Quotes of the Day - April 1, 2012

I was cleaning my room this weekend and I stumbled upon a huge pile of articles I must have printed out in some strange journal article frenzy. So I decided to read them all. Since I'm still slogging through A Bed for the Night, I thought I would pick out some noteworthy passages from the articles and discuss them here. Most of the articles below describe aspects of Postfordist life.

The first article entitled "The State of Families, Class and Culture" is by Arlie Hochschild, a professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley. In it she describes "a profound shift in the American family, one that bears the deep footprints of a disappearing economic sector and a transformed culture," and argues that "these days, the best gauge of social class is years in school." Hochschild repeats the liberal shibboleth of education as an anti-poverty measure.

"In 1970, a female high school dropout had a 17 percent chance of becoming a single mother (versus 2 percent for a woman with a bachelor's degree). By 2007, her chances had jumped to a whopping 49 percent (versus 7 percent for the B.A. holder). Nearly all new mothers with graduate training, but only half of high school dropout mothers, are married." 

Clearly the socioeconomic divide is also an educational divide. In the new "knowledge economy", the college degree is a signifier of knowledge possession, whether or not the skills learned at college are needed for the job. Those lacking complete educational credentials therefore lose out in the job market. Naturally, the Right applauds this kind of shift in class composition. For them, this represents a shift towards meritocracy. Yet, the meritocratic ideal of a workforce dominated by the best and brightest doesn't actually exist. Access to education is uneven; there is no such thing as equal access to opportunity. And, naturally, inequality of access leads to inequality of outcomes.

Hochschild turns to economist Richard Wolff to explain the change in class composition and ends up discussing the feminization of labor that has taken place since the 1970s.

"For a century before 1970 most American companies paid wages that slowly rose decade by decade, so that a male worker could feel better off than his dada and trust that his son would be better off than he was. But by the 1970s, the deal was off; corporate profits continued to rise while worker's real wages stagnated...the blue-collar family became the shock absorber of the broken deal."

To make matters worse, she argues, "over the last 30 years, companies and government have offloaded risk onto the shoulders of individuals." The best example of this is the bailout of the banks during the financial crisis. The above passage also reveals the predatory impulses of neoliberal economists. Socialized benefits are considered unsustainable and an unacceptable expansion of government, but the socialization of risk and the burden for the financial crisis is considered laudatory.

Hochschild also offers a spot-on critique of the common conservative trope that "liberals and feminists knocked family values from the safety of their intact middle-class mariages, Douthat and Salam believe, while precarious blue-collar families spiraled downward into divorce, poverty, and school failure. Family values help prevent that spiral, they argue. Culture counts." One of the great political ironies, and something that isn't pointed out enough, is that the most consistently conservative states have some of the highest poverty, divorce, and teenage pregnancy rates. These are the same "value voters" courted by social conservatives who hide an ideology of rapacious capitalism under a veneer of old-time family values. Liberal academics are responsible for the collapse of middle America: free market fundamentalism is. The steady decline of blue-collar America isn't due to the papers written by tweed-wearing academics; it's due to the consistent efforts by the Right to commercialize and commodify every aspect of life.

As a follow up to Hochschild's article, I read "Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited" by Guy Standing. The whole paper is really awesome and filled with quotable lines, so I'm only going to choose a few to expand upon.

The process of the feminization of labor is as follows:

"After generations of efforts to integrate women into regular wage labor as equals, the convergence that was the essence of the original hypothesis has been toward the type of employment and labor force participation patterns associated with women. Thera era of flexibility is also an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of labor."

For an in-depth and very relevant discussion of precarious labor, watch this video of the Left Forum panel sponsored by Verso and Dissent, The New Dangerous Class: Perspectives on Organizing Precarious Labor.

Factors shaping the feminization of labor include:

"labor rights in industrialized countries increasingly perceived as costs of production to be avoided in the interest of enhancing or maintaining 'national competitiveness.' 

"cost considerations of alternatives have become more significant determinants of allocations and divisions of labor.

"There has been a crystallization of a global economic strategy, under the banner of 'structural adjustment,' 'shock therapy' and other supply-side economic policies. This strategy has been associated with radical changes in labor market relations, involving erosion of protective and pro-collective labor regulations, decentralization of wage determination, erosion of employment security and a trend to market regulation rather than statutory regulation of the labor market."

