Young people are right to be angry about their financial insecurity

Social injustice on an unprecedented scale, massive inequities and loss of trust in elites define our political moment - and rightly so

Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education or gender, as on the voters' generation.

There are good reasons for this divide. The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects. The cold war, for example, was over even before some were born and while others were still children. Words such as socialism do not convey the meaning they once did. If socialism means creating a society where shared concerns are not given short shrift - where people care about other people and the environment in which they live - so be it. Yes, there may have been failed experiments under that rubric a quarter- or half-century ago; but today's experiments bear no resemblance to those of the past. So the failure of those past experiments says nothing about the new ones.