Theirs To Ruin

Millennials and Gen Y kids are demanding a greater say in their own future by backing fashionable causes and a murderous political system they are too young to remember. By Nick Cater.

In the long history of political redemption, few tales are as miraculous as the rebirth of Sinn Fein, the former political arm of the Irish Republican Army.

A heavy dose of socialism spiced with a little woke has done wonders for its electoral appeal. Indeed, its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, could be leading the Irish government now — if only she could tempt a coalition partner to join her.

Her party won the popular vote in last month’s Irish election, a result few would have thought possible when McDonald succeeded Gerry Adams as leader just two years ago.

Sinn Fein’s old-school kneecapping faction, which might have scorned the encroachment of political correctness under McDonald, would have been heartened by her acceptance speech. “Up the republic, up the rebels,” she declared. “Tiocfaidh ár lá (Our day will come).”

Gaelic-speaking students of revolutionary Irish republican literature would have recognised those words as the final sentence in the hunger strike diary of Bobby Sands, a terrorist of some renown.

McDonald, however, dismissed the connection. “I was setting out things that I believe passionately in – social progress, social justice, shared prosperity and a new Ireland.”

Democracies across the Western world are being turned upside down by left-wing populism riding a wave of what we might call political amnesia, were it not for the suspicion that many voters never knew their history in the first place. US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn find a surprising number of takers for doctrinaire socialist policies long past their use-by dates.

The new left turns out to be much like the old left, albeit overlaid with new sensitivities towards the environment and the adoption of identity politics. When McDonald was accused of being a puppet of her party’s old guard, she fought back in modern fashion by claiming to be the victim of sexism.

Sands and his fellow hunger strikers have been reinvented as campaigners for gay rights. The 10 who died in 1981 “were prisoners who ensured queer representation from the cells of Long Kesh,” claims Sinn Fein senator Fintan Warfield.

Behind these novel political formations is the force of the youth vote. Almost a third of Irish voters under 35 gave Sinn Fein first preference, compared with a quarter across the electorate as a whole.

In the US, Sanders’s presidential hopes rest on his ability to draw out young voters in greater numbers than before.

“It would be paid for by engaging in the age-old socialist blood sport of hunting golden geese.”

The voting split across the age divide is stark. Corbyn would have become prime minister in 2017 if the over-35s had been banned from voting. New Zealand’s National Party would be enjoying its fourth term of government if the voting age had been raised to 35. The Finnish government is led by Sanna Marin, a 34-year old socialist who was four when the Berlin Wall came down. Left-leaning governments led by Gen Y and Gen X women are in power in Denmark and Iceland.

Sinn Fein’s socialist agenda includes massive spending on public housing and a rise in unemployment benefits to assist the alleged victims of austerity — in other words, chiefly the young. It would be paid for by engaging in the age-old socialist blood sport of hunting golden geese.

Sinn Fein has pledged to raise Ireland’s low corporate tax rate, thus ending the competitive advantage that has lured the likes of Google, Facebook, PayPal, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson to set up headquarters in Dublin.

Thus, true to the socialist playbook, a program to help the unemployed and disadvantaged will increase unemployment and reduce the overall amount of wealth to redistribute.

The young, according to folk memory, have always been more comfortable on the left of politics. Yet memories can deceive. Exit polls from the 1984 US presidential election showed that Ronald Reagan won voters under 25 by a margin of 61 to 39 per cent.

This time around the voting is very different. An Economist/YouGov poll last month found that 60 per cent of Democrats under 30 support either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Support for the party’s two progressive candidates was much weaker among voters over 65, at only 27 per cent.

Yet a hardening of left-wing populist thinking among the young and the rise of age as a dividing line in politics is a trend too widespread to be dismissed as cyclical. In anglophone democracies such as the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, the shift has yet to pose a serious threat to the established parties.

In Europe, however, it has been one of the principle causes of the fragmentation of the party system and an increase in stalemate, three-way election contests.

The most potent new movements embrace nationalism. Scottish nationalism, Irish unity and Catalan independence have been co-opted as left-wing projects.

The expansion of higher education provides a partial explanation but there is more to unpack. It does not on its own explain the palpable sense of grievance commonly heard, the sense that today’s young people have somehow been cheated of their just rewards.

In Europe in particular, the 2008 financial crash appears to have radicalised the university-educated youth, notably in Greece, where ill-advised borrowing by national governments and membership of the common currency deepened the recession. Anti-austerity is the rallying cry of the populist left, giving rise to the birth of new political forces in Spain and Greece, and reviving the fortunes of others, such as Sinn Fein.

Gen Ys and Gen Xs who were promised so much appear ill prepared for the setbacks that inevitably occur. In the US, the gap between graduate and non-graduate wages has fallen, and jobs in the so-called knowledge economy have been less plentiful than were promised.

Salaries for those with lower-ranked college degrees are lower than those for the cohort that didn’t pursue higher education. It is here that support for Sanders is fomenting. Quick-fix socialism and crazy-brave redistribution ­appeal to those who sense they have nothing to lose.