“8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance” was originally published in 2011, then republished on several Internet sites, and has become one of my most viewed articles. The eight reasons include: student-loan debt; various pacifying effects of standard schooling; the psychopathologizing and medicating of noncompliance; surveillance; television; and fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. Over the last seven years, many young people have told me that they appreciate that article, but they have urged me to detail a hugely important pacifying source which I had not included.
First, to be clear, not all young people are completely broken. The general state of acquiescence by young people was recently interrupted by their short-lived burst of dissent in the form of large rallies for gun control, in reaction to fears of being murdered in their classrooms. But that was an exception to the general rule of resignation to eating shit.
A longer period of dissent occurred during Occupy, in which many young people protested against their financial subjugation by the 1%. However, one lesson that young people learned from Occupy is that their rulers only pay lip service to democracy—and so mere dissent has little impact. Young people today are correct to recognize the impotence of mere dissent if it is unaccompanied by a withdrawal of cooperation with the ruling class’s capacity to turn a…