ew0k1h ago2ish decades ago I think young people like myself at the time were upset with the US war machine (and general government corruption) because we could still remember what the tail end of the American dream looked like and we didn’t want to lose it, so you know we had more civic engagement and gave a damn. Young people now never saw the American dream with their own eyes and America has offered them zero (really just offered them scams and blatant exploitation)— I can’t imagine why they’d give a shit if the whole thing collapses post Iran, post AI. I get why they’ve totally checked out.
Politicians are behaving as though young people will give a shit, that they will actively try to turn this ship around, and that’s an error.
Which is bad for both because it can always get worse GM
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Globe9932m agoI assume by "tail end of the American dream" you mean the 90's... I was probably roughly the same age cohort around the time of the Iraq war, and was completely opposed to it.... Although I guess it wasn't so much out of a sense of "losing something", because when you're a libertarian the world is so far from your ideal anyways that there's kinda only room to grow.
Hard to understand how good certain aspects of the 90's were at the time, except in the rear-view mirror...
As for young people, the nice thing about them is that they're much more given to hope and optimism than older generations. A transformational figure like Obama (or Trump for that matter) could, for good or ill, mobilize them... I think we just haven't seen that person emerge yet.
Although my hope would be that people get mobilized around social movements rather than people, because it's always better to champion an idea than a person...
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