So how real are the grievances of American students—now firmly of the Gen Z persuasion—compared with their comrades around the world, and what can their millennial predecessors reveal about the course of their lives? I recall very clearly, having managed plenty of them myself, the grievances of peak millennials in the workplace pre-COVID. They were stereotyped (often unfairly but sometimes accurately) as a generation of snowflakes who never stopped bleating about the cost of living, their need for acknowledgment and comforting.
But it turns out millennials are likely to emerge as the richest generation in history thanks largely to the supermassive wealth transfer from their boomer grandparents and older Gen X parents. So, where does that leave the much-aggrieved Gen Z, members of which are now leading student protests around the world and in the U.S.? They have replaced millennials as the self-proclaimed “lost” generation, spooked by AI, anxious about jobs and housing and even a looming world war.
For graying Gen Xers, it’s just too tempting not to think, “Plus ça change.” There is an obvious contrast between students in the U.S. and those who recently overturned decades of Russian influence in Serbia, the Cockroach Janta Party in India or even the school student protests in France triggered by neglect and national decline. (Newsweek reader comments on the French clashes were all over the place, ranging from “Vive la Révolution” to blaming them on migration and jihadists.) The leading U.S. colleges—the great hothouses of the new wave of socialism—are dominated by students from high household incomes. Last year, a report claimed that more students in the top 38, including five in the Ivy League, come from the top one percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent. Income inequality is less of a problem for the student class than those outside higher education.
As Newsweek reported, overall U.S. youth unemployment is far below the rates across Europe. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their privilege, America’s Gen Z students remain deeply disgruntled. In a recent survey, only nine percent said America is headed in the right direction and only one in four expected to surpass their parents financially.
Another poll found 45 percent believe physical violence can be justified to silence speech they consider hateful, while 42 percent believe that hearing an opposing political viewpoint can harm their mental health. It seems Gen Z students are exactly like millennial students used to be, only more so. The irony of Gen Z student nihilism in America is that they are more likely to inherit wealth, because they tend to come from the more privileged strata of society.
So, those with the most militant, anti-establishment grievances are most likely to be from the establishment and—like their millennial forebears—also most likely to be absorbed back into the ruling elites of the country and become, for want of a better word, rich. All Gen Z students have to do is wait. They’ll get what’s coming to them.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
