After years of being told that the progressive attitudes of younger generations would “save us” and take us towards a utopian future, we are rapidly learning that the politics of gen Z – today’s 13- to 27-year-olds – are something more fractured, with just as many young people carrying rightwing views as leftwing ones (and, on certain issues, even more).
This reality has become starker in recent days in the wake of many surveys uncovering “shocking” new findings about gen Z’s political attitudes. A Mail on Sunday survey published two weeks ago found that more than two-thirds of the 18- to 27-year-olds questioned supported chemical castration for sex offenders – and just under half supported bringing back the death penalty.
A survey from Channel 4 – Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust – published a few days earlier found that more than half of gen Zers thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. A third said the UK would be a better place if the army was in charge.
A poll from the Times released on Monday discovered far less alarming views, such as that most gen Zers aren’t proud to be British and only one in 10 would fight for their country – findings which were framed as shocking to Times readers.
You might think that this evidence would be met with concern and alarm and calls for urgent intervention debating how best to help and understand these reactionary young people in order to divert them away from such disturbing beliefs. However, the response has instead been the opposite: these young people have been roundly mocked, patronised and described as “ahistorical”, “illiterate” and simply “stupid” online and in the media.
But how effective is this criticism at changing young people’s minds, if that is indeed the real intention? Recent history has shown that not only is this approach useless but that it can also be dangerous too.
These commentators are falling into an obvious trap, familiar since 2016, in which ridicule, alienation and scolding (while patting yourself on the back for your moral superiority) have only caused these harmful views to fester and grow. It’s the exact problem with how the left and centre approached the rise of racism and anti-feminism over the last decade.
Rather than trying to understand and dissuade disenfranchised individuals, they speak down to and make fun of them – making it easy for hard-right figures, like Andrew Tate and even Donald Trump, to capitalise on their disillusionment.
Now, these views aren’t just a fringe movement but squarely in the mainstream (and increasingly the ones in power). It’s naive to think we are not encountering identical circumstances with gen Z and that the same phenomenon won’t occur again if – instead of trying to understand what has pushed them rightward – we merely call them idiots.
Gen Z has landed here after suffering dire socioeconomic circumstances. They entered adulthood in a recession just as the guardrails against disinformation began rapidly decreasing and, having come of age during Covid, have not known life without the blaring, misinformed noise of social media. They deserve connection and curiosity, especially from older generations that have not contended with even a shadow of these difficulties.
“Gen Z is a brilliant, vibrant, creative, bubbling mass of ideas and deep beliefs,” said Channel 4 chief executive, Alex Mahon. “Their collective genius is our future, but they need a Britain they can trust in. We need to ask what we can do to keep them with us, to weave them into a community that we who came before them and those who come after them can all share.”
For a healthy democracy, and even just for harmonious intergenerational living, there needs to be an active desire to grapple with what has made us each come to the views we hold. It’s understandable why this might feel uncomfortable – after all, many of these opinions are heinous and dehumanising.
But these findings are ultimately symptoms of a deeper problem, one that won’t be solved without openness and understanding. This doesn’t require acceptance but a willingness to reach out and help – and not to turn our backs on those in crisis.
• Sarah Manavis is a US writer and critic living in the UK
