The Organization Kid at 10

In case you haven’t read the piece, here is Brooks’ central thesis: “At the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who ... feel no compelling need to rebel — not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority, they admire it ... At the schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics but the Organization Kid.” In short, the way we were raised, combined with the defining global events of our lives and the expectations of schools and colleges, had killed the revolutionary spirit of our parents’ youth and early adulthood, dooming America to a future of “goodness” rather than greatness.

The world has changed almost beyond recognition in the years since Brooks visited here, and many of the causes he cites as contributing to our political apathy and acceptance of authority have reversed themselves. Toward the middle of the article, Brooks wrote, “Nothing in their environment suggests that the world is ill constructed or that life is made meaningful only by revolt. There have been no senseless bloodbaths like World War I and Vietnam, no crushing economic depressions, no cycles of assassination and rioting to foment disillusionment.”

Though it seems an exaggeration to say that the war in Iraq is our generation’s Vietnam and the Great Recession our Dust Bowl, the decade from 2000 to 2010 was a significant departure from the euphoria of the 1990s. And so, a decade after Brooks visited here, it’s worth asking if the essential characteristics of Generation Y have changed. Assuredly to his disappointment, I don’t think they have.

The political engagement and rebelliousness of the baby boomers stemmed in large part from their direct exposure to the problems of the 1960s and ’70s. Forty-one years ago, there was a significant chance that Princeton men would be drafted to serve in Vietnam. Today’s all-volunteer force has insulated our generation from the direct effects of war. And there has been no concerted national civilian effort to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as there was for World War II — no victory gardens, Rosie the Riveter posters or rationing boards.

Furthermore, despite the Great Recession, statistics about the value of a college education in a globalized economy have solidly convinced us that there are enough jobs to go around, tempering potential rebelliousness caused by economic uncertainty. At least at Princeton, this is enhanced by the Orange Bubble effect. Very little has changed here since spring 2009. For a time, the Forbes College dining hall was closed once a week (adding insult to injury for students made to live there), but that policy was reversed this year. Academic departments haven’t made significant cuts in programming. The food in dining halls seems just as good.

And yet, despite the persistence of our generation’s political apathy, there are two reasons not to share in Brooks’ pessimism. The first is that radicalism for radicalism’s sake is an unconvincing argument. The fatal flaw in Brooks’ article, I find, is that he never justifies the rebelliousness, the mistrust for authority, the free-spiritedness that he thinks our generation lacks. Our parents’ counterculture movement gave us The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, but also the Weathermen and violent protests. And the claim that the counterculture movement ended the Vietnam War, though widely accepted, vastly oversimplifies the real reasons that the United States left in the early 1970s.

Second, much of our generation’s political apathy runs only skin deep. While we may appear politically uninterested, many of us are at least civically engaged. The first debate sponsored by Whig-Clio this semester, which was on vegetarianism and featured renowned bioethics professor Peter Singer, was attended by well over 200 students. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am president of Whig-Clio.) The academic departments on campus that attract the greatest number of majors each year are all in some way policy-related: politics, history, economics, psychology and the Wilson School.

The challenges our generation will face in the decades to come are at least as daunting as those faced by our parents. And ironically, as economics professor Uwe Reinhardt wrote on this page a year and a half ago, many of those problems will have been caused by Brooks’ generation. It’s unclear, though, whether genuine radicalism — or just the increased political interest that will come with age — is the solution.