You can't say that young people today are more confident about their future than their parents were, because they're not, and they’re right not to be. So if you cared about them, you would consider that a tragedy. As a matter of public policy, you’d consider it a disaster.
Because your job, if you run the American government, or if you seek to influence the running of the American government, is really simple. Help the people thrive. That's it.
And if you don't do it, someone else will.
Maybe someone with an economic program that doesn't work. Maybe someone with deep racial animus that's going to split the country along racial lines. Maybe someone who hates white people or thinks that men can become women or something crazy.
That person is going to win anyway.
Why?
One reason, because he at least pretends to care about the people who live here. And not just their material wellbeing, but their spiritual wellbeing. Are they happy?
Can you imagine 400,000 or 500,000 American 18-year-olds plucked at random from cities across the country in a field this summer, 57 years after Woodstock, can you imagine what they would look like with their shirts off? Which is not to make fun of their lumpy physiques, that happens to a lot of us over time.
But can you imagine what their faces would look like? Would they look as cheerful as the kids you see in the pictures of Woodstock? You hope so.
Probably not.
So maybe the last thing they need is to be lectured by people who are clearly the beneficiaries of unearned privilege, like Ben Shapiro, who somehow got into Harvard Law School, despite a middling IQ. How did that happen? Never asked.
People like that have no standing at all to lecture the rest of America's young people about whether or not they complain about their clearly declining standard of living and their future prospects. They have no standing at all, but they do it anyway.
Now, why do they do it?
Well, one reason is because they feel it. Now, the second Matt Walsh sent his tweet about grocery prices out, there was a chorus of people making exactly the same noise as Ben Shapiro made:
“Shut up, burritos are enough for you. A $20 burrito is a good deal. Eat your burrito and be quiet. Eat your burrito and be happy. No chalupas for you.” So there was that. It was clearly coordinated.
But it's not just coordination that gets us to a talking point like that. There was a deep feeling behind it, and that feeling was contempt. It was loathing of the people complaining, it was loathing of the population.
And that is part and parcel of this whole program. And this ultimately is the reason that the neocon worldview is a cancerous worldview. Not simply because it's wrong about which countries we ought to invade and which leaders we ought to topple, which democracies we ought to erect in countries whose languages we don't speak. That's obviously all wrong.
But that's not the worst thing about it.
The worst thing about it is not just its inattention to the fortunes of actual Americans.
It's its hostility, its hatred of Americans.