As last week’s midterms demonstrated, young people appear poised to drive American politics, and particularly the Democratic Party, further to the left. This is particularly true in big cities. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected last year with crucial support from younger voters, while in Los Angeles, preelection surveys showed democratic socialist (and now Mayor-elect) Nithya Raman leading by almost five to one among voters in their thirties and by more than four to one among voters aged 18 to 29.
This is not merely an urban phenomenon. In California, though Proposition 40, the billionaire wealth tax, lost decisively, polling from the Public Policy Institute of California showed that 75 percent of young adults aged 18-34 supported the measure. This group of Californians makes up about a quarter of overall voters statewide.
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Nationally, two-thirds of voters aged 18 to 29 voted Democratic in House races last Tuesday. Large boosts in registration among younger votes contributed to the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race. In Washtenaw County, home of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, El-Sayed won a smashing 74 percent of the vote.
The recent return of generational conflict has a 1960s vibe. As back then, it’s affecting the “rich” countries like the United States, Canada, the U.K., and the nations of the European Union, but it’s also occurring in poorer regions, with mass protests spreading from Paris and Milan to Katmandu, Jakarta, Manila, New Delhi, and Sri Lanka.
A new generational war could prove devastating. Societies, noted Aristotle, are like ships: though the crew members have different roles, they all must work together on a common journey. Seniors and young people need each other, but the movement to confiscate the wealth of “the greedy geezer” can only fundamentally weaken society by turning parents against children and vice versa.
The temptation to go after the successful baby boomers seems irrepressible. Many economists and politicians treat the aging population as a great liability. The United States, like the rest of the world, is older than it has ever been: the population aged 65 and older is projected to grow from 58 million in 2022 to 82 million by 2050. Seniors’ share of the total population is expected to rise from 17 percent to 23 percent.
The anti-senior agenda resonates most on the progressive Left. The Atlantic, for example, denounces a corrupt gerontocracy that has “amassed disproportionate wealth and power.” Vox portrays older voters, making up nearly one-third of the electorate, as oppressing the young by prioritizing low property taxes over expanded welfare benefits. And earlier this year, the New York Times published a viral guest essay, titled “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” authored by Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale and author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. Moyn advocates policies to confiscate the wealth of boomers—all now over 60—and hand it to younger generations.
Burning down their grandparents’ world may feel satisfying in the moment, but the notion that older Americans had it easier is not convincing. Boomers faced interest rates as high as 17 percent and unemployment rates much higher than today. Working-class boomers and Gen Xers were also the primary victims of job loss to East Asia.
Many Generation Z (zoomers) and millennials appear to lack appreciation for the contributions of their elders. The political and economic structures created by previous generations are the foundation of a world that has put young people on track to become “the richest generation in history.” In the U.S. alone, according to one financial estimate, younger cohorts will harvest upward of $73 trillion from older generations by 2045.
To be sure, youthful resentment has roots in reality: fewer than half of American millennials are doing better than their parents. Between 2022 and 2025, median net worth rose 37 percent for Americans aged 75 and over while falling 23 percent among those under 35. In terms of income, millennials have fared better than their parents but still lag behind in net worth, largely because of low homeownership rates. High housing prices have bedeviled younger voters in the U.S., Australia, and Canada—all countries with ample land and natural resources but excessive regulations that limit the supply of available housing and worsened costs.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the homeownership rate among young adults aged 25 to 34 was 45 percent for Generation X but dropped to 37 percent for millennials.Not coincidentally, the share of Americans aged 18 to 29 living at home has grown steadily in recent years and now sits at 49 percent.
This creates the prospect of a new cohort of “forever renters” dependent on large corporations or the state to supply their residences. They have a different outlook from earlier, more aspirational generations: If you have little hope of ever owning your own home, why not support public housing and rent control?
“Boomers don’t get it,” Elizabeth Hansburg, a longtime leader of the California YIMBYs, a group dedicated to expanding housing opportunities for young people told me. “They don’t see how things have changed.”
