It is a throwaway term this writer has been hearing for many years. It is contemptuous and drips with condescension. One hears it quite a lot now, for reasons I’m happy to speculate on in this blog. That it is a matter for speculation is interesting in itself, because it is clearly the case that many of today’s conflicts in the public space are not acknowledged. That there is a conflict taking place is undeniable, but many people – usually the ones holding the microphone – are often coy about the real bone of contention. But wait, you might be asking, what am I even talking about? Well, surely it is obvious. I am referring to that apparently shameful thing called “student politics”.

As a way of politically engaging with the world, it has always been considered to be unrealistic, a brand of idealism with no footing in the way the world works, lacking in that most crucial quality, nuance. And why is this a thing in the 2020s? One answer I put to you is that this is the era of the savvy, nuanced, sophisticated politics understander. They are ubiquitous in contemporary media ecosystems. To be an “understander” of politics is to enjoy considerable status and clout. And one doesn’t usually come to such a station in life by being hostile to power. Purveyors of “student politics”, therefore, are mortal enemies. To suggest that our economic and political systems are man-made constructs and not immutable forces of nature is to pose a threat to the politics understander. Such ideas need to be shut down at source. The student politics epithet is a crucial weapon in the armoury. 

There is an argument that idealism, which is often derided as ideological purity, collapses when it crashes into the realities of Great Power competition and the sullen resentments boiling over in many societies around the world. Certainly, there are many things the student doesn’t know or doesn’t understand. The way the world works certainly is pretty amoral, which should be obvious to anyone observing world politics in the 21st century. Forging a path through crises and injustices shouldn’t, however, entail a surrender to cynicism. Our compasses should still be set towards moral clarity, so that we can recognise policy that is needlessly cruel, recognise genocide when it is happening, and recognise environmental destruction and who is responsible for it.

We know perfection is unattainable when dealing with imperfect humans, but the values of “student politics”, which are usually founded in social justice, anti-racism and latterly in averting climate breakdown, are attractive attributes. The series of disasters that have characterised our century so far – the Iraq War and the succession of conflicts and atrocities that succeeded it, leading to today’s dangerous moment; austerity policies in response to the global financial crisis in 2008; abject inadequacy to date on reducing emissions – necessitate a higher striving if we are to avert the calamities that appear to be lying in store for us.

In that light, why is continued disdain for the student still so rampant, when they bear negligible responsibility for the world’s problems? Why is it further assumed to be an outlook that a “sensible” young person eventually grows out of? Certainly, plenty of people who seemed like revolutionary firebrands in their youth turned out to be very reactionary members of the commentariat or the closely aligned political class. Observation of many such people’s careers leaves this writer with the impression they were generally a preferable crew when they were younger. 

Demographics are complicated, and it wouldn’t do to make simplistic arguments around intergenerational struggle. But there feels to me like there’s something to be read into this well-trodden path. This is particularly manifest in the contempt for young people who sought to rise up against austerity in the 2010s and got pulverised for it by neoliberal centrism. One frequently returns to the great article written by the late David Graeber in The New York Review of Books in the wake of the 2019 UK general election, and it still has a strong explanatory power. This powerless writer reads a passage such as this and pities today’s students, for so much is stacked against them.

One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.