“The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am,” a recent Atlantic article begins. The topic is political extremism.
I’ve done plenty of my own reporting on surveys which shows that, yes Gen Z is much more favorable to Communism and Nazism. They’re the most open to using political violence to shut down opposing points of view, they’re open to killing executives, supporting Hamas and any brand of awful politics.
And I don’t mean to dismiss legitimate concerns about these things, but who else would you expect to have these views?
Young people always have radical views. They embrace radical politics because they have no sense of what works in the real life, because they suffer from political narcissism, toxic empathy, lack of empathy, main character syndrome, epater les bourgeois or a dozen other familiar conditions.
Yes, some young people have horrible views. It comes with their age.
Who was planting bombs in the 20s and 70s? Who made up the strike forces for the Bolsheviks and the Nazis? It wasn’t the senior citizens. The occasional radical elders keep smirking and shouting, “listen to the youth” because they know perfectly that teenagers have a weakened immune system against their terrible ideas.
Does this represent most young people? No. But it’s a population with an elevated susceptibility to political extremism. When society catches a cold, the under 25s have a fever. This can be disguised by peer pressure around socially acceptable politics which channel the radicalism into what is considered into what is considered appropriate behavior. This artificially lowered, for example, antisemitic views in surveys, without necessarily lowering them in real life.
And then they grow up.
Youth radicalism is primarily dangerous when older radicals convince people that they represent the future. Right now there are multiple groups both pro and con trying to make horrible brats, whether it’s Greta Thunberg or Nick Fuentes, into the ‘voice of a generation’. All of this is fake and stupid. Teenagers and these days many twenty-somethings have erratic politics when they have any politics at all. (Mostly they don’t.)
Young people are not the enemy. Nor should they be listened to. They don’t know what they’re talking about. And only weak uncertain people give in to them. The last time we gave in to some unfocused ‘voices of a generation’, the country was turned upside down.
Let’s not make the same mistake again.
