It was recently announced, with great fanfare from demographers, that Millennials had overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest demographic cohort in Australia. To which I responded with a yawning, “So, what’s the difference?”
Millennials are the children of the Boomers, and the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. The same ridiculous sense of entitlement, stemming from the same mollycoddled upbringing – and the same herd mentality. The predilection of both groups for those awful, awful music festivals is the plainest sign of their ovine obedience to leftist group-think.
The Millennials are the natural metastasisation of every awful “progressive” idea of the 60s. It was Boomer Marxists who first espoused the Long March through the Institutions. That strategy bore fruit with the Millennials.
Generation X were cut from a very different cloth to their elder siblings. The latchkey kids who left school in time for recession and surging unemployment, and the end of the Boomers’ taxpayer-funded “free university”.
The Xers’ children are not the Millennials, but the Zoomers: Generation Z. Like their parents, the Zoomers are showing pleasing signs of ditching the cosy nostrums of their “progressive” predecessors.
As much as we are led to believe that universities are bastions of Woke-ism (however we choose to define it), I have been surprised by the contrary. The medical students we encounter are not only enthusiastic, motivated and intelligent, but, for the most part, truly open-minded.
Millennials are the children of Clinton and Obama. Zoomers are the children of Trump and the Great Meme War. They’re shaping up to be a lot more conservative than many take for granted, especially legacy media Millennials who filter the world through Twitter.
There appears to be a real backlash amongst students against some of the dogmas being thrust upon them. Whilst they may not feel able to challenge those in authority, they know that sometimes the emperor has no clothes.
I will not name specifics, but many students feel unease at some of the modern shibboleths that parade through society, brazenly assaulting our experience of the world.
Younger acquaintances either recently finished or still at university regularly report that they keep their more “conservative” – meaning, by the current, looney-tunes standards of the “progressive” Establishment, centre-left – views to themselves. As one told me, he knew not to speak his real political views, because he knew he’d be attacked, not just by the small clique of far-left bullies, but the lecturer himself (an open communist).
Like GenX, the more conservative Zoomers just keep quiet and get on with it.
Through university, they have learned to keep their mouths shut and to parrot dogma that is told to them by politically partisan professors. However, if you provide the space for them to talk freely, a room full of diverse and interesting opinions appear, each with nuanced perspectives and experiences in which we should revel […]
In another domain, I am also struck by the fact that many students do not want ‘safety’ to govern their lives. Instead, many of them want to be put outside of their comfort zone, and when they are given structure to do so, not only do they flourish but relish the opportunity.
The Covid pandemic has been a particular lightning-rod. Especially for the medical students.
Many of these students feel acutely what they have lost, not just in terms of life experience, but also of their medical education. I cannot speak for all of them, but – having been shut out of hospitals for two years – many feel like they want to be part of the workforce.
Spectator Australia
It also seems that a growing number of young gay people are rebelling against the ‘rainbow’ orthodoxy. Increasingly, they are voicing their disgust at the open degeneracy being peddled in their name.
It’s a similar story with ethnic minorities. In the US, the children and grand-children of Latin migrants are even more hostile to socialism than their elders who fled it. For the first time, a slim majority of black voters are turning to the Republican party.
So, maybe, just maybe, the kids really are all right.
