Austerity and Dependence

Welcome to the era of the gerontocracy. Nearly all political energy is exhausted in dealing with the ramifications of the growth of one demographic: the elderly. Such a political climate was predicted a decade ago. But, now that the call for austerity measures has been issued, the American public has been asked to reckon with the facts. 

"Today the ratio of working taxpayers to nonworking pensioners in the developed world is around 3:1. By 2030, absent reform, this ratio will fall to 1.5:1, and in some countries, such as Germany and Italy, it will drop all the way down to 1:1 or even lower. While the longevity revolution represents a miraculous triumph of modern medicine and the extra years of life will surely be treasured by the elderly and their families, pension plans and other retirement benefit programs were not designed to provide these billions of extra years of payouts" (Peterson, G. Peter. Grey Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis. Foreign Affairs. Jan/Feb 1999). 

Faced with the financial crisis on one hand and this demographic crisis on the other, neoliberalism presents us with a false choice - cut education and social services for the young and the most in need and leave Medicare and Social Security untouched, or cut entitlement programs for the current generation of retirees. The choice is a false one; agreeing to any kind of cuts affirms the logic of neoliberalism and its arsenal of moral conceptions regarding debt and deficits.

The generational conflict must be acknowledged. The youth of today are going to foot the bill the profligacy of the ruling generation - a generation that includes the Baby Boomers, the first cohort of which is about to retire. Students and recent graduates already drowning in debt are being asked to pay for the continued State support of their parents, whether through taxes or cuts to public education. Yet this generational politics described by Connor Kilpatrick in this essay at Jacobin and Malcolm Harris in this essay at the New Inquiry will not be solved by fighting the elderly for the last scraps of government assistance. Such an argument does not break from the logic of neoliberalism. In fact it uses the very language of neoliberalism to make its case. To truly fight austerity and the economic order it rationalizes, we must throw out the market-based conception of "dependence". 

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of successfully fighting austerity is the continued use of "dependence" by the left. Declarations such as, "batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while" are characteristic of a reactionary argument. Indeed, Reagannites and Thatcherites provided this same rationale provided during for cutting social services during the 1980s. 


The reasoning behind portraying the elderly as dependent is as follows: since the elderly, like the unemployed, do not participate in the productive process they are not entitled to any kind of support. And, because those populations do not participate in productive life, the rest of the able-bodied population is forced to subsidize their indolence. A serious challenge to the rationale for austerity rejects the idea of dependence completely and reframes government assistance as an issue of freedom.  In an essay for the Nation last year, Corey Robin discussed how this might be done:

"We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job."

Social Security and Medicare do not abridge freedom by way of government intervention. Instead, these social welfare programs expand freedoms for the members of a polity. Social Security allows the elderly to live free from the threat of starvation, provides the elderly to move about freely despite living on a fixed income, and frees the elderly from the threatening vicissitudes of post-employment life. This kind of reasoning must be extended to all corners of economic life. Austerity measures, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans say, do not expand freedom. Placing the fates of those citizens most in need - students, the poor, and the elderly - at the mercy of the market does not enhance individual freedom; it limits it.

This mode of thought can even be extended to explain the relationship between the youth and the retired. Asking the younger generation to pay for the care, in the form of cuts to healthcare and education, absolutely constitues a curtailment of freedom. Yet, the way to prevent this state of unfreedom is not to in turn cut social services and entitlement program for the elderly. That, too, is a curtailment of freedom. The State, empowered by a democratic polity, can instead expand support for at-risk populations, in turn expanding freedom. This idea, that an expansion of social services is the answer to the problem of intergenerational conflict, is the real challenge to neoliberalism and austerity.

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There is another component to the popular picture of generational conflict. The irony of living in a gerontocracy is that when the government is run by old people in possession of fantastic wealth - Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, John McCain, to name a few - it is easy to forget that the many older Americans are not so fortunate. Baby Boomers, from the union-shop manufacturer to the school teacher, have been also been fleeced and exploited. They, too, have seen wages stagnate, houses foreclosed on, savings wiped out, and debt increased. The response to the crisis and concomitant calls for austerity measures should not be a cry of "eat the old." It should be the cry of "eat the rich", accompanied with a hearty shout of "no one is dependent!" 

Don't fight the elderly simply because, after years of wage slavery, they finally get to step off the unceasing economic treadmill. Fight those who argue that anyone deemed "unproductive" does not have the right to a basic level of social security. Challenge the idea that people are only of value to society when they have productive potential. If neoliberalism is an economic model that awards power to those with the fattest wallets, fight for an economic paradigm that insures everyone has an equal ability and equal resources to engage in the political process.

