I believe that there exist giant but difficult to see cycles in our social world which occur on the order of every 50 or 100 years.
Around 1973 wage growth halted for 60-80% of workers in the West. As you can imagine, economic cycles and social cycles are linked, even if they are not the same and one lags the other.
The next generation after the millennials is not progressive, it is much further to the right than the right of the present. To cut a long story short I believe that the phenomenon we see in Israel with the young people there is going to spread to Europe and America.
My tentative guess is that this left/right divide we talk of, is actually tens of thousands of years old and is buried into our source code, our DNA.
It would make sense, would it not, since 'being wrong' politically usually meant death for whoever didn't turn out to be our ancestors.
It follows that 'changing our perspective' or 'education' is not going to work, that is thinking on the software level when the bug/feature is coming out of the hardware.
To give you a quick run down of what I think is on the cards.
- Root and branch purge (ex-STEM) of the universities for monetary and ideological reasons (looks like starting in Japan).
- Gen Z becomes the most right wing in living memory.
- Social programs go bankrupt. No Pensions. End of social democracy.
- Transnational nationalism becomes a thing.
- The middle class lose their jobs thanks to sustained cuts (dying tax base) and technology. Silicon Valley gets flak.
- Interest rates rocket upwards. Student loan debt and mortgage debt becomes unsustainable.
- Conflict breaks out in Europe.
- Surveillance and robotics technology bring us all kinds of new goodies.
The good news, as I see it, is similar to the 20th century. Depending on where you lived it was either a utopia or a dystopia. It was either the best of, or the worst of worlds depending on place and time. France on the eve of the Revolution, Germany before the crash, these were the most advanced societies of the time.
I suspect this all looks strongly like a step backwards but a glance at history suggests this is preferable to the alternative of a long slow stagnation. I suspect retrenchment is a necessary feature of our system.