience. 15 years of a worsening climate crisis. 15 years punctuated by two of the worst economic crises in the last century. And 15 years that have only added on new crises, like the humanitarian disaster at the borders, without solving old ones. Our vision of the world and the fundamentals of how life 'just works' have been defined by crisis and insecurity. Everywhere and always is chaos. No one is in control.

Amid all this, some commentators criticise our generation for being overly sensitive. We simply don't appreciate how good we have it. We're snowflakes who complain about every minor issue. All our attention is focused on ourselves and we are unwilling to sacrifice for the community (local or national).

And it may well be true that we are more vocal about our worries than our parent's generation. But why wouldn't we be? Our formative experience is defined by the transition from one crisis to another. The proliferation of stress and anxiety among young people cannot simply be written off as an exceptional weakness or the product of overly sensitive parenting. We more desperately seek out comfort and stability, not because we take them for granted, but precisely because we know how rare and fleeting they can be. Housing is unaffordable, well-paid jobs are harder to find, competition is more intense, utilities are expensive and old luxuries (like smartphones and the internet) are now so essential they should be considered as utilities.

When the end of 'boom and bust' was declared, there was some truth to the idea. Boom and bust was a regular, reliable cycle. Now that's gone - an economic boom is near-impossible to imagine as we stagger from one bust to another, scraping together slivers of growth in between. The mere presence of a crash gives no reassurance whatsoever that strong growth will come back, a bit later down the line. In this precarious form of society, there are no real certainties. We know that things can always get worse.

An absence of leadership

In this context, it's easy to imagine how my generation could become utterly disenchanted with politics. Publics always demand that their leaders provide improvements to their lives but the ability to lead and inspire confidence, to produce tangible results, is especially in demand during times of crisis. It is an unfortunate reality that the responses to the crises of the last two decades have been a mixed bag. No matter the ideological stripe, there is a feeling that governments have only just about kept things together and that the whole structure could collapse again at any moment.

In the wake of the financial crash and the debt crisis, millions were pushed into hardship and the road back out has been slow and tenuous. The dominant narrative at the time, that we need austerity in order to correct public finances, is increasingly seen as a mistake, sometimes abandoned by the very parties and individuals who insisted on it in the first place. The climate crisis is getting worse, not better - America pulled out of its commitments and until it comes back to the table, the hope of getting other big polluters like China or India to undertake the necessary action will remain slim. We watched thousands die in the migration crisis and still there is no effective European migration and asylum system - tear gas at the southern border is seemingly the only solution.

If young people seem so consistently out of step with the dominant political factions in countries around the world, it is because these groups have been unable to demonstrate that they could bring solutions to these crises. It is only reasonable to assume, as some do, that young people would reject politics entirely and start to disengage from the system of democratic political change. They would not turn to violence, it would not mark a mirror of the terrorist groups of the 1970s and 80s. But they would simply stop trusting the political system and their leaders. The path to improving society would become invisible as engagement with politics declined, allowing corruption to grow. It is a vicious circle we have seen in other countries - politics has failed, so people turn away from politics, leaving no popular mechanism to reform politics, meaning politics keeps on failing.

Of course, it is not only the younger generation that has experienced these crises. Others have too and the backlash has been much broader than just among the young. Indeed that backlash has already produced a new and different set of political leaders. The point, then, when we say the young are out of step, is not that the young are in a different place to the leaders of the 90s, or 2000s, but instead that they are at odds with the leadership produced by the backlash subsequent to those years. New populists that have risen dramatically in popularity and who have even taken power are mostly the product of the older vote.

Why growing up with the crises forms such a different response to 'simply' living through them is not an obvious question to answer. That said, it appears at least somewhat likely that the answer lies in the presence or lack of nostalgia. The populists present a vision of what once was, they articulate the belief that we can go back to how good things used to be. The crisis generation does not believe this narrative. It does not believe that the past actually was meaningfully better, it does believe it is possible to reproduce the past and it does not believe it is desirable to do so. If things can always get worse, then going back is little more than unhelpful. The past was a good place for our parents; it holds no charms for us.

The pandemic

And so we are brought to the present. Still in the grips of the four previous crises, a new threat has now asserted itself. There is an air of panic but also a tinge of weariness - is it not always a crisis, after all? We didn't know what form it would take, but did we actually believe anything else was coming?

While the financial crisis of little more than a decade ago was widely seen as the worst since the Great Depression, now we are in the grips of a global pandemic - COVID-19 - which is compared to the Spanish Flu. It is a reminder that when we talk about a crisis generation, the word 'crisis' is not used lightly. It highlights how existential danger and conflict has become a regular feature of our politics, almost fully integrated as we default to scenarios where one action or another, one party or another, is defined as a swing between salvation and disaster.

