Never underestimate the human proclivity for wanting more,
and wanting it for free. President Obama is building his
re-election campaign around that theme. “Obama
money” doesn’t exist, but our 44th president will
do everything in his power to convince Americans that everyone
deserves the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle, only achieved
if we return to a 90-percent tax bracket for the wealthiest among
us.
It’s a cult of adolescence. Teenagers demand the
privileges of adulthood without paying for it. Parents provide a
car, and teenagers wreck it; parents hand over a credit card, and
teenagers spend like profligates. It’s human nature. By the same
token, a large share of voters in the United States feel entitled
to the fruit of their neighbors’ labor, and they select public
officials accordingly.
The cult of adolescence is seen most abundantly among
Millennials, many of whom are languishing in their 20s without a
clear direction in life, either personally or financially. Not to
be outdone by their Baby Boomer parents, Generation Y is
supplanting the midlife crisis with a massive quarter-life
crisis.
Some Millennials don’t want to be stuck in neutral, but a
poor economy and poor upbringing have set the stage for it. The
rest are content to lull through their 20s, continually in search
of the next drink, party, and thrill.
It’s a demographic and generational shift never before
encountered in the United States. In past generations of the 20th
century, the average man in his mid-20s already had the
responsibilities of adult life: A job, and a wife and child to
support. That was good for society, because a man’s natural
aggressiveness was tempered and channeled toward nobler
ends.
Not so anymore. Robin Marantz Henig,
writing in the New York Times Magazine in
2010, writes about the shifting landscape in the West:
We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing
timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the
“transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing
school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying
and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of
men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones.
Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United
States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of
the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical
30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as
a 25-year-old in the early '70s.
Sociologist Michael Kimmel echoes that research in his
book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. He
writes:
The passage between adolescence and adulthood has morphed
from a transitional moment to a separate life stage. Adolescence
starts earlier and earlier, and adulthood starts later and later.
This stage — call it “the odyssey years” as does New York
Times columnist David Brooks, or “adultolescence,” or “young
adulthood” — now encompasses up to two full decades, beginning at
puberty and ending around one’s 30th birthday. Everyone knows
that 30 is the new 20. But it’s equally true these days that 12 is
the new 20.
There are legitimate reasons for the dawn of perpetual
adolescents. One is rising education expectations. With the advent
of graduate school becoming a near necessity for young adults, many
college students won’t graduate until their mid-20s. Even students
who only get an undergraduate degree tend to spend five or six
years earning it, putting the finishing point in the same
range.
That fact of life aside, modern changes, mixed with the
unparalleled wealth of the United States, have allowed
twentysomethings to enjoy a second adolescence in a way that past
generations could not. But it’s a pandemic of immaturity that our
society can scarcely afford.
From an economic standpoint, men in their 20s who languish
in unending boyhood severely damage their future earning and career
prospects. From a social standpoint, such men harm women, and the
children produced by their often out-of-wedlock relations, by
shrugging off the responsibilities of adulthood.
That lack of coming-of-age fits in nicely with the Obama
paradigm, however. It’s little wonder, then, that Millennials are
among Obama’s most loyal supporters. The allure of getting
something for nothing is too great a
temptation.
