“The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

This old quote, often misattributed to Socrates, accurately describes the attitude of several young people today—with members of generation Z, millennials, and generation alpha increasingly accused of being entitled and of lacking respect for authority.

“They see themselves as equals and peers to their elders, parents and teachers. They feel comfortable and are even brazen about inserting their opinions into the conversation. They often ‘school’ adults on the correct socially conscious words, phrase, and approaches to the world,” reads an article from market and consumer research firm Greenbook, titled “Ten things you should know about respect in the Gen Z world.”

This attitude seems most prevalent among youth on the Left, and has been far from harmless. It has made for hostile situations on college and university campuses, as well as in workplaces.

For Greg Lukianoff, an American lawyer, bestselling author, and president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that monitors campus culture, educational institutions and their “woke” ideology bears the blame.

Entitled and disrespectful students on campuses

College and university campuses have served as ground zero for youth displaying their entitlement and contempt for authority.

This summer especially served as a notable showcase, when far-Left, anti-Israel students at North American colleges and universities set up encampments to demand their institutions divest from the Jewish state. In some cases, they also demanded free tuition and free housing.

When they didn’t get their way, things got ugly.

At McGill University, activists attempted to barricade themselves in the administration building and held a protest outside a senior administrator’s home. A student also made “spitting motions” at faculty members during convocation. At the University of Ottawa, students interrupted a conference and stated, “We can show the university that we won’t allow any conferences to occur here until divestment happens.”

At Columbia University in New York, students occupied an academic building and then demanded that the university provide them with food and water, claiming it was “basic humanitarian aid.” When police cleared the encampment, law students wrote a letter calling for exams to be cancelled saying, “many are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate” amidst police “brutalizing our students.”

To recap, groups of students felt they were entitled to dictate their university’s financial investments, and when they did not get their way, they occupied campus, and in some cases, also harassed university leadership—including at their homes—and vandalized university property, all while expecting universities to provide them with food and water during their protest, and postpone exams.

If this is not the definition of entitlement and an egregious display of disrespect for figures of authority, then I don’t know what is.

And to be clear, today’s left-wing students are different from the activists of the 1960s.

“The biggest difference between these two groups is that the activists of the ‘60s wanted less oversight,” Lukianoff explained in an interview with The Hub. “They wanted power to have less power over them, they wanted to be treated like adults, and they didn’t want the administrators to act like they were their parents.”

Lukianoff added that left-wing students today “want power [i.e. universities] to have more power because they somehow think that it will be used to the advantage of things they care about, and weirdest of all, used to the advantage of the powerless.”

Individuals who took part in protests of the 1960s have also come out to say that what took place this summer was different.

In his books The Coddling of the American Mind and The Canceling of the American Mind, Lukianoff highlights multiple other examples of epistemic arrogance amongst young people today.

Justice Kyle Duncan, a U.S. appeals judge appointed by President Donald Trump, was met with a hostile reception from left-wing students when he came to give a talk at Stanford Law School. Students shouted him down, with one allegedly screaming, “We hope your daughters get raped!” When the school later apologized to Duncan for the disruptions, students held another protest, and put up signs stating “Counter speech is free speech.”

In the workplace

This entitled and disrespectful attitude has also spilled into workplaces.

According to a 2024 Deloitte survey, 61 percent of generation Z believe they “have the power to drive change within their organizations.”

At Penguin Random House Canada, employees were up in arms when the publisher announced they would be publishing Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life book. Employees leaked their dissent to the media, with one junior employee saying they would have organized a walkout if they had known earlier. At a meeting with Penguin executives, disgruntled employees reportedly cried “about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.”

A similar situation took place in the U.S. at publisher Simon & Schuster, where employees demanded that their employer cancel the publication of former Vice President Mike Pence’s book So Help Me God, claiming that publishing the book would be “legitimising bigotry.” Some employees were hostile towards CEO Jonathan Karp during a resulting town hall.

At Google, 50 employees reportedly staged a 10-hour sit-in in executive offices because their company’s leadership would not divest from Israel. Google has since fired those employees.

