The Daily Beast has published an article titled, "Blame Millennials for President Trump."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/16/if-america-elects-a-pre...

Brilliant job, American media. You created the Trump monster by giving him billions in free coverage because it was good for your bottom line. You did everything that you could to prop up the uninspired candidacy of Hillary Clinton (who, in the latest polls, is losing in Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri, while barely hanging onto Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia by spreads of 0.5 to 3 points), and now that you're staring into the abyss of a looming Trump presidency, you don't like what you see and you have to find someone to blame. So, the millennials are the new Naderites.

Yet despite running against a candidate who combines the racial divisiveness of George Wallace with the pro-Russian sympathies of Henry Wallace, Hillary Clinton has barely been able to break 48 percent in any national poll. She does significantly better in head-to-head match-ups than in the actual four-way race, thanks to the not insignificant number of voters expressing support for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein. Support for these minor candidates is most pronounced among a crucial demographic, my demographic: millennials. Twenty-six percent of voters aged 18-29 say they will vote for Johnson; 10 percent back Stein.

What explains the millennial willingness to risk a Trump presidency? A lot of it stems from cynicism towards, if not downright hatred of, Clinton and everything she represents. Seventy-seven percent of voters 18-34 find Clinton untrustworthy, compared to 65 percent of all likely voters. There’s also not a small degree of lingering bitterness from those who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, only 52 percent of whom, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, plan to back the party’s nominee (Sanders won millennials overwhelmingly, and Saturday will be in Ohio to try and convince voters there to hold their noses with one hand and pull the lever for Clinton with the other).

[...]

But there’s something deeper, and darker, about millennial opposition to Clinton and the attendant blitheness towards the prospect of a Trump presidency. It’s best described as a mix of moral relativism, historical ignorance and narcissism.

Millennials are the first post-war generation to have come of age after the Cold War. Baby boomers, by contrast, grew up listening to their parents’ tales of American heroism in World War II and read about the depredations of international communism every day. Throughout their formative years, the United States was locked in Cold War struggle against an expansionist Soviet empire, and the world lived under threat of nuclear holocaust. The anti-Vietnam War movement may have bred skepticism about America’s global role, but the notion that American power was necessary to protect freedom in the world remained a majority one.

Millennials, by contrast, spent their early years blissfully unaware about the world and its dangers. That changed, of course, on 9/11. But unlike other age groups, over half of us believe U.S. actions might have provoked those attacks. “Older people think, ‘We’re a great people, we got attacked by these crazy people, and now we are dealing with it and we have to be careful,’” Trevor Thrall, co-author of a study on millennials and foreign policy, told Voice of America last year. “Millennials are the only generation the majority of which think the U.S. must have done something to provoke 9/11.” Thrall’s study concluded that millennials “perceive the world as significantly less threatening than their elders,” “are more supportive of international cooperation than previous generations,” and “are also far less supportive of the use of military force.” Millennials are also deeply skeptical—like Trump—of American exceptionalism. A 2011 Pew poll found that only 32 percent of millennials believe America is superior to other countries, compared to 64 percent of baby boomers.

But the main reason for millennial apathy towards the possibility of a Trump victory, I suspect, is a lack of historical understanding. Millennials, particularly American ones, are too young to have any memories of the Cold War, never mind World War II, when fascists ruled Europe and millions of people died as a result. Trump’s echoes of fascist movements past has no resonance with us.

Moral Relativism? Narcissism? Historical ignorance? You, Mr. Kirchick, can go fuck yourself. Millennials are more informed than any other generation thanks to technological advances, globalization, and the presence of the internet. They understand the neoliberal status quo perfectly well, and they can see what will happen to them no matter who becomes president because both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two sides of the same putrid, corporate coin.

All of this fearmongering bullshit about "fascism" and "socialism" doesn't work on this generation, and it scares the shit out of the media, because they can't control the largest segment of the voting public (next to the baby boomers).

Do you really want to know why millennials refuse to support Hillary Clinton? As someone on the older end of the millennial spectrum, let me speak frankly. It's because we don't give a shit about candidates that don't give a shit about us. We will not vote for the lesser of two evils. We're not going to go to the polls to protect your pocketbook and sense of security. We've grown up with this garbage all of our lives and we know where it leads. We're sick of it. Instead of listening to the people and choosing a candidate that represents our interests, the Democratic Party decided to nominate the quintessential establishment politician during a "change" election cycle. Yet, it's our fault that Hillary might lose to Trump? If you don't nominate a candidate that we can support, don't be surprised when we don't vote.

This entire article makes excuses for the worst excesses of American militarism, neoliberalism, and frankly, conservatism. The fact that this is what passes for "liberal" intellectualism these days disgusts me. America has become a failed state ruled by corporations. Thanks to Bush and Obama, we live in the Surveillance Society. If you haven't gotten the message yet, establishment folks, here it is: we don't like it, we don't want it, and things need to change, right now. The vast majority of the population has felt that the country is moving in the wrong direction for more than a decade, yet the political and media elite choose not to listen. When a huge number of Americans are so upset that they are waging a figurative war against the status quo through every kind of political and cultural surrogate imaginable, Trump included, our leaders would do well to listen instead of blaming the victims of their policies.