Clash of generations shaping outcomes of democratic contests

President-elect Donald Trump speaks at the USA Thank You Tour 2016 at the Giant Center on December 15, 2016 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Many young voters were disheartened by the election of Trump. PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • In Europe and America, the odds are stuck against the young who have suffered disastrous defeats by the older generations.
  • But propelling generational tensions and extremism is a dangerous mix of the youth bulge and a deepening crisis of liberalism.

On January 20, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America and the de facto leader of the world.

Clearly, Trump is a phenomenon, epitomising the resurgent clash of generations on a world scale.

The silent generational wars, now eclipsing ethnicity and class as the pivot of power struggles in liberal democracies, are being fought primarily at the ballot box – although some have spilt into the streets.

But the question remains: how is this clash of generations likely to affect global peace, Africa’s development and, more specifically, Kenya’s coming General Election?

Confronted by the upheavals that rocked the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in their Communist Manifesto (February 1848) that: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

And in the wake of the collapse of Communism in Russia in the last decade of the 20th century, American scholar Samuel Huntington fretted about a “clash of civilisations” (1996).

However, in the opening decades of the 21st century, a clash of generations is everywhere shaping electoral contests and outcomes.

In many ways, the British referendum on European Union revealed a sharp age divide.

Young Britons aged 18 to 24 strongly supported by 78 per cent to 22 per cent their country remaining in the EU while voters aged 65 and older backed Brexit by 68 per cent to 32 per cent.

But the young British “Europeanists” lost to the older generation of isolationists and enthusiasts of the defunct “British Empire”.

The age factor also immensely swayed the outcomes of recent American elections.

It defined the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination with under-30s preferring Sanders by a 71-29 margin.

STRONG GROUP

But Sanders’ young supporters lost. Many young voters were also disheartened by the election of Trump.

In Europe and America, the odds are stuck against the young who have suffered disastrous defeats by the older generations.

One explanation is that here the population is aging, demographics have become increasingly decisive in elections with the younger generations of voters hopelessly outnumbered by older voters.

But youthful voters are also to blame for their losses.

They have not turned up in their numbers to vote for Europe or for Clinton.

The clash of generations is also renting African elections.

In North Africa, the age divide defined the Arab Spring revolutions.

In South Africa, Jacob Zuma’s (74) African National Congress (ANC) lost control of key metropolitan municipalities (the Nelson Mandela Bay, City of Tswane and City of Johannesburg) to an opposition led by the young generation – Julius Malema’s (35) Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Mmusi Maimane’s (36) Democratic Alliance (DA).

But why, exactly, are the world’s young people up in arms?

Recognisably, the clash of generations is not new; it is as old as the hills.

It was the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke who famously saw society as a contract not just among “those who are living”, but also with “those who are dead” and “those who are to be born”.

CAPITALISM
Generational tensions in the 21st century reflect the justifiably seething anger of the young who feel that the older generations have breached the social contract and unduly burdened them with bad policies.

In turn, this has eroded the sense of generational justice that undergirds the idea of society-as-a-contract and the ensuing “generational balance of power.”

In Africa, as elsewhere in pre-colonial societies, decisions were taken in the light of how they would affect the next several generations.

Today, this long view of generational justice has given way to painfully short-range policies that hardly see beyond the next election.

Second, scholars are increasingly attributing the youth fury to turbulent demographic transitions in the 20th and 21st centuries.

One of the most influential contributors to this line of thought is Robert Kaplan who argued in his article: “The Coming Anarchy” (1994) that anarchy and the crumbling of nation states will be attributed to demographic and environmental factors in the future.

Kaplan’s thinking might have compelled Huntington to qualify his “Clash of Civilisations” thesis by adding an age dimension.

“I don’t think Islam is any more violent than any other religions”, he noted, adding that: “The key factor is the demographic factor … the people who go out and kill other people are males between the ages of 16 and 30.”

But propelling generational tensions and extremism is a dangerous mix of the youth bulge and a deepening crisis of liberalism.

The Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria reckons that youth bulges combined with slow economic and social change provided a foundation for the resurgence of extremism, especially in the Arab world.

Because of this, the argument that “capitalism has screwed the young” is gaining popularity.

The crisis started in the 1980s neo-liberal policies, inspired by a new-found conservatism identified with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, which rolled back the welfare state and weakened trade unions, led to decline in jobs for the young in the public sector and removed social safety nets such as generous pensions for workers, subsidised/ free health care.

CLASH OF GENERATIONS
In the ensuing crisis of liberalism, the young faced the full brunt of two recessions, the 2008 one really bad, leaving them with high student-loan debts, cost of health care and shrinking prospects of well-paying jobs.

In a word, capitalism has produced its own gravediggers by propelling the rise of far-right extremists.

But the Harvard historian, Naill Ferguson, has a different view.

“It’s not really capitalism that has screwed the young. It’s socialism,” he declared in a recent article: “The clash of generations” (Boston Globe, June 06, 2016).

Although socialist ideas inspired social democracy and created the welfare state as a highly successful response to the challenge of Marxism in the 20th century, its policies of willy-nilly borrowing to pay for these subsidies and social services and to make up for unmet tax revenue targets led to huge public debts and the inflation of the 1970s.

The Thatcher-Reagan liberal reforms were too little, too late.

If socialism is responsible for the worldwide generational conflict today, why is Communist China rising?

Prof Kagwanja is the chief executive of Africa Policy Institute