Why Millennials Are Angry

“Millennials occupy the rather strange position of being both an angry and apathetic generation.”

Introduction

A great deal has been written about Millennial and Gen Z anger, particularly how it has now channeled into “overwhelming” support for Bernie Sanders. Some coverage of millennials has been laudatory; some has been highly critical. But complementing these discussions about Millennial frustration is the question of why these same angry people do not typically turn out to vote. Millennials occupy the rather strange position of being both an angry and apathetic generation. As Kendrick Lamar put it: “The great American flag is wrapped in drag with explosives/Compulsive disorder, sons and daughters/Barricaded blocks and borders/Look what you taught us!” Deep feelings of anger tend to be combined with a sense of powerlessness—for a generation that never learnt of other possibilities to a deeply unjust status quo. It is worth asking how this came about.

The War on Terror and Economic Precarity

If you are Millennial, you grew up in a time period where everyone was told that we had reached the “end of history,” to invoke Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis. All major political alternatives had been overcome, and liberal capitalism was the only game in town. For many ideologues, who only cared about “winning,” this sounded like an unconditionally great development. Most of these commentators failed to recognize what Fukuyama himself was wise enough to see: that many of us felt we had lost something fundamental with the arrival of the end of history. That is the freedom to remake the world if it turns out to be scarred by serious injustices. When I was a teenager living in Canada, I saw the World Trade Center fall. This was followed by the world’s greatest democracy and its allies—the now immortal bearers of world spirit in an apparently post-historical age—launching an illegal war and breaking with its most fundamental ideals by torturing and disappearing its enemies. For many of my friends and co-workers at the time, this made us fundamentally distrust politicians and virtually every cheesy pundit’s insistence on Western or American exceptionalism. Critics, of course, pointed out that our “enemies” living in scary parts of the world with strange sounding names did far worse things than we did—or insisted that this was all necessary to protect our sacred consumeristic “way of life.” All of this amounted to a stunning display of hypocrisy, as we called ourselves “the good guys,” while insisting that we and we alone were permitted to do truly evil things.

The irony underlying all of these events was that the so-called end of history became a time of deep historical reflection. The declining faith in our self-described masters led many Millennials to look more deeply into their civilization’s past. This was immeasurably aided by new technologies, which facilitated the dissemination of information at breakneck speed. What many of us found was not pretty: long histories of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and oppression. Many of these sins were barely acknowledged until a few decades before we were born, and, even then, they were quickly brushed aside. The same groups calling for Jim Crow in the 1950’s were claiming the consequences of racism were all gone by the 1980’s, which meant we no longer needed to commit to fixing them. Proud declarations about the rights of Western states to close their borders to refugees in the name of national sovereignty looked vulgar when considered along with centuries of imperialism and colonialism. This reinforced our sense that the hypocrisies, on display during the War on Terror, were nothing new. If anything, they were par for the course.