The fashion for the young: turn to the radical right
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The kids are, it is becoming clear, all right. Well perhaps not all right, but certainly increasingly right — in their political views, that is. (Whether they are OK is, unfortunately, much less clear.)
In poll after poll on both sides of the Atlantic, young people are aligning themselves with — and casting their votes for — parties, movements and ideas on the right. And not just moderately or traditionally rightwing ones either, but populist, anti-immigrant and reactionary forces. These movements question liberal-democratic norms, disdain institutions like independent media and universities and despise the political establishment.
Curtis Yarvinthe blogger and computer engineer whose ideas helped shape Trump 2.0, is sometimes dubbed the “godfather” of the more iconoclastic faction of these online and mainly young rightwingers. He has recently taken to calling the “new right” — as the more radical, edgy, uncompromising faction is often labelled — the “young right” because of how important its younger members have become.
There is, as always, another level of complexity. As the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch has demonstratedthe political gender divide among “Gen Z” — roughly those aged between 13 and 28 — is such that it might make more sense to think of it as two different generations rather than one, with Gen Z women becoming more “liberal”, and Gen Z men more “conservative”. So the “young right” could better be thought of as the “young male right”.
And I used inverted commas deliberately: the progressive left — both young and old — sometimes shows a casual disregard for the traditional liberal values of free speech and open debate. And while this younger, newer male right might share some of the old right’s views when it comes to immigration and nationalism — and increasingly on “Judeo-Christian values” — it is often more interested in overthrowing the existing order than conserving it.
In the panic about young people flirting with fascism, this difference is important. Because one of the main reasons the young are drifting not just to the right, but to the radical or even far right, is its intellectual energy — a fresh fizz of ideas about the ways in which we organise society. That appeals to young people looking for something to get excited about, and something that feels like a departure from — a rebellion against — what their stodgy liberal parents believe.
And while there are plenty of prominent theorists on the right offering radical ideas — Yarvin himself argues that democracy should be replaced with monarchy — there is a distinct deficit of such thinkers, or even of new ideas, on the left. The young men who might once have been excited about Noam Chomsky’s arguments about the media manufacturing consent are now immersing themselves in the pseudonymous rightwing writer Bronze Age Pervert’s Nietzschean critiques of modernity, and his enthusiasm for pre-civilisational masculinity.
But the gender gap is not the only intra-generational divide: polling suggests another significant disparity between the older members of Gen Z, who finished school before the pandemic hit in 2020, and the younger ones, who finished afterwards. The latter group skews right more than their predecessors. In a poll by Yale University this year, 18- to 21-year-olds supported Republicans by nearly 12 points over Democrats, while those aged 22-29 backed Democrats by about six points.
Younger British Zoomers, meanwhile, are also deserting the mainstream left: in the 2024 elections, fewer 18- to 24-year-olds voted for Labour than a broad swath of the middle-aged. And while only 9 per cent voted for Reform UK, that figure is likely to rise in future elections: in the latest youth poll from the John Smith Centre, more than a quarter of men aged 16 to 29 — 26 per cent — said they felt “warm” towards Reform (compared with 15 per cent of young women).
Maybe they won’t vote, though — in a recent YouGov survey for the Tui Foundation, only 60 per cent of UK 16- to 26-year-olds agreed democracy was preferable to other forms of government, while 18 per cent agreed that “in certain circumstances, an authoritarian form of government is preferable to a democratic one”.
The old maxim, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain”, no longer quite works, unless we believe young people lack heart. What I see is a disillusioned generation, doubtful that liberal democracy can do anything worthwhile. We need some new, fresh thinking — as well as a free and open environment in which to test, debate and challenge it — to prove it still can.
