Young People and Politics

[Barrister]

Yeah one thing I would not blame is "the economy".

I remember 25 years ago being told that "Generation X would be the first generation to have lower living standards than their parents".  Turns out that wasn't true - it's just that young people invariably start out on the lower rung of the income ladder and it takes time to climb.

[Sheilbh]

I think part of it isn't really a change, but rather a realisation that there's something distinct going on in continental Europe. I think the US, UK (and maybe more broadly Anglo) perception is that the young people are left-wing and move right as they get older. That's held up in UK where age is the strongest indicator of voting preference; it's not that in the US but in 2016, for example, Trump won less than 30% of the under-30s. It's been true for a while that that doesn't reflect support for especially the far-right and radical right in Europe who have long tended to do better with the young (and the young side of working age) while doing worst with the old.

There are signs that's shifting in the US and, as in several of the examples in that article, there is a particular difference between young men and young women. An example of that gender gap among the young is in Poland, which in other generations basically doesn't really have a gender gap in voting patterns (similar in the UK, if anything women were more likely to vote Tory - but signs that's shifting):#


So I think there's two bits - why the young and why young men in particular.

I think one key factor across the West is increasing distance from WW2 and, I think, a decline in a sort of anti-fascist consensus as a core political basis. I think that's perhaps particularly strong in Europe where the support for the far-right is often lowest among 60 somethings who grew up marinated in that consensus and possibly with direct or family experience of fascism. FWIW I think you also possibly see the left-wing equivalent in the rise of young tankies online who are unironically praising Stalin or Mao. I think the most basic political consensus of the post-war era is dying because it was established 80 years ago. I also worry that as we move further from WW2 we will see - on the fringes - a rise in Holocaust denial as well as revisionisms of "actually Stalin/Hitler/Imperial Japan was good".

In the European context specifically I think the divide in expectations and experience is particularly strong. I think this has also started to emerge in the Anglo world but has developed later - the current Boomer resentment is an example. But I think in Europe, which has long tended to have higher youth unemployment than the Anglo world, the older people who are continuing to vote for the parties of their youth were people who experienced the Trente Glorieuses and have since had relatively comfortable retirements. The parties and politics of their youth delivered for them then and throughout their lives. I don't think that's been the experience of the young which is why explicitly anti-establishment parties are appealing.

Relatedly - again particularly in the context of Europe with the crash followed by a decade of Eurozone crisis, austerity and mass youth unemployment - there is evidence that the economic context you grow up in shapes your views particularly on zero-sum v positive sum attitudes:



If you personal, lived experience is of growth, upwards mobility and ability to benefit from autonomy then you're likely to believe that everyone can do well - and the opposite is probably also true. I think that probably has a particular impact in relation to anti-immigration views.

Basically if you're economically secure and your status is also secure through education, you've got no issue with sharing the pie. If you're neither, you're not sure there's enough to go around (because there hasn't been for you):


In relation to young men specifically I think John Burn-Murdoch did a really interesting article on this. One theory is basically negative polarisation, which I think is probably reinforced by social media/online where young men and women are in different parts of the internet. So different (and sometimes diametrically opposes) cultures and ideologies can take off very quickly and, to an extent, reinforce each other. In the West we don't have particularly communitarian, intergenerational societies which can perhaps help establish and reproduce norms and ideologies; and increasingly we don't have a shared (mixed gender) cultural space or production, as more of people's social lives are online that will increase.

And to be clear I think the effect of social media/online bubbles is ideologically neutral. I think there are basically entrepreneurs within those bubbles who are shaping it and the experience of people within it - whether that's people on the far-right appealing to young men watching video game YouTube or the similarly mad (but "woke") world YA Fiction TikTok.

On the young men front one possibility is this may all break down as they try to start dating young women and face the shock of the real

And on the gender divide, Alice Evans who's an academic writing a book on this growing gender divide, may be of interest: https://www.ggd.world/

So my guess is one ideological model slowly dying, declining economic opportunity (and associated status) plus increasingly atomised (online) cultural experiences/spaces.

Again I wonder what is the driver in this drastic change, and what the potential long term impacts are.

On some of that in relation to more diverse cities - I suspect part of this is immigration. London is, by some distance, the most religiously observant part of the UK and also, in terms of attitudes to homosexuality, sex before marriage etc, the most socially conservative. But London's a solidly Labour-voting and Remain-y city. The most irreligious and least socially conservative region was the North-East - which is classic Red Wall territory and voted Leave.

[Sheilbh]

-nature of European politics.  When mainstream parties refuse to really even engage in issues like immigration then the far-right becomes your only option

I'd possibly frame this differently. Most of Europe has PR.

There is a broad trend of fragmentation in various ways across countries. The Netherland is an extreme example because it is strictly proportional with no minimum threshold - the first Dutch post-war election returned 7 parties, the latest one had 15. But you see it across Europe in different ways.

