There’s a handy website that can help you follow along!
This also makes me think of how in many cases support for something can be well meaning but damn shallow, or even be more a “vibe” than a true conviction, so easier to flip.
Oh, they are still a shrinking population, and demographics would have politically doomed them. That of course is the point of destroying democracy; it won’t matter anymore how few of them there are since slaves and corpses don’t get a vote. You don’t need to worry about, say, modern women being feminist when you can just break your wife or daughter’s fingers until she confesses to your superiority with the full backing of the law (in fact, you’ll probably be executed if you don’t abuse women).
That’s the future we’re headed towards; demographics won’t matter anymore, only skin color, gender, and the ability and willingness to apply brutality.
But we do not know that. People inferred it from statistics that however provided no guarantee of a continuing trend and that a younger, browner society would sweep the Right into the dustbin. It was not something that was predestined, it had to be fought for.
Just as these by now tedious proclamations of an upcoming hellworld are not predestined either… if people bother to fight it.
No; societies change, it was always “predestined”. That’s why to get their way and freeze society they need to install a totalitarian state and enslave or murder most of the population. They want to impose an unnatural and malignant stasis on society.
My Gen Z daughter is convinced that Gaza is the issue that put Trump in the White House. I don’t know that they voted for Trump, but they just sat out the presidential election.
That is fair, but I think for Gen Z, the problems though are a little lower on the needs hierarchy. Dress and length of transportation aren’t really the crisis situation unaffordable food and shelter are.
Moreso I think a lot of it is trajectory as much as current situation. Generations in the past had their struggles, but there was a general sentiment that if you worked hard you could have a better life than your parents and your kids would have a better life than you. With Gen Z the believe is things are bad and continually getting worse. Birth rate is way down in part from their economic struggles, but also a lot of people don’t believe they just bring a kid into this world. IF you think things are getting better you are going to be okay with incremental change. Without hope you want to blow the system up.
Why would Democrats talking about Project 2025, make Gen Zers like them more? This the other guy sucks vote for me, doesn’t work with young people who want to change the world.
This is the other side of things. The young are a lot more inclined to idealism and catastrophism, regardless of generation. It’s hardly unique to them, just more common. “Blow it up so we can rebuild it” looks a lot more attractive when a large part of your politically aware life looks like just one thing. From my pov it’s usually the least attractive solution - blowing shit up usually just leaves piles of rubble and shit gets worse. And it almost always can get worse. Trump '24 is much worse than Trump '16.
But I’m middle-aged and have the dubious advantage of more perspective and experience - i.e. I’m cynical (“pragmatic”) as fuck.
This, the part about wanting to blow things up so we can rebuild it, is what I don’t get. Maybe I just didn’t see (and still don’t) whatever decline may have already been going on, but things seemed to be going really well towards the end of Obama’s second term, with 2014 probably being the peak of what I’ll call post WWII Western civilization. Then the people (meaning not just American Gen Zers, but people of all generations across the world) started going crazy around 2015, and things have been downhill ever since. Sure, there were some brief but temporary reversals, like Biden winning in 2020, but it seems to me that our problems can be laid squarely at the feet of MAGA (and MAGA type movements in other countries around the world) messing up the good thing we had going. If that is correct, then the answer is to go back to how things were during, say, the first two years of Obama’s second term, and then continue to build in the direction we were going at that time.
In one sense, Gen Z isn’t to blame, because they aren’t old enough to remember those good old days. But the information is there, and if some young idealistic person wants to “blow it up so we can rebuild it”, it’s easy enough to see that what should be rebuilt is early 2010s style civilization, just further down the line of progression.
ETA: In other words, yes, I think the US would be doing just fine in some hypothetical timeline where Hillary Clinton (or Joe Biden for those who prefer him to Clinton) won in 2016 and 2020 and Kamala Harris won in 2024. Had that happened, today would likely be our peak as a civilization, with an ongoing upward trajectory.
People generally think they are living through terrible times, and only in hindsight do we see whether it’s true or not.
I’m reminded of the musical Rent. One of the themes of the show is how horrible times are then. But the show takes place in the late 90s, which in hindsight we now know were some of the best times of the last several decades.
I just saw a Peanuts cartoon from 1979. Charlie Brown was trying to get someone to adopt Spike, Snoopy’s brother. The person at the door said that she just couldn’t imagine adopting a dog considering all the bad things happening right now.
I graduated from college shortly after Black Monday in 1987 and there were all these articles that we (Gen X) will be the first generation not to do better than our parents, etc. Exactly the same as the Gen Z stuff you see now.
This was a huge one. And it wasn’t even that the Ds didn’t help Gaza, some prominent people like Kamala actively sneered at the issue. When pro-Gaza protesters heckled her at a campaign rally, Harris didn’t respond by saying what she’d do to help Gaza and stymie Israel, she taunted them, “Keep talking like that and you’re going to get Trump elected.”
The DNC seriously underestimated the amount of anger that many Gen-Z progressives, especially Arab Democrats in swing states, felt about the issue.
Got a cite Harris said that?
But again, exit polls had Inflation as the big issue,m followed by Immigration and crime, Gaza wasnt even in there.
And you’d have to be REALLY foolish to prefer trump over Harris on the Gaza issue.
“You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”
Not the same as
And she wasnt specifically speaking about Gaza.
My bad, somehow I garbled her words. But yes, basically the same meaning.
ISTM movements infused by nationalist populism had been having a moment for a while already at that time, though they tended to be more locally/regionally focused, thus could be trending left (Chavez) or right (Erdogan) depending on what each country’s voters thought the “problem” was they would fix. A tipping point though did seem to come about in the early/mid 20teens, with more successes of the proudly unhinged faction ever since.
It’s almost quaint looking back at the original “Tea Party” group in the US and remembering how the Republicans were mortified by the races of Sharron Angle and Christine (I’m not a witch!) O’Donnell, and realizing that barely a decade later they’re gladly electing Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
Most of the media environment is trash at this point, so they’re beaming trash into their brains 24x7.
You cannot simply ask “why don’t they consume the good stuff”, because when everything is awful, and you don’t even know what good media looks like, you don’t even know how to seek it out or how to recognize it.
Of course they are somewhat reacting to material conditions, but these effects are swamped by media effects, as is our ability to even understand if the things we’re told they’re reacting to, are in fact the things they’re reacting to.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Shortly after the election I read something on Medium to the effect that some people had forgotten what voting is for. The article went on to argue that the point of voting isn’t to send messages but rather to set policy, and that too many people had done the former. IIRC this was alluding more to the Gaza genocide than to the economy, but either way it made a strong case.
I don’t recall that the article mentioned the age factor, and I met many older progressives online who said they wouldn’t vote for Harris. On the other hand, recalling how I voted when I was in my twenties, I can understand how frustrating it is for young people. We barely take control of the Senate, and even when we do, there always seem to be one or two members like Manchin or Sinema staying in the way of getting anything done.
I was registered as a Peace And Freedom voter and usually voted that way.