Housing is just one source of younger Americans’ skepticism about the future. In the early 2000s, economic decline was largely confined to the working class. Today, the angst is more generational, as 69 percent of millennials believe success is much harder to achieve than it was for older generations. Underemployment among recent college graduates has reached 42 percent, and many young people carry massive student-loan debt. The “Lulu Lenins” driving the socialist revival have emerged from the underpaid, overeducated, and largely childless urban population. Their radical grandstanding proceeds even as over half of millennials and nearly three-quarters of Gen Z receive financial support from their parents.
One might expect that young people would be excited about unprecedented technological progress, from the rise of space industries to artificial intelligence. Instead, many view the rise of AI and robots with trepidation. According to Pew, 73 percent of Americans under 30 think AI means fewer jobs, and the portion more concerned than excited about AI has nearly doubled since 2021.
Fear of the future under capitalism plays into the hands of those promoting an authoritarian alternative. This includes some who have embraced the Chinese model —a Tik-Tok-nurtured trend known as “Chinamaxxing”—while an appalling 43 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they have a positive view of Islamic sharia law. Patriotism, unsurprisingly, is far weaker among young people than older generations, a phenomenon seen not only in America but also across most Western countries.
It’s not just the flag that young people are unenthusiastic about but the liberal economic system that has powered the American experiment. According to a Cato Institution/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans under 30 have a positive view of socialism; one-third support Communism.In Canada, a Fraser Institute poll found that half of those age 18 to 24 back socialism; among those 55 and older, only 38 percent do.
What “socialism” and “capitalism” mean remains up in the air. Only a quarter of Canadians polled define socialism by its traditional standard: public ownership of the means of production. In the U.S., two-thirds of Democrats have a positive view of “free enterprise,” but only one-third say the same of “capitalism.”
Of course, despite the talk of geezer greed, not all boomers are rich. Forty percent of U.S. retirees have insufficient savings, a trend made worse by inflation, and 19 percent have already burned through what they had stored away. But overall, the generation’s hard work has paid off: today, only about 14 percent of seniors are poor, compared with 30 percent in 1966.
Despite the emphasis on billionaires, the richest target for mass intergenerational redistribution lies with the boomer upper-middle class. The top 10 percent of boomers account for 71 percent of generational wealth, yet expropriating the resources of this demographic and using it to expand the welfare state will weaken young people’s economic prospects by drying up capital markets’ most reliable source of cash. High taxes on wealth have failed elsewhere, as money and people react by either moving elsewhere or disengaging from the economy.
The more constructive alternative to generational war, of course, would be a truce. Besides keeping capital markets afloat, seniors often support their children financially. In 2024, 2.6 million parents gave over $26 billion to their children living outside the home. Nearly one in four first-time homebuyers rely on families for down payments.
Boomers—the vast majority of seniors—and the aging Xers account for the largest group of formal and informal volunteers helping out their neighbors and fellow citizens. Today, more than two-thirds of grandparents are caregivers, often on a regular, even daily basis, contributing over $900 billion to the broader economy by allowing parents to work or go to school. And it’s a two-way benefit street: caring for grandchildren also appears to boost longevity among seniors.
Every year, approximately 26 percent of U.S. seniors aged 65 and older—16 to 17 million strong—volunteer for a wide array of charitable activities. Consider efforts like the Parentis Foundation, whose older volunteers assist young children with their reading skills at Boys and Girls Clubs in Orange County, California.
“We’re filling in the gap that many find in their homes,” explained Parentis Foundation Executive Director Janice Frenchette-Artinger. “Our goal is to drive enthusiasm for reading.” Helping the young, she adds, “gives a reason to live.”
Other efforts that help both generations are programs in which seniors provide rooms in their under-occupied houses—particularly attractive in areas like Southern California, where rents are high for young people and many seniors are stressed by rising housing costs.
But just volunteering or mentoring young people will not be enough to blunt generational conflict. Seniors may wish to protect their neighborhoods from overdevelopment, but they could also support new housing, especially in the suburbs and exurbs, to provide younger generations with the options they themselves enjoyed.
Seniors need the younger generations, too, especially as they age. Many active and healthy older people will inevitably require help from their offspring. Stymieing younger generations’ progress will limit what they can do as parental abilities wane.
The truth is, the generations need each other, as they always have. Most young Americans aspire to own a single-family home and start a family. It’s the obligation of the older generation to help them achieve this—not for their own pleasure, but for the future of society.