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Are our children going to rescue us from this political hell? That question has been asked, in varying tones of desperation, by a lot of us older voters recently.

I heard it last week from the great British historian Simon Schama who, while watching more than a million young people take to the streets of London to urge their government to stay in the European Union, uttered this hopeful prediction: “Brexit can’t win because the overwhelming majority of the young are against leaving and if forced to, without getting a vote, will make it their life mission to reverse it and will damn those who brought it about.”

There has certainly been a lot of damning going on, as young voters realize what the over-50s have done to their world.

For the more than 70 per cent of 18- to 24-year-old Britons who voted for their country to remain in the European Union, for the six out of 10 Americans aged 18 to 29 who voted against Donald Trump in 2016, for the big majorities of young people who have voted against the Bolsonaros and Orbans and Putins of the world – and for those of us, like Mr. Schama, who are counting on them to do so – it’s just a matter of waiting.

But does it really work that way? Does anything work that way?

There’s another, darker possibility: That younger people are voting more wisely not because their generation is more liberal, but just because they’re young. And like the aging hippies before them, they’ll soon stop being young, and stop being liberal, and we’re back in the soup.

There’s been a heated scholarly war of interpretations over the past couple of years and over those two narratives: Young voters as a new, more enlightened generation versus young voters as the next wave of anti-democratic rejectionism.

That more cynical view got a lot of its ammunition from a widely reported 2017 study by political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, whose data seemed to show that a majority of people born after the 1970s no longer believe that it is “essential” to live in a country that is governed democratically. The younger the voter, according to the study, the less democracy matters.

But that study has come under severe criticism from academics, who point out that it relied on sample groups sometimes containing only a few dozen people, taken mainly during the pessimistic years following the 2008 economic crisis.

And it seems to have been completely refuted in a new, much larger study by New York University scholar Jan Zilinsky, who drew on 15 years of research involving 350,000 European voters to find that “young people are generally more satisfied with democracy than older citizens” and that “satisfaction with democracy has increased” among voters of all ages. The research consensus seems to be that younger voters are the greatest defenders of democracy and its values.

What has really shaken this debate is a significant new study, built on huge banks of data in most Western countries, published by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their new book Cultural Backlash.

Their data show a huge chasm in basic values, and voting patterns, between people who spent their childhood before and after the 1960s – a “silent revolution” that is not just a matter of “life-cycle effects” (i.e., people being more liberal when young) but rather are “enduring intergenerational differences based on birth-cohort effects." Most important is “the rapid expansion of access to tertiary (university and college) education," which has erased authoritarian mindsets, but also the more diverse, urban and equal surroundings of Generation X and the millennials. These “leave an enduring mark on core values that subsequently endure throughout one’s life.”

What we are witnessing today is the backlash against that silent revolution. Now that the socially liberal, non-materialist values of the post-1960s generations have become the majority, the authors write, we have reached a “tipping point” where “members of the former cultural majority, who still adhere to traditional norms, have come to feel like strangers in their own land” – and they lash out by voting for parties and candidates far more reactionary than they would have considered before.

Those younger, more liberal voters may be an unquestionable majority, but they are less likely to vote – only half as likely in the case of millennials, who may have been turned off of voting by the dominance of boomers and their candidates. And they’re concentrated in urban areas, so therefore the older and authoritarian are able to dominate more ridings and constituencies.

As a consequence, it could be another couple elections in Britain and the United States and, well, here, before the young become numerous enough to save us, in a lasting way, from the angry electoral spasms of the old.

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