Can Millennials defend liberty? Across the developed world the new generation appears to be trying with Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, Europe and Australia.
More power to ’em, I say. Sure, there’s virus risk in it. But protesting is never about convenience. It’s about fuck you, and damn the lifeboats!
It is encouraging to see a younger generation defend something, anything, to get off Facebook pages and onto the streets and celebrate the rights and liberties at the heart of our civilisation.
Yet the values impulse that is driving the protests seems more typical of Millennial politics than it does any breaking out of it. No generation is more sensitive to racial power imbalances, as well as sexuality and climate. For instance, MB has chronicled a disastrous decade for Millennial economic rights and liberty that have passed without protest. Whether it is the distribution of public finances and taxation, access to education, access to an affordable roof over one’s head, access to a well paid and secure job and, of course, access to cheap energy that does not destroy the entire planet.
Indeed, in a broader definition of social equity (which includes economic), all Millennials of all colours have been rorted, abused, and exploited with a merciless abandon unseen since the nineteenth century.
Let me say again that I support the BLM protests. My issue is not that they are transpiring. It is that, beyond the odd environmental and gay marriage kerfuffle, Millennial politics and what we at MB describe as the “fake left”, seems unable to get exercised about much else.
At MB, we have had at least five years of this experience with Millennials. MB was founded for many reasons but uppermost was the economic inequity driven by house prices. Through the early years of the twenty-first century, Millennials globally (and especially in Australia) lost the basic right to own an abode. This, it seemed to us, was such a violation of basic human rights that any society that persisted with it deserved to be driven over by a revolutionary truck.
One of the key drivers of this inequity (as well as wages, falling living standards, and environment amenity) is mass immigration. So we went after it. Yet that campaign for class and generational equity has often been greeted with howls of protest from the very Millennials it seeks to aid.
My experience of Millennial protest is thus coloured (pardon the pun) by this. Identity politics has not just trumped class politics, it has all but replaced it.
So, as I look forward to the looming challenges to liberty and liberalism that Millennials will face, I can’t help feeling a little fear for their fate. If ethnic, sexual and climate equality are the touchpoints of revolution to the exclusion of all else, then how will Millennials deal with other existential challenges such as the breakdown of their own system? The rise of class inequality? The obvious geopolitical and ideological wars that loom? How will they deal with the encroachments of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into all forms of liberal western life if the purity of racial equality is of greatest importance?
This value system goes far beyond the BLM movement. We see it every day in the Australian press which is pre-occupied with rooting out all forms of racism, while, at best, it makes only a passing reference to broader, economic inequities. In part, this is driven by Millennial journalists. Yet it is also the system itself, which is wedded to the economic model of freely moving people and capital, or open sovereign borders.
So, Millennial moral champions focussed upon racial social justice find themselves uniquely at one with the very globetrotting global capitalism that is largely responsible for their own mass economic disenfranchisement.
Moreover, and most worryingly, the CCP constantly exploits this misalignment to its advantage, stoking racial fears, silencing dissent, while doing everything in its power to increase its participation in the capital flows.
This is nicely illustrated by the dichotomy of huge numbers at BLM protests over one man’s death (not to minimise it or take away from the systemic issues it represents) versus almost no support for six million democratic brothers and sisters in Hong Kong dying quietly in the background.
You can see where this is headed, I’m sure. As admirable as Millennial open borders and social justice objectives are, they are also a red carpet upon which CCP influence gains traction. Yet Millennials seem unable to see it.
Perhaps it is that, as a generation, Millennials feel helpless before the magnitude of the formidable challenges that they face. So chasing racial and sexual equality is a manageable win.
Perhaps it’s the internet, which is a kind of nutcase media machine of flat earth information provision that offers perfect access to prejudice reinforcement.
Perhaps it’s the post-modern education system that we put these kiddies through, leaving them bereft of all rage unless it violates the truth that there is no truth, crushing respect for their own cultures.
Perhaps it’s the pop-psychology movement that has made all social failures into victimhood and illness instead of empowerment and responsibility.
Perhaps it’s the collapse of the familial unit and Judeo-Christian values.
Perhaps it’s capitalism itself, feeding upon freedom until it is devoured.
I don’t know the answer. Further, I fervently hope that I’m wrong. Millennials may well be able to chew gum and walk at the same time. They may be able to defend liberty, which requires borders to protect their own liberal system, even as they seek global answers to global problems.
Perhaps when the BLM movement settles down and pushes progress towards greater racial equality, Millennial movements will broaden their scope to include issues of more utilitarian liberty such as class warfare at home and a Chinese Communist Party invader abroad.
It just doesn’t look like it.
