Woke Revolutionaries: Why Aren’t They Coming for Howard Schultz? (1 of 2)

Twenty years ago, we thought Islamic terrorists were going to take down America. We spent several trillion dollars fighting that threat. Over the next twenty years, we will likely focus our attention on China.

But if America is to fall, it won’t be because of suicide bombers or Chinese cruise missiles, it will be because of Zach.

So, who is Zach?

This is Zach.

Zach is not a villain – he is just a millennial who grew up being told that he should pursue his dreams no matter what. Zach’s dream was to be the next great filmmaker. Columbia convinced him that if he spent $300k on their master’s program that could happen.  

So, Zach borrowed the money and got the degree and now Zach is 29 and facing terminal unemployment coupled with insurmountable debt.  

Zach, like many others of his generation, is a victim of higher education.

As this WSJ article relates, getting young men and women to accumulate mountains of debt for useless degrees is now a key revenue generating activity for universities – which are addicted to new sources of funds to support their bloated bureaucracies.

Now you can look at this and think “well if this guy wants to pay almost half a million dollars to discover he is not Steven Spielberg, then let him.”

But if that is your response, then you don’t understand revolutions. Zach and his dashed expectations are to America what the Visigoths peering over the Danube were to Rome.

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The common perception is that revolutions occur because people can’t take it anymore – oppression leads to aggression.

In 1972, James Davies took that theory to task with his J Curve paper. He analyzed 84 revolutions across different periods/geographies and discovered that revolutions rarely occur when a population is oppressed but rather when things have been improving but the rate of improvement begins to slow. When that happens, a gap opens between expectations and reality, and it is in that gap that a revolution is born.

Now, what does all this have to do with useless degrees and Zach?

Zach is an individual example of what is a much larger phenomena – and that is the enormous gap between reality and expectations that has mushroomed among millennials as they have come of age.

Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) grew up with growing prosperity and optimism and rising expectations of success. However, as they have reached adulthood, they find themselves nowhere close to those rising expectations – accumulating less wealth, forming fewer families, owning fewer homes, and even being less healthy than their parent’s generation.

Expectations minus reality equals revolution.

While America has not yet embarked on a full-scale civil war, revolutionary fervor is simmering, especially among over educated but frustrated folks like Zach. You see it on Twitter and Facebook, and you now are seeing it in the streets – the 2020 social justice protests were the largest in American history and the protests were driven largely by the young and underemployed – in other words by Zach.

While America’s restive state makes sense in the context of the J Curve (after all America is still in absolute terms incredibly prosperous), the revolution gets confusing when you examine its aims.

If you asked the folks tearing down statues and storming university halls, what their goal was, they would give you answers like “ending white supremacy” or “ending the patriarchy.” They are not looking to guillotine the King or shoot the Tsar, they are looking to overthrow concepts, ones dreamt up by academics.

America’s ruling class, in turn, is left off the hook. We don’t see the woke revolutionaries going after America’s governing trifecta (Biden, Pelosi, Schumer) or the multi-billionaire plutocrats who run America’s tech firms and Hollywood.

Instead, the young revolutionaries go after a comic who misgendered someone’s pronoun (Dave Chappelle) or a professor who wrote a book they don’t agree with (Charles Murray).

The biggest target of their ire are the Deplorables – the large swath of Americans in the middle of the country who have neither cultural relevancy, nor money nor power but who’s more traditional views they deem at odds with their goals of societal transformation. It is if the Bolsheviks were reborn as a movement that went after lowly surfs and their sympathizers and not the Russian aristocracy. 

In a world where wealth inequality has never been higher, progressive virtue signaling has given America’s aristocracy – the cultural, economic, and political elite most responsible for the current state of arrested affairs – an invisibility cloak. Howard Schultz can kill unions and liken their formation to Nazi prison camps (see here) and Nancy Pelosi can insider trade (see here) – as long as they put out the right progressive hashtags, the revolutionary mob views them as allies. 

The irony though is that the folks most responsible for making life hard for young people and these would be revolutionaries are these very same progressive plutocrats.

If you need proof of this, just go visit the state of California and read the next post…