We already know that hundreds of thousands will catch the disease. On some estimates, this will climb up to the millions. The fatality rate will be serious and will likely be one of the most deadly diseases we have faced in some time. State capacity will be severely tested as states are required to bring in sweeping new controls, limiting the freedom of movement, calming populations to maintain adequate supplies and coordinating with real precision to ensure healthcare systems are not overwhelmed.

It will take time to know just how effective (or otherwise) the response of governments in Europe has been. Right now, mitigation looks like the best-case scenario. Particularly as more stringent measures are imposed, as there is more disruption to people's lives and as the vulnerable take the hardest hit, there will need to be quite a visible demonstration that governments acted in the best way possible.

What will come

If governments step up and are able to restore public confidence then maybe the narrative will start to change. If not, and especially if a narrative takes hold that a large number of deaths were preventable, the crisis of confidence that lies at the heart of the crisis generation will deepen.

That is not to say that all this heralds a return to the politics of Blair, Schröder or Clinton. This period does not have any more hold on young people today than the earlier decades on which populists stake their claims. Though the 90s and early 2000s can be recognised as 'good times' - they are also seen as having paved the way for many of the problems that we face today. If anything they are symbolic of a period of self-congratulation that is totally at odds with the pressing difficulties and challenges we face today.

But this brings us back to the idea of a group that is disenchanted with politics - an idea which is false or at least simplistic. It is not true to say that my generation has no faith in the process of politics or indeed in public power. It is, in fact, the opposite.  Faced with insecurity, a lack of control and a sense of chaos, there is a very strong belief in the potential of public power to bring about solutions.

Some look at these structural factors and declare that this necessarily means the return of socialism or nationalism or some other ideology. The reality is we simply don't know whether any of these things are true, in whole or in part. The demands from politics are fairly clear but there is a much greater ambivalence towards the origin of that answer than might be assumed. Paradoxical as it may seem, youth support for Matteo Salvini or Jeremy Corbyn draws on similar sources: the promise of a strong state that will protect. In the liberal camp, Macron's promise of 'a Europe that protects' runs along the same lines.

In a meaningful sense, the young are highly engaged in politics - look at the climate strikes or pro-European protests, even the youth vote is becoming more important (though it starts from a low base). But we still don't know where this energy or commitment will be channeled or who will most successfully harness it. Maybe it will be a nationalist revival, maybe it will be a liberal-green consensus or maybe, if no convincing answer comes forward, it will retreat into nihilistic decay. What seems very likely is that the demand for state-led security will not go away.

That demand could be expressed in a number of ways but it is hard to see how it could be in any non-radical form. Not revolutionary or extremist, as already established, but not centrist either. Though it may seem odd that a desire for security would express itself through a preference for policies of change and upheaval, it is entirely logical when you see the current system as one that produces successive crises. If you want security and stability then major change and a definitive break from the status quo becomes necessary. Radicalism is not necessarily a good in itself but is approached pragmatically as a route to a society where radicalism is no longer needed.

We have a lot to learn

If the image arose of generation crisis as a collective of self-obsessed, selfie-taking airheads it's perhaps because in their teenage years they had both the possibility and desire to seek escapism, to look into a cleaner, happier, digital world rather than to despair at the world falling apart around them. Moving into adulthood, that option is no longer possible and, anyhow, the digital world has become equally poisoned with the same malaise of anxiety and crisis that envelops the real world. Now this generation is starting to take over and we will see in more detail what that really means.

We are only starting to understand the meaning of a generation defined by successive crises. And too often, it seems like some individuals in politics and the media don't even want to ask the question, so fixed in the certainty of their position and of the idea that the younger generation don't really have any problems.

Given the highly strained and highly strung nature of this generation's upbringing, it seems plausible that the long-term effects could be either good or bad. An insecure population can certainly shift to extreme politics. But it doesn't have to, and past analysis has been too hasty in expecting that precariousness would lead to soft fascism.

What we can say is that there will be a clear first-mover advantage for those groups that can successfully redefine and deliver security in the 21st century. Is it a security of borders? Of the environment? Of wages? Where you put the emphasis can lead you to very different places. For now, a somewhat leftist form of politics likely has the upper hand thanks to its long-standing emphasis on fighting climate change - a position which has been vindicated by the scientific reality and the lack of action, or even outright climate change denial, from other factions. But this is shifting and even the extreme right is now taking on elements of conservation rhetoric in order to present a green face.

For the crisis generation, it could well be that the politics of the future is not the politics of redistribution (the past) or of identity (the future some anticipate) but of security - a security which encompasses economics, social interactions and the very environment in which we live.


Image via Flickr