Yes stop coping lol

Nah the “conservative trending Gen Z” is a story told by MSNBC to help libs sleep at night with out having to reckon with the larger, systemic issues. No different than “latino and black men voted for trump, those poor fools.”

This new trend of millennial exceptionalism needs to be nipped in the bud. Because the switch up from “the zoomers will execute me for being counterrevolutionary” “texas will be blue and republicans will simply go extinct” (LOL at this utter delusion) to “WE MILLENIALS ARE THE LAST PROGRESSIVES!” is something.

I work at an university and I’m involved with student activism. There’s plenty of kids who are cool and radical, even if a bit hopeless/nihilistic. They don’t complain that their cohort are reactionary though, they mostly complain that their classmates/friends are largely apathetic or cynical, materialistic and a bit callous.

American politics is reactionary, the great majority of Americans of any age are reactionaries.

In my experience, the early 20s are less reactionary than older people

Polls for the last two years consistently show POC Gen Zers and Alphas are slightly more progressive than their millennial counterparts

While white Gen Zers and Alphas are slightly more conservative than their millennial counterparts

tbh I don’t think millennials or even gen x were as a whole meaningfully less reactionary than previous generations, I think there just happened to be some social pressure to appear progressive in the last few decades, probably due to “muh end of history” in the 90s, and that pressure is going away because history is starting up again

At some point, “revolutionary optimism” has to take a backseat to reality which is that yes, younger Americans are more reactionary, particularly young American men. We can thank the manosphere and algorithms designed for the most misogynistic and hateful shit imaginable to drive engagement

Reactionary in terms of conservative? No. Reactionary in terms that they almost entirely get their politics as a reaction to whatever personally irritates them? Absolutely. Most zoomer politics are not class based, they are based on how many of a particular annoying personality they encounter, and who tends to be on that annoying side more often. It’s basically an end point of own or be owned media culture. But that can create space for you to make points if you are media savvy or personally savvy enough. Just don’t expect it to stick.

Are Americans in their late teens and early 20s actually super reactionary?

Yes

Not in my experience. I’m in my mid 20s with lots of friends still in university and they’re all cool, progressive people. Ofc I wouldn’t keep them around if they weren’t but my experience is that most young people I meet are fed up of the system as it exists, the bigotry and exploitation inherent to it. There are reactionary shitheads in this age bracket but I do not think they’re a majority

I don’t think it is really worth trying to cast political stances on a group of Americans who likely have voted maybe ONCE in their lives. The average American 20 year old is probably neither outright progressive or conservative unless they decided to major in Poli Sci straight out of HS or are one of those people who grows up in a political family and has the same politics/a reversal of them.

I cannot call myself ‘early 20s’ anymore, but I am still in my 20s for what it is worth and I do not think any of the people ~5 years younger than me that I’ve encountered in my day-to-day have been more conservative. Most people under 30 believe in climate change, can usually be convinced that billionaires (if not capitalism as a whole) are ruining the planet & need to be shot, and that free healthcare is a human right.

• 61% of those aged 18-34 say climate change is mostly caused by human activity, compared with 63% of those 35-54
• More than half (54%) of Americans aged 18 to 34 agree that “large corporations and government policy can reduce climate change, but individual action makes no difference.” (15% of them strongly agree).
  • they’re right too
  • 41% of those aged 35-54, and just 19% of those over 55, feel the same. 39% of those aged 18-34 agree that it is “too late to stop climate change at this point,” compared with 24% of those 55+.
• 69% of Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 favor a national health plan as of 2018 when AP-NORC did their polling. Those 15 year olds would be the early 20s Americans we’re talking about today.

various sources for above numbers:

• https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/generational-gap-climate-change-isnt-what-you-think
• https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/29/increasing-share-of-americans-favor-a-single-government-program-to-provide-health-care-coverage/
• https://apnorc.org/projects/younger-generations-stand-out-on-identity-acceptance-and-progressive-policies/

As always, polling is virtually meaningless when you’re trying to generalize a group of ~60 million (18-29yo Americans) but I think a lot of the ‘gen z is so reactionary’ is because we (leftists) are primed to focus more on that kind of stuff. Things like a video or tiktok of some fascist 18yo doing a racially motivated shooting or a drunk 21yo cracker frat boy shouting ‘fuck Palestine’ at a protest are more likely to be posted/shared in leftist circles on the internet (even if only to dunk on them) compared to like - various content about on-going protests/social movements/etc. And I get it - seeing something like one of the various ‘Stop Trump!!’ protests that is just a bunch of white boomers walking around with signs can get demoralizing, hence why a lot of that content is never posted/shared here but…

We’re 3 days from the year anniversary of the Stop Cop City protests at Emory University, for example. We’re not even a year out from various university protests/walkouts/etc across the country for Gaza/Palestine.

I personally do think that the kids (i.e. the 18-29 group; but I’ll even include 18-35) are the most progressive generation alive in this country and likely will probably get more progressive (don’t quote me on this) as we age into the planet burning down around us & climate refugees are being created every other month by freak ‘once in a century’ storms & we have a blue ocean & the AMOC stops cycling and…

anyways, tl;dr - no they’re not.

I’ve been teaching high school and/or college for close to 15 years now, and anecdotally I haven’t really seen the needle move one way or the other (at least in that dimension). The one trend that I’ve maybe noticed is that the students who are more politically engaged tend to be somewhat more radical in either direction–either very right wing or full-on commies. Even that doesn’t seem like an especially pronounced effect to me, though.

I think it’s more common to see a disengagement from politics, at least for issues that don’t affect them directly. That’s reactionary in effect since the status quo is reactionary, but the motivation (generally) isn’t reactionary. What I see more than anything else is a pervasive kind of despair, whether that manifests as gallows humor, cynicism, ironic detachment, or nihilism. Some kids manage to forge that despair into righteous anger, and some of those manage to point that anger at the right target. Most of them, though, are just pretty checked out. That ends up reproducing the behavioral politics (if not the motivation) of libs.

I’ve commented on being suspicious of sweeping generalizations of both GenZ and Millennials before, but we should beware of the media presentation of these generations.

There was a large drop in Gen Z turnout which seems to have correlated with a swing to the right in Young men for Trump as more left leaning people abstaned.