The economy is personal. It colors our decisions about everything: when to have kids, what city to move to, who to vote for, who to sleep with. And nobody knows this better than the biggest generation in history: the Millennials. These 80 million Americans have come of age during the worst economic recession since the Depression, an experience that will have profound repercussions on our lives\u2014and our political consciousness.<\/p>\n
I call us the Crash Generation. For many of us in our twenties, 2008 was a period awash in exhilarating highs and terrifying lows. The words \u201cdepression,\u201d \u201ceconomic crisis,\u201d \u201cmass layoffs,\u201d and \u201cforeclosures,\u201d along with \u201chope,\u201d \u201cchange,\u201d and \u201cObama,\u201d all clogged the headlines and made their way into whiskey-fueled party conversations. Washington and the media had never been so frank about the cataclysmic proportions of a financial crash. And a candidate had never kicked young voters into such high gear like Barack Obama, who seemed to reflect the seismic demographic shift our generation was heralding. The mythic American dream-bubbles were bursting for young people at the exact moment we had begun to wield our political influence. That second half of 2008 was our JFK assassination. Our Vietnam. Our Great Depression. <\/p>\n
Study after study finds that Millennials are \u201cmaterialistic\u201d or obsessed with money. But really we’re obsessed with the money we don\u2019t have; put in political terms, we\u2019re class-conscious. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and Mitt Romney\u2019s slipups, the concept of income inequality is finally part of the public conversation. The economic patterns of the past few decades, with the financial crisis as their crescendo, have yielded an atmosphere ripe for a youth-led social movement that hinges on our bottom lines. Because of our sheer numbers, we have enormous potential to transform waves into tsunamis, and we have already flexed our political muscle in two elections. Those of us who came of age when the bubble burst, particularly the downwardly mobile \u201cprivileged poor,\u201d have a tangible common experience, a renewed indignation.<\/p>\n
But too often, this indignation often has nowhere to go, and is enveloped in our frenetic lives of multiple jobs, demoralizing underemployment, or joblessness\u2014the constant physical and emotional stress of keeping our heads above water. Years later, the status quo has not budged. We haven\u2019t done much to shrink the income gap or encourage upward mobility. We haven\u2019t gotten our leaders to address anemic state budgets, deregulation, unions\u2019 decline, freelancers\u2019 precarity, shrinking wages, student debt, or the insane cost of living in major cities. All those economic pressures have primed this era for an economic shift. Yet those same pressures limit our freedom to protest or push for policy changes. In other words, we\u2019re pissed\u2014but we\u2019re paralyzed by the very forces we\u2019re pissed about.<\/p>\n
Right now, most of the permanent underclass feels politically frozen: When one missed paycheck means descending into poverty without a safety net, unions and political activism seem like a low priority. Educated young people are frozen, too\u2014caught in the privileged-poor paradox. Our meager (or nonexistent) paychecks incite righteous anger\u2014especially when we think of our middle class parents\u2019 luck at their age\u2014but they also choke our very ability to organize, create, and take risks. As our wages fall, our degrees lose value, prices of food and rent rise, and workdays expand, we have less and less time to read a book, to join a rally in the next town over, to hop a bus to Washington, to even have a hours-long discussion about politics with our friends. Most Millennials aren\u2019t starving, Great Depression-style, but they are starved for a low cost of living and a baseline of economic freedom.<\/p>\n