I wonder how much good old sexual frustration has to do with Trump’s appeal to young men. The back-to-back “me too” era and pandemic isolation has left a lot of these young guys pining for the days when the rules of relationships were apparently a lot simpler and more favorable to satisfying one of the predominant male urges during their twenties.
But that’s what they (and everyone) has been hearing/reading over and over.
This describes the general approach of the vast majority of the politically disengaged. You are politically engaged. Many people who vote are not. You have to get out of this mental trap that everybody carefully weighs the pros and cons of their decisions. Many do not and resentment has broad shoulders.
It’s not much different than Arab-Americans concerned about Gaza choosing to vote for Trump. Careful consideration could have shown they were probably trading arguably bad for considerably worse. But hope springs eternal and “maybe he’ll be better so let’s roll the dice” has a strong appeal.
I’m Millennial, not Gen Z, but I’m going to guess that I’m closer in age to Gen Z than most Dopers.
From what I can see, it is that, bizarre as it sounds, the right wing is often friendlier and more welcoming to many young people on social media like Reddit, TikTok, etc., and this is often an age when many young people are first finding their political footing. MAGA is a weirdly big tent. You can be of any race, be a woman, etc. and you’re welcome as long as you love Trump. On the other hand, you can toe many liberal lines but still be vilified by progressives for being un-liberal in just one issue (look at JK Rowling, for instance - a progressive in every single possible way except one issue - transgender issues - but she has become vilified for that alone, as if she’s not a liberal feminist in 99 other ways.)
For many young folks on social media, they find that if they agree with MAGA/Trump on 90% of issues, the right-wing crowd thinks, “Well, that’s pretty good, welcome aboard,” but if they agree with liberals on 90% of issues, the liberals think they’re a bigot because of the 10%.
The other issue, as many alluded to, is that Gen Z is getting DESTROYED economically. Trump promised bullshit, but at least he made them feel something might change in a big way. Democrats paid some yammering lip service but you could see their hearts weren’t really in it. Look at how few Democratic Congressmen are lobbying for single-payer, a higher minimum wage, UBI or crackdowns on bloodthirsty health insurance companies.
I don’t want to derail the thread into Gaza, but this thinking (I don’t mean YOUR thinking as the OP personally, but the DNC/Democratic thinking in general) is symptomatic of exactly what doomed the Democrats on Gaza last year. They kept arguing, “We don’t have to do anything to win pro-Gaza votes since the Republicans are worse, so we’ll get pro-Gaza votes by default even if we just let the genocide continue. After all, given the choice between bad and worse, they’ll prefer bad, right?”
Same thing with Gen-Z. Democratic leaders thought that since Trump wouldn’t help Gen-Z economically, they also didn’t need to do anything to help Gen-Z economically either since they ‘deserved’ Gen-Z votes by default. It doesn’t work like that. People who are financially desperate will do financially desperate things and cast financially desperate votes. They’d rather vote for a wild card bull in the shop who MIGHT do something, than a well-known product who won’t do anything.
There are obviously a bunch issues, and this isn’t going to be the best place to get a good answer, but I suspect these types of dismissals of their struggles is number one on the list. They aren’t reading and hearing about these problems, they are living them. For many millennials this is a crisis situation. If you don’t have generational wealth, you don’t have access to the American Dream. They are having massive struggles finding jobs, affording houses, and being able to even get in position to think about raising family.
If you and your family and all your friends are struggling, and all you hear from a political party, is actually things are great, and if you think you are struggling it is because you are too dumb to understand economics or too untalented to find a good job, well you are probably not going to like that party much. The fact that the party has been pretty hostile to new and younger voices certainly doesn’t help. Millennials don’t like Republicans either, but at least they admit there a problem and they talk to them, even if they tend to be racist and stupid.
There’s no way to be confident about it but one thing we know is that the younguns got mad at Biden and, by proxy, Harris over Gaza. And we also know that the most popular platform among younguns is TikTok.
And then we know that Trump was visited by TikTok, and they showed him some numbers that made him think they helped him, and now he’s actively ignoring the law to help TikTok stay in America.
That’s substantially understating Rowling’s statements and position on trans-genderism. It isn’t as if she just isn’t an enthusiastic supporter of transgender (or generally LGBTQ) rights; she’s accused trans-women of being rapists, trans-men as ‘diseased’ and ‘perverted’, and anyone supporting teenagers who identify as anything other than cis-gender roles as pedophile groomers. She denies the science on the issue of gender identity and is openly hostile to anyone who cites or defends it. She also has a history of not being particularly friendly to queer fans (despite the popularity of her novels with people who feel different and outside mainstream society), especially fan-fic that ‘ships’ her characters in same sex relationships.
So, on this issue she’s sharing the same cultural bed as MAGA and Putin. It’s hard to argue for overlooking that in service of trying to offer a ‘big tent’ for self-identified progressives.
Stranger
Don’t think they make a brush that big.
Is any of that actually true though?
At least in my experience on Reddit, most of the Gen-Z and adjacent types on there who are saying that are looking for some sort of idyllic situation that didn’t exist as far back as Gen-X. Stuff like getting entry level jobs right out of college that pay well enough for them to make ends meet and have all the luxuries and their own place. Or being able to buy a good house a few years out of college. Or just have health care out of nowhere without paying for it. And some sort of Euro-style job security.
