FWIW I think also a non-trivial amount also getting mad at folks who are making the world better in small steps because it reminds them that raging about it online isn't making the world better /at all/
They just fall back to “the system is broken” as an excuse to not do any actual thing, even ineffective things. I’ve spoken to many recent college grads who talk like this on any conceivable issue.
I was trying to tell one recently this congestion pricing thing in NYC is a real fight and if you want to try some political involvement, you should try it. “The system is broken” and refused to support it even though it’s a massive scale climate policy plus would directly help them living in NYC.
It’s so enormously frustrating honestly. These are people who claim to care about the climate a lot, but won’t learn and won’t support any of the things the real people doing the work are recommending. Drives me up the wall.
There’s no tangible difference between the Leftist that opposes a policy bc it doesn’t do everything they want and the conservative that opposes it bc they don’t want anything to move in the same direction as that policy.
PayPal: Someone tried to log in as you
Me: uh oh
PayPal: Don’t worry, they didn’t guess your password
Me: cool
PayPal: So, go ahead and change your password
Me: ...
PayPal: ...
That’s the sort of despondence that makes a polity ripe for dictatorship. “I want someone else to fix it and I don’t want to be involved.” We have a mode of government for that and it’s not our current one.
It is pretty common among young people. Not my students who are way more engaged because they’re in a policy school, which by definition is the student taking some concrete step to improve things for real even if they fail, but I talk to plenty of other young people in person and it’s tough.
It’s not only young people that are a problem of course but they are the ones simultaneously passionate about improving things, supposedly, which is why it’s extra annoying. By young here I mean like 18-25. A bunch of them are so angry about Gaza they won’t vote which will help elect a worse person.
Well these people in particular are highly unreliable voters, plus if you go along with what they claim to want there’s a good chance it won’t be good enough anyway plus you’ll alienate others. They “matter” but they reduce their own importance by not knowing how stuff works.
It is not fair to say that they do not know how stuff works. The single issue voter has a political calculus that they rely on: either support the issue or don't get a vote and run the risk of losing.
Their gambit only works if they are serious about letting the candidate lose.
The challenge with some single-issue voters is that adopting a satisfying policy for them might lose more other voters. If they were the only people who existed and voted they’d get their way though
Partly a function of age; they may get more invested as they get older and feel they have more to lose. “Starting a career/work for a living is hard” anxiety seems also to have been amplified into “the world is hopeless” by bad social media habits
Yeah but many boomers etc have even worse opinions and are just explicitly against fixing stuff so I don’t buy that at all either. A lot of support for progress is strictly decreasing by age group.
I think Thomas and Alito and so on are the ones throwing a bigger generational tantrum than the 21 year old music major just getting acclimated to global affairs
