There’s a chilling idea going around these days that America is losing its edge. We outsource all our labor to Asia, for instance, and our health care costs are going up. Despite our election of Berlin’s favorite president, America’s standing with the other nations of the world seems worse than ever. Unemployment rates are hanging out at thirty-year-high levels. The surprise television hit of 2009 (though is it really a surprise?) was MTV’s Jersey Shore.
And yet, America’s prospects have never looked better.
I’m not joking when I say that. Folks like Thomas Friedman may believe we’re in the midst of a dawning Chinese century, but it’s much more likely that the twenty-first will follow the twentieth as a distinctly American century. Progressive liberals certainly hope and many conservatives certainly fear that the United States is inching or even walking briskly toward European-style social democracy—but that’s not likely, either.
As a member of the so-called Millennial Generation, I may have the most reason to believe that my country’s place as a leader in innovation and inspiration is a relic of the past. After all, I’m about to graduate from college into a terrible labor market as mounds of generational debt is voted upon me. I’ve been frightened into thinking that every time I buy a burrito at Taco Bell, the Earth is going to get its sweet revenge by flooding my house and/or burning me to a crisp. I also have to worry about AIDS, swine flu, secondhand smoke, carbon-monoxide poisoning, and any of the million other ways I am going to die. To make matters worse, the soundtrack to this disastrous state is Lady Gaga—and I think I’m even beginning to like Lady Gaga. This can’t bode well for another age of American prosperity. Can it?
It took living over three months in the modern utopia of the European Union for me to confirm that things aren’t so bad here in the States. In fact, they’re quite good. This generation has the opportunity, not to mention the ability, of building on the institutions and advances of past American generations to create and sustain a vibrant and free society, if we choose to do so. Certainly there’s something about the institutions of the United States that engenders success and wealth. We have fewer regulations and more liberal tax laws than many Western countries, characteristics that make our country more amenable to entrepreneurism and experimentation.
There’s also a cultural element to American success, which I did not fully appreciate before my time abroad. British columnist Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, referred to the United States as a nation “that still believes in itself.” This, she says, is opposed to the United Kingdom, where there exists “hostility to the country’s identity and values.” The same, perhaps, could be said for many other European countries. My own experience living in the Republic of Ireland showed me one of the most disappointing cases of this national ennui in Europe. Ireland also provides one of the better cautionary tales for my generation, which sits at a societal crossroads of sorts.
I spent a semester at the National University of Ireland in Galway. In many ways, life for a student in Ireland isn’t much different from life in the United States. Students go to class (or skip it) with perhaps the same frequency as those in America. The central dining hall houses both a Subway sandwich chain and an environmentally friendly, fair-trade, guilt-free coffee shop called Eco-Grounds, which wouldn’t be out of place at any university in the States. And the freshmen are always getting lost.
Ireland largely embraces American youth culture. Girls wear their imported Abercrombie and Fitch shirts and sweatpants, while the lads sport gel-infused spiky hairstyles. Walk by the student apartments on any afternoon and you are guaranteed to see either Friends or The Simpsons on the TV. Were it not for these slightly anachronistic styles and shows (not to mention the delightful brogue), the seaside college town of Galway could easily be mistaken for Ann Arbor or Chapel Hill. Irish students may be about ten years behind us pop-culturally, but they’re almost as American as Americans are.
Understanding their culture at a deeper level, however, requires a look back at the history of the republic. Ireland’s long road to independence produced a very different national culture than what we Americans have had. Unlike during the American fight for independence, when patriots sought to establish a limited government in place of British tyranny, Irish republicans simply were looking to replace a British government with an Irish one. The philosophical underpinnings of the Irish Free State and the eventual Republic of Ireland were less pronounced than those in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Importantly, the Anglo-American political tradition was not particularly welcome. Political influences like Catholic corporatism and agrarianism, as well as the politics of unification with the North, excluded Ireland early on from the mid-twentieth-century economic growth of Western Europe. Into the 1980s, Ireland’s economy was still largely agrarian and poor, with high corporate tax rates and little homegrown industry to speak of.
