will Gen Z be the "based" generation?
or the gayest? or both?
One of my right-wing critics, Ubersoy, wrote an article the other day entitled Generation Z Is Shifting Rightwards. If you are on the right, this would be called a “whitepill.” If you are the left, this would be a “blackpill.”
If Gen Z is shifting rightwards, then maybe the pendulum is finally swinging back. Liberals had a good run for the last 93 years since FDR took power, but the Weimar Era is finally over, and fascism is inevitable. After all, the left has spent 12 years calling Trump a fascist, worse than Hitler. What could be worse than worse-than-Hitler? Super-Hitler? Hitler 2.0? Mega-Giga Mecha-Hitler, riding dinosaurs in space?
Whatever it is, it is inevitable! If Gen Z is more right-wing than previous generations, this means that the country, as a democracy, will elect someone further to the right than Trump. That means banning abortion, overturning gay marriage, putting prayer back in schools, deporting 30 million illegals (for real this time), outlawing no-fault divorce, and raising the birth rates. It means stapling a post-it note saying “it’s ok to be white” to every single classroom door in every single kindergarten classroom in America. Forever.
Or, maybe not. In this article, we will be exploring the ambiguity of statistics:
Yes, Gen Z men have swung to the right — but since Gen Z women have swung to the left, the effect is somewhat blunted.
Yes, admiration for Andrew Tate and Hitler is growing among young men — but mostly among non-whites.
Yes, young men are getting more misogynistic — but there are also more gays among young men than ever before, more support for abortion than ever before, and 43% of them are feminists.
Yes, Gen Z is more disagreeable, offensive, and radical than every other age group — but that is also true for most other generations in history. Men usually mellow out over time with declining testosterone.
Yes, Gen Z will become more politically influential over the next 40 years — but Gen Z and younger (Alpha, Beta) will not have a controlling influence over politics until after 2046. Voters ages 45+ make up 66% of the electorate, and that figure could rise as lifespans increase and birth rates drop.
So no, we will not be getting Giga-Mega-Mecha-Super-Omega Hitler in 2036. You’ll have to wait till 2046, and by which time it will be too late. Genetically modified lesbians will be growing clone armies in test tubes to hunt down the last white person and cut off his penis. (*phew!* That was a close one.)
did the left get tired of winning?
When I started watching the Young Turks and the Amazing Atheist all the way back in 2008, they would rag on conservative Christians as old white people who were on their way out. The younger generation was more tolerant, more open-minded, and more diverse. All of those predictions turned out to be true, in the grand scheme of things, at least up until 2022.
Overall, support for liberal policies like gay marriage have increased since 2008. Change in support for abortion is a bit more ambiguous, but it’s certainly higher today than it was in 2008.
What my leftist and libertarian mentors did not imagine was that these supposedly “naturally” tolerant, open-minded, and diverse minorities (as opposed to the close-minded whites) would end up shifting massively in favor of Trump in 2024.
Specifically, younger non-white men shifted 21% to the right in the span of four years. However, young non-whites don’t have high rates of voter participation, so this 21% shift represented only a small fraction of all voters. Still, it was part of the story of the 2024 election. If this trend continues, we may eventually see a Republican Party that wins an outright majority of Hispanics.
Closing the “White Gap”:
Let’s quickly measure the Republican-Democratic gap in the white vote since 1996.1
As you can see, should the present trend continue, the “white gap” should close by 2040,2 due to the flood of brown people invading the Republican Party. At that point, racism will finally be defeated by racism, and black Hitler will become dictator of America.
Germany:
Regarding Europe, the data provided by Ubersoy contradicts his strongest claim, which is that Europeans are becoming uniformly more right-wing over time.
In Germany:
18-24 year olds are the least right-wing (at 39%)3
35-44 year olds are much more right-wing (at 54%).4
The oldest, 70+, have the least AfD support, but were 58% conservative overall.
What Germany really needs to reproduce the American right-ward shift is some more black and Hispanic immigrants! Non-whites are always doing the jobs that whites won’t do…
If we break this trend down by gender, however, then young German men are probably more right-wing than their elders. This is because young German women are massively more leftist than their grandmothers. Women can vote, so unless the men get together and start a violent revolution, the right-ward shift in German men has been completely politically neutralized.
France:
In France, the picture contradicts Ubersoy more than in Germany:
the Reconquest party is most popular among 65+, with no positive trend among younger people.
The National Rally party (Le Pen’s party) has lower support among 18-34 year olds than 35-49 and 50-64 year olds.
The Renaissance party, center-right (Macron’s party), is lowest among young people.
The Republicans party of France, another center-right party, is lowest among young people.
The parties benefiting from youth are France Unbowed, a far left party, and the Green party. There is no trend toward the right-wing among young people in France.
Again, if you control for gender, the results probably look better for Ubersoy, but that doesn’t matter in elections, just in LARPy civil war scenarios.
I accept the claim that young Gen Z men are more right wing, but not that Gen Z as a voting bloc is more right wing. This is an important distinction, because acting as if women do not exist will not magically win you elections. This might be why most right-wingers fantasize about coups and civil wars, because they know they can’t win otherwise.
General Radicalization
If America becomes radical and anti-democratic enough, a January-6th-style coup or civil war could occur. I predicted that was extremely unlikely in 2024. Meanwhile, deranged lunatics on Youtube get hundreds of thousands of views predicting imminent Civil War.
Predicting imminent collapse is much more emotionally compelling than saying “nothing ever happens,” or at least, “things happen slowly and boringly.” For many people, politics is a fantasy-land where they escape from their personal problems by imagining a future where their annoying boss is shot by firing squad and their knot-tying skills are finally appreciated by the college educated women who ignored them.
Still, Ubersoy provides some statistics on youth radicalization, showing that young people tend to be more politically extreme, while old people tend to be more moderate. He cites the example of Luigi Mangione, and declining support for democracy. I agree that there is a general decline in trust for institutions, which is advantageous for both far left and far right parties, and bad for centrist liberals like me.
On the other hand, Gen Z, so far, isn’t less trusting of politicians than Millennials. We may be hitting “rock bottom” levels of low-trust with Gen Z. According to the Survey Center on American Life, the data doesn’t support a continued decline, at least not yet. Maybe as Gen Z ages their cynicism will increase, and they will become even less trusting than they are now. Or, maybe trust will rebound because AI makes all of us smarter, safer, and more prosperous. Time will tell, but as things stand, Gen Z isn’t more disenchanted with reality than Millennials are.
Generational Biodiversity.
Hereditarians are supposed to be all about determining human behavior via biological materialism, so why ignore the factors that affect personality due to age? It’s possible that biology plays a role in the supposed “radicalism” of young people. Perhaps a percentage of this radical is a result of a hormonal phase that will go away with time.
Has there ever been a time in modern history where young people were not more radical than old people? Isn’t this just the effect of aging on agreeableness?
Since young people are more radical than old people, and political opinions are somewhat sticky (they don’t all just disappear or regress to your grandparents views when you turn 50), this will lead to increasing radicalization over time. I wouldn’t disagree with that.
American society in 2024 is, by any metric, radical by the standards of the 1960s; and the 1960s were radical by the standards of the 1920s; the 1920s by the 1880s, and so on. I’m sure that many old Hoover voters were shocked by FDR, just as many McKinley voters were shocked by Roosevelt, and Buchanan voters were shocked by Lincoln.
The opposite tendency is moderation, as represented by figures like Carter, Reagan,5 Bush Sr.,6 Clinton, Bush Jr.,7 and Biden.8 Each of these figures restrained the extreme tendencies within their party. If Kamala was elected, she would have also performed this function.
Whoever succeeds Kamala as leader of the Democrats may be more radical, but so far, the field looks pretty moderate. For Republicans, there’s a better case to be made that figures like Vance, Ramaswamy, and DeSantis could be considered radical, while figures like Christie and Haley have been sidelined.
The funniest graph that Ubersoy posts shows that young people are more supportive of Hitler — but the same graph suggests that this is driven by non-white Hitler fans, not radicalization among whites. Increasing anti-democratic feeling among Americans seems to be a result of third-worlders bringing their ideology with them, while native whites are more resistant to embracing Hitlerism.
Anti-Feminism
Ubersoy claims that Gen Z is the most anti-feminist generation in America. This isn’t true, even if we limit the scope to just men. If you exclude Millennials, feminism isn’t in decline. Millennials are just an unusually woke generation.
