Ed Kilgore is right on with this: “The single most important element of politically appealing to young single middle class voters is optimism: an agenda of hope and aspiration that matches their own sense of unlimited opportunity and openness to change.”  Many of the other posts about young people – including comments from those who were skeptical about targeting 20-somethings – also either implicitly or explicitly emphasized the importance of conveying a sense of hope, ambition, and conviction. 

The conservative push to privatize Social Security presents an opportunity for progressives to regain the upper hand in putting forward an optimistic vision for the future. For months, we have heard the same bleak forecasts over and over again about  what life will be like after the Baby Boomers retire: economic growth will be anemic,  Treasury securities will be at risk of default, younger workers will inevitably confront deep cuts in promised benefits (with or without private accounts), and the entire Social Security system will be “unsustainable.” Those dire predictions are connected to a broader conservative portrait of the future best encapsulated in the titles of books by Pete Peterson (Gray Dawn, On Borrowed Time) and Laurence Kotlikoff (The Coming Generational Storm).

What makes progressives more optimistic? For one thing, the nation responded successfully to the demographic shock of the Baby Boomers when they were children. (During that period, they constituted about 40 percent of the population; now they are less than 28 percent and will drop below 25 percent during their retirement.) As my boss Richard Leone has noted, between 1952 and 1970, elementary-secondary school expenditures increased more than 275 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. The shift in GDP that paid for school costs and other added education expenses for boomer kids – from 1.4 percent to 4.1 percent – is larger than that required to keep Social Security at current levels for the next century.

The lesson from that experience, and many others in the nation’s history, is that we can surmount all kinds of daunting challenges and emerge stronger when we tackle them head-on rather than conceding defeat – and defeat is what privatization of Social Security would amount to for all Americans. Progressives envision a future in which Americans are more secure than they are today, providing them with greater opportunities to fulfill their goals. But getting from here to there requires applying our collective energy toward addressing challenges comparable to educating the Baby Boomers: repairing the broken health care system, strengthening the other insurance protections that Jacob Hacker and Mark Schmitt talk about, investing in a far more robust lifelong learning infrastructure that capitalizes on new information technology, bringing order to our anarchic immigration system, and fighting a much smarter war against jihadism. The first step toward that brighter future is restoring soundness to the federal budget, as Bill Clinton did.          
           
Most conservatives don’t want to do more than pay lip service to those issues. But if the country doesn’t deal with those challenges, the prophecies of Peterson and Kotlikoff will be self fulfilling. A brighter future will require the energy, creativity, and will that the progressive movement in the past has generated to improve our environment, promote civil rights, improve access to higher education, and other accomplishments that have significantly improved our society. The country’s future depends on us.