by Mark Bauerlein
Today is November 5, 2024, election day, and the nation is holding its collective breath to find out who gets to run the country for the next four years (or more).
I suppose I read The Dumbest Generation Grows Up (dumb title) in part to gird myself, because the titular Millennials could well decide whether we get Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. If they do, Bauerlein’s pessimistic book doesn’t give me much hope for the future.
The book, a follow-up to Bauerlein’s 2008 survey of this age group (which I haven’t read), paints an unpleasant picture. Millennials, he writes, were coddled by Boomers and left to their own devices (literally and figuratively) by their mentors — specifically, college professors. The result is millions of young adults who scroll smartphones but know nothing about Shakespeare, Dickens, or Dostoevsky — all of them dead, white males, of course, and therefore unworthy of study.
Bauerlein contrasts this cohort of woke “utopians” with Malcolm X. The latter, he points out, had good reason to find fault with Western Civilization but, rather than simply dismiss it as evil, studied it so that he could make intelligent arguments.
Young people today don’t do that because it’s too difficult.
It’s possible we’ll learn tomorrow how the Millennials voted, and in what kind of numbers. God help all of us.
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