Old and young have been pitted against one another, presumably since the first day a human being actually actually made it to retirement age. The young have always been sent to toil, fight and otherwise suffer to defend the elder generation, and a set of comforts that they too might enjoy one day. And now, as at every other time of strain, the young across the world have had to shoulder the bulk of the burden. In the UK the bill for higher education has been handed to students with barely a second thought, while any cuts to pensions must make it through lengthy negotiations. In France and Spain almost half of all twenty-somethings languish jobless, while their parents remain well-paid and unsackable.
The division is most extreme in America, where almost ever major issue is a clash between young and old. Obama’s attempt to extend health insurance to the young met with bitter opposition from well-off old people; the values of an older generation and the laxer morals of the young continue to provoke vicious clashes. Yet politicians tend to reach out to each group only through euphemism: conservatives lament the passing of time, while liberals prefer to talk of the future. The Tea Party and the Occupy movement are drawn almost exclusively from old and young respectively, and instead both implausibly claim to represent all ‘real’ Americans.
The question, then, is whether this long, sprawling economic crisis, by exacerbating the divisions between old and young, will lead politicians to break the taboo and actually talk about generational conflict. It seems unlikely, not least because nakedly pandering to a particular group of voters tends go down badly even with those voters themselves. Self-interest looks best when dressed up in a grand narrative, a tactic that has reached a zenith of absurdity on the America right, where any attempt to channel spending to under-50s amounts to a socialist conspiracy to end Western civilisation.
The patchwork of values that has for so long sustained indulgence of the old is wearing thin. The state today is expected to provide on the basis of need, not age. The mantra about having worked hard all one’s life rings hollow when that work was for private gain; though no politician would survive long calling for television and fuel subsidies to the elderly to be cut, they would hardly fare better calling on the young to be proud to serve their elders, an exhortation that would have seemed quite normal only a few decades ago.
Still, the young remain weak as a political group, not least because of our tendency not to bother voting. Whatever disadvantages we may suffer as a group are masked by the fact that our individual lives are, in general, constantly getting better, as we receive first paycheques and find first homes, but the latent tension remains. The odds of a youth political movement emerging to promote investment in education and reforms to pensions are therefore quite negligible, but a more honest discussion of the conflicts of interests between young and old may not be far off.
