Step forward and stand tall, millennials, your moment has come at last. The baby boomers are starting to retire. Generation X is turning tired and gray. But millennials are now the single largest bloc of citizens and workers, 80 million strong. The keys to the country are in your hands.

Please don’t drive it into a ditch.

It’s anyone’s guess, though, what road Generation M is going to choose. The generation born from 1981 to 1998 that was discouraged from ever growing up is now creeping towards age 35, and despite a lot of time peering at its own navel, it still hasn’t worked out exactly what’s in there. Millennials are an unusually self-contradictory bunch, according to number-crunching books such as the thoughtful and personal new offering “When Millennials Rule: The Reshaping of America” by 20-something twins David and Jack Cahn, and Paul Taylor’s 2014 summation of Pew Research Center data “The Next America.”

Millennials support more gun control but oppose an assault-weapons ban. They’re blazingly optimistic, but they’re also terrified about how they’re going to pay the bills. They love President Obama despite opposing his two main legislative achievements. They’re the narcissist humanitarians. They tell marketers they care about sustainability and cruelty to animals, and yet their meat consumption is on a par with previous generations. They love socialism, so long as it doesn’t mean government taking over the economy or anything weird like that. They’re going to change the world, but they’re in no hurry to move out of the room over Mom’s garage.

You could say the millennials are nuanced, multifaceted and open to many modes of thought. Or you could get real and say that intellectually speaking, they’re a freaking mess.

Making categorical declarations about entire generations composed of tens of millions of Americans is reductive, unfair, presumptuous, impudent, offensive, treacherous — and fun. When an otherwise bald 65-year-old insists on keeping his ponytail and keeps flashing you the peace sign, it says something about what the country was like when he was a young draft dodger. When Generation Xers whose parents split up wax nostalgic about “The Brady Bunch,” it says something about us, too.

Marketers know that different approaches work better with different generations. You just can’t sell Chevy trucks with flag-waving America-first appeals to diverse, international-minded youngsters. Only 12 percent of Gen M consider themselves patriotic.

Selling political ideas is a kind of marketing, and based on what the data are telling us, the millennials are of two minds about everything. They’re tolerant when it comes to immigration, accepting of gays and marijuana legalization, but if you drill deeper, it’s hard to say what the core beliefs of the millennials are. A lot seems to depend on exactly how you frame a question, which means that, despite their liberal cultural leanings, young adults remain politically up for grabs. It would be just as much of a mistake for the Republicans to write them off as it would be for Democrats to take them for granted.

Millennials on economics: Wait, I have to pay for this?

Overeducated, underemployed and burdened with student debt that dumped them into low-paying service-sector gigs, millennials could be a lost generation of productive workers. A Yale study found that those who enter the job market during a recession such as the downturn that followed the 2008 stock market crash face the prospect of decades of persistently lower wages as compared to those who begin their careers in a boom. The difference for MBAs can be as much as $5 million over the course of their careers, noted a Stanford study.

Yet the kinds of renewed trade barriers that intrigue older and Rust Belt workers turn off millennials. They love free trade, even the TPP deal with Asia that is now opposed by both Hillary Clinton (who once called it “the gold standard”) and Donald Trump. In keeping with their diversity and tolerance, millennials actually want more international inflections of the US economy, along with less regulation and more favorable treatment for small business. They could potentially be receptive to the Republican economic message about red tape being an enemy to entrepreneurs.

So, are young adults socialists? Absolutely maybe.

Unless you turn to the topic of student loans, in which case millennials sound about as moderate as Karl Marx. Millennials are carrying a load of student debt, and they’re not psyched about the idea of paying it back. They love President Obama’s idea of free community college. Bernie Sanders’ unlikely rise from fringe kook to durable challenger to Clinton was fueled by student-loan fury: “Bernie Sanders Is Saying What Millennials Have Been Thinking All Along,” ran a headline in Elite Daily, a millennial news site.

Clinton’s Sanders-lite proposal to make college tuition-free didn’t draw nearly as much enthusiasm because states could opt not to participate.

So, are young adults socialists? Absolutely maybe. They have a Kardashian-level combo of fascination with, and disgust for, socialism. Some 69 percent of millennials say they’d be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate, yet only 32 percent of millennials favor “an economy managed by the government,” which is the mildest definition of socialism. “Millennials Like Socialism — Until They Get Jobs” ran a recent Washington Post headline.

Millennials say they favor smaller government and lower taxes — but also say they support more aid to the poor, even if it means more taxes. Huh? It gets better: When you take that position to an extreme, even more millennials get on board: Nearly three-quarters say that government has a responsibility not just to spend more on the poor but to guarantee that every citizen has a place to sleep at night and enough food to put on the table. You’d pretty much have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find an American president on that wavelength.

