Ignore the sneering: young people’s rage is an age-old sign of failed politics

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/21/young-people-rage-failed-politics

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In the documentary Everybody in the Place, the Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller delivers a talk to a group of sixth-form politics students about late-80s acid house in Britain. As well as documenting the massive cultural changes that took place, he draws a clear line between the decline of industrialisation, the miners’ strike, sound-system culture and the rise of dance music. As Deller shows old footage of whey-faced ravers in bucket hats and sports gear dancing in fields and warehouses, the students look on with a blend of bafflement and fascination. It’s weird, one of them says, that no one has a phone.

Another film, also out now, reports on a youth movement born from political and social disenfranchisement, and a desire for a new way of living. Woodstock – Three Days that Defined a Generation tells the well-documented story of the hippy era and the 1969 music festival that took place in the shadow of Vietnam and civil rights unrest. “We were looking for answers,” says one attendee. “We were looking for other people that felt the same way as we did … If 400,000 people could get together and have absolutely no violence, absolutely no conflict, I felt like we could bring all of that love back into society – and change the world.”

The similarities between the two eras go well beyond the urge to get off your face in a field. In both films we hear of politicians attempting to legislate against large gatherings; of social and generational schisms; and of young people finding common purpose via music and like-minded communities. We see this in a different guise today: our youth may not have found kinship through a specific musical movement but they have nonetheless gathered together for a higher cause. Their attempts to tackle climate catastrophe through online campaigning and protest movements such as Extinction Rebellion, to shake world leaders out of their torpor, would seem more urgent than the hedonistic cultural revolutions of yesteryear. But still their elders sneer.

It has become a sport among commentators of a certain age and political persuasion to goad and humiliate young activists for their idealism and integrity. Last week brought the unedifying spectacle of the radio presenter and professional troll Julia Hartley-Brewer crowing on social media about booking a long-haul winter holiday above a picture of 16-year-old climate-crisis activist Greta Thunberg – who is currently travelling by a zero-emissions yacht to attend UN climate summits in New York – and noting: “Level of guilt being felt: 0%.” Fellow garbage-spewers Brendan O’Neill, Rod Liddle and Toby Young have variously mocked Thunberg for her appearance, her supposed ignorance of environmental policy and – based on the fact that Thunberg’s mum performed on Eurovision – her privilege. (That latter gem was highlighted by Young, the son of a baron who famously phoned up Oxford University to secure a place for his low-achieving lad.) It’s always interesting to hear these voices decrying Britain’s lack of identity and community, and using it as an explanation for the Brexit vote, while overlooking the cultural movements trying to make life better through collective action.

Youth movements don’t come about in a vacuum, though that doesn’t stop the older generation from clutching their pearls when the young reject their thinking and values. We have seen it repeatedly, from the birth of rock’n’roll, to the hippy, punk and rave eras. Youthful rebellion isn’t always about sticking two fingers up at parental authority. It can be about artistic innovation, political alienation and recognition of the need for social change. It can be young people looking at the world handed to them and reacting not with gratitude but alarm.

Yet, as Deller makes clear, similarly woven into our culture is a distrust of the younger generation. Midlife moral panic is as much a rite of passage as dyeing your hair blue in your teens. Deller’s masterstroke in his film, and what elevates it above your average nostalgia-soaked music doc, lies in how it allows us to see a 30-year-old youth movement through the eyes of a group of 17- and 18-year-olds: witness their delight at the footage of mid-80s Chicago dance parties, and their horror at the police brutality on display during the Battle of Orgreave. While the technological gulf between then and now seems huge, other elements are more recognisable, from music being blamed for perceived social dysfunction to establishment figures swooping in to make money out of a crisis. A chill runs down the spine with the appearance in the film of Paul Staines, one-time publicist for the acid house entrepreneur Tony Colston-Hayter (currently serving a prison sentence for fraud), and now the brains behind the hard-right gossip website Guido Fawkes. Not for nothing does Deller call him an “agent of chaos”.

These films’ message is that culture is inextricably linked to its political age. They also show us how optimism and creative thinking can curdle over time. When you’re young, the compulsion to find like-minded people and to effect change is powerful; by contrast, middle age can make you selfish, complacent and bring an urge to stamp on youthful idealism. Becoming old and curmudgeonly isn’t compulsory, of course, as illustrated in Deller’s film by the smart, silver-haired man in late-80s Salisbury defending Travellers against the heavy-handed tactics of police. “I don’t want no bugger hassling me and chasing me about telling me what I can’t do and I can do,” he says. “It’s a free country. Everybody [should] do what they please.”

History shows us that mass movements of young people seemingly doing as they please is often underpinned by more serious grievances against failing social and political systems. We ignore them at our peril.