Yet everywhere the precariat is split into three factions, each suffering from feelings of relative deprivation, with respect to others and to time.

1. The first faction consists of those who have fallen from old working-class communities or families. They feel they do not have what their parents or peers had. They may be called atavists, since they look backwards, feeling deprived of a real or imagined past. Not having much education, they listen to populist sirens who play on their fears and blame “the other” – migrants, refugees, foreigners, or some other group easily demonized. The atavists supported Brexit and have flocked to the far right everywhere. They will continue to go that way until a new progressive politics reaches out to them.

2. The second group are nostalgics. These consist of migrants and beleaguered minorities, who feel deprived of a present time, a home, a belonging. Recognizing their supplicant status, mostly they keep their heads down politically. But occasionally the pressures become too great and they explode in days of rage. It would be churlish to blame them.

3. The third faction is what I call progressives, since they feel deprived of a lost future. It consists of people who go to college, promised by their parents, teachers and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realize they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions.

For a while, the progressives opted out of mainstream politics, reflected in declining voter turnouts and so on. However, this has been changing since 2011, albeit not by enough to stop the UK voting to leave the European Union and the US from electing Donald Trump. They have begun to define the future again, drawing energy from the need to revive the great trinity of the Enlightenment – liberté, egalité and fraternité.

It is messy out there, but there is a lot of energy. It is time for politicians and the international community to respond, or to step aside and let others do so.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/

Maybe this "third faction" can begin to turn things around. In the end, they are Western Democracy's only hope. It remains to be seen whether the corrupting influence of shareholder capitalism has rendered Western Democracy impotent.

But if you think the college educated protesters are out there because "they can afford to be" then you're missing something. Even taking the unemployed and still in mom and dad's basement out of the equation, 43% of recent college graduates are underemployed. We're learning that has far reaching consequences.

We all have heard stories of newly minted college graduates working as baristas or selling clothes at Gap. It’s what economists call underemployment: people doing jobs for which they are overqualified. Generally, however, we dismiss the phenomenon as a relic of the recession or a short-term problem affecting a small number of graduates who will find their footing soon.

But underemployment may be far more widespread than we have imagined — affecting up to 43 percent of recent graduates, according to a report. This unprecedented analysis of 4 million unique résumés examines the scope and impact of underemployment on graduates in the years that follow college. It turns out that underemployment can mark the first steps to a permanent professional detour — more than a speed bump on the journey to a prosperous career.

The results are troubling, if instructive: With the exception of a few disciplines, such as computer science, engineering and communications, grads who start off underemployed have a higher likelihood of remaining underemployed five and 10 years out. For women, the odds are even worse.

Underemployment, we’re learning, is not a short-term challenge. It is a long-term problem with serious financial implications. So how can recent graduates avoid the underemployment trap? Three things matter most: first job, college major and gender.

The data are clear: If graduates start off underemployed, there is incredible inertia that prevents them from getting out of that rut. The 43 percent of workers who were underemployed in their first job were five times as likely to be underemployed five years later as those who were not underemployed in their first job.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/06/01/first-jobs-matter-avoiding-the-underemployment-trap/

Note: that article was written (and the study it references was done) well before the Covid crisis, so the impact of the pandemic was not even considered. The situation for these highly in debt, underemployed college graduates, one can imagine, has hardly improved with the outbreak of the pandemic.

It's a damned shame higher education has become little more than vocational training in this country, but that such is the case is almost beyond question. Somewhere along the line we decided "everyone is entitled to a college education" and that fundamentally changed the entire enterprise. Because STEM majors are "hard," we produced more liberal arts and soft science (sociology, psychology, etc.) majors than a functioning society could absorb. This is not to say those sorts of majors are without merit. Indeed, I'd argue the exact opposite. But, imo, there is no stronger condemnation of what has happened to higher education in this country than the fact that the most popular major at Indiana University is Business. This is bad because it diminishes the import of a college education and depresses the wages of all college graduates. I rebelled against the idea of "getting a degree in something that will lead to a job" for most of my life. But today, with everyone and their pet dog "earning" a college degree, I can no longer hold on to the quaint idea that a college education is purely about expanding your mind and helping you better understand the world and your place in it. As my quote indicates, your major now and possibly forever henceforth does matter.