NONE of that stuff was actually true when I got out of college in the mid-90s, and that was on a computer science grad’s salary in the beginning of the internet boom. We were still strapped for cash, still had to pay for health insurance, still couldn’t buy houses until sometime in the early 2000s after saving for a while, still had roommates, still drove used cars, and so forth. Maybe some of us could afford a new car, or could afford a house earlier, but nobody could get all of them.
I’m not even sure all that was actually 100% true for the Baby Boomers. They lived a much more spartan lifestyle in a lot of ways vs. today’s young adults who are just starting out. One car per family, one small TV, no cell phone, and so forth.
So I’m thinking they’re voting based on erroneous assumptions- that somehow what they want has ever been achievable, and second, that Trump is somehow going to enable it.
Amen. That very much describes my life experience, starting with my first quality full-time job in 1990. I consistently made good money, though granted in a very expensive urban area. But I still didn’t own a new car until 1995. I had non-partner roommates until 2003. I didn’t own property until 2006.
I do indeed believe the economic situation is worse today in a number of ways. After all I first bought property with a no money down 80/20 piggyback mortgage about a half-second before the housing crash (I was underwater on my mortgage for years) - good luck getting those terms today. But perhaps not by quite as much as some younger people imagine it is.
Still it’s perception that counts. Far more than a lived reality they didn’t experience.
This was something I really noticed during the 2016 election. A lot of people liked Trump because he didn’t sound like a politician who deliberately chooses his words carefully. If you just went with your gut, it sounded like Trump was being honest, or at the very least more honest than the others. But we’re not just talking about the politically disengaged here, I think we underestimate the number of people who felt as though the system was failing them. And it wasn’t just life long Republicans, Ashli Babbitt went from voting for Obama a few years earlier to dying for Trump on January 6, 2021.
What I’m getting from these posts, as well as those from several other somewhat related threads, seems to come down to this. There seems to be two competing, but not exclusive, hypotheses. One is that Harris and the Democrats lost because they failed at countering false Republican propaganda. The other is that the Biden / Harris / Democratic policies aren’t working for the American people in general and Gen Z in particular, and that furthermore Democrats are refusing to acknowledge this and change their platform.
I don’t know how much blame to assign to each option. As an almost 50 year old upper middle class professional who checks off only one category on the oppression hierarchy, I’m not in the best position to judge. What I’ll say is that my instinct is to blame a failure at countering Republican propaganda rather than that the Democrats have a platform that needs to be changed. If the latter is where the problem lies, the question then arises as to what those changes should be. Short of leaning more heavily into taxing the wealthy to fund things like health care, improving the environment, etc., (and needless to say coming up with an effective counter to Republican propaganda, but that isn’t a policy position) I can’t identify where the shortcomings to the Democratic platform is.
I suspect there’s no single reason, but a confluence of various rivers of crap that has contributed to the poop storm we have today. It’s as if the United States went crazy.
I do think that both are true. The Democrats have spent so long relying on being the “at least we’re not the Republicans” party that they really don’t know how to be anything else anymore. People want change and a lifeline, and the Democrats don’t have it in them to offer either; they’re the party of the status quo. And are at a loss now that the status quo has been burned to the ground.
But, they also lack the vast propaganda apparatus the Republicans spent decades assembling. As well, they aren’t so unprincipled/undignified to be willing to lie as much as the Republicans if they had it, and their base isn’t as incredible stupid and vile so they can’t really duplicate that anyway.
The Democrats don’t need to lie (nor should they,) but they do need to find a way to make truth sound as good as lies.
Make promises like, “If elected, we’ll enact (sweeping, transformational change)” then actually do it. Within the bounds of realism, of course, but catchy and short enough to fit on a bumper sticker.
Unfortunately they don’t have the power to actually do that, so it won’t work. They’ll be lucky if they manage to slow down the full transition of the US to fascism; sweeping positive change isn’t on the table.
There’s also an unfortunate trend among parts of the left of “it’s not my job to educate you.” Which, well yes, but when one side refuses to interact and the other side is happy to evangelize, at least some people who might not have listened initially will do so.
The online left can be extremely toxic in their opinions and how they express them. And as we all spend more time online, it becomes more of a driver of opinions from those interactions with extremists and absolutists online. Few things make me dislike other liberals more than reading the comments on a NY Times article.
That looks like a huge derailment to me. I’m not going to respond to it, but sheesh, if you were sincere about not derailing the thread you could have chosen different words.
Back to topic.
The point that Gen-Z doesn’t really remember Trump45 is good, but even more salient-- he is worse now. Kids do hear and repeat-- I hear preschoolers repeat things about Trump they have clearly heard from their parents. Any anyway, what they may remember, pre-pandemic, is nothing in particular, because even though he was saying a lot of stupid stuff, and trying to build a border wall, he was more of a buffoon in over his head than a dangerous despot.
Also, remember that Trump did win in 2016-- he may have in actuality, lost the popular vote, but marginally. That means a lot on Gen-Z’s parents voted for Trump.
From the stats I can find, a pretty good proportion of 2016 Trump voters voted for him again in 2024. Many parents of Gen-zers must have voted for Trump, more than once.
So you can’t discount the idea that much of Gen-Z voted for Trump because their parents did.
Then, once they had voted for him, they were involved, and started paying attention. Now they have their own opinions. They may be wild cards in 2028.