sc94597 said:
A 5 point shift is probably statistically significant, but not so much that I'd consider it evidence that "Gen-Z is more conservative" or not necessarily "more progressive" than previous generations. This is especially the case given that many people seemed to have voted Trump not out of ideological alignment this round, but because of more global effects and the real politics surrounding them. He did win the popular vote this time and didn't in 2016, after all. I don't think young white people are voting slightly more conservatively in this round because of "woke politics". Especially when a lot of that has been purged from schools by the right over the last decade. To the point where not even the history of chattel slavery in North America is often taught. When I was talking about social alienation, I was talking more generally than the left-right spectrum. People are more atomized and socially alienated now than in the 20th century and even the first decade of the 21st century. This makes building meaningful trust-based connections harder and to maintain them even more-so. This then leaves one susceptible to radicalization. In 2004 if you started talking about "white replacement" you'd likely be talking about it in real life and get meaningful push-back by friends and family and other social connections, nipping the radicalization in the bud. In 2024 though, you would likely be on Twitter (hell the owner himself (re)tweets about it), 4-Chan, or Reddit, anonymous yourself, and with those quasi-anonymous relationships developing that ideology to the point where when you do talk about it in real-life you're already invested as a true-believer and it is much harder for your looser social connections to talk you out of it. And I am not talking about the right-leaners anyway. Young, white male Americans, always leaned right and likely always will for material reasons. Being a right-leaning liberal conservative isn't a problem. The real question is why white men are moving to nationalist, traditionalist politics (which certainly aren't "lean right"), and why non-white men are also shifting a bit more right-wing. Social atomization and alienation in society is almost certainly the primary factor that has them funnel through "mano-sphere" and nationalist circles. |
Yeah I did not mean to imply that Gen Z wasn't more progressive overall, just that there's been this expectation that all or at least the vast majority of young people will be more progressive than their elders, and as we can see that's not necessarily true; being young doesn't make you immune to the allure of right wing politics, and the difficult economic and social conditions Gen Z (and Alpha) have grown up in makes them especially susceptible to those who can seem to promise them a better life.
I think more broadly we are seeing a backlash to the hard left "woke" politics of the last decade or so, where so called anti-wokeness is becoming a movement in its own right and a lot of the more ridiculous and nasty excesses of the activist left in recent years have generated a lot of resentment that people like Trump are capitalizing on.
And yeah, social media and the way it separates us into echo chambers is a huge factor too. Our reality has become constructed by the media we consume, to the point where liberals and conservatives basically live in entirely different realities and can't reconcile their differences because any disagreement with one's views is seen as an attack on one's very reality.
