bemusedbibliophile:

The generational aspect of Corbyn’s success can be overstated or confused. A substantial part of Corbyn’s success was reaching out to a chunk of UKIP-voting older voters in the North. But the biggest increase in turnout was in constituencies where 18–34 year olds are the majority of the population. The 18–24-year-old turnout increased from 58 per cent to 72 per cent. Thirty-eight per cent of the Tory base was made up of over-65s, as compared to 16 per cent of the Labour base. Nine per cent of Conservatives were 18–34, compared to 28 per cent of Labour voters.

The youth surge was the great unknown of this campaign, which upended all calculations, made a mockery of most predictions. Shortly prior to the election campaign, Labour was 20 per cent behind in the polls. Corbyn’s personal approval was poor among all demographics. But as the campaign unfolded, with a strong Labour manifesto driving up the party’s support, and a youth-oriented campaign focus – Corbyn’s surprise appearance at a Libertines concert, the #grime4corbyn trend, the meme-and-banter driven culture of young Corbyn supporters online – the polls found that The Absolute Boy had won the political argument among the young. It only remained to be seen whether they would turn out.

What’s different about the younger generations? One important factor is that they don’t read the papers. Less than a fifth of those aged under thirty-five read any daily newspaper on a regular basis, compared to half of pensioners. The tabloid smears about Corbyn’s ‘links’ to the IRA worked on a section of older, less educated white voters, who are more likely to read the tabloids. But the diminished influence of this sector is vivid and clear in the upending of conventional wisdom and reflexes. For the Labour party to so dramatically increase its share of votes, let alone under a socialist, in the aftermath of not one but two horrifying terrorist attacks, in the midst of a truly deranged onslaught of smear by the Sun and the Daily Mail, is to defy what we have learnt is political gravity.

Complacency would be foolish. But the much-vaunted ‘dark arts’ of spin, of media manipulation abruptly look as threadbare and pathetic as the hocus pocus of some two-bit conjuror.

And the liberal-realist press, the Independent and the Guardian, is also losing influence, with the former folding its print edition and the latter losing 10 per cent of its readership year-on-year. This is partly due to the shift away from print culture, producing an economic crisis for the old media. But it is also the outcome of an ideological crisis not just for an ageing Tory Britain, but for the management of what had become ‘Third Way’ social democracy, the Guardian’s ferocious anti-Corbynism losing it the support of a readership that was overwhelmingly supportive of Corbyn, just as El Pais’s difficulties arise from its role as the brain trust of the PSOE centre.

Commentators, even on the Left, treat age as a purely independent variable, as if the de-composition and re-composition of class experience in the UK over the past twenty years occurred because people got older. This was a class vote – a vote of proletarians enthused about the prospect of a material improvement in their collective interest – even if the class concerned is not your grandmother’s working class. The much-maligned Millennials, who grew up in the era of the disastrous ‘war on terror’, and the elite debacle that was the credit crunch, came of age amid a lost decade of stagnant wages and economic growth. While oligarchs hoarded capital and hoovered up ever greater chunks of national resources, especially from the privatised parts of the public sector, businesses used precarious work and zero-hours contracts to drive up the absolute rate of exploitation. The austerian economic formula had produced only stagnation and the bottoming out labour productivity. And it was the young who got the worst end of that deal, with 16–24 year olds three times as likely to be unemployed as other workers. The UK’s insane property market, the pivot of a debt/speculation economy, works for those older voters who have assets against which to borrow money – above all, of course, a house. But it leaves young workers, especially those in cities and large towns, with no chance of joining the mythical ‘property ladder’.

The generational question, then, is in part a class issue and a culture issue. Younger voters were unconvinced that the pressing issue was that Jeremy Corbyn was unwilling to trigger a nuclear doomsday, or that he had met Sinn Fein representatives in the 1980s. Almost twenty years since the Good Friday agreement, after which former IRA leaders have participated in the British state, administering the sectarian mini-state under the rubric of neoliberal capitalism and shaking hands with the Queen, young voters had other things on their minds. It is, with this in mind, notable that many of the recent figures of left-wing revival have been older politicians – Mélenchon is sixty-five, Sanders is seventy-five, and Corbyn is sixty-eight. The difference between those politicians and their, sometimes younger opponents, is that they are completely unsullied by the betrayals of the centre. Corbyn’s record as a principled opponent of British foreign policy, anti-nuclear campaigner and proponent of Irish republicanism was of a piece with a general incorruptibility. Those politicians implicated in the hacking scandal, or the expenses scandal, or in betrayals such as Clegg’s reversal over tuition fees, appealed to a cynical subjectivity: this is just how politics works. Corbyn was being demonised for breaking with this pact, which had been part of what turned millions off parliamentary politics altogether.

Labour, under Corbyn, has intelligently harnessed these social-demographic shifts, responded to capitalism’s crises, and produced a broad class agenda which answers to all of these crises and the diverse lived experiences of students, the precarious and pseudo-self employed, public sector workers, and trade unionists. It combined elements of an emergent common sense and shared experience in a ‘national-popular’ thrust, in the authentically Gramscian sense. It also exploited hitherto concealed weaknesses in the Conservative strategy of nationalist kulturkampf, which derived part of its persuasive power from a thin gruel of ‘class’ rhetoric that looked risible next to Labour’s agenda, and its ability to terrify from the intimidated acquiescence of its opponents in shoring up a failing consensus on war, terrorism and national security. The most exciting thing about the election is this potential birth of such a new, politicised working-class culture – embodied in the #grime4Corbyn phenomenon – adequate to the working class of 2017, not that of 1957. For some years, ‘working class’ has been taken as a synonym for ‘white and racist’. Corbyn’s achievement enables us to nail that canard.

“Absolute: On the British General Election,” Salvage (x)