European Millennials Are Not Like Their American Counterparts

Europe's Young Are Not That Woke - The Atlantic

"In public perception, age is often related to political views. “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head,” the 19th-century French monarchist François Guizot is supposed to have said...

There is indeed some evidence that people become more conservative with age, as an individual’s views evolve with one’s lifestyle and needs. However, most research suggests that one’s political outlook is formed at an early age, shaped by major economic and political events. In the United States, economic insecurity has pushed Millennials (born from 1981 to 1996) and Gen Zers (born after 1996) to the left on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike...

If a European-style welfare state is the preferred destination of young Americans, where are young Europeans heading? After all, they already have most of the things their transatlantic counterparts say they want...

Polls show growing support among younger European voters for policies advanced by left-wing parties. Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.

Yet on closer inspection, Europe’s young are less progressive—or “woke”—than their American contemporaries. A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left. Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority. And they are emphatically not socialists. Like their parents, most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.

In the U.S., Millennials and Gen Zers are losing their belief in the American dream, with its individualistic promise that your destiny is in your own hands. Some surveys even put socialism ahead of capitalism with very young voters. In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality.

Research from the International Monetary Fund shows that the young bore the brunt of Europe’s post-2008 economic downturn. Because pensions and salaries—especially in the public sector—were relatively well protected, older voters were much less exposed to the consequences of the financial crisis. It was younger Europeans who were hit by very high unemployment rates, precarious or part-time employment, and the low wages that go with such jobs. Moreover, fiscal-consolidation efforts generally hit younger age groups harder than older ones, especially pensioners.

All of this has contributed to a growing generational economic divide. The inflation-adjusted income of EU pensioners has risen by nearly 10 percent since 2007, according to the IMF, while that of the rest of the population fell during the financial crisis and has only recently regained its precrisis level. Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are nearly 10 percentage points more likely to be poor...

Many young Americans share Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vision of democratic socialism as something that already exists in northern Europe. “What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble,” she told Anderson Cooper earlier this year, “are what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”

However, the young people who actually live in those countries have a less rose-tinted view of European welfare states. During the crisis, Europe’s young learned that the welfare state in practice provides a much bigger safety net for older voters than for younger ones.

According to polls, only about a fifth of Americans under 35 want the U.S. president to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Among the older age groups, support for the wall is evenly divided. Yet in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration...

For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels."