Anyone who has said that Gen Z will rebel against their seniors, that they'll tell the 33-year-old millennial social justice scold to stuff it, got it all wrong. I myself predicted that Gen Z wouldn’t put up with “woke,” and now I feel like a dupe. Gen Z may turn out to be more woke than the millennials themselves, who supplied most of the troops for the woke revolution as it spread across campuses and into the streets from 2015 forward.
It isn’t hard to explain. The celebrities young Americans follow, the singers, athletes, internet stars, and actors ... all voice the leftist take with near unanimity, and the kids think it’s cool. Exceptions such as Jordan Peterson are rare. The tools Gen Z-ers wield and the social media they consume reinforce the message to the point of coercion. I remember in the 1990s, web cheerleaders and libertarians hailing digital technology as a glorious guarantee of individualism and debate and dissent.
“Everyone will have a voice!” they cried. “And the public square will be more vibrant and diverse than ever.”
But the opposite happened. The web turned into a surveillance and tattletale zone, and cancel culture took off. Gen Z has never known anything different. They have no living memory of life before the iPhone. They'll be the most conformist cohort in American history, already favoring cancellation more than any other age group, and politics will be a primary mode of grouping.
Conservative students know the score and keep their heads down in Sociology 101 when the professor knocks the traditional family as a patriarchal institution. They stay quiet when traditional heroes of the West, from Columbus to Churchill, are pegged for modern sins. They don’t object when “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and similarly fugitive notions are affirmed as knowledge.
More important, perhaps, is the effect on nonconservative and nonliberal students. For those undergraduates who are in the middle of the political spectrum, are neutral about the parties, or are just plain ignorant of the scene, a few years of exposure to leftist opinion from the podium does the job of proselytizing. The more or less mild impact on these kids may be even more significant than the suppression of budding conservatives, given the fact that the somewhat apolitical students outnumber their conservative peers. As they hear again and again the bias against conservatism, they drift toward the left—not drastically so, but enough to turn them Democrat when it comes time to vote.
Years of youth culture plus years of schooling equals Democrat loyalty. The task that leftists envisioned long ago when they turned their tactics to the classroom and the media have borne permanent fruit. The kids won’t change. What Republicans say won’t make a dent in this two-thirds partisanship to the left. Lower taxes, smaller government, and fewer regulations mean little to our 25-year-old who isn’t married and has no kids, doesn’t pay much in taxes, has student loan payments, and worries about health care. He lives far from the border, so immigration isn’t on his radar. The national debt, interest rates, and trade policy are white noise to him. Republicans can go on about these issues all day and night and leave our Gen Z-er unimpressed.
But he knows that racism is really bad and so are homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. Those lessons have been drummed into his head since grade school, and his teachers and idols have located those sins on the right. They know where to stand, even if their judgments are more social than political. Republicans are mean and backward, and they’re uncool, too, and that’s enough to steer our Gen Z-er’s vote. Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton may not reach him when they speak, but the gibes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stephen Colbert, and LeBron James certainly do.
I don’t see any Republican solution for this. Social media, sports, and entertainment are a tidal wave of liberalism to our young Democrat. The infrequent conservative voice he happens to hear is a trickle. Republicans may talk fiscal responsibility, but he doesn’t think that far ahead. He likes free stuff, and Biden’s forgiveness of student loans probably touched him more than the combined speeches and interviews in this election season of every Republican candidate in the land combined.
His lifestyle fits Democrat policy. Don’t expect him to reconsider his vote until he marries, starts a family, buys property, sends kids to school, pays a lot more in taxes, and thinks about saving for retirement and kids’ college. In other words, don’t hold your breath.
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