The prevalence of mental illness among young people has been framed as a social problem in desperate need of both awareness and attention. The largest national and international agencies are already attuned to the matter. According to studies done by the World Health Organization, one in seven 19-year-olds has experienced “a mental disorder.” In the United States, one in five people between the ages of three and seventeen have experienced “mental, emotional… or behavioral disorders,” according to Dr. Vivek Murthy, surgeon general under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. 

However, this very same official recognized only one social ill that might be causing their distress: the climate crisis. Economic insecurity or childhood hunger, for example, are not mentioned. It isn’t hard to generate a more plausible, if basic, hypothesis as to why American youth today seem particularly hopeless: their social and economic prospects are extraordinarily grim. Indeed, nothing seems to change—except the climate. Late Imperial blandishments regarding “freedom” by conservatives, or “tolerance” by liberals, ring hollow. We seem to lack credible promises for the future, as well as the words to diagnose our ills. Language itself is worn out—no wonder AI is so dumb! 

There are social causes for mental disorder: the absence of a positive, universal ego ideal has led to a weightless existence for adolescents. Instead, their non-productive consumption habits continue to be regarded as representing allegedly novel, non-normative forms of being that, according to liberal adults, should be emulated and protected. But this institutionalized, adolescent acting as transgression, or desublimation, does not produce freedom; constant anxiety about recognition produces more obsession and self-fixation. This disposition has its roots in the liberal counterculture, and has combined with the bourgeois idea of protection to engender a particular kind of helplessness in young people—and the adults around them. 

Helplessness and vulnerability are biological constraints on human infants. The prolongation and cultivation of the period of childhood dependency is an achievement of bourgeois societies, with surplus value expended on the children of elites, beginning most dramatically in Europe during the Renaissance with the growing power of Italy’s merchant class. Its much lauded humanism extended itself to dependents. Today, white-collar, college-educated parents across the political spectrum agree on one thing: children should be sheltered from material concern. Worry about one’s family is an important aspect of bourgeois ideology: parents who have accumulated enough family wealth hoard it so that it can be passed on to their feckless, irresponsible, but charming progeny. Professional-class people look to prolong the period of childhood dependency in order to promote juvenile optimization in preparation for a lifetime of intensive competition. The prolongation of dependency creates new social problems, with the most privileged adolescents demanding protection from ideas and confrontations on college campuses that allegedly endanger them, while working-class immigrant children labor in fields and slaughterhouses that present actual, imminent, and immediate dangers. The “well-being” of working-class, agricultural child laborers receives much less media attention than the travails of the coddled.

Late Imperial blandishments regarding “freedom” by conservatives, or “tolerance” by liberals, ring hollow.

A Prolonged Infancy

In Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations of America, US children and childhood stood out as distinct from their European, Old World counterparts. Observing life in the early republic, he believed that the American family was more democratic and egalitarian, with children and parents bound together by love rather than by anxiety about inheritance and legacy. Tocqueville also noted that American children played an important role in semi-rural family farmsteads, demonstrating remarkable dexterity and competence, compared with their European counterparts. Toddlers cleared tables of fine china and slightly older children handled all forms of sharp farm tools. His conclusion was that American parents, in need of labor, trusted and honored their children’s innate abilities to contribute to household needs. What he failed to note was the fact that peasant children all over the world contributed to household labor: agricultural economies, whether or not they used enslaved people’s labor, depended on little hands in every aspect of material reproduction. 

So the Frenchman certainly idealized the American family, but his observations reflected his own experience of the corruption of the European aristocracy and its powerful usurper, the bourgeoisie, which began, under the spell of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and later the German and English Romantics—to hold children up as helpless, secular symbols of innocence. Of course, most children in Britain and continental Europe did not enjoy comfortable existences: under the brutal regime of the Industrial Revolution, they were little workers and exploited alongside their parents. 

In twenty-first century America, though, children have been confined to non-productive, idealized forms of consumerism—and this correlates with a deterioration in the condition of American childhood and adolescence. Young people today suffer from mental health issues ranging from severe anxiety and depression to the chronic inability to self-regulate, which can be attributable to social and economic conditions, fostered by a hegemonic, liberal ideological formation. The transformation of this order will demand a great deal of collective action, mutual respect and political commitment, which in turn rests on confidence in our own ability to work together with honesty and responsibility. These are precisely the virtues lacking in elites and cultural authorities.

Today, the more powerful you are, the less responsibility you have to take for your actions. From academia to finance, short-term self-interest and the erasure of historical and social commitments is the name of the game—one that must be played in the ruthless field of professional competition. Liberalism has sanctioned its own kind of irresponsibility: the Democratic Party leadership blames voters for its failure to appeal to the masses, while liberals at large blame extremists and populists for creating problems in democracy. In fact it is their own betrayal of democratic values that has led us to the present state of ungovernability. 