"There has been growing privatization of social security, whereby more workers have to depend on their own contributions and entitlements."

 In the interest of greater "flexibility," firms have eliminated programs and benefits that once provided steady employment to American workers. This feminization of labor is essentially the "precariat-ization" of the entire workforce.

"Growing market flexibility and diverse forms of insecurity have encouraged greater female labor force participation and employment."

However, instead of women taking salaried positions with full benefits and pensions - the kind of positions once exclusive to men - more women are employed in general and more men are employed in the kind of precarious and flexible (read: temporary and lacking in benefits) labor that was once reserved for women.

The paper was written in 1999. More than ten years later, the shift he describes has fully occurred.

 "The concept of regular, full-time wage labor as the growing type of employment has been giving way to a more diverse patter, characterized by 'informalization' of employment through more outworking, contract labor, casual labor, part-time labor, homework and other forms of labor unprotected by labor regulations." 

"The types of employment and labor force involvement traditionally associated with women - insecure, low-paid, irregular, etc. - have been spreading relative to the type of employment traditionally associated with men - regular, unionized, stable, manual or craft-based etc."

The financial crisis completed the transition from stable employment to precarious employment as the dominant type of labor. Austerity measures, mass layoffs, and a concerted effort to limit the political power of organized labor have facilitated the transition.

The challenge for the Left is to address this new normal of precariousness and informalization in the face of the hegemonic "knowledge economy," which is fueled not by the physical labor but by cognitive labor. The perceived ephemeral nature of cognitive labor necessitates flexibility. In-demand skills change by the minute. Firms must be able to adjust to these changes by altering the cognitive composition of their workforces or risk facing a loss of market share and potential revenue.

Paola Virno, in "General Intellect," explains we can understand the nature of production in the "knowledge economy" or Postfordism. "Marx's 'Fragment on Machines', a section of the Grundrisse, is a crucial text for the analysis and definition of the Postfordist mode of production." Virno uses this section of the Grundrisse to describe the economic paradigm we live in now:

"Here Marx defends what can hardly be called a 'Marxian' thesis. He claims that, due to its autonomy from it, abstract knowledge - primarily not yet of a scientific nature - is in the process of becoming no less than the main force of production and will soon relegate the repetitious labor of the assembly line to the fringes."

"Marx uses an attractive metaphor to refer to the knowledge that make up the epicentre of social production and preordain all areas of life: general intellect."

Virno, like Hochschild, describes what is essentially the commodification of human beings through the commodification of their cognitive power.

"Given the tendency for knowledge to become predominant, labour-time becomes a 'miserable foundation': the worker 'steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. 

This process of commodification gives rise to the "flexible" model of employment.

"Disposable time, a potential wealth, is manifested as poverty: forced redundancy, early retirement, structural unemployment and the proliferation of hierarchies."  

If the value of a commodity is determined by the labour time embodied in it, then disposable time must constitute a loss of potential value. Yet, as Virno describes, "the so-called law of value is regarded by Marx as the architrave of modern social relations, yet it crumbles in the face of the development of capitalism."

Some claim flexibility represents emancipatory potential. Virno disagrees.

"[T]he individual who has changed as a result of a large amount of free time, cultural consumption and a sort of 'power to enjoy.' Most of us will recognize that the Postfordist labouring process actually takes advantage in its way of this very transformation albeit depriving it of all emancipatory qualities. What is learned, carried out and consumed in the time outside of labor is then utilised in the production of commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is computed as profitable resource."

It is important to note the differences between the industrial capitalism that still exists in the developing world and the cognitive capitalism that exists in post-industrial societies.

"Whilst the traditional process of production was based on the technical division of tasks (the person making the pinhead did not produce its body etc.), the labouring action of the general intellect presupposes the common participation to the 'life of the mind', the preliminary sharing of generic communicative and cognitive skills."

"The effect of putting intellect and language, i.e. what is common, to work, renders the impersonal technical division of labor spurious, but also induces a viscid personalisation of subjectification. The inescapable relationship with the presence of an other entailed by the sharing of the intellect manifests itself as the universal establishment of personal dependency." 