Support for Andrew Tate (a good proxy for anti-feminism) is highest among non-whites, based on data from the UK. We have to decouple and avoid conflating anti-feminist beliefs with “rising white identity.”
Brown people really hate feminism. As a Vermontese feminist, this makes me slightly uncomfortable. Maybe we should force every male immigrant to kiss another man at the border, to filter these people out.
modeling the future of homophobia.
Ubersoy is going to do a follow-up post, so I assume he will issue some corrections or rebuttals to what I have said so far in this review. What I’d like to do next is focus on homophobia specifically.
Between 2021 and 2023, every cohort became more gay friendly, with the exception of Gen Z. The drop was significant: 11% in the span of two years. Gen Z is still more pro-gay than Gen X or Boomers, but they are slightly less pro-gay than Millennials now.
Obviously, if this trend doesn’t continue, it’s not very radical. A 4% decline in support for gay marriage between Millennials and Gen Z is not going to bring back the Klan — 69% of Gen Z still supports gay marriage!
However, if the trend does continue, then:
Gen Z will be the Gayest Generation,
but also, more people (men) will be aggressively homophobic.
when do people change their minds?
Let’s assume that people change their minds on politics between ages 13 and 29. After age 30, we will assume that there are diminishing returns on changes in values.9
The oldest Zoomers just turned 28, and the youngest is 13. Assume that people stop changing their political views at age 30, so Gen Z has 17 years to go. Assume they become 5% more homophobic per year. Also assume that there is no population growth or decline — there are exactly as many 13 year olds in America as there are 28 year olds.10
In the first model, assume a 1% increase in homophobia among all members of Gen Z, every single year, from ages 13 to 29. This would mean that, by 2042, Gen Z support for gay marriage would only be 59.5%. This would make Gen Z more conservative than Boomers are today, by 1.5%. But overall, they would still not be a “conservative” generation. Keep in mind that today only 46% of Republicans support same-sex marriage, and it’s still not part of the platform of the Republican Party to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. Gay marriage is probably safe for the next 17 years.
In the second model, assume a 5% increase in homophobia among all age brackets per year. This results in a catastrophic decline in support, all the way down to 21.5%. But this model is very silly, because that would mean that the only people supporting gay marriage would be LGBTQ people all by themselves.
conclusion.
Back in high school, I read a book called American Theocracy (2006) by Kevin Philips. You know, the Southern Strategy guy. He was sounding the alarm that, because evangelical Christian conservatives have more babies, inevitably, they would take over America, make Christianity the official religion, and destroy the constitution. Scary stuff!
When you read American Theocracy today, behind all the data, the statistics, and the projections, there is an over-simplified hysteria. No, you can’t predict political trends over the next 20 years simply by looking at birth rates. Political affiliation is somewhat heritable, but also, testosterone rates are plummeting at a rate which far exceeds any genetic explanation. If you really believe in biological science, the data on testosterone points toward Uber-Ultra Liberalism, not Mega-Mecha Hitler.
It is simply not accurate to say that young people (men and women together) are much more conservative than older people. There is one way that this could change: with massive non-white immigration from homophobic countries, it is possible that net homophobia will increase over the next 20 years. The result will be that white SJWs will be pitted against black Nazis like Kanye West and Andrew Tate.
The shift in attitudes on gay marriage between 2021 and 2023 among Zoomers was dramatic, but this is one data point over two years. As loyal readers of this blog know, we love to do linear extrapolation into the realm of fantasy, because it is very entertaining to think that society could change very quickly in a novel direction. Whether you’re happy about change or fearful of it, change is exciting! We all want to be entertained; that’s why we watch action movies, comedies, and horror movies where something sudden and dramatic happens.
Think of COVID like an earthquake, and birth rates like global warming. If Zoomers keep getting more right-wing, it would eventually have a political impact, but it would also require a continuation of the trend among Gen Alpha. And as of 2023, only 28.4% of Gen Z votes, while 77% of Boomers vote.
But surely, Gen Z will grow in population, right? Wrong!
Gen Z has already peaked, since there aren’t any more Gen Z being born. Gen Z will actually shrink as a percentage of the overall population by 2035. It is true that between 2025 and 2030, the aging of Gen Z will result in more Gen Z voters, but this effect still isn’t very impressive.
