STEPHENS: “To The Class of 2012″ (Wall Street Journal, US)

Bret Stephens offers a highly contentious, argumentative, and yet ironically entertaining article about the US graduating class of 2012, soon to be seeking employment.  Except his words are not of encouragement; they range more closely to sarcastic and demoralising.

It’s no secret that college graduates and 20-somethings face some of the hardest times looking for work.  It is estimated that over half of all college grads are unemployed or underemployed.  No one is surprised anymore to see a Harvard graduate working at a diner and living with their parents into the healthy age of 25, when previously such a scenario was inconceivable.  But Stephens doesn’t mince words when he tells graduates to ‘suck it up’ and that they should have chosen more legitimate degrees (leaving the reader to wonder what, exactly, is a more legitimate degree?).

Such aggressive and patronising writing forms the backbone of most of Stephens’ editorials, so it should come as no surprise that this one should earn him a special place as one of the few ‘extreme right’ columnists in mainstream US print journalism.

This article can be classified as ‘extreme right’ under the pretense that it sets out to insult as many young people as possible, while simultaneously trying to rile up the more brick-and-mortar WSJ readers, namely the educated businessmen working on Wall Street.  To this extent, Stephens accomplishes this task with tremendous efficiency.

(Article found here)