These Little Town Blues Are Melting Away
What Does a Mamdani Win Mean for Millennial Socialism™?
Photo credit: ABC news
Millennial Socialism™ has its deepest roots in the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, Air America/Ring of Fire Radio and Occupy Wall Street, and subsequently more salient cultural signifiers in the various Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 campaigns as well as historically the cohort of podcasts and independent media involving Chapo Trap House, CumTown, The Majority Report, and somewhat the David Pakman show and the Jimmy Dore Show (pre-covid).
The existence of the Millennial left as a political cohort owes most of its life to the Obama era, ironically where Paul Ryan summed it up succinctly as “College graduates should not have to live out their twenties in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.”
There are two primary cohorts of Millennials which define their political reaction to this era - some for which the choice was to get up and leave the bedroom for work, and others for activism, passive activism, or Facebook-bound slacktivism.
It is important to understand firstly that the median millennial is in their mid-30s and essentially only now achieving family formation or otherwise with no prospects for growth, 15 years on from the Great Recession, while elder millennials are in particular the most cowed, cow-towy, politically correct and lacking in argumentative ability of a onetime “youth” cohort since the 1950s. This is a generation that is basically at sea and has, through various means of “giving up” (e.g. two failed Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, various small-left parties in Canada and Europe with no real economic perspective) come to expect “Daddy Government” to save them. I personally can still remember Sam Seder and Chapo Trap House acting like it was obvious that Bernie Sanders would lose - once it happened of course - while on the Republican side Trump essentially threatened to detonate his own party if they formed allegiance against him.
The reality may or may not be that “Mommy Government” has gotten in the way, whether may be best referred to as “Nanny State”, the “Bedroom State”, the “Bedpan State” or the “Dominatrix State” depending on how involved you think it should be in personal life. Extensive regulations, taxation and spending that has led to the gradual diffusion of responsibility out of individuals hands - the increased use of government-secured credit products, the decreased propensity to save and invest, the increased expectation to be bailed out (especially if you’re like, a bank or whatever) - to the point where total government expenditure is now 50% more of the economy than it was in 1960, consistently approaching 40% of total economic activity in the United States since 2010.
source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ
With not the littlest scintilla of irony, as government has gradually taken on an increased role in society, trust has declined. Indeed, the more you see it, the more you may recoil in its presence.
source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/americans-views-of-government-decades-of-distrust-enduring-support-for-its-role/
And yet, by that same token, Millennial Socialism™ continues to inhabit the main-line of the Democratic Party, a Party which uncoincidentally has a constituency that believes that laws exist to protect people from themselves.
Not only does this take place in the absence of individual autonomy, but it is also symptomatic of an increasingly paternalistic society in decline. The cultural trends in the United States - deference to authority, dislike of change, discomfort with growth, aversion to risk - are more similar to the cultural traits of the British Commonwealth and Continental Europe than they are to the historical (and perhaps apocryphal) United States with which many are more familiar today.
Mamdani seems like a fairly generous and earnest candidate. There is nothing wrong with him on a personal level, and for that he is most likely to win. But it is important to understand that the constituency he represents is essentially indolent, and that is their most defining quality, and the generation which is carrying his representation to higher office is among the most indolent in decades, and most indolent in one of the most indolent places on Earth - New York City, baby.
The aspect of Millennial indolence is proven not simply by the actual politics that the generation practices, but also the actual attitudes towards things like entrepreneurship. Indeed, much of the commentary on business formation since the Great Recession was that it was essentially flat and, as a proportion of all businesses, much smaller than what it had been in previous decades. As it happens, business formation has spiked since the entrance of Gen Z into the work force - coincidental or not - with perhaps also a COVID-induced high of businesses being formed to take advantage of fraudulent PPP loans (Father Government never too far out of the picture).
source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BABATOTALSAUS
As for the indolence of New York itself, well, New York is a world-center for performative work: Private Equity associates pretending to need to work long hours through the night to forecast the P&L of midwestern father-son HVAC acquisitions (on fictitious excel sheets), equities traders pretending they wouldn’t be better off simply buying the S&P, performative-tech coffee-shop-types and social-enterprise-hangers-on who cannot survive an office space without Shakshuka for breakfast and 8 lattes a day.
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Yes, we can all be jealous, and yes the above person may not actually work at Google (probably because many actual employees who post videos like this get fired). But the point remains: even if jealousy applies, when one achieves luxury - as Thorstein Veblen might observe - indolence is the point.
And so, as circuses come to New York (the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final, though technically in New Jersey), so must bread. New York is the richest city in the world, the seat of its most powerful empire, in fact the new Rome. And so as Caesar had to promise grain to the plebs to maintain their compliance, Government must promise more to people who expect more from government because they have lost the instinct to get things for themselves, to travail, to collaborate, to invent, and they have done so not necessarily as an effect of government in the first place, but an effect of a culture which has taught us to look to others to solve our problems, to take our self-ownership away from ourselves - to live on tracks and narrow paths and never take risks or express an intrusive thought. This is essentially the lingua franca of Millennial Socialism™ - hey, I took the bargain, I went after the American Dream and didn’t get it, now Government owes me the difference.
It’s clear inasmuch that the working and middle classes have been betrayed, it’s clear that elites want to suppress revolution, but the type of revolution that poses a real risk to them is not the one where they’re signing the cheques, in fact - it never is.