The Weekly Wrap: The kids are not alright

This is, in essence, a bourgeois revolt. They’re not rejecting the values of stability, responsibility, or aspiration per se. They’re rejecting the idea that those virtues still pay off. These are the people doubting Reaganism on the Right and Obamaism on the Left. They’re rejecting the political narratives that told them steady progress was assured. Understanding their frustrations in these terms matters because it sharply clarifies what the proper response ought to be. Young people may sometimes express their discontent in cultural or ideological language—including about identity, immigration, or institutional legitimacy—but the underlying drivers are overwhelmingly economic. If you cannot afford a home, if you cannot imagine having children, if you cannot save or invest or build something of your own, cultural grievances quickly become a stand-in for deeper material dissatisfaction. Yet there have been two major problems in diagnosing what young people are saying and how best society ought to collectively respond. The first is that many—namely on the Right—have interpreted these problems as mostly non-materialist. Which is to say, they argue that the main issue is a lack of personal agency or a sense of belonging or even metaphysical questions of meaning and purpose. This confuses the difference between stated and revealed preferences. People may be communicating their concerns in the language of culture and identity, but if we listen carefully enough, we can hear, as Dreher and Thiel discern, that they’re at their root, really about a sense of stalled mobility and diminished aspiration. The second interpretative problem, which is found on both the Left and the Right, is that this is evidence of a failing of free-market capitalism. The malaise that younger people are feeling tells us that capitalism or libertarianism has failed. One often hears that libertarians have been running economic policy and it hasn’t worked out. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is news to libertarians who themselves lament the lack of market-based competition in our economy. Advanced economies, including our own, are suffused with protections, subsidies, and other impositions that preference certain assets, industries, or technologies at the expense of others. The direct and immediate costs of these distortionary policies aren’t always seen. But often manifest themselves in the unseen: the homes that don’t get built, the businesses that don’t get started, the productivity gains from new technologies that go unrealized. Yet as these opportunity costs build up across the economy, they eventually become seen and rightly viewed as a burden on aspirations and progress. Take Canada, for example. Roughly 40 percent of our GDP is directly attributable to government spending. Another 25 percent or so comes from sectors where competition is limited or non-existent—including highly regulated industries, public monopolies, or protected sectors shielded from new entrants. And then there are the other sectors—from auto to journalism and virtually every other in between—that depends on government subsidies to one extent or another. We’ve come to describe this Canadian model of political economy as “Laurentian capitalism.” This, it’s safe to say, isn’t laissez-faire. This is not hyper-capitalism run amok as left- and right-wing critics would claim. If anything, it is an economy where market forces are constrained, incumbents are protected, and gatekeepers—public and private—limit entry, choice, and innovation. The problem, in other words, isn’t too much capitalism. It’s too little. The best way to address the economic stagnation at the heart of young people’s frustrations is, in the words of Pierre Poilievre, to “get rid of the gatekeepers.” Free up the supply side of the economy. Allow people to build more housing. Open markets to new competitors. Enable entrepreneurs to start and scale businesses without navigating a labyrinth of approvals or punishing taxes. Give young people more room to act as producers and consumers in a dynamic marketplace rather than as supplicants in a closed one. This type of agenda rooted in free-market thinking is the best way to restore competition and dynamism to the economy. It’s also, coincidentally, highly consistent with how younger people have been socialized themselves to think about and experience economic life. I’m 43, which means I remember what life was like before the internet. I remember taping songs off the radio onto cassette, and waiting for the DJ to stop talking so I wouldn’t ruin the intro. Today, my sons can listen to any song ever recorded on virtually any device at any moment. The abundance and autonomy that define the modern digital experience are something younger generations simply take for granted. And that, I would argue, offers an important insight: We’re not living in a post-liberal moment. We’re living in the most liberal moment in human history. Young people have unprecedented freedom and access as consumers—but they’re encountering scarcity, barriers, and gatekeeping as would-be builders of their own lives. A free-market reform agenda that eliminates those barriers, accelerates productivity, and expands opportunity aligns squarely with their expectations and aspirations. It matches the intuitive liberalism they live in every day. None of this is to say that economic growth alone will solve the deeper cultural and spiritual problems in our society. It won’t. Yet, as George Will likes to say, the difference between 2 percent growth and 3 percent growth isn’t 1 percent—it’s 50 percent. Higher growth won’t mend every crack in the culture, but it can reshape people’s expectations, restore a sense of possibility, and create the financial and psychological space for individuals to pursue meaning in their own ways. And that’s the point. It’s not the government’s role to provide fulfillment or belonging. Frankly, it struggles to issue passports and deliver the mail. It’s simply not capable of offering actualization or salvation. What it can do is build an economic framework in which individuals can pursue those things on their own terms. Which brings us back to the core challenge. If conservatives misdiagnose young people’s despair as primarily cultural, we’ll end up offering the wrong solutions. We’ll replace economic reform with cultural combat. We’ll double down on grievances rather than growth. And we will, unintentionally, deepen the conditions that are driving people to political extremes. The real task is to restore dynamism—to make it possible once again for merit, effort, and creativity to pay off. That’s what young people want. That’s what they believed they were signing up for. And that’s the surest way to defuse today’s bourgeois revolt. A society that is growing, building, and creating is one that leaves less room for radicalism. A society in which people can reasonably expect to own homes, build families, pursue careers, and accumulate meaning is one in which politics regains its proper scale. If we want less rage and more hope, the path doesn’t run through economic retrenchment. It runs through greater opportunity, more competition, and a revival of the basic promise that tomorrow can be better than today.