Stuff

rsities want students to care about climate change, Palestine, colonialism, racial inequality, and the very concept of gender itself, because caring about those issues demonstrates that they can afford to not care about housing, or food, or work, or crime. (If you doubt this, ask any student at an elite university what kind of career counseling they are getting. The answer is none.) Caring about these “meta-causes” instead of practical concerns became a class signifier core to the identity of a generation. And that carried over into politics.

fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.”