This changed after 1987, when the elected political coalition, influenced certainly by the liberal free market successes in the United Kingdom and the United States, made some radical changes toward smaller government. Most important, Ireland lowered its corporate tax rates dramatically, a move that brought foreign direct investment into the country. Foreign companies like Intel relocated major parts of their production to the once-provincial island. The wealth that flowed into Ireland created more disposable income for Irish citizens, so much so that Ireland became one of the wealthiest nations per capita in the European Union. This economic boom, labeled the Celtic Tiger, moved Ireland into the modern world, an achievement that very few believed possible; among the most pessimistic the Irish themselves, who had been dealing with the violence in Northern Ireland and the dead-end nature of a mostly agricultural economy.
The new Ireland has cell phones, grocery and department stores, SUVs, satellite television, and Starbucks. This may be the joint nightmare of traditional preservationists and the opponents of corporate imperialism, but Ireland is a demonstrably better place to live than it was twenty years ago. The march of economic progress may seem obvious and inevitable in the United States, but for the Irish people a generation ago, it took a conscious choice to liberalize.
And therein lies the cultural conflict for the Irish Millennials. For most of their lives, quality of life has improved dramatically at seemingly little cost to them. Their youth was spent so deep in the heart of the Celtic Tiger era that its existence is almost an afterthought. Only now, after banking scandals and a real estate bust far worse than that in the United States, the Irish economy is hitting its biggest slump since the initial boom. The big cars and fast food and modern conveniences aren’t going away, but everyone in Ireland recognizes they just don’t have the same amount of money in their pockets as they used to. What’s disheartening is that this generation may fail to appreciate the ideas that allowed their society to progress while blaming those ideas for their economic problems.
The reaction of the whole of Ireland, including the youth, to the economic downturn has been quite disappointing. After two decades of some of the most liberal economic policies in the European Union, the citizens of Ireland voted “yes” on the Lisbon Treaty, guaranteeing deeper integration of the Irish economy with that of Europe. For Ireland, this means an influx of money through transfer payments from the European Union’s coffers. The treaty also promises more industry regulations and will probably force Ireland to raise its corporate tax levels to European Union’s standards, measures that will tear away at the country’s competitive advantage. All this Ireland chose for itself, after rejecting it sixteen months before, in the first Lisbon Treaty referendum. And one of the most prominent demographic groups to make the swing from “no” to “yes” were youth voters.
What was the rationale for voting on a treaty that would diminish Ireland’s advantage in the marketplace (not to mention her national sovereignty)? Most of the students I spoke with about it agreed that it “just seemed like the thing to do.” Concerned about their economic well-being, integration with the behemoth European Union is associated with security. The recession that hit between the referenda served as a warning sign of what was to come, and no one wanted to take any chances. After all, the country, as was repeated countless times by the Irish media, was “bankrupt.”
The Irish may have sided with business and entrepreneurs on the first vote, but the second vote was clearly in line with what the Irish government wanted. Declan Ganley, an Irish businessman who led the charge against the Lisbon Treaty, was derided as an “eejit” and much worse, and more than one person suggested to me that he was probably a stooge for the Brits or the CIA! Ganley’s message was that Irish business would suffer in the overregulated, overtaxed economic environment of a post-Lisbon European Union. Moreover, he and the “no” side of the vote stressed that the republic was essentially giving up its sovereignty to a governmental entity in Brussels. For this, he was accused of being anti-Europe and anti-Irish.
All the technical aspects of the Lisbon Treaty aside, the issue of sovereignty is perhaps the most fundamental part of Irish society that young people have trouble reconciling, because it is linked with national identity. It may seem counterintuitive, given the legendary reach of Irish nationalism, but modern Ireland seems to be bathing in contradiction. The Irish have historically prided themselves on being distinctly un-British—even though they watch just as much British television as they do American. Ireland has forever been one of the most solidly Catholic nations in Europe, even into the twenty-first century—except that hardly any young people attend mass on a regular basis, mostly because the clergy sex abuse scandals have left the Church in Ireland a shambles. The Irish government has taken great care to preserve the Irish language—despite the reality that most Irish students hated learning the old Gaelic language and only small communities on the coast speak it regularly. A friend once told me that the Irish were so bad at sports that they made up their own and were finally good at something, until Ireland’s Gaelic football team began competing annually against Australia’s similar Australian football team—and losing.
At the same time, the robust economy and ripe environment for investment and innovation that had come to define modern Ireland has met its apparent demise. Sure, Dublin stands with the best of modern cities in Europe and America, but the closing of factories across Munster and Connacht and a shattered banking system revealed to the Irish youth that perhaps nothing was underneath the prosperity with which they had become so familiar. Old Ireland is gone, and new Ireland is broken, and don’t we really need the European Union (and the European Union’s money) to get us out of this rut? It’s the subconscious but very obvious belief among the Irish, particularly among the youth. It’s been a long journey from the self-determination of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera and a quick abandonment of the moderate move to freer markets and smaller government.
