(We can see this again now in the risible rush by purely-for-profit brands to bend the knee to Wokeness.) But this new development examined by Professor Kaufmann would indicate that the very young aren’t rebelling quite in the way we’re used to. The awareness that there will be a lot less to go around would explain why young people in particular might be less tolerant of the liberal establishment line on issues such as immigration.Įver since the invention of teenage, young people have been encouraged to rebel against their parents by a crafty capitalism which was well aware that many trappings of rebellion – outrageous clothing, sexy music – could bring in a pretty penny. The centrepiece of the £2 billion programme in this week’s budget will see the government subsidising six-month job placements for under-25s. They were kids when the Prime Minister Harold McMillan said “You’ve never had it so good” – imagine a PM saying that today! Instead they get “You poor things – don’t worry, we’ll help you”. It was predictable that people who led such hedonistic lives would be loath to grow old gracefully. Jobs were so plentiful that if they were sacked for getting back to the office a little late they could walk straight into another position that afternoon and still have money to blow on pills and thrills at the weekend.
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One of the most fascinating examples of this were the teenage suburban Mods working in West End offices who would spend their lunch break taking speed and dancing in the basement clubs of Soho, as recorded by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 essay The Noonday Underground. Then in the Sixties, pleasure-seeking and leisure-taking, which had been the preserve of the rich, was democratised. Generally, before the invention of the post-war Western teenager, they went from being children to adults, following the path their parents had plotted without much questioning. The variously attributed quotation has it that “If a person is not a liberal when he is 20, he has no heart if he is not a conservative when he is 40, he has no head.” But it’s not strictly true that young people have always been rebellious they’ve always been prone to taking a puritanical view on emotional issues such as abortion and adultery because they’re naive. Still got it! And now we’ve got the big intellectual guns on our side, in the essay Unherd published this week by the brilliant academic Eric Kaufmann, Are Young People Turning To The Right? Every time I read a new survey about young people having less sex or old people catching more STDs, I get a snuggly shimmer of sleaze-superiority by proxy. Ever since the creation of Absolutely Fabulous’s sober, censorious Saffy back in the 1990s, we ageing ravers have liked to portray ourselves as wilder than the generations which have succeeded us.
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