the young and the restless

Millennials are the most contradictory, confusing demographic in American history, with shifting opinions on almost every major issue. So will they ultimately swing Democratic or Republican . . . or embrace a new ideology altogether?

S Please don’t drive it into a ditch. It’s anyone’s guess, though, what road Generation M is going to choose. The generation born from 1981 to 1998 that was discouraged from ever growing up is now creeping towards age 35, and despite a lot of time peering at its own navel, it still hasn’t worked out exactly what’s in there. Millennials are an unusually self-contradictory bunch, according to numbercrunching books such as the thoughtful and personal new offering “When Millennials Rule: The Reshaping of America” by twenty-something twins David and Jack Cahn, and Paul Taylor’s 2014 summation of Pew Research Center data “The Next America.”

Millennials support more gun control but oppose an assault-weapons ban. They’re blazingly optimistic, but they’re also terrified about how they’re going to pay the bills. They love President Obama despite opposing his two main legislative achievements. They’re the narcissist humanitarians. They tell marketers they care about sustainability and cruelty to animals, and yet their meat consumption is on a par with previous generations. They love socialism, so long as it doesn’t mean government taking over the economy or anything weird like that. They’re going to change the world, but they’re in no hurry to move out of the room over Mom’s garage.

You could say the millennials are nuanced, multifaceted and open to many modes of thought. Or you could get real and say that intellectually speaking, they’re a freaking mess.

Making categorical declarations about entire generations composed of tens of millions of Americans is reductive, unfair, presumptuous, impudent, offensive, treacherous — and fun. When an otherwise bald 65-year-old insists on keeping his ponytail and keeps flashing you the peace sign, it says something about what the country was like when he was a young draft dodger. When Generation Xers whose parents split up wax nostalgic about “The Brady Bunch,” it says something about us, too.

Marketers know that different approaches work better with different generations. You just can’t sell Chevy trucks with flagwaving America-first appeals to diverse, international-minded youngsters. Only 12 percent of Gen M consider themselves patriotic.

Selling political ideas is a kind of marketing, and based on what the data are telling us the millennials are of two minds about everything. They’re tolerant when it comes to immigration, accepting of gays and marijuana legalization, but if you drill deeper it’s hard to say what the core beliefs of the millennials are. A lot seems to depend on exactly how you frame a question, which means that, despite their liberal cultural leanings, young adults remain politically up for grabs. It would be just as much of a mistake for the Republicans to write them off as it would be for Democrats to take them for granted.

MILLENNIALS ON ECONOMICS: WAIT, I HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS?

Overeducated, underemployed and burdened with student debt that dumped them into low-paying service-sector gigs, millennials could be a lost generation of productive workers. A Yale study found that those who enter the job market during a recession such as the downturn that followed the 2008 stock-market crash face the prospect of decades of persistently lower wages as compared to those who begin their careers in a boom. The difference for MBAs can be as much as $5 million over the course of their careers, noted a Stanford study.

Yet the kinds of renewed trade barriers that intrigue older and Rust Belt workers turn off millennials. They love free trade, even the TPP deal with Asia that is now opposed by both Hillary Clinton (who once called it “the gold standard”) and Donald Trump. In keeping with their diversity and tolerance, millennials actually want more international inflections of the US economy, along with less regulation and more favorable treatment for small business. They could potentially be receptive to the Republican economic message about red tape being an enemy to entrepreneurs.

Unless you turn to the topic of student loans, in which case millennials sound about as moderate as Karl Marx. Millennials are carrying a load of student debt, and they’re not psyched about the idea of paying it back. They love President Obama’s idea of free community college. Bernie Sanders’ unlikely rise from fringe kook to durable challenger to Clinton was fueled by student-loan fury: “Bernie Sanders Is Saying What Millennials Have Been Thinking All Along,” ran a headline in Elite Daily, a millennial news site.

Clinton’s Sanders-lite proposal to make college tuition free didn’t draw nearly as much enthusiasm because states could opt not to participate.

So, are young adults socialists? Absolutely maybe. They have a Kardashian-level combo of fascination with, and disgust for, socialism. Some 69 percent of millennials say they’d be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate, yet only 32 percent of millennials favor “an economy managed by the government,” which is the mildest definition of socialism. “Millennials Like Socialism — Until They Get Jobs” ran a recent Washington Post headline.

Millennials say they favor smaller government and lower taxes — but also say they support more aid to the poor, even if it means more taxes. Huh? It gets better: When you take that position to an extreme, even more millennials get on board: Nearly three-quarters say that government has a responsibility not just to spend more on the poor but to guarantee that every citizen has a place to sleep at night and enough food to put on the table. You’d pretty much have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find an American president on that wavelength.