THAT'S WHAT THE NEW BREED SAY.

No less than in publishing, The State of the Youts is a staple of the propaganda industry. The idea isn’t so much to sell to the kids themselves, though, as to vampirize their vitality. Just as the glossies’ perennial kids-today spreads aren’t pitched at the youngs but at the post-youngs who enjoy a little taste of something fresh and supple, so political mags use the kids to give their movement a youthful patina.

One popular gambit is to assure oldsters that the kids are alright, i.e. just like them only with firmer butts. The latest such offering from Libertarian flagship Reason, which has of late gone all-in on millennials (check out “A Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton Prez Race Would be a DISASTER for Millennials” by Nick Gillespie), is Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s “Rise of the Hipster Capitalist.”

From riot grrrl 'zine publishers to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, anxiety over selling out to the mainstream dominated the cultural discourse of people who came of age in the '80s and '90s. Baked into the concern was an intrinsic sense that art and social change could only be corrupted by capitalism. 

Millennials, generally considered to be those in the late teens to early 30s right now, simply do not wrestle with this issue.

They’re good capitalist kids, not like those rotten Gen Xers, and will make their bobo parents proud! Also, like all model Youts, they’re plucky in the face of adversity:

For those millennials who do have jobs, wages have stagnated or dropped… Millennials have adjusted their expectations accordingly. Job security and retirement benefits seem as quaint and anachronistic as floppy disks and fax machines. And only 6 percent of millennials think full Social Security benefits will be available to them, according to a Pew Research poll from March 2014, compared to 51 percent who think they'll get nothing.

Libertarians seem to have a love-hate relationship with this economy. On the one hand it’s bad, and they can blame it (like all bad things) on Statism; on the other, it depresses wages and wage expectations, so they can spin our current neo-feudalism as a rich environment for opportunity capitalism. And that’s how it works here:

Yet members of Generation Y, as millennials were once known, are still remarkably optimistic about controlling their own destinies, despite the mess of 21st century America. 

Why so optimistic? In part, because they’re young and fashionable, which tends to buoy one’s spirits. Brown tells us about a bunch of young small-business starter-uppers, and makes sure we know they are not uptight business drags but awesome dudes and dudesses from the hippest Brooklyn precincts: For example, Greenpoint  -- where Brown once “lived across the street" from a bright young thing with “boundless enthusiasm for taking on new, unpaid creative work” -- and Bushwick  -- where Brown “lived in a warehouse that had been converted into a semi-legal residential space”; her roommates were showing their no doubt magnificent artwork, but not in some half-assed hippie way: Their “planning from the get-go involved not merely showcasing their art for the local creative community but luring in wealthy buyers.”

So how’d that go? Who knows? Whether successful or not-telling, Brown’s hipsterpreneurs seem uniformly the sort of young-people-with-money who can afford to dick around with socially-conscious dream businesses: Before co-founding the wonderfully-titled BeGood, Brown tells us, “Mark Spera was burned out on his corporate job at the Gap. ‘I couldn't imagine the idea of sitting at a desk all day.. I was considering getting into a nonprofit and he was considering traveling abroad.’” The new breed, says Brown, “chose to take huge pay cuts to pursue their dreams and make a business out of their passions.” Sounds like they didn’t have to worry too much about money, or about getting funding even in these tight-lending times.

For those who do have to worry about it, there are other hipsterpreneurial opportunities:

In the Buzz Marketing Group/Young Entrepreneurs Council survey, 33 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old respondents had a side business. (This included activities like tutoring and selling stuff on eBay.)

Selling stuff on eBay! No word on how many of these second-tier-and-lower millenials have a side business in begging for change or going through their girlfriend’s purse.

After a bellyful of that, it’s almost refreshing to look at an example of the more traditional conservative kids-today yak, like John Hawkins’ “Millennials, Hollywood Is Lying To You About Work And Success.” Don’t worry, despite the addressing, Hawkins isn’t really talking to millenials at all, but about them to other wingnuts – partly because that’s how greybeards talk in the presence of punk kids (Look at him, I got him a nice razor but he won’t shave!) but also because it makes a nice hook for discussing the outrages that really exercise Hawkins, and which these punk kids are too dumb to understand:

However, we've done something even worse to these kids. We've left far too much of their education in life to Hollywood, musicians, and college professors who've passed on a skewed view of the world. 

Unfortunately for them, reality doesn't care about boring, mean or "uncool." It just keeps rolling on like a threshing machine, cutting anyone who ignores it to pieces. 

Many's the time, in this the autumn of my life, I’ve sat on a riverbank and thought of life in just that way.

With that in mind, do you REALLY want to know why America has been so prosperous? Want to know why we're a superpower?

Whoops, pops is talking to you again, kids.

It's because of Judeo-Christian values, Western culture, a Puritan work ethic, patriotism, capitalism, small government, adherence to the Constitution, and a capability and willingness to use our military to decimate enemies of our country. 

None of those things are being celebrated in songs by Lady Gaga, movies by James Cameron, or in women's studies courses at American colleges. 

The whole thing pretty much goes on like that. Between the two of them, I have to give the edge to Hawkins, who at least doesn't embarrass himself by pretending to like his ostensible subjects, or by telling us about his groovy years in Crown Heights.