"A new trend has emerged in American politics: The very youngest voters — 18-to-24-year-olds — say they’re more conservative than the cohort that’s just older,” according to the latest Harvard Youth Poll.
“This new trend — which is true for both genders and emerged only in the last few years — is especially pronounced with men.”
I think it’s just the overall tightening of the right wing echo chamber. Yes, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all create spaces for right-wing chauvinists to capture young men when they are most impressionable and feel least seen.
But also these are dividends from Fox News slowly poisoning discourse and rural communities treating being liberal or left as an immoral betrayal of your kin and kind. For those people, being conservative is seen as being sane and the natural state of things, and no amount of facts or cognitive dissonance can influence those communities to change.
The only way to reverse it is to find a way to prevent those top-down right-wing spaces from engaging in propaganda. But not only is that difficult with the First Amendment, we haven’t even politically acknowledged what is happening.
Conservatives still gaslight and play the victims while exerting excessive influence on our discourse. The left continues to treat them with kid gloves, which only emboldens them. So I expect this trend to fully continue.
This has generally been bothering me. You’ll have someone on the far right say like “We should kill the jews”, and I say “We should stop that guy. Like, I’m okay with someone doing violence to that nazi” and people are like “whoa whoa whoa we can’t have VIOLENCE.” So basically the right wing can do and say whatever, but everyone else has to hold themselves to pristine standards and just take it.
“Cops brutalize family and shoot their dog”. “Maybe we should fight back.” “Whoa whoa whoa violent speech is unacceptable bro.” Like, ok, I guess I’ll just get shot quietly.
I got permanently banned from Reddit cuz I commented on a post with “400k Americans died in WW2 to give us the right to punch nazis in the face.”
400 seems like a low estimate.
Sorry 400 thousand. I’ll fix it.
Paradox of Tolerance. A truly 100% tolerant society can not exist as it will quickly fall prey to intolerant groups that they are forced to tolerate. People don’t seem to understand that concept and think if we just be nice the bad guys will go away. It doesn’t work like that. Any school kid can tell you that ignoring or trying to befriend a bully rarely works. The only thing that works is fighting back.
Could be just an extension of conservative indoctrination, getting in at “ground level”. They indoctrinate religion and prejudice. They are trying to make inroads at the local government level like school boards. Why not try to further that MO and go after disaffected young men. Works for jihadists and suicide bombers, it’ll work for the talibangelicals.
I have wondered a similar question… Is the trend that young men who are raised in a republican environment / family / culture aren’t leaving it at the same rate as their predecessors? Or is it that more young men raised in a liberal / apolitical environment are being captured by the right wing internet pipeline?
I would guess that in previous generations, kids are raised about 50/50 to match their parents beliefs (who are roughly 50/50 conservative or liberal) and the significant dominance of liberal youth vote was attributable to kids leaving that ideology behind as they form their own beliefs, reenforced by peer effects. But I’ve wondered if tiktok and other new social dysfunction of current generations has made it easier for kids raised in that 50/50 to just “stay” where they were raised.
Perhaps it could all be explained by the weakening of the ability of peer effects to influence young people’s political beliefs. Young men feel they have more community in online conservative spaces than they do in their more egalitarian real world social environments, so instead of ditching their parents beliefs to match their real world friends they ditch their real world friends that don’t match their beliefs.
Yeah I agree with your assessment