Will millennials survive the left?

Mocking millennials’ neediness and intolerance has become common. We bemoan them as special snowflakes who demand kudos for even the most banal accomplishments. We decry their lack of intellectual rigor and unwillingness to participate in a free and open marketplace of ideas. We chide their frequent choice to privilege emotion above reason in their approach to justice. Fair criticisms all.

But millennials are not imposing this flawed philosophy on the Left. They are following orders given by people born long before 1980. In a recent article, Robert Tracinski lays out exactly where these cultural practices’ roots lie: “It’s important to remember that the contemporary code of political correctness emerged from an actual, literal totalitarian ideology. Karl Marx argued that all of culture—ideas, religion, art, everything—was just a ‘superstructure’ built to disguise and perpetuate the real foundation of society, which was the economic relationship between labor and capital. Modern neo-Marxists turned this idea into the slogan ‘the personal is the political,’ which was the origin for the concept of political correctness.”

What we are seeing here is the effect of Marxist nostalgia. What Francis Fukuyama missed in his “End of History” was the extent to which the democratic, capitalist West would in victory reinvent its nemesis, communism, free of all its pesky flaws. He didn’t foresee celebrities wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. We’ve lost the very nuanced relationship between Cold War-era American liberals, Karl Marx, and communism. It wasn’t just that the intellectual and academic American liberals of the 1950s and 1960s feared blacklisting, they feared the totalitarian tendencies of Marx-based governments.