Millennial subcultures split into collectivist and individualist responses to thwarted materialism

Evidence

While Occupy Wall Street types attributed their generation’s materialism to the structural inequality of late capitalism, young right-wingers embraced the rat race with gusto. Like the 1990s stockbrokers who memorized the “greed is good” speech from Wall Street, millennial finance bros and entrepreneurs found their mantra in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street, in which junk bond salesman Jordan Belfort exalts, “There is no nobility in poverty. I’ve been a rich man and I’ve been a poor man—and I choose rich every fucking time.” If millennials were doomed as a generation, then it was every person for themselves. Only those with what psychologist Angela Duckworth called “grit”—the “passion and perseverance” to succeed in long-term goals—deserved to win. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 313

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s omnivore-monoculture framework: the two political responses are opposite but co-emergent within one generation, echoing the flattened-sameness thesis.