It is true that the young have been made to bear a disproportionate burden of the austerity measures that have come out of the financial crisis, and that they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Students and recent graduates are paying for the profligacy of the bankers  and the ruling class in the form of cuts to public education. These same students, in the event that they find a job, will then pay for those same profligate bankers to retire, while the students, when they grow old, will not have the luxury of that same kind of safety-net. All of this is tremendously distressing and reason enough to take to the streets. But, at the same time, the pensioned factory worker or school teacher is not the enemy; they are partners in the fight to alter the status quo that forces us to make the false choice - to side with either the youth or the aged. When you face off with the police in during the next occupation, remember to stand side-by-side with your parents, not face-to-face against them.

The Crisis Generation

Much of the current generational writing - about the Millennials in particular - defines generations based on their relation to the development and growth of the internet.  Hence the description of the Millennials as the first generation to grow up on the internet and the last generation to remember a time before the internet.  This approach to generational writing is problematic for (at least) two reasons.

Firstly, the progression of the relation between members of a generational cohort and the internet does not take place in a vacuum. There is, of course, a broader geopolitical and socio-economic context for any generation. The web-centric approach to discussing the Millennials may be useful for a certain kind of writing, but by ignoring the greater context it ignores one of the most important political events in recent history  - September 11 - which separates the younger Millennials (my peers and me) from our older brothers and sisters.  Both cohorts may have grown comfortable with the internet, but every aspect of life - including the way people interact with the internet - changed in the wake of 9/11; the United States entered into a state of siege and the mindset of "total war all the time" from which it has never emerged.

With the expansion of the national security state the younger Millennials, the oldest of which are now in high school, have lived a near dystopian existence. For us, war has been the status quo, ignorance blissful, and dissent consistently construed as an act of treason.  Out of fear of arrest or loss of future career opportunities we are afraid to step on to the streets, unlike our older brothers and sisters - grad students and post-grads - who stand at the front of the Occupy protests. Hemmed in on all corners since we were toddlers by the expanding state apparatus and the digital extension of the global market, we have opted for inaction in order to preserve the modicum of comfort provided by obedience and conformity. As our cohort had just learned to read when the Patriot Act was passed, we have been raised with considerably less freedom than our older brothers and sisters.

Secondly, the rate of change in the nature of the relation between younger Americans and the internet accelerated rapidly with the passage of each year. Those of us still in high school can hardly remember a time before Facebook, let alone a time before wireless connectivity. In fact, these rapid changes eliminated many of the commonalities critics now use to draw a unform picture of the Millennials. Such a uniform picture, however, does not exist; those born in the mid- to late-nineties experienced the internet - considered the linchpin of writing on the Millenials - in a drastically different way. Younger Millennials never met the cyber flaneur, since our whole internet experience has been privatized and commercialized from the get-go, while our older brothers and sisters had the opportunities to experience the web without the endless paywalls and omnipresent advertisements.

For us, the generational clash is about far more than economics and class identity.  It's about reclaiming our lives from the state that has turned our schools into prisons and our streets into warzones and from the market that has invaded our homes and once-personal spaces. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't even be considered part of the Millennial Generation; the post-9/11 world into which we were raised is far darker and oppressive than the angsty boredom of the 1990's during which our older brothers and sisters came of age.

Millennials, Obama, and the Status Quo

In his essays, such as "Generation Sell" and "Generational Conflict", William Deresiewicz seems focused on understanding the social and political ramifications of what he calls "the commercial personality" - the mannerisms and ethos adopted enthusiastically by the Millennials in their attempts to fix "the world by making things and selling them." Yet, in his exegesis of contemporary consumer and youth culture, Deresiewicz actually explains how and why Barack Obama was elected, and why the Left shouldn't have expected anything from him in the first place.

Indeed, for a while now, Deresiewicz has been complaining about kids these days. The Millennials, he gripes in a recent essay, are "motivated more by narcissism than anything else." At a time when the country is in crisis, young people have withdrawn from politics in favor of social entrepreneurship. They see politics and activism as destructive and would rather work outside the system than change it from within, take it over, or even destroy it. Taught from a young age to play nice with others in the sandbox, the Millennials favor consensus, and shirk from confrontation. Thus, any dissent or disruption of everyday life to draw attention to a problem is thought by Millennials to be "uncool" and unproductive; agitating for a cause doesn't change the world, but creating some sort of socially beneficial entrepreneurial venture does. To illustrate this, Deresiewicz writes:

"A Stanford professor told me about two internships that were open to students at his college last year. One, for a small East Bay nonprofit, drew several hundred applications. The other, for the office of the Speaker of the California State Assembly—the second-most-powerful person in the eighth-largest economy on the planet—drew three."

