Here, as in France, it turns out that young voters are not the sure thing many progressives had hoped. Pollster Sam Abrams has found that a small majority of students reject both political parties; only 18 percent think the Democrats are moving in the right direction which looks good only in comparison with the 10 percent who think that Republicans are doing so. Most young voters, according to the Pew Research Center, are neither liberal, outside of cultural issues, nor conservative. A strong majority think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Why so alienated? Start with economics. In the United States, the odds of a middle-class earner moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s, meaning the young face diminished prospects. A Deloitte study projects that Millennials in the United States will hold barely 16 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2030, when they will be by far the largest adult generation. Gen Xers, the preceding generation, will hold 31 percent, while Boomers, entering their eighties and nineties, will control 45 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Not surprisingly, many young people—and not only in the United States— are deeply pessimistic about the future, and show levels of anxiety far more pronounced than other generations. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that poll respondents in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany were even more pessimistic about the next generation’s prospects than those in the United States. Such sentiments were also shared in countries like Japan and India, where many new college graduates fail to find decent employment.