In 2022, Zoomers made up 6% of voters. By 2032, we can assume they will make up 13% of voters (as young Millennials do today), and by 2042, they will make up 15% of voters. Even if Zoomers were uniquely right-wing, as is claimed, they would have to overpower Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials to gain power. If we add Gen Alpha to the mix, it will still take a while for this Zoomer-Alpha coalition to take power.
At this rate, even if Zoomers, and Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta teamed up against Millennials and Gen X, and even if all the Boomers die off (no life extension technology), voters ages 45+ would still make up 66% of the voting population. There will be no Zoomer revolution or Andrew Tate president before 2046.
None of this matters anyway if Gen Z women cancel out the right-ward trend in Gen Z men.
Or, maybe Gen Z women get married, they will become more conservative.
Or, maybe this trend will be counteracted by Generation Alpha, who will buck the Zoomer trend and be even more liberal. We will see!
What I can say with confidence is that Gen Z is much more gay and much more supportive of abortion than any prior generation. They are also much more socialist and lonely. These are not the traits of a confident right-wing conservative generation, but a sad, scared, weak, and nihilistic mass. Their homophobia is driven by non-white immigration. The best hope for homophobic right-wingers is to open the borders and pray for black Hitler.
bonus charts:
Gen Z Pastors most likely to perform a same-sex wedding:
Gen Z cares the least about race:
Gen Z whites are the most woke on race:
I’m mixing data sets here to get 2024 data, so it looks like Republicans and Democrats got whiter in 2024, but this is due to the fact that white people vote more. The gap should still be comparable either way when we control for voter participation.
I also produced two alternative projections, including estimates from the 1932 and 1964 elections. In the first, I use the actual data based on the demographics of the time, in which non-whites were only 10-14% of the population.
In the second projection, however, I show what would happen if we adjusted for increased immigration. That is, if there were as many non-whites in the USA in 1964 as there are in 2025, what would have been the “white gap”? This second projection results in an estimate of 2051.
(13% CDU, 5% FDP, 21% AfD = 39%)
(24% CDU, 4% FDP, 26% Afd = 54%)
Reagan was a moderate in that he slightly pushed back against some of Johnson and FDR’s most radical fiscal policies, without abolishing any of the fundamental programs (social security, welfare, affirmative action, Civil Rights). His Republican FBI director William Webster was also fighting right-wing terrorists, sovereign citizens, and other right-wing revolutionaries.
Bush Sr. was so moderate that he faced a primary challenge to Pat Buchanan; he was so unpopular as a result of being moderate that Ross Perot (a social conservative, economic protectionist) chose to run third-party.
When you compare Bush Jr. to the Evangelical social conservative alternatives (Santorum, Huckabee), he comes across, in retrospect, as a restraining figure rather than a radical one. He also signed PEPFAR.
Compared to every other candidate, except maybe Bloomberg, he had the most socially and fiscally conservative record.
Basically every president since Johnson, for the last 60 years, can be described as a moderate, with the exception of Obama and Trump. Obama because he encouraged the riots of Ferguson, and Trump because… well, he’s Trump.
One might switch from voting from Obama to Trump, perhaps, but if you asked those voters in 2008 and 2024 what their values were, I think they would be fairly consistent. It’s not that they changed their values as much as they felt like Obama betrayed their original values, and Trump restored them.
This isn’t true due to declining birth rates, but let’s overestimate to steelman the model in favor of the right-wing.
I like the graph about Hitler. Despite the occasional hyperventilating, National Socialism is dead and buried. It was tried exactly once and smashed by the combined might of almost the entire world. It won't be coming back, at least as long as our current world exists in a recognizable form.
What this means is that "support" for National Socialism has no practical meaning. Like a Funko Pop or a Grateful Dead T-shirt, it is something you purchase to affirm your own identity. In practice this means that you are pissed off by liberals and would like to piss them off in turn. The term LARP is accurate.
In other words, your chart shows that blacks and hispanics are more likely to feel this desire than other groups. Given their low social and economic status and the distaste of black and hispanic men for feminized American culture, this is to be expected. If National Socialism ever became practically thinkable (not, as I said, even remotely a reasonable possibility), they would certainly reconsider.
hate politics but always enjoy your posts
I never know what i can expect
but never leave disappointed