Why Are Young Americans Rejecting the Social Contract?

This piece is one of my favorites. It was the first long-form piece I wrote in my attempt to heal the West. It was originally published at Areo https://areomagazine.com/2023/03/22/why-young-americans-are-rejecting-the-social-contract/.

There have been some major shifts in US politics over the past few years. Once-sacrosanct ideas like free speech are now being dismissed as far-right. A desire for socialism is on the rise, especially among younger people. The broadly neoliberal vision that dominated the political scene from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama—the vision of an individualistic society with a fairly small safety net, in which individuals are more or less free to do and say as they please and reap the economic and social consequences—has lost its appeal. More and more Americans want to replace that rough-and-tumble social contract with something with a lot more protections.

So why do so many young people want to renegotiate the social contract?

The first reason is that many Americans feel that globalisation has failed them. It might be a net economic good, but it’s hollowed out a lot of American towns. In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance describes a reality familiar to many Middle Americans: “I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been haemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.” As commentator Mike Collins writes, “People used to have stable, permanent jobs. Now we live in constant dread of losing our jobs to foreign competition and outsourcing.”

In addition, Americans are increasingly experiencing economic insecurity. According to a recent survey by Bankrate, 6 out of every 10 of us don’t even have $500 in the bank. Many people are looking back with wistful nostalgia at the mid-twentieth century, when families could get by on a single income. The Simpsons, which premiered in 1989, portrays a lifestyle that was common at the time, as critic Dani Alexis Ryskamp has pointed out: “A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary.” This lifestyle, Ryskamp notes, was considered, “quite ordinary—they [the Simpsons] were a lot like my Michigan working-class family in the 1990s.” For many, this American Dream seems no longer attainable.

Millennials came of age during a global economic crisis, in which almost 4 million Americans lost their homes, while elites profited. In 2009, Congress passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which gave $254 billion to banks and other financial institutions. Maybe this money was essential to save the global economy—or maybe it was granted as a result of cronyism and behind-the-scenes lobbying. According to a study by Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, banks were 26% more likely to get TARP funds if they had ties to a member of a Congressional finance committee.

Is it any wonder that young Americans are leery of capitalism? A recent poll found that 46% percent of 18–34-year-olds have a negative view of capitalism, compared to just 36% of Americans overall. For many of my generation, capitalism means a system of economic insecurity and financial meltdowns in which billionaires and hedge fund managers somehow always land on their feet, while government always steps in to save the biggest banks from their own decisions.

The second reason that so many young Americans want to renegotiate the social contract is related to the rise of the internet, and the perceived increase in political bad actors. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the US had its fair share of racists, sexists and homophobes. But such people didn’t have a nationwide megaphone. The Ku Klux Klan had fewer than 5,000 members in the 1990s. There were other Neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations, but together they still represented a relatively small number of people in a country of 300 million. Many people—especially white people—went long stretches of time without hearing the N-word thrown around as a slur.

But then came the Internet, and suddenly everyone was connected to everyone else—including to all the worst elements of society. Now, the most cursory search of Twitter will reveal hundreds of people willing to call African Americans the N-word. Every bigot gets quote-tweeted by decent people, pointing out how wrong they are—and those quote-tweets amplify the bigot’s message. In our hyper-connected world, that has created the perception that bigots are everywhere. Even though racism itself seems to be on the decline—94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, for example, up 46% from 30 years ago—social media has created the perception that prejudice is endemic.

The third reason that so many Americans want to renegotiate the social contract is psychological. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff point out in The Coddling of the American Mind, young Americans differ from previous generations in their preoccupation with safetyism. Many of the younger millennial and gen Z cohorts have been brought up protected from any kind of conflict. Parenting magazine even cautions parents to stay close by when their school-age children have playdates because, “You want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.” Parents frequently intervene in conflicts between college roommates too, reports mental health counsellor Susan Fee. From infancy to college years, then, young people are being trained to avoid trying to resolve conflicts on their own. The net effect is that relatively few young Americans have the skills to do so.

Some psychologists are inadvertently contributing to this learned helplessness by characterizing mere words as violence. For example, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues, “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.” Under this view, disagreement isn’t just bad; it’s actively dangerous.

This matters because the neoliberal social contract of the United States is inherently combative. The First Amendment enshrines viewpoint diversity as an American ideal, and it doesn’t carve out exceptions for hate speech. This means that we must be OK with the existence—and speech—of Nazis and KKK members. More prosaically, we also must accept that half the country supports the opposite political party from us and will probably vote to install someone we don’t approve of. That social contract was appealing to Americans who crossed an ocean and fought a revolution partly to safeguard their freedom of conscience. It’s a much harder sell for young men and women who have been socialized into thinking that words are violence and that even a squabble with a roommate requires outside intervention.

Many young Americans are no longer convinced of the benefits of free speech. In a recent survey, 41% of college students said that the First Amendment should not protect hate speech. Fifty-one per cent of the Gen Z respondents even viewed it as “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”

The US government offers its citizens only a small economic social safety net. We have far fewer safeguards than most other developed countries. Most of us have to make our own way in the world and will not receive much help if we fail. Unfortunately, young Americans have been deprived of the opportunity to develop the mental resilience such a situation demands. Some state governments warn parents against even letting children under the age of ten cross the road by themselves. Parents are discouraged from allowing their children to fail academically—even if that means calling teachers to demand a higher grade or co-writing their child’s college application essay. These children might be protected from failure in the short term, but as adults they will have to try to make a living in an especially ferocious capitalist economy and are likely to lack the skills to make their own way.

These three components—an insecure economy, an internet that magnifies hate speech and a generation encouraged to see themselves as fragile—have combined to create a perfect storm. Whether or not the perception is accurate, to many young people the US feels like a scary place to live. Pair rising economic insecurity with a generation with a lower-than-average tolerance for insecurity of any kind, and you have the makings of a societal crisis.

Economist Steve Horwitz has noted that helping children develop the ability to peacefully resolve conflict among themselves is essential to the maintenance of the liberal order. He argues that we “pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from ‘figure out how to solve this conflict on your own’ to ‘invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.’” Jonathan Haidt concurs. “If we do not make major changes soon,” he warns, “then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.”

When people feel that they lack the ability to navigate the rough edges of the world on their own, they tend to demand more guardrails to protect them from the rough and tumble. In some cases, more safeguards might be good, but too many can spell the end of the liberal state.

To address this crisis, it will not be enough to pursue financial reform or attempt to regulate social media. Instead, we need to encourage individuals to become emotionally resilient citizens who can flourish in a free democracy.