The Global Sociology Blog

There has been a lot of Internet discussion regarding this Pew studies on the Millenials. Specifically, this has attracted a lot of attention:

The Millennials – Pew Research Center via kwout

If one looks closely, it is easy to see that most bullet points refer to cultural issues. It seems undeniable that the Millenials tend to be more culturally progressive. Although I have doubt on the last bullet, which is not very clear to me.

But that is a far cry from being politically progressive, that is, to support mechanisms of redistribution and certain ideas regarding collective struggles against systemic forms of oppression. Indeed, the emergence of what has been termed new social movements seem to reflect the kind of activism Millenials might be culturally attuned to: environmentalism and other cultural and identity issues.

However, social theorists (Bauman, Beck, and Sennett, to name only a few) have demonstrated that cultural progressivism can also correlate with individualization, hence, the lack of social progressivism. The support for interracial marriage, or even LGBT rights can be interpreted as “rights of individuals to be themselves”, that is, as an identity issue, not a socially progressive one.

When political activism means changing one’s avatar on Twitter for a day, one can question commitment and efficacy. We already know that these young voters definitely leaned towards Obama (which is not to say that they lean Democratic) as part of individualizing and individualized celebrity pop and political culture (hence the lack of mobilization for health care which is NOT a cultural but truly a social issue, along with labor issues).

Since this research is a work in progress, we will have to wait for more results but I will stick my neck out and predict, again, cultural, rather than social progressivism; sensitivity towards identity and cultural issues rather than social ones; individualized forms of participation rather than collective ones especially thanks to social networking technologies (the Millenials are causewired); individualized problem-solving orientation rather than understanding of structural problems of oppression; greater tolerance for the mechanisms of the surveillance society; low trust in institutions such as the state, organized religion or education.