Millennials want a meaningful existence. Are they getting it?

Mark Bauerlein writes,

I decided on a presentation of Donald Trump as a traditional American rogue figure, a model of Emersonian nonconformity, an outlandish character in a lineage of comic renegades. No other individual in my lifetime mobilized the entirety of respectable opinion in America against himself, I would tell them, and that very fact deserved analysis. Everybody in the elite denounced him—a strange uniformity for a social group that professes its admiration for thinking outside the box. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the swamp, the art world, the media, academia . . . they hated him with a passion that revealed more about themselves than it did about the object of their enmity. He had to have something going for him to evoke such a monolithic pageant of slurs.

A young man stopped in front of my townhouse the other day blasting his pop music with the top down, and I said to him, “Do you know that if you drove through your neighborhood playing Beethoven that loud you would be a renowned figure, instead of a guy just like a million other guys your age?” He gave me a puzzled look that implied, You some kind of a nut? and drove off, but one can hope that the notion stayed with him. There is greatness to be enjoyed, he should be told over and over; there are talents to revere; the past contains wonders.

Without that belief, our 30-year-olds are disappointed, uncertain, pessimistic, and resentful. It’s a natural response. We can’t all be liberal ironists skating through life free of deep commitments and supportive deities. They want a meaningful existence, and they look for it in false gods of social justice and the like, unable to find it where they should, in church, in tradition, in humanitas, in country, and in role models. As we watch them march against systemic racism, science-denial, and the rest, let’s attribute those errors to what didn’t happen in their classrooms 10 years earlier.

Read more here:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/28/the-road-to-vengeance/