The kids are not alright – we must convince them there is still hope

To be fair, we may have freighted them with too much expectation over the last few decades.

Crippled with increasing existential risks and personal precarity, we’ve laid the bet that our children are the future. As “helicopter” parents, we have hovered over them, trying to ensure their skills and ambitions are at the ready, for whatever comes flaming down the tunnel of life.

But have they been properly equipped for this century, in which all the standard systems – money, politics, technology, jobs, property, ecology – seem to be cracking at the seams? For which, incidentally, these same ever-monitoring parents are directly responsible?

In response to all this, the kids aren’t alright. But our dominant framing of their lack of alrightness – where they are both tremulous sufferers, and angry radicals – seems to place an extra burden on them.

Are they the generation beset with anxieties and illnesses of all kinds? A recent NHS Digital report identifies that one in four 17-19 year olds had a probable mental disorder in 2022 – that’s an increase from one in six in 2021. Covid seems to be wreaking havoc in all ways. Neuroscientists have just discovered that the brains of post-pandemic teenagers are ageing quicker, which usually (in older generations) implies reduced cognitive functioning.

Or are they the generations consumed with injustice about what their elders have done to the planet and the economy, and thus their future? And are glueing themselves to things, or (in a more organised fashion) skipping Fridays at school, to publicly protest this state of affairs?

In this month’s New Left Review, Goran Therborn notes how Fridays For Future reports 17 million strikers in 8600 diverse locations across the planet (admittedly before the pandemic).

Of course, anxiety transmuting into militancy is not an unfamiliar route. Small-c conservative politics (from whose cauldron the anti-protesting Keir Starmer currently sips) has been alerted to the possibility that this anxious-and-angry generation may slide to political extremes, never mind be permanently lost to the Tory vote. Going by their recent research, the right don’t know exactly what to raise the alarm about.

Are young people the “woke” dupes of their indoctrinating educators? Or, conversely, are the very youngest of them becoming authoritarian-loving post-democrats?

For the former, take Eric Kaufmann’s November report The Political Culture Of Young Britain from Policy Exchange. Its polling purports to show that a “clear majority of British schoolchildren are being indoctrinated with cultural socialist ideas”.

“Among the 18-year-olds I sampled,” writes Kaufmann, “63% were taught or heard from an adult at school about at least one of ‘white privilege’, ‘unconscious bias’ or ‘systemic racism’ – three concepts derived from critical race theory.

“If we include radical feminist ideas such as ‘patriarchy’ or the idea of many genders, this rises to 78%. Those who have been taught more of these critical social justice ideas are more likely to favour political correctness as a way of protecting disadvantaged groups, rather than viewing PC as stifling free expression.”

I am tempted to make a scary Halloween face at this kind of material. Does being taught about the actuality and legacy of empire and colonialism really downgrade “historic British [or Scottish] values such as freedom of speech, objective truth and attachment to the nation’s historical accomplishments”, as Kaufmann puts it? Or doesn’t it just enrich and deepen kids’ understanding of the past, present and future?

Kaufmann sees a generation gripped by “cultural socialism”, who won’t abandon it “as they pass through milestones like taking a job, owning a home, or having children.

The woke revolution is cultural, not material”. From the viewpoint of yours truly, whoop-de-doo. The future may well be in safe hands.

But swivel your eyes to a centre-right position (in a paper endorsed by William Hague, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and that notorious toad-botherer, Matt Hancock). Their fears for young people, or at least the younger end, is that they are authoritarian-lovers in waiting.

Onward’s, The Kids Aren’t Alright: Why Young People Are Detaching From Democratic And Social Norms – And What To Do About It, brandishes this stat from their polling of 8000 respondents.

“Nearly half of millennials believe that army rule would be a good way to run the country” – which is triple the level of a decade ago. Some 61% of 18-34s agree that “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections would be a good way of governing this country”.

Scary if so. Yet even their own findings seem incoherent. If the Onward youth are so over democracy, why do other parts of this poll also show a “pandemic bounce” in solidarity – meaning increasing and unprecedented levels of social trust in others, post-Covid – among those aged 18-34?

Could it possibly be that the horror-show they’ve actually witnessed over these last few years – representative democracy at its worst – has unmoored these young citizens?

Keir Milburn, author of Generation Left, has pointed out to me that “the Onward poll only offered a choice between a democratic political system or three versions of authoritarian rule. It’s likely that most respondents will treat the phrase democratic political system as a stand in for the political system as it currently exists, and that has in fact failed young people”.

THERE is a vacuum of agency here opening up, which (in terms of authoritarian models) is maybe being filled by the scripts coming from computer games and superhero franchises.

However, as Milburn notes, when a viable alternative was offered in the figures of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – who directly addressed young people’s material needs and aspirations – they overwhelmingly supported it.

Even now, such a gap could just as readily be addressed by political appeals to creative community action – asking for “forgiveness not permission” on the use of buildings, communications or forms of mutual aid. Why couldn’t militancy build on that increase in social trust?

The Tory-enablers at Onward are throwing their own, rather familiar ideas into the vacuum – forms of national service, increase in voluntary activity, clampdown on social media – which are stolidly conservative takes on the possibilities. (I’m also fascinated to see them campaign for less-monitored playspaces for kids – aimed at self-strengthening their own characters, so they can be better prepared for adult life. One can’t fault the right for their endless opportunism…)

IS it different in Scotland? It may be. In the last few days, a major poll showed 62% of 16-24 year-olds and 57% of 25-34 year-olds are in support of independence – representing a consistent trend over the last decade.

We don’t have many polling stats on Scots youth and authoritarian attitudes. But it’s easy to see why indy would be an answer to the unmoored nature of youth politics.

Scottish independence, at least in theory, offers up a vision of hopeful democracy to young people. The theory is backed up by current policies like no student tuition fees and free public transport. And the prospectus of indy has the promise of better to come.

However, the dark scenarios therefore become obvious. If the current leaderships of the SNP and Greens begin to seem like the same, tarnished old political classes, more interested in maintaining power than national progress, then the youth vote would slip into its frustrated, desperate mode. Eventually, some smart political technologists would find a way to engage them in that mode, pulling them towards a more worrying, post-democratic politics.

Indy is always imperative. But if we want to keep a generation on board with the basics of democracy itself, it may be even more urgent than we think.