The most powerful contemporary liberals are unable to situate themselves in relationship to the social whole, or to the historical or global context of the contemporary world. Take a recent, very public case of liberal turpitude: presidential campaign managers Quentin Fulks and David Plouffe have lamented the failure of their focus group-driven attempts “to tell Kamala Harris’ story” in the 2024 election—as if information about the Democratic candidate was what Americans lacked most in their political lives. Plouffe’s politics, inherited from the Obama campaigns, are distinctly apolitical, and, it turns out, distinctly unpopular. For the Democrats, the emptier the persona, the more malleable the package: Plouffe kept looking for ways to promote a new avatar to represent tolerance and diversity, but the campaign managed only to burn through a billion dollars—and fail. The recent political defeat of the Democrats is so fundamental that the only way their brand of liberalism can sustain itself is through denial of any responsibility. In this, they are merely imitating the lack of accountability enjoyed by the donor and capitalist class to whom they have pledged their fealty, consciously or unconsciously.

The ostensible opposition to all this, the Left, is unable to mount a challenge, and is indeed increasingly imbricated with establishment liberalism—a process that began with the countercultural New Left’s rise over fifty years ago. The New Left promoted the idea that private experiences could lead to instantaneous revelations that transform an ordinary person into an activist. In the 1970s, political awakenings allegedly took place in consciousness-raising groups where women, in telling their personal stories, had “Ah-ha!” moments—private experiences that were suddenly illuminated by political enlightenment. Political insight did not need political education as the “Ah-ha!” represented an immersive immediacy that mobilized the new feminist subject as the eminent embodiment of politics itself. Today, “vibes” fomented on social media resemble those “Ah-ha!” moments of the 1970s, taking on outsized importance in left/liberal political organizations. 

This weaponization of affect and vibes has up until now served centrists and neoliberals best of all, though. Shouting about reparations over Bernie Sanders at a political rally fit nicely into Hillary Clinton’s attempt to paint the Senator from Vermont as a racist. Asking people not to applaud speakers at a Democratic Socialists of America convention dampens enthusiasm for left organizations and makes them an object of right-wing ridicule. Throwing soup on famous paintings in order to “raise awareness” of climate change and the fossil fuel industry fits right into the demobilizing shock tactics of people who have no sense of the frame of address in their actions. Raising awareness is a bankrupt set of spectacle-oriented activities that supports the psychological structures of a solipsistic liberal political activism. Unmediated expressions of distress—“Ah-ha!”-driven, vibes-based politics—are infantilizing and nihilistic. Liberal approval of such displays of mental distress promotes an opportunistic weaponization of psychological disorder. 

The recent track record of left-liberal politics in creating the conditions for a society in which respect and dissent are valued is appalling. How can we entrust this group with any prescriptions regarding mental health or mutual care? The hypocrisy of a political party that preaches tolerance but practices censorship and demonization is a fact that has not escaped the majority of Americans—many of whom are rejecting contemporary liberalism in favor of the carnivalesque, will-to-power infantile hedonism represented by Trump. Though MAGA may not be fit to govern, it is libidinally authentic. A mature politics would recognize its authenticity but reject its formula for satisfaction.

Unmediated expressions of distress—“A-ha!”-driven, vibes-based politics—are infantilizing and nihilistic. Liberal approval of such displays of mental distress promotes an opportunistic weaponization of psychological disorders.

Stronger Egos, More Responsibility

In a fractured political world, how do we educate young people to be responsible citizens and to value civilization in the psychoanalytic sense—that is, to affirm collective civilizational achievements while accepting our responsibility to the universality of class struggle? We need to re-install a sense of historical responsibility in the political subject whose immaturity is built on a defensive ignorance about the human past and its contradictions and achievements. We have to work to unleash the universal capacity for reason and critique in the young: these capacities are not given, but must be cultivated by the proper use of leisure time. 

In turn, children and young people’s contributions to the well-being of their families and the social units in which they live can free them from the cosseted world of domestic consumption. Children learn by doing, by participating in the world in which they live, by learning to take responsibility for themselves and each other. Most people who call themselves leftists have tacitly or explicitly supported the spectacle of infantilism that has taken over progressive political spaces: it is time to demand more of liberals and their acolytes. 

In the activist spaces of recent years, leftists were demonized more vociferously by identitarian “activists” than almost any other political opponent. Today’s leftism has an opportunity to articulate its positions more clearly and more aggressively. Infantile acting-out was encouraged by liberal leaders when directed at non-compliant leftists. It served the centrists to have identity politics extremists shout down economic analyses, with performances of Baroque contortions. 

Self-control, skepticism, objectivity, instinctual renunciation, and detachment from emotional flooding enable individuals to construct egos strong enough to resist the ideological emollients of liberalism’s nihilistic narcissism. We should demand a skeptical, honest, engaged and responsible attitude toward both history and politics. To honor the student or child within would require telling her to overcome the need for immediate recognition in order to do the hard work of struggling against the powers arrayed against us in the name of collective and material good. The confusion of emotional expressivity with political participation on the side of the liberals and liberal-leaning leftists has produced a culture of conformity. Re-establishing boundaries between the personal and the political is the first step in building strong political egos, capable of the difficult task of re-inventing politics and friendship on the basis of solidarity, critique, and respect rather than “vibing,” forced consensus, and fear. We on the Left are the only ones who accept a responsibility to the struggles of the past in relation to the struggles of the future. Let us not lose sight of the burden that we share with the working class, past and present, and the historical left intelligentsia who both led and followed them on the hard path to freedom and dignity. 

Catherine Liu is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her book Traumatized is forthcoming with Verso in 2026.