Part 2
The Rise of the New New Left

By Peter Beinart

At Clintonism’s core was the conviction that to revive their party, Democrats must first acknowledge what Reagan got right.

Obama, in describing his own political evolution, does that again and again: “as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election … I understood his appeal.”

“Reagan’s central insight … contained a good deal of truth”

“In arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview”

Having given Reagan his due, Obama then sketches out a worldview in between the Reaganite right and unreconstructed, pre-Reagan left.

“The explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other,” he declares in a chapter in which he derides “either/or thinking.”

“It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock.”

Had the term not already been taken, Obama might well have called his intermediary path the “third way.”

The nationally visible Democrats rising behind Obama generally share his pro-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, Reaganized liberalism.

The most prominent is 43-year-old Cory Booker, who is famously close to Wall Street and supports introducing market competition into education via government-funded vouchers for private schools.
In the words of New York magazine, “Booker is essentially a Clinton Democrat.”

Gavin Newsom, the 45-year-old lieutenant governor of California, has embraced Silicon Valley in the same way Booker has embraced Wall Street.

His book, Citizenville, calls for Americans to “reinvent government,” a phrase cribbed from Al Gore’s effort to strip away government bureaucracy in the 1990s.

“In the private sector,” he told Time, “leaders are willing to take risks and find innovative solutions.

In the public sector, politicians are risk-averse.”

Julian Castro, the 39-year-old mayor of San Antonio and 2012 Democratic convention keynote speaker, is a fiscal conservative who supports NAFTA.

The argument between the children of Reagan and the children of Clinton is fierce, but ideologically, it tilts toward the right.

Even after the financial crisis, the Clinton Democrats who lead their party don’t want to nationalize the banks, institute a single-payer health-care system, raise the top tax rate back to its pre-Reagan high, stop negotiating free-trade deals, launch a war on poverty, or appoint labor leaders rather than Wall Streeters to top economic posts.

They want to regulate capitalism modestly. Their Reaganite Republican adversaries, by contrast, want to deregulate it radically.

By pre-Reagan standards, the economic debate is taking place on the conservative side of the field. But—and this is the key point--there’s reason to believe that America’s next political generation will challenge those limits in ways that cause the leaders of both parties fits.

America’s youngest adults are called “Millennials” because the 21st century was dawning as they entered their plastic years.

Coming of age in the 21st century is of no inherent political significance.

But this calendric shift has coincided with a genuine historical disruption.

Compared to their Reagan-Clinton generation elders, Millennials are entering adulthood in an America where government provides much less economic security.

And their economic experience in this newly deregulated America has been horrendous.

This experience has not produced a common generational outlook. No such thing ever exists.

But it is producing a distinct intragenerational argument, one that does not respect the ideological boundaries to which Americans have become accustomed.

The Millennials are unlikely to play out their political conflicts between the yard lines Reagan and Clinton set out.

See which celebrities support Bill de Blasio, one of the rising stars of the new new left.

Even if they are only a decade older than Millennials, politicians like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker hail from a different political generation.

In 2001, just as the first Millennials were entering the workforce, the United States fell into recession.

By 2007 the unemployment rate had still not returned to its pre-recession level.

Then the financial crisis hit. By 2012, data showed how economically bleak the Millennials’ first decade of adulthood had been.

Between 1989 and 2000, when younger members of the Reagan-Clinton generation were entering the job market, inflation-adjusted wages for recent college graduates rose almost 11 percent, and wages for recent high school graduates rose 12 percent.

Between 2000 and 2012, it was the reverse.

Inflation-adjusted wages dropped 13 percent among recent high school graduates and 8 percent among recent graduates of college.

But it was worse than that.

If Millennials were victims of a 21st-century downward slide in wages, they were also victims of a longer-term downward slide in benefits.

The percentage of recent college graduates with employer-provided health care, for instance, dropped by half between 1989 and 2011.

The Great Recession hurt older Americans, too.

But because they were more likely to already have secured some foothold in the job market, they were more cushioned from the blow.

By 2009, the net worth of households headed by someone over 65 was 47 times the net worth of households headed by someone under 35, almost five times the margin that existed in 1984.

One reason is that in addition to coming of age in a terrible economy, Millennials have come of age at a time when the government safety net is far more threadbare for the young than for the middle-aged and old.

As the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, younger Americans are less likely than their elders to qualify for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Not to mention Medicare and Social Security.)

Millennials have also borne the brunt of declines in government spending on higher education.

In 2012, according to The New York Times, state and local spending per college student hit a 25-year low.

As government has cut back, universities have passed on the (ever-increasing) costs of college to students.

Nationally, the share of households owing student debt doubled between 1989 and 2010, and the average amount of debt per household tripled, to $26,000.

Economic hardship has not always pushed Americans to the left.

In the Clinton-Reagan era, for instance, the right often used culture and foreign policy to convince economically struggling Americans to vote against bigger government.
But a mountain of survey data—plus the heavily Democratic tilt of Millennials in every national election in which they have voted—suggests that they are less susceptible to these right-wing populist appeals.

For one thing, right-wing populism generally requires rousing white, Christian, straight, native-born Americans against Americans who are not all those things.

But among Millennials, there are fewer white, Christian non-immigrants to rouse.

Forty percent of Millennials are racial or ethnic minorities. Less than half say religion is “very important” to their lives.