When I was growing up, a prominent characteristic of society was the generation gap. My generation wore completely different clothes from our parents, experimented with drugs, listened to different music and had more libertarian attitudes to social issues such as premarital sex and homosexuality.
By the time my eldest daughter was born, in 1993, the kidult had emerged – socially liberal older people who loved fashion, music, festivals and partying. Receding hairlines, pot bellies and “old white men rule” T-shirts began to appear at gigs. The generation gap had mysteriously disappeared.
Now it is back. Age is the new class. I am starting to understand how my dad felt when he looked with incomprehension at me wearing flares and playing Grateful Dead albums. My firstborn is now a tech-savvy 23-year-old social justice warrior. Her three sisters are part of this cohort, their lives revolving around screens and their passion for animal rights, the environment, Europe, gay and transgender rights and feminism (even my 10-year-old is an outspoken feminist). They don’t dress very differently from older people or even listen to very different music. But their world view is increasingly separate.
Much has been written about this epochal new relationship with technology. But the nature of youth politics has been less clear. The general election has helped to clarify it. More than a million under-35s registered to vote after the election was called. Not many of them were Theresa May supporters. That there is now a New Generation Gap is plain.
Politically, the NGG represents a sort of echo phenomenon. There was “my” generation gap, a rebellion against stuffy postwar values. Then there is my daughters’ generation gap, which also rebels against those values – still extant and beloved of Daily Mail readers and some ageing Brexiters. However, they also, to some extent, reject the values of soft “pragmatic” liberal kidults like me.
I have come to admire this new generation, just as my dad finally decided the Beatles weren’t just a load of noise. But there are things they don’t seem to get – they don’t understand the downsides of the big state, and big unions or the importance of freedom of speech. They are too young to have known a time when those issues were problematic and so are indifferent to them. And they are too in thrall to the questionable merits of identity politics.
Nevertheless, a new (old) way of looking at the world is coming into being, not only through technology but also propelled by that crazy hipster Jeremy Corbyn. Once there were neocons and now here come the “techno-left”. This is where the real NGG is taking form.
My daughters’ generation is still quite straight – less boozy and druggy, more exercise prone and a bit puritan (an element they share, oddly, with some of the generation I rebelled against). But they are also angry, motivated and committed to change – change of almost any sort, that doesn’t lead to Little England nostalgia or ill-advised wars in the Middle East.
After the election, I’m grateful for the NGG. My children’s time, perhaps, is coming. But it may sweep away not only the oldies in the shires, but city softies, like me.
The last great youth revolution was in the 60s when Mao’s cultural revolutionaries attacked the “four olds” of Chinese society – customs, culture, habits and ideas. Teenage gangs roamed the cities setting on those with “bourgeois” clothes or reactionary haircuts. “Imperialist” street signs were torn down (not so different from the modern desire to remove imperialist statues from university campuses).
I can’t see it happening in Slough, Billericay and Brexiteering provincial towns. But I couldn’t see Donald Trump, Brexit or Corbyn coming either. But if this is the future, I just hope my daughters let me keep my reactionary haircut and my bourgeois clothes. Some old habits, like old people in general, die hard.
