America leads the world in incarcerated citizens. Six times higher than Britain, Seventeen times higher than Japan. Even for an old-school fan of the public sector, it's become difficult to feel any enthusiasm for a government whose activism seems to consist mainly of harassing and jailing citizens. Those who hoped that a Clinton administration might slow or reverse this trend have been bitterly disappointed. Young people sense a growing measure of class consciousness.
Kids sense that class lines in America are hardening.
Labor unions membership has been falling globally. Welfare states have been scaled back or dismantled throughout the industrialized world. Poverty and inequality are growing in much of Western Europe, as are all the modern social ills. Young people in Europe face a wall of generational economic disadvantage and future downward mobility at least as high as that faced by their American counterparts, along with chronically high unemployment. We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests, let lobbyists run government.