Not every young person is joining the campus radicals. In the West, some are rebelling by turning against progressivism.
Not every young person is joining the campus radicals. In the West, some are rebelling by turning against progressivism.
L ike Hunter Biden, I did a lot of foolish things when I was young, only I stopped before middle age. I had a good time. Sometimes I think my generation was the last that could go to a party without having to worry about pronouns or tell politically incorrect jokes in college without having a secret file opened on you.
We did crazy things: drinking cocktails through plastic straws, studying non-egalitarian mathematics, watching Dumbo without finding any trace of racism, and learning history instead of rewriting it. I often thank God that I was born in 1981. Our idol was John Belushi, not Greta Thunberg. And the only pre-pandemic time I was placed under house arrest was when my parents ordered it, for being late and a little drunk.
Youth is a time of freedom, fun, and rebellion. That’s a good thing. If we didn’t have certain adolescent conflicts with our parents, we would never feel the need to seek a path of our own and, ultimately, form a new home and have our own children. Yet in the midst of a stifling environment of all-encompassing wokeism, today’s kids lack that freedom and have much less fun; fittingly, the only thing that can save them is that biologically ingrained yearning for rebellion.
It’s starting to kick in.
Now, a scan across the American college landscape — with its sanctimonious scolds and, lately, hordes of Hamas apologists — does not give the impression that today’s youth are undergoing a political transformation. Indeed, some are as radical as ever. But they don’t speak for their entire generation. An interesting recent survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek showed that 72 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds actually support the slogan, “Go woke, go broke.” It makes sense. Today’s kids aren’t just told by the government and most of the media how to think, what to be outraged about, or what events and people to cancel. They are also lectured to by big corporations who have madly surrendered to the religion of extreme progressivism. In other words, it is an elite, established order, something to be rebelled against. I know just the people to do it.
Young people have long felt an inordinate fascination with the Left, it’s true. Remember Ban the Bomb, the French May ’68, and the Maoist groups formed by rebellious children of conservative families during the latter half of the last century. Remember the long hair, the skinny pants, and the cigarette-smoking by the door of a Volkswagen Kombi. I’m not trying to romanticize all that moral garbage, but in all fairness, many of those kids abandoned leftism as soon as they got their first paycheck and found out how much of it the government keeps. There are people who need to go through that process as part of their life experience.
To be young used to be to think that everything that had been done before was wrong, and that it was necessary and possible to change the world from below by putting pressure on those at the top. Today, the governments of the postmodern Left and their allies believe that everything that came before was wrong, yet they intend to change the world from a position of power, imposing their ways on those below them.
Young people are more difficult to shepherd than adults.
And so, in some corners of some countries, young people are playing a pivotal role in the pushback against progressivism, and it’s having consequences in the political arena. In Argentina, in the PASO elections in August, half of young people under 35 voted for Javier Milei, who publicly scorns wokeism, the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, and other leftist belief systems. The percentage was even greater among those under 20: Seven out of ten voted for the libertarian-right candidate. Just look at his rallies, full of young people, shouting slogans against Kirchnerism and the Left, and roaring with enthusiasm every time Milei shouts his slogan: “I did not come here to lead lambs, but to awaken lions!” Last Sunday, Milei went on to win the presidential election in his country, a historic victory propelled by young voters. Let us remember that Argentina is one of the few countries in which 16- and 17-year-olds can exercise their right to vote. With its choice of Milei, Argentina has signaled a desire to move past the Peronist politics that have impoverished the country for decades.
In Italy, the youth vote has also been decisive in bringing the conservative Giorgia Meloni to power. The electoral analysis of the vote by age confirms that, in the last elections, Meloni was the second favorite among young Italians, almost tied with the populists of Beppe Grillo’s M5S. This is also happening in Spain, where in the polls of the government’s Sociological Research Center the favorite party among 18- to 24-year-olds is Vox, the right-wing party led by Santiago Abascal, the only one openly opposed to wokeism and the 2030 Agenda.
This effect is significant in the United States as well. An analysis by Michael Podhorzer for the Atlantic surprised the authors by finding that while Generation Z overwhelmingly supported Democrats in blue states, in red states this same generation voted overwhelmingly Republican. (Curiously, Gallup found last year that “independent” is a far more popular affiliation than either major party for Millennials and Gen Z.) I am amused to see that the older leftist analysts don’t quite grasp that there could be young people who don’t vote Democrat.
Their numbers may only grow in the years ahead. A society that once offered the youth mainly Christian-oriented values as a guide to life — even if they chose to rebel against that path — has been replacing those values with an empty amalgam of secularism, wokeism, and victimhood as if it were a new religion, only more ascetic than any religion past generations followed.
To make matters worse, the new feminism places many young boys in the same predicament as the A-Team: persecuted for a crime they did not commit. Whether the historical debt that postmodern radical feminists want to collect for past inequality is fair or not, it is more relevant to ask whether today’s children should feel guilty about what their grandparents’ society was like. Personally, I think they have enough on their plate dealing with climate anxiety, avoiding canceled classics, and putting up with TikTok. No wonder they are rebelling against this world order.