If you are young, idealistic and anxious to know whether the purity of your left-wing principles will survive the disappointments of middle age, you might pay attention to the language being spoken around you. If you can hear English there is a better chance that your youthful socialism will remain uncorrupted. In Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, millennials are defying ancient political laws and failing to become more right-wing as they age. Modern 35-year-olds in Britain and America are, according to a recent analysis in the Financial Times, “by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history”.
But in the rest of Europe, notably France, Italy, Germany and Spain, young people still follow ancient routes of political migration, voting for more right-wing parties as they get older. In Britain, millennial leftism is usually attributed to economic disadvantage — house prices, student loans, falling living standards. But this analysis applies only unevenly in Europe. Young Germans may be better housed, better employed and more cheaply educated than their British peers but young Italians (of whom two thirds between the ages of 18 and 35 live with their parents) are hardly gazing towards futures of unclouded financial freedom.
Many factors are at work. It’s worth noting that European millennials wishing to vote for economic redistribution often have options on the right as well as the left. But perhaps the most interesting is the way that in a world connected by social media, language not geography is becoming a critical cultural divide. The West, which we are accustomed to thinking of as a monolith, is split between those English-speaking countries that share the internet with America and those that do not.
Anybody with a Twitter account will be familiar with the incessant proximity of America’s culture wars. Psychologically, many British people now inhabit an American world, obsessing over American politics, American injustices and American Supreme Court rulings. Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders are exhaustedly familiar with the theme.
American progressive ideas spread across the English language internet as does a fear of the conspiracist, anti-democratic American right. But where other languages are spoken online, the connection to American morals and American anxieties is looser. It helps to explain why most European countries lack an American-style progressive consensus among younger voters. In France, millennials support far-right parties in numbers that would be inconceivable and horrifying in Britain or America. In the second round of the French presidential elections last year, 49 per cent of voters aged 25 to 35 voted for Marine Le Pen. In an election in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany last year, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party performed more strongly with millennials than with older voters.
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Meanwhile, battles over trans rights have little purchase on public discourse in France and Germany. There is, as my colleague Oliver Moody has written, “no German word for woke”. The modern German student experience resembles more closely the easygoing university life of the early 2000s than the intensely political environment of some contemporary campuses in Britain and America.
France has culture-war clashes, but establishment hostility to “woke” ideas is far more unified than in Britain. To liberal English ears a centrist such as President Macron sounds as if he belongs much further on the right when he rails against left-wing ideologies “racialising” French society.
In his book History Has Begun, the Portuguese diplomat and intellectual Bruno Macaes goes so far as to suggest that American and European civilisation are diverging. He argues that America, once essentially a European society, is moving away to create a new kind of culture that is incomprehensible to many Europeans. Whereas liberalism, with its claim to universal moral principles, can be applied round the world, “woke” ideas, rooted in the specific racial atrocities of US history, are less easily exported.
Macaes says cultural differences between Europe and America have grown so wide it is no longer possible for European thinkers to forge careers as public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. No modern French intellectual has the influence of Sartre, De Beauvoir or Foucault. Michel Houellebecq, France’s most acclaimed novelist, is a mainstream figure at home but his controversial books — Submission imagines an Islamic takeover of the French state — make it impossible to conceive of him achieving similar stature in Britain or America.
In anglophone countries, elite prestige increasingly derives from an ability to talk about intersectionality rather than European culture. Declining numbers of Britons speak a foreign language. The days when European films — Godard, Fellini, Bergman — were obligatory viewing for cultured English-speakers are past. Indeed, the old American sense of cultural inferiority to ancient European culture is morphing into hostility. Courses on western civilisation, tracing European culture from the ancient Greeks to the American present, were once a mainstay of US campuses. Now the very phrase “western civilisation” has fallen under suspicion.
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“All they do in America,” the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once remarked, “is to remasticate the old European culture.” Well, no longer. It is impossible now to believe American culture is merely a gaudy, inept regurgitation of old-world themes. From a continental perspective it is morphing into something altogether stranger, more exotic and harder to understand. And we in Britain are along for the ride.