Saddled with student debt, freaked out by climate change and school shootings, and driven by a sense that their parents aren’t going to fix any of these problems, millennials, Alter suggests, are ready to harness their political potential.

She does an excellent job detailing — with persuasive data — what has shaped and motivated this young generation so far. The recession is “an invisible postscript” that explains how millennials have been economically disadvantaged. The low salaries and scarcity of jobs that confronted many of us upon graduating from college meant it took us much longer than previous generations to find our way in the world, to say nothing of repaying loans we took out for our very expensive degrees. By the time jobs began to come back, in 2012, Alter writes, employers were looking for younger, cheaper graduates, leaving some of us stuck in underemployment.

The “forever war” has inextricably colored how we view American foreign policy: Millennials are far less likely than boomers to think the United States should get involved in the affairs of other countries. And how we use technology has transformed the way we organize politically. As Alter points out, movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter began on the internet. (We also learn that Buttigieg’s early internet use in college consisted mostly of “just logging on to WNDU.com to look at a grainy picture of South Bend,” a detail that will stay with me for a long time.)

Alter is upfront about the fact that we don’t yet know what a millennial political revolution might look like, writing that “by learning where they’ve been, we can get a sense of where we’re going.” The great millennial takeover is very much a work in progress; the average age of our congressional leaders still hovers in the 70s, and Senator Bernie Sanders (age 78) continues to poll highly among young voters in the Democratic primary — far higher than Buttigieg, who remains unpopular with voters under 35.