Educational institutions bear a fair share of the blame

“This is something that higher-ed has created for itself, and in many ways, quite intentionally,” Lukianoff said. “Higher-ed and K-12—where all teachers have largely [gone to school themselves] been educated in higher ed—make this attitude of epistemic arrogance way worse.”

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and co-author Jonathan Haidt explain that young people have been taught three great untruths: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil people.

These ideas foster a worldview where individuals are either oppressors or oppressed, where feelings take precedence over facts, and where people must be protected from anything that makes them feel “unsafe”—all staples of the modern progressive worldview.

“They think of it as a kind of uncompromising moral vision,” Lukianoff stated. “If you’re dead certain you are right and you’re on the right side of history, then you are justified in showing as much disrespect to whomever and shutting things down.”

Too many educational institutions have also prioritized activist mentalities over academic pursuits, all while discarding the value of free speech.

Educational institutions have also contributed to the entitlement and disrespect phenomena by giving in, and even abetting or encouraging the students they’ve indoctrinated when they act in an entitled and disrespectful way.

In Canada, several universities attempted to negotiate with the encampment protesters, with some deciding to offer students who took part in them amnesty from academic sanctions. The University of Windsor went as far as to capitulate to their demands. Several professors also actively participated in the anti-Israel encampments.

In the Stanford case mentioned earlier, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, intervened during Duncan’s speech to scold him herself. She later resigned from her position over her conduct.

“When you have a long history of, overwhelmingly, protesters on the Left who want to shut down a speech, and they get at most a slap on the wrist if they do it, or even sometimes get praised by the administration, that’s kind of indistinguishable from it being a formal part of the university system,” Lukianoff said.

“What gets rewarded gets repeated,” he added.

Time for a reckoning?

It’s time for a reckoning, unless we want to raise another generation of brats.

Of course, not all members of generation Z, or millennials or, generation alpha are entitled and disrespectful left-wing activists. Only a small minority of students actively took part in encampment protests. A 2021 Morning Consult poll found that just eight percent of generation Z have a positive view of cancel culture. Furthermore, not all young employees believe they have the “power to change” their workplace—and even for those who do, not all want to do so in a revolutionary way.

There are also other factors behind entitlement and disrespect for authority among young people, like parents failing to discipline their kids.

But the young people who are “woke,” entitled, and disrespectful have become problematic enough to warrant action on the part of educational institutions.

Colleges and universities need to stop teaching toxic ideologies to their students,  grow a spine, and enforce their rules against those who shout down speakers, harass teachers or fellow peers for having views they subjectively deem “harmful,” occupy university space, or vandalize property.

And if administrators fail to do so, then they must be held accountable.

“I think anytime that there is a shout down, or an attempt to get a professor fired for their opinion, or to get a student expelled for their opinion, there should be an independent investigation to figure out, did administrators help?” said Lukianoff. “Did administrators do anything to encourage the things that are a threat?”

He added that if school administrators, including mid-level administrators, are found to be complicit in abetting problematic student behaviour, they should be fired.

“Those people have to go,” Lukianoff said.

I couldn’t agree more.

Sometimes I think that occasional distance from Ottawa can help one see the forest for the trees. Ottawa regulars—the media, public servants, and partisans of all kinds—are convinced there’s going to be an early writ period. Some think it will be earlier than others, and when it comes to the Conservatives, I can certainly understand their wishful thinking. But if you ask me, it’s hard to see the path to a snap election.

Only a week into the fall Parliament, the opposition parties have already mounted, and dispensed with, a motion of non-confidence in the government. Heck, the matter was dispensed within hours of its being considered. Ottawa watchers went from impressed with the discipline of Pierre Polievre’s crystal clear, not-at-all-torqued opposition day motion to deflated with Yves Francois Blanchet’s quick and shameless insistence he wouldn’t bring down a government he has disavowed. And that’s before we get to  Jagmeet Singh’s subsequent clarification that he would be voting against non-confidence because…Conservatives are evil? Well, it wasn’t entirely clear why.