 The general intellect is something common, unowned by any individual or particular entity. However, postfordism is characterized by attempts to privatize the general intellect - to use the generic communicative and cognitive skills of some and extract value. Christian Marazzi describes this in "The Privatization of the General Intellect."

"[T]he implementation of the principles of post-fordist flexible production in the field of education, with the privatization of the costs of education (increase in tuition fees, and additional costs for specialization) and the deregulation required by the industries of the private sector (just-in-time education and competition between university centers involved in both education and research). From now on, education can only rhyme with casualization."

The very nature of the knowledge-based economy demands the proletarianization of knowledge-producers.

"The economic colonization of the field of education has set in motion a new cycle of struggles for the right to education - struggles in which the flexibility/precariousness of educational curricula also affects researchers faced with diminished public budgets and the corporatization of knowledge production."

Fights over grant funding, minimal salaries, and expensive healthcare now characterize the precarious lives of many professional academics. Naturally, this should lead to a radicalization of academia and reenergize the student movement. However, student mobilizations will necessary be very different from the mobilizations of '68.

"The point is then to understand the extent to which the education-research-finance nexus may define a confrontational terrain living up to the current transformations of the productive system a the global level."

Marazzi seems to hint that part of why postfordism is exploitive is that many refuse to recognize cognitive labor as labor.

"Innovative knowledge is something that has to be produced and that, as a result, has to be remunerated. In other words one as to consider the technological progress generated by the production of knowledge as a cost. This is what emerges from theoretical developments in the micro-economic analysis of growth factors. Theories of endogenous growth have made it possible to break from the neoclassical idea of a free-floating innovative knowledge situated outside the field of human action, as if it were something whispered to Robinson by his parrot, for free at that."

Marazzi puts forth a policy proposal to address the privatization of the general intellect, but he does not suggest any steps toward communization. The postfordist mode of production isn't destroyed, it is simply made more humane.

"It is this contradiction between the valorization of knowledge and  the devalorization of the workforce that explains the current  cleavage of the labor market between a “working class aristocracy” on  the one hand and a “flexible proletariat” on the other. It is therefore necessary to redefine the nature of the Welfare State by combining flexibility and social safety nets (“flexicurity”) in order to successfully address the processes of financial globalization, but also by developing a Learnfare State, a state, that is, where support for education/professional retraining operates as a guarantee of basic income and redistributes social wealth."

All of the above articles and quotations are terribly negative. Privatization is this huge, inescapable demon that has pauperized us all, turning people into mere commodities. In "The Common in Communism", Michael Hardt presents with a ray of light at the end of the very dark postfordist tunnel. To get there, "we need to explore...neither the private property of capitalism nor the public property of socialism bu the common in communism."

He first presents his own take on today's conditions:

"The triumph of movable over immobile property corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation. In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc."

In immaterial capitalism, industry must "informalize":

"Knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important throughout the traditional sectors of production, and the production of affects and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process."   

The general intellect, because it originates as something that is common, is both the source of postfordism's strength and postfordism's potential destroyer.

"Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common."

This is because the above-mentioned goods are of the general intellect; they are naturally common.

"If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically- and I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity."

Contrary to the common American liberal impulse, state management is not the answer to postfordism.

"Neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only against public property but also and perhaps more importantly by the common."

"Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental way."

The emergence of the general intellect and attempts to privatize it sets the stage of an explosive situation:

"the biopolitical process is not limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capitalism and create something entirely new...biopolitical production, particularly in the way it exceeds the bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation."

"The increasing centrality of the common in capitalist production - the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life - are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project."

"That capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism - indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it."

Unfortunately, there are significant obstacles on the road to organizing the future communist project. The chief obstacle is the inability of the Left to offer a complete and cogent Marxian critique of financialization in a way that is comprehensible to a non-academic audience. The tools of finance - securtitization, commoditization - are the chief means by which the general intellect is privatized. Cognitive labor and finance are inextricably linked; both are types of immaterial and mobile labor that make postfordism possible. Cognitive labor is the base of the postfordist cake on which the icing of finance is placed. A complete cake, and therefore a complete understanding of postfordist conditions, requires a complete understanding of financial tools and engineering. As elite universities train students in operations research and financial engineering, the Left must respond with an army of Marxian financial engineers equipped with the tools to preserve the autonomy of the common.

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.

***

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.

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.