This weekend, I found myself in Tempe, Arizona, for a long weekend—my first true vacation in over 18 months. I was there to catch a few Spring Training ball games and spend time with my son. At 36, he and I share the kind of relationship fathers and sons dream of. It is a blessing I enjoy with both of my children.
They appreciate tradition and heritage. Tradition, someone once wrote, means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
I take little credit for their perspective. I am merely passing along the continuous observations of my late mother. Raised in a tenement on Chicago’s West Side, she never failed to remind us “how good we had it” or that we needed to remain mindful of those less fortunate. My mother’s philosophy and deep faith, combined with my father’s relentless work ethic, left an indelible mark on their four sons. To this day, I cannot pass a homeless person without thinking, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” In simple English - that could just as easily be me.
I remember my father losing his business during the recession of the 70s and his willingness to take any labor to keep his family afloat. I grew up on stories of my grandfather, who walked five miles to and from his restaurant job rather than spend a few cents on the bus, saving every penny for his family. That was the America of sacrifice and character—a country we all claim to love and wish would return.
But on Sunday morning, while strolling in search of coffee, I witnessed a very different America. Tempe is an affluent college town, and Arizona State University has long been known as a "party school." But today, the marketing for the young "urban" class has taken a strange, performative turn.
I stopped on a side street in front of a storefront that looked as though it had been gutted during a 1960s riot. Outside, a man sat at a plastic table that looked salvaged from a dumpster. He had a cup of coffee. I asked, “Is this a coffee shop of some sort?” He nodded with somber gravity.
The storefront was a fogged-glass mess of scrapings and markings. Inside, however, was a cavernous, warehouse-like room. Young people sat on mold-crusted furniture with their laptops, sipping eight-dollar lattes. There were the requisite piercings, multi-colored hair affectations, and a few dogs wandering the concrete floor. In the back, an espresso bar was being manned by a group of what appeared to be Maoist baristas. Driven by caffeine-deprived desperation, I ordered a coffee and decided to study the scene through the lens of a sociologist.
These coffee bars are now ubiquitous in every "edgy" hipster neighborhood in America. Cleanliness is no longer the goal; in fact, a bathroom with soaked floors and the faint scent of neglect is a selling point. These spaces are "gritty" for a privileged class—a world carefully constructed to feel authentic, dangerous, and morally serious, while remaining remarkably insulated from any actual hardship. It is a bad caricature of the working class, a costume party where the fashion is borrowed from laborers, punks, and revolutionaries.
As George Orwell once observed, “The typical Socialist... is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have settled down into a middle-class job... or, more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job.”
The language these patrons use—learned in cushy political science seminars—is filled with words like "resistance," "struggle," and "solidarity." These terms are proclaimed by professors who have nothing in common with the laborers they claim to represent. Their lectures have all the intellectual weight of a group of chimpanzees trying to determine the circumference of the earth.
There is no "struggle" in Tempe, Arizona, or in Cambridge, Evanston, or Madison. The inhabitants of these enclaves are the children of stability. They were raised in comfortable suburbs, educated at elite universities, and surrounded by the soft protections of the upper-middle class. They have inherited a life that is materially effortless but, apparently, psychologically unsatisfying. Their lives lack the drama and risk that forge real character.
So, they construct an imaginary world. These are do-it-yourself playdates, much like the ones their parents arranged for them alongside Suzuki violin lessons and European vacations. Their parents created a world of participation trophies and "everyone is gifted" platitudes. This is their pathetic attempt to revolt—much like the Boomers "revolted" at Woodstock while sending the sons of the working class to die in Vietnam. They inhabit spaces that provide the aesthetic of danger without the reality of it. These are padded cells of simulated rebellion.
For all the complaining one hears today, the vast majority of humanity has never had it so good. It is the very system these young activists attack that is responsible for the freedom and wealth that allow them to attack it. They know nothing of the world as it existed even a century ago.
The true pioneers and the immigrants the Left claims to protect would be revolted by this performance. In the 1880s, real labor leaders were justifiably angry about 12-hour shifts, child labor, six-day work weeks, and the constant threat of cholera and tuberculosis. They didn’t have to "simulate" hardship; they lived it. They would have craved the lifestyle these young liberals denounce. In those days, an economic downturn didn't mean making coffee at home or moving into a parent's guest room—it meant starvation.
The same applies to the way they view service. Today, military duty is often looked down upon as something performed by "those people" in flyover states. They justify their guilt by claiming those who volunteer are merely political opposites who deserve their lot, while they rage online about "injustice" over a latte.
Even the modern view of "liberation" is skewed. The idea that manual labor was "liberating" for women is a fantasy created by wealthy activists like Gloria Steinem, who made a career out of performative empathy. The women of 1880, working 15-hour days in sweatshops or curing meats on a frozen farm just to survive the winter, would have loved to teach today’s feminists a thing or two about "micro-aggressions."
When my brothers and I were kids, we played "running away" and lived in treehouses. But by the time we were thirteen, we knew it was time to work. We were constantly reminded that our lives were far easier than those of our grandparents. Responsibility was not just an obligation; it was a point of pride.
The way today’s "edgy" youth react to their affluence is neither justifiable nor honest. It is grounded in ingratitude—an arrogant dismissal of the enormous sacrifices made to get them here. It is not a revolution; it is a prolonged and tedious playdate. When I see it, I feel the same way I did when I was trapped at a Chuck E. Cheese for three hours while my kids dove into the ball pit—except the ball pit was honest play.
These are not stupid people; they are spoiled children. And there will be a real human toll. Instead of building something real—families, communities, and institutions—they are acting out a theatrical version of hardship inside the safest society in history.
As Theodore Roosevelt said, “A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is a life which has no place in a nation which aspires to be actually great.”
If they truly wanted to change the world, the recipe is right in front of them. All they need to do is put down the "gritty" coffee, look at the sacrifices of the generations before them, and act with a shred of the same gratitude and courage.
