Grumpy Old Men: The Youth Appeal of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and Jean-Luc Melenchon
On a sunny May afternoon in a suburb of Liverpool, England, young people pack into the local soccer pitch for a music festival. It is a typical scene of millennial culture, replicated the world over from the deserts of California to the urban parks of Australia. But this afternoon is anything but typical; a surprise guest has the crowd more excited than any of the music acts on the day’s schedule. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is stopping by to speak, his furious underdog campaign in the British general election in full swing. Though he speaks for just a few minutes, the slender sixty-eight year old with a gaunt face and a scraggly white beard whips Liverpudlian kids a third of his age into frenzy worthy of the Beatles in their heyday. He roars “Do you want housing, do you want care, do you want a society coming together, or do you want selective education and fox hunting?” He lets the contempt drip into his voice on that last part, and as if on cue, the crowd erupts into a derisive chorus of boos at the mention of one of incumbent Prime Minister Theresa May’s least popular proposals. He leaves the arena almost as quickly as he came, sent on his way by thunderous applause and the crowd singing his name.
Over the past two years, similar scenes to this took place across the United States and France as well as Great Britain; men who had for years been derided for years as relics of a bygone era suddenly had the magic formula for captivating the youth of their respective countries, mystifying the political and media establishment the world over. Politicians like Jean-Luc Melenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and others like them defy conventional wisdom on what sorts of politicians appeal to young people. I am going to argue that these grizzled mavericks do not have the appeal to the youth that they do in spite of their age and experience, but because of it.
When most people think of a politician with great appeal to young people, who are the most typical people who come to mind? Many will point to Barack Obama as an example, or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Others of an older generation or who remember their history will think of John F. Kennedy. These men all share a similar profile. Most obviously, they are themselves young, or at least young by the standards of modern politicians, which generally means under age fifty; Kennedy and Trudeau were forty-three when they came to power and Obama forty-six. They were able to portray themselves as fresh faces that would bring change to the political establishments of their respective countries, despite the fact that they were in many senses products of the establishment- Trudeau the son of a previous Prime Minister, Kennedy of a wildly successful businessman and ambassador, Obama a product of the Ivy League education system. Nonetheless, all inspired a wave of devotion from younger voters in their ascension to power.
Corbyn, Sanders and Melenchon defy the conventional wisdom of what politicians young people respond to in almost every respect. Most obviously, they are all old; Sanders is seventy-five, Corbyn sixty-eight, and Melenchon sixty-five. More curious still, all of them have decades of time in office under their belt. Melenchon was first elected to the French Senate in 1986, Sanders has served in Congress since 1991, and Corbyn has represented the same North London seat in Parliament since 1983. Any claims that these men represent a challenge to the ways of Washington, or London, or Paris, should be ludicrous on their face. So how, then, have they attracted such enormous legions of young followers who are certain they represent just that?
It is exactly this point where we see my thesis borne out; Melenchon, Sanders and Corbyn’s long electoral records become an asset with young people rather than a liability because of the unique natures of their respective political careers compared to the vast majority of political officeholders. While they each served in elected office for decades, they have a consistent track record of being on the margins, long viewed as gadflies on the fringes of their respective parties. Corbyn arrived in the House of Commons just as the left wing of the Labour Party was discredited by its disastrous defeat in the elections of 1983; when Labour returned to power in the late 90s it was firmly in the hands of centrist Tony Blair, and Corbyn was a consistent thorn in the side of Blair’s government during his ten years in power. Most notably, Corbyn served as Chairman of the Stop The War campaign while Blair was loyally following George W. Bush into the Iraq War. Sanders was long regarded as a curiosity in DC circles for his decades-long identification as a democratic socialist in the ages of Reagan, Clinton and Bush, when free market ideology seemed to run over all in its path. Melenchon was consistently on the left wing of the French Socialist Party, advocating against its moves to the center that began in the late 1980s, eventually breaking with the party in 2008.
It is a decades-old cliché that authenticity is a trait that young people respond to. Any hack advertiser trying to sell a new flavor of chips can tell you that. And yet the appeal of these candidates is fundamentally rooted in that authenticity. All three of them challenge the conventional wisdom that has dominated the political culture of the western world for the past thirty years, which has focused on reducing the size of government, privatization, deregulation, and austerity measures in response to economic downturn.
Since the early 1980s, the pathway for most ambitious young politicians in both parties lay through either embracing these trends wholeheartedly, or at the most incrementally trying to rein them in. It is only in the wake of events such as the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008 that the prevailing winds of politics in the West have fundamentally shifted. The views of these men on issues of foreign intervention and economics had only a few years before been easily dismissed by most politicians or the mainstream media as irrelevant relics of a bygone era now were seen by millions as forward-thinking, prophetic even.
The stances that these “grumpy old men” have taken may defy political convention and seem extreme to some, but they make eminent sense to many members of a generation whose formative years were marked by the foreign and economic policy disasters of 2003 and 2008, policies long supported by “reasonable” centrist politicians across the established political spectrum. When these candidates say they take on the establishment, they have a long track record of doing so that confers credibility and authenticity.
Of course, all of this would not matter if it were not for the fact that the policies Corbyn, Sanders and Melenchon espouse are fundamentally popular with the countries they represent at large and young people in particular. Despite the mainstream media narrative that it is a pipe dream, some version of Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal is supported by sixty percent of the American people, according to the latest polling. Corbyn’s surge in British election polling came about after the release of his policy manifesto, which even Tory-friendly writers in Britain admit contains popular policies such as nationalizing the railway lines and mail services (the fact that it is easily summed up in the pithy, catchy slogan “For The Many, Not The Few” only helps.) The same is true for Melenchon’s proposed defiance of European-imposed austerity and privatization measures, as well as his proposal to lower the French workweek to thirty-two hours.
The rise of the “grumpy old men” to the national stage in their respective countries is, above all else, a symptom of the fact that in much of the Western world, the elite consensus on what constitutes “mainstream” politics became a kind of closed loop. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, it seemed as if there was no alternative for elected officials but to wholeheartedly embrace the ideology of deregulation, privatization and austerity, save for perhaps triangulation and incremental accommodation. And yet, this “end of history” type thinking has ironically been proven to have a sell-by date after which it turned rotten for large segments of the body politic of these countries, especially for the young people now burdened with debt, facing mounting inequality, and despairing of ever achieving the material security their parents did. While Sanders, Corbyn and Melenchon have proven to be skilled politicians once given the spotlight, they would have remained in obscurity if they were not representative of a mass desire for a different kind of politics, the kind of desire that makes the crabby gray-haired man seem less like an intrusive panhandler and more like a prophet.