Expect more of this. A lot more of this. Breathless headlines, Conservatives chomping at the bit, clumsy opposition manoeuvres, and painful NDP contorting, followed by some hand wringing, frustration, and then resignation to the current state of affairs. To understand why, let’s consider the actions of each of the various parties that hold the balance of power and think through what’s driving their next steps.

NDP

It’s been clear for a long time that this federal NDP is not interested in trying to form government. Not only that, but it also now seems clear that while there may be some internal pressure for Singh to distance himself from Justin Trudeau, that pressure isn’t strong enough to make him trigger an election. When forced last week to choose between allying himself with the Conservatives who want an election and the Liberals who don’t, Singh chose obeisance, even with the cover of the BQ propping up the government.

I use the word “allying” on purpose here. Unlike the NDP under the often pragmatic Jack Layton, Singh isn’t open to working with Conservatives to advance his party’s interests, because for Singh the world is divided into two groups: the progressives (acceptable) and the not progressives (unacceptable). And however distasteful he and his caucus may find some Liberals, supporting their agenda doesn’t get them kicked out of the acceptable people club.

Bloc Québécois

What about the BQ? They haven’t had a chance to flex their muscle on the national stage in a number of years. And in the intervening period, it must be noted that while they remain a Quebec separatist party, they have evolved into a separatist party of the Left. While the recent Montreal by-election result should embolden Blanchet (and emboldened, he sure sounds), his role in the informal progressive coalition blob is to fight pipelines that would convert our natural resources into wealth and squeeze the Liberals for some more indiscriminate spending, maybe trying to boost the fortunes of his provincial counterparts in the PQ while he’s at it. A national election that would surely secure a majority government for the Conservatives doesn’t serve his interests. So, why even pretend?

Liberal Party

And what of the Liberal Party? How to make sense of its behaviour these past weeks? Seeming indifference at badly losing another historically safe Liberal seat, barely a shrug from caucus as weekly news emerges of key cabinet ministers not offering in the next election, and a stubborn leader, refusing to clear the way for the next one. Certainly, this behaviour baffled me a year ago as I watched formerly formidable electoral foes pass on the opportunity to define Poilievre after he was elected leader, fail to acknowledge the cost-of-living crisis, and watch their standing in the public opinion polls ebb down to the low twenties.

But lately I’ve come to think of Trudeau differently. He’s appointing overtly partisan Liberal Senators, pulling levers of power to benefit his allies, and he seems strangely relaxed, willing to try to prosecute a rhetorical moral case against the Conservatives—but also not terribly interested in having it convert into a change in public opinion. Liberals around Trudeau insist he’s still intent on winning. They insist he’s a fighter, he performs best on the campaign trail, and he’s eager to go up against Poilievre.

What if all that’s true, with the caveat that Trudeau has redefined for himself what winning looks like? Many have pointed in recent weeks to the example of Brian Mulroney, who, having stuck around for too long, left the Progressive Conservatives with only two seats in Parliament and Kim Campbell in a very tough spot. But what if there’s a different way to look at that cautionary tale? What if Trudeau thinks Mulroney didn’t leave too late but left too early?

Once you entertain the idea that Trudeau believes he’s the only Liberal leader who can save the furniture, and that that’s the only victory he can salvage now, everything starts to make sense. Add to that the fact that the NDP and the BQ see themselves as part of a broader soft coalition of the Left, who, together with the Liberals, can hold onto power in Parliament even as their grip on public opinion wanes, and you start to accept that we’re probably not going to see an election soon.

We’re in purgatory, or political limbo, where a serious, durable shift in economics, politics, and public opinion is about way more than just vibes. But despite that, Parliament’s got a year before it must catch up. The BQ will probably have a couple of opportunities to, as Blanchet crudely put it, “grab something.” The NDP is going to do the same.

As for Trudeau? Expect more partisan appointments, more intractable policy change, more difficult-to-cut spending, and some global travel. I’m sorry to say it, Conservatives, but Trudeau is in his the-longer-I’m-prime minister era, and he’s got a couple of dance partners who are more than happy to keep the party going before the clock strikes midnight.