Millennials on the olds: You suck, pass the remote

Contrary to accepted wisdom, the 18-29 group since the 1970s wasn’t much more liberal than senior citizens and was slightly more likely to vote for George W. Bush than the olds in 2000. But, in the Barack Obama era, millennials created a generational voting chasm — 66 percent of them voted for Obama in 2008, a 21-point gap with seniors. In 2012 the gap was nearly as large, 16 points.

Without millennials, Mitt Romney would today be president. Even so, millennial turnout was just 20 percent of the electorate in 2012 despite the group being 25.5 percent of the voting-age population. Apathy is setting in, and Obama no longer seems so young and fresh to the actually young and fresh. Only 24 percent of millennials thought Obama’s $787 billion stimulus was a good idea, and a majority oppose ObamaCare — though a majority also say it should not be repealed.

If the generations are in conflict, where is the battleground?

The percentage of Americans who agree that there is a generation gap was the same in 2009 as it was in 1969, the peak of Flower Powered cultural strife — yet we’re also at a moment when the percentage of young adults still living with parents has just reached an all-time high.

If the generations are in conflict, where is the battleground? With scattered exceptions (the Black Lives Matter protests, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations), millennials have been relatively quiet compared to their hippie forebears. Aren’t they angry that they might be the first generation to fail to advance to a higher standard of living than their parents? In 1983, the typical household headed by someone 65 or older enjoyed eight times the wealth of a household headed by a young adult. By 2013, that ratio hit 20 to one.

Public policy supports this shift of resources. Though millennials are far more likely than seniors to agree with the sentiment that government should do more to help people, it’s the oldsters who are feasting on government spending that figures to rend the social-safety net, not expand it. More than half of the federal budget will go to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by 2022. A young person earning, say, $22,000 may pay no federal income tax, but his $3,300 contribution to Grandma’s Medicare and Social Security comes straight out of his paycheck, and both systems stand to be insolvent long before he reaps any benefits.

Will millennials get angry enough about this state of affairs to use their voting power to change it? Their self-interest is opposed to their liberal ideals about more helping and caring. So the stage is set for an inter-generational war.

Except, not: “It would be awkward to storm the ramparts against Mom and Dad when you’re a twenty-something living in your childhood home,” Taylor writes.

Millennials on politics: Anyone but Trump

The candidacy of one Donald J. Trump could not have been more precisely engineered to repel millennials. America is the greatest country on the planet? Only a third of Generation M thinks that. Immigrants are stealing our jobs? Millennials actually want more globalization and free trade, reasoning that these can only stimulate the US economy. Racially charged appeals? Forty-three percent of millennials are minorities. A recent McClatchy/Marist poll put Trump at 9 percent millennial support, behind Hillary Clinton (41 percent), Libertarian Gary Johnson (23) and Green Party hopeful Jill Stein.

Traditional Republican schtick about religion, the flag and the married-with-children family means little to millennials, and yet they are surprisingly fond of the Second Amendment. The young ones are by far the least supportive of any generation of renewing the 1994-2004 federal ban on assault weapons, and two-thirds of students said they had thought about getting a gun in the future.

“We’ve been labeled as America’s most pro-gun generation,” write David and Jack Cahn. Republicans, pay attention. And yet 92 percent of younger Americans support universal background checks, a key Democratic talking point, albeit one that applies only to a small percentage of gun sales. (Licensed dealers are already required to run FBI checks.)

Trump made it as far as he has by being an unconventional Republican. But a less unconventional one who struck a moderate tone on certain social issues — someone on the Marco Rubio wing of the party — would enjoy considerably more millennial support.

Millennial conclusion: Millennial confusion

To a certain extent, millennial urges are canceling each other out, leaving a generation still uncertain what it stands for. Undergraduate-level idealistic dreaminess meets a healthy suspicion of government power. Maybe we’re just assessing millennials by the wrong measures; despite being over 18, most aren’t truly grown-ups yet and haven’t fully thought out which side they’re on when it comes to the routine choices and tradeoffs of adult life.

This is a generation caught between two stages: They’re not kids, but they’re not independent either. Half of millennials said in a 2015 survey that they were either living with parents or had delayed purchasing a home or starting a family. At the same age, their parents and grandparents had launched their careers or served in the military or had their first babies or gotten their union cards.

Today childhood is being extended into the late 20s by forgiving parents who welcome their 20-something children back to their homes; by the federal government that declares parents can carry their children on their insurance plans until the youngsters are 26; by an economy that isn’t providing enough grown-up career-track jobs to cover the glut of college graduates; by a media culture that encourages play, informality and immaturity; and by technology that allows people to cocoon themselves in social circles of people much like themselves.

It’s always been difficult to be young. But maybe it’s never been harder for young people to grow up. Millennials will figure out who they are as soon as they start paying all of their own bills.