We obviously shouldn’t minimize the focus on police violence against Black Americans, which is the precipitating incident here. But it seems clear that these protests are tapping into a powerful latent anger among a generation of young people who’ve been beaten down and ignored.

Millennials have come of age amid the worst economic conditions of any generation in US history, and face severely depressed prospects for earnings, wealth and economic security for the rest of their lives. As bad as it is, Gen Z may have it worse. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/...

Americans under 30 have all essentially grown up in one long period of economic crisis, and that crisis has been particularly devastating for people of color. By some measures Black Americans lost *half* of their wealth in the 2008 mortgage crisis. Half.

Young people have watched a staggering accumulation of wealth at the top as most people have fallen further and further behind. They’ve watched Boomers hand the keys of the country to an authoritarian white-nationalist reality TV host who has only accelerated runaway inequality.

And now they’re watching as the pandemic and the federal government’s catastrophically negligent response to it kills, sickens and bankrupts millions of people, particularly Black and Latino workers, further exacerbating all these longstanding disparities and injustices.

I don’t think you can really tell the story of a broken shop window without this kind of context. The economic conditions of the last ~15 years have produced a profound crisis of legitimacy and authority in this country, and we’re increasingly seeing that laid bare.

I don’t really have a reassuring note to end on here. I think it’s only going to get worse. There are few if any leaders truly grappling with how broken things are right now, much less laying out a program to fix them.