Deresiewicz's actual gripe with the Millennials is not just that they are narcissistic and consciously apathetic, but that they have eschewed the most logical avenue to effectuate change - politics. But the problem lurking beneath the surface is not the self-aggrandizement and narcissism implicit in the Millennials' belief that entrepreneurial activity rather than politics can result in meaningful societal change. The problem is the word "change" itself. 

Barack Obama was elected as the candidate of change, supported ardently by the vast majority of Millennials. Young, multi-racial, fresh - Barack Obama was one of them. He had stylish posters with the hipster stamp of approval thanks to Shepard Fairey, a presence on social media, and a slogan behind which anyone raised in the era scheduled play-dates could rally: CHANGE. Obama's candidacy made it acceptable for Millennials to engage, albeit cautiously, in the political process.  But why?

The rallying cry of change carried with it none of the baggage that had made politics so untenable for Millennials. It was vague but generally inspiring, and suggested action without specifying direction. Obama's candidacy embodied the characteristics Deresiewicz sees as lamentable in the Millennials: "no anger, no edge, no ego." It was as if the Obama campaign team had lifted the slogan from some California start-up, which naturally made Obama the favorite candidate of those most enamored with the cult of entrepreneurship that has become the social creed of the Millennials. The way Obama appealed to these young voters - with the incessant repetition of  CHANGE to the point that it became a sort of mantra - should have been a warning that Obama's presidency was destined to be as bland, effete, and inoffensive as any Millennial who thinks his or her newfangled water filtration gadget will save the world.

When Barack Obama campaigned with his platform of CHANGE, his candidacy did not suggest a paradigmatic shift or systemic reform.  Instead, his candidacy represented merely an aesthetic change and, for the Millennials, a change from leadership by the older generation to leadership by the newer generation. Equipped with saccharine and banally optimistic rhetoric, as well as savvy marketing, Obama presented a packaged promise of a somehow nondescript political future. This remarkable power the Obama campaign had over young voters (read: Millennials) was primarily due to the lack of direction suggested by the word "change."

By virtue of its lack of direction, change implies neither revolutionary nor reactionary movement. And, due to its lack of specificity, a call for change is essentially a call for the maintenance of the status quo, albeit with a superficial alteration.  This is because a call for change in the language of today's politicians is actually a call for exchange - of issues, compromises, constituents, and anything to maintain the status quo. Change does not herald the arrival of something new; it simply notes the exchange of an idea or policy from one hand to another. The healthcare plan put forward by the Obama administration is the best example of this. Initially a Heritage Foundation counter-plan to Hillarycare, the idea of an individual mandate first belonged to those on the right. Current presidential candidate Mitt Romney instituted this plan in his homestate of Massachusetts. But then change happened. Lo and behold, the individual mandate had switched hands and the best deal for private insurance companies in the history of mankind was championed by the president many assumed would be the most progressive in a century. 

Many on Left have been disappointed with the way President Obama's first term has played out. In 2008, CHANGE appeared as a form of salvation from the nightmare of the Bush years, but it has been translated by Pres. Obama into few if any political gains.  Liberals projected onto Obama their desires for progressive change, most of which have not been realized. With Deresiewicz's analysis of the Millennials in mind, Pres. Obama's inaction should come as no surprise. 

As much as liberals would like to believe otherwise, Obama's "change" promised nothing in the first place. He did not advocate for progress, which would suggest an alteration of the status quo. And he certainly did not advocate for reaction, which would constitute an attempt to undo reforms that had previously been made. Obama offered essentially no direction; the change he promised was solely aesthetic, designed to put a human face on a status quo that was becoming increasingly unpalatable for many Americans.  For Millennials, this was all they wanted - politics without the contention, debate without anger, and politicians without ego. 

The birth of the Tea Party movement and the recent conflagrations at Occupy Wall Street protests show that the American public has grown tired with the status quo - tired of the exchange of old ideas dressed up in the language of change.  The partisans on the Left and the Right, much to the chagrin of many Millennials, want direction; they want to be participants in the grand clash of ideology, as old as the state itself, between reaction and revolution. Naturally, the Millennials are opposed even the very recognition of this clash, and not just because it violates their general rule of non-confrontation. 

The Millennials have become remarkably successful because of their docility, eagerness to conform, and nearly unthinking respect for authority. Reaction and revolution alike would threaten the Millennials' acquired privilege. Reaction, with its accompanying austerity, would strip them of their privilege by increasing indebtedness and inequality. Revolution, or more pragmatically progress, would negate their relative privilege through redistributive policy. The Millennials want none of this, so they vote for change because they know that it will not alter the status quo, but for a few aesthetic shakeups here and there.