Perhaps the most important fact about the Millennials is the sheer size of this generation. They’re the first cohort we’ve seen in the past 40 years that’s actually big enough to swamp their Boomer parents, whose interests and worldviews have dominated American politics ever since the youngest of them hit voting age in the late 1970s.  The Boom was the biggest generation in American history, to the point where their sheer size itself was transformative (as they say: quantity has a quality all its own). But the Millennials are even bigger. And between now and 2020, the youngest edge of this generation will finally turn 18 and register to vote. The results stand to be at least as transformative for us as a nation as the moment when the Boomers themselves arrived.

Conservative Millennials? Don’t hold your breath
Any number of GOP pundits have written thumb-sucking articles explaining how this cohort is going to become more conservative as it ages (because every generation does, right?) Feel free to rip those up: it’s not likely to happen, for several reasons — starting with the fact that no, not every generation does. The Boomers did, because from left to right and youth through their approaching old age, they’ve shared a belief in radical individualism — the primacy of the individual over any claims made by society — that fed everything from Evangelicalism and free market fundamentalism on the right to New Age religions and social experimentation on the left.  That individualism is the one shining through-line that defines everything that generation has ever embraced. It made them hippies. And it also made them vote for Reagan.

The Millennials are their historical opposite number — a generation raised  from babyhood to cooperate, share, include, network, and self-organize. They value conformity (Boomers and Xers are horrified by the “calling out” ritual that Millennials run on each other constantly as they vigilantly police each other’s behavior. We’d have choked on our own spit before telling each other what to say, think or do; and would  have rightly expected to be told to fuck off if we tried it),  and as this pervades their politics in the coming decades, it’s going to involve a lot of telling other people how they should live. That’s how their GI grandparents created and enforced the great American Consensus of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and it’s how they’re going to re-create a new consensus about the Next America they’re going to build.

That bred-in-the-bone collectivism is likely to be as durable a lifelong feature as Boomer individualism has been; but it stands in stark opposition to conservatism as it’s currently constituted. It’s possible to imagine another, distinctively Millennial form of conservatism emerging in time — but it would have to be rooted in the idea of a strong social contract, one that obligates individuals to cede some of their desires to the greater good, represented by trusted authorities — and is willing to use social shame as an enforcement mechanism. The GOP is a long way from offering any narratives along these lines now. If they do emerge, it could take another 20 years or more, becoming something today’s Millennials embrace as they age on through their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Millennials and Elections
Obama, to his credit, was the first candidate to recognize the raw political power and profound unrest of this rising cohort in 2008. Even though fully half of the Millennial generation was still too young to vote, his overt efforts to capture the energy and attention of the half that could was a conscious strategy. The Millennials ended up supplying him with the margin that put him over the top in the election — support he later rewarded by bringing home the troops (most of whom were Millennials) and restructuring the federal student loan program to make over $30 billion more in Pell Grants available and reduce the loan burden on new graduates (both of which were policies I pointed to in my original 2011 report).

But the Millennials want more. They’re looking into a future that most of them understand is a fatal dead end without a radical, rip-up-the-floorboards restructuring of how the entire planet works — how we do everything from energy and money to community and education to transportation and agriculture. This yearning for a different kind of world even has the potential to upend our current understandings of “right” and “left,” as I wrote in my report:

Some research suggests that this generation’s politics lean toward the “independent” and the “centrist.” However, those words don’t mean the same thing to under-30 Americans that they do to older ones. The self-described “independents” also express core values that are deeply collectivist and inclusive, which gives them a strong affinity for progressive ideas and solutions. (Studies by Pew and Barna have even found these same affinities among self-identified conservatives in this cohort.) Likewise, these “centrists” see their generation’s communal focus on a shared future and shared prosperity as a matter of plain common sense. To them, “we’re in this together” is not a radical idea; indeed, it stands at the center of their politics.

The Millennials spurned Hillary in 2008 because they were craving a true change candidate — and Obama promised to be that. But in the end, the change he could deliver wasn’t enough. And that’s why this generation is going, overwhelmingly, for Bernie Sanders, whom they see as sitting entirely outside the corrupt party system that made it impossible for Obama to give them the goods, unbeholden to Wall Street, uncontaminated by party cronyism, unfiltered in the media — someone who seems to be entirely their own.  This is what their candidates look like — and are going to continue to look like for the next several election cycles.