Late last year, web developer Zeke Weeks created a browser application that promised to block all references to “millennials” and replace them with “pesky whipper-snappers.” It hit enough of a nerve that Salon’s Prachi Gupta reported on it and wrote, “Regardless of what you think about millennials … we can probably all agree that the term ‘millennial’ is an annoying and overused buzzword that needs to go away forever.” We can all agree? Demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss coined the term “millennial” in 1991 as part of a larger study on generational cycles. But in the last few years, its academic origins have been obscured by thinkpieces, meta-thinkpieces and asinine marketing advice. I recently watched a conversation on “millennial” unfold on a friend’s Facebook page; the term encountered significant resistance from people who saw it as cloying and insincere. If you twitch uncontrollably when you hear buzzwords like “innovative,” “disruptive” and “results-oriented,” there’s a good chance you’ve sworn off “millennial” too. But to use a quintessentially millennial phrase, this strategy is an epic fail. Rather than scorn the term, it’s time to take back “millennial” and use it to our political advantage — as an organizing tool, not just a descriptive one. Doing this will require young people to make their peace with a term that many feel has been thrust upon them from above. (It’s easy to be skeptical when your elders’ attempts to sell you on their political agenda are so clumsy and condescending.) I’ve heard many of my peers question the usefulness of a generational frame in the first place. We’re the largest, most diverse generation in American history, and 20 years passed between the birth of the oldest and youngest among us; what could we all have in common with one another? The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

The Fail Decade

Generational voting history. Source: Pew Research Center Millennials, defined by Strauss and Howe as the generation born roughly from 1981 to 2000, came of age during what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called “the Fail Decade” — a 10-year span filled with disasters in almost every major facet of American life. Two in particular shaped our generation’s consciousness. The first was a horrific terrorist attack, followed by a decade of poorly planned, nakedly deceitful wars. The second was the Great Recession, which has caused young people to enter the worst job market in decades and will almost certainly lead to depressed wages and personal financial instability for our entire adult lives. Wars and recessions certainly took place before, but they didn’t last as long as the ones unfolding as millennials came of age. In other words, millenials grew up surrounded by failing institutions on all sides.

This shared trauma resulted in a clear political realignment. A new report from the Pew Research Center, “Millennials in Adulthood,” bears this out. Nineteen percent of millennials say that most people can be trusted, a full 12 percentage points below Generation X, the next-least-trusting generation. Millennials are isolated from institutions, with 29 percent religiously unaffiliated and 50 percent identifying as political independents — higher numbers than for any other generation. Mike Hais and Morley Winograd, demographers who study millennials and their voting behavior, pointed out that “once people have voted for one or the other of the parties a couple of times during their politically formative years, they usually vote for that party for the rest of their lives.”

Political independents. Source: Pew Research Center If this pattern holds, on the basis of their voting data from 2008, 2010, and 2012, millennials are likely to remain relatively liberal throughout their adult lives. But kinship with an ideology is not the same as membership in a party, and it seems fair to predict that millennials’ widespread distrust of political institutions will lead many of them to refrain from registering with either major party.

Now that nearly every form of institutional authority — religion, government, the financial sector, higher education — has been discredited along with the two major political parties, millennials are left with few resources to form ties of identity and solidarity. What remains, in short, is our fellow millennials. Former Sen. Alan Simpson once suggested that nothing would change until someone could walk into his office and say, “I’m from the American Association of Young People. We have 30 million members, and we’re watching you, Simpson.” But “youth” is a slippery thing to organize around, because at a certain point everybody stops being young. It doesn’t help that the average age is 57 in the House of Representatives and 63 in the Senate. We have the uniqueness of our historical and economic experience, and we’d be crazy not to use it.

Starting point