So where’s the lesson for Americans, and why are we in a much better position to emerge from this crisis more energized and more prosperous than before? Mark Steyn asks, “What is the energy in a society?” and answers that it’s “young people.” Young people are in movies, on TV, starting companies, developing ideas, researching at universities, serving in the military, consuming, and investing. And in the United States, the youth are energized and ready to build a better, stronger society, even if we don’t know it yet.
The American identity is innovation, and we Millennials still belong to that identity. Americans love to explore the process of trial and error, from souping up their muscle cars to building their own supercomputers. We’ve been served by a government and a society that tolerates failure in the name of discovery. Even better, this generation has come of age in an open-source era, where technology and ideas are free for experimentation. Steve Jobs may have spent years creating the iPhone, but soon after its release there were college students across the country developing new applications that Apple probably never thought possible. This generation is eager to adapt new platforms to their own creative purposes. While YouTube is a timewaster’s mecca and an unending source of funny feline videos, it’s also a free, easy-to-use method of content distribution for entrepreneurial types. Brandon Hardesty, a young actor based in California, has uploaded over fifty video clips of his quirky “reenactments” of famous movie scenes onto YouTube. The exposure from these videos has raised his profile in Hollywood and earned him parts in movies. His method is uniquely modern and American, taking advantage of his talents and technology to market himself. These individual examples may not seem like enough, but these smaller innovations and successes will be what continues to build and maintain our economy and livelihood.
Ours is an economy of individuals choosing how to spend their time, money, and resources. Young voters may have caught the Obama fever, but we won’t be pleased with the attempts at central planning when they restrict our choices. Our consumption is based on choice, right down to the very last detail. We don’t have to buy entire albums anymore; we can pick and choose which songs we want to pay for and download. We can customize our shoes online, picking the color and design, and have them shipped to our doors in days. We aren’t even satisfied with the litany of available ringtones on our cell phones, insisting on downloading our own favorite songs or sounds for every person in our contacts list. We young Americans have stopped letting corporations make these important decisions for us, so why will we put up with the government telling us which doctor to go to, or what kind of car to drive?
Ultimately, though, our decision to continue the American tradition of innovation, experimentation, and success will require us to know and appreciate that tradition. We can choose to carry on the tradition in our modern way, or we can slip down a path that leads us to dependency on a bigger government. That is, of course, the flip side to this Millennial coin. If our lives have been marked by rapid technological and communication progress, they’ve also been subject to attitudes that reinforce dependency. Professors at my university in the United States bemoan the lack of self-sufficiency among many of their students. Students are more likely to ask for the answer than seek advice for how to reach the answer themselves, they say. Some combination of the “push ‘em through” mentality of public schools and the cult of self-esteem probably contribute to this. The danger for our generation is not that we will overthrow the establishment for one more to our liking, but that we will expect the establishment to provide for us all the solutions.
Where America has the advantage is in those institutions and traditions that have sustained one of the oldest nations in the world. Ireland is not so fortunate. A victim of the entrenched feudal system in Europe and its own self-immolation by refusing to co-opt the capitalist traditions of its hated British neighbors, the Emerald Isle does not have the institutions from which to gain inspiration and fortitude. Fortunately, we do.
We have the history to justify our existence and our institutions, and our connection to that history is what allows us to believe in ourselves as a nation. We’ve borne witness to the positive effect that a free and open society can have on its citizens, especially when individuals are able to pursue their own self-interest. As young Americans, the energy of our society, we have to choose to acknowledge both the opportunities we have in a modern world and the economic history from which we have grown.
Perhaps there’s a silver lining to this untimely recession. Instead of spending these first years of our adult lives mulling around in self-discovery, the Millennials will be forced to look outward and evaluate the path ahead. Do we want to be saddled with debt, or do we want the work we do over the course of our careers to pay for something more worthwhile than a bloated government making empty promises? Do we want to abandon our identity as a free, prosperous, and advanced nation, or do we choose to strengthen that identity by working harder and by thinking more critically? Do we retreat from this challenge to our way of life, or do we face it with a renewed sense of purpose?
It’s all up to the choices we make, as young people and as Americans. I think we’ll make the right choice.