We’re often told that “generation” has replaced “class” as the major political dividing line. Just look at the last British election campaign, where the Labour Party handily won the youth vote even as it slumped to a twelve-point defeat nationally. Maps showed that if only those under twenty-five had been able to vote, England and Wales would have been painted a sea of Labour red; even among twenty-five to forty-nine-year-olds — a population hardly reducible to stereotyped “lazy students” — Labour had a nine-point lead. The picture was the opposite among those over sixty-five, as the Tories took 64 percent of that demographic and Labour just 17 percent.

Such data seems to confirm the idea of a “millennial socialism” taking hold among the young. But we could also ask how age — or, rather, the times in which we live — shapes our class attachment. In 2019, Labour failed to mobilize working people born in the 1950s, who bore the brunt of Thatcherite deindustrialization but who also had an easier path to homeownership and property wealth. Its stronger appeal was among the “austerity generation” — more likely to be university educated, but also more likely to have made their key career and family choices in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis.

Even if we recognize that material interests — property, stable income, cost of living — play a key role in shaping our political choices, it’s also clear that our expectations are generationally specific. Despite narratives painting “millennials” as overdependent “snowflakes,” works such as Keir Milburn’s Generation Left and Matt Myers’s Student Revolt: Voices of the Austerity Generation have emphasized how downwardly mobile young people sold the neoliberal snake oil of “aspiration” have instead found their careers precarious and their future prospects harshening.