In a FPTP system I think there is an incentive to build as wide a coalition as you can within your party and to be a really big tent which means you need to address those issues. The parties are the coalitions. In a PR system, you'll directly feel the consequences of, say, more liberal voters defecting if you try to "address concerns" on immigration. But also because the coalitions are negotiated after elections and between parties, rather than within, there will always be space for a party to set up and focus on x issue and if that's your one key issue then the incentive is to vote for them so at least they can really push it in coalition negotiations. That's how you'll move the government policy rather than through trying to shift the traditional established/governing parties.

In some ways I think the first parties to make this breakthrough were the Greens in the 80s (similarly outside the traditional, class based right-left plus liberals divides). In that sense I think it's less that other parties won't immigration and more that, say, Geert Wilders can become to immigration or concerns around assimilation what the Greens are to environment policy.

Edit: And I think the Greens have made a similar transition from parties of protest to parties of power - which is part of what we're seeing across Europe with the far and radical right now.

[Tamas]

In a FPTP system I think there is an incentive to build as wide a coalition as you can within your party and to be a really big tent which means you need to address those issues.

As a counterpoint I present you.. the current Tories. They just drift to the edge and (try to) drag the center with them

[Sheilbh]

As a counterpoint I present you.. the current Tories. They just drift the edge and (try to) drag the center with them

And they're polling at 20%

[Barrister]

I think one key factor across the West is increasing distance from WW2 and, I think, a decline in a sort of anti-fascist consensus as a core political basis. I think that's perhaps particularly strong in Europe where the support for the far-right is often lowest among 60 somethings who grew up marinated in that consensus and possibly with direct or family experience of fascism. FWIW I think you also possibly see the left-wing equivalent in the rise of young tankies online who are unironically praising Stalin or Mao. I think the most basic political consensus of the post-war era is dying because it was established 80 years ago. I also worry that as we move further from WW2 we will see - on the fringes - a rise in Holocaust denial as well as revisionisms of "actually Stalin/Hitler/Imperial Japan was good".

I feel like there is something to this.  Let me tell you about my grandfather.  I think I was 12 when he died.  The two pertinent things about him that you need to know is that he was a proud RCAF veteran, and that after the war he nearly died from polio and as a result his one leg was withered and useless.

So things like WWII (and polio) were still history to me growing up, but I had this very literal link to those issues.  As a result I am firmly an "atlantacist" in foreign policy, and firmly pro-vaccine.

But the newer generations don't have this link.  And the online tankie crowd often has zero memory of the soviet union as well.  And yes, as such old assumptions are being questioned.  The lessons of the past being forgotten.

[Josquius]

Think of those graphs of primary, secondary, and tertiary employment.
Back in the mid 20th century industry was the main mass employer. These days it's, what, 10%? Whilst services have taken over.
As blue collar jobs have declined, pink collar jobs have risen.
And then yes, women are increasingly daring to intrude on the higher end traditionally male dominated jobs whilst the lower end service jobs traditionally female dominated....little willingness from men to go that way .

Yeah ok but now you are talking about things that happened 40 or 50 years ago, long before even people my age were looking for work. I don't think young men today are shocked they can't just go into the local broom factory and find a decent paying job for life as nobody since their grandparents generation (or even great-grandparents) could do that.

Nothing has a single cause. Especially something so complicated as this. There's a lot of other factors at work too. Social media takes a large share of the blame also.

But worth remembering there's a cultural drag. That this was economic change happened 40 years ago doesn't mean the culture changes over night. There'd be hopes it was temporary, that some replacement would come along. Habits of a lifetime don't break easy.
After this time however we have had generational unemployment and helplessness really festering.
Poor people who have to track back to their grandparents to find someone working class are increasingly common.
We have passed the stage where dad would tell you to walk around town with paper cvs and you'd definitely get a job as it worked for him in the 70s.
Now it's dad saying since his plans for you to be a professional footballer didn't pan out you now just have to try and grab the biggest share you can of the dwindling world.

And most pink collar jobs are very labor intensive with terrible pay. So what? The rise of the school teacher, office staff, nursing, and maid service worker has yet to occur.

yes. A lot of these very human centred service jobs are crap. That's why not many men are eager to go into them whilst many women are keen to go into the more desirable traditionally male dominated jobs.
It's an unequal trade of jobs in a situation where there's less jobs overall, especially on the male dominated side.

[The Brain]

Many factors I think. In Sweden one of them is that the traditional parties completely refused to adapt their position on immigration in the face of growing anti-immigration opinions, sending voters into the arms of a nutjob party that has ballooned to Sweden's second biggest, led by closeted, and sometimes uncloseted, Nazis. Immigration has never been an important political issue to me. Why didn't some traditional parties broaden their tents on immigration to keep votes and to keep the issue in non-nutjob hands? Turned out that they were one-issue parties, and the issue wasn't the economy, the environment, law & order, education, healthcare, defense, equality... it was immigration. This obsession is weird to me.

[Syt]

Yeah, agreed there's many factors. For one there's a general discontent where the younger generation feels it's getting the short end of the stick in an increasingly shitty world. It of course depends on what you see as the bigger problem to swing a certain way - economy, jobs, immigration? Probably more to the right. Discrimination, climate change, social justice? Probably more to the left. Doesn't help when "the big established parties" (to which I'd definitely count the Greens in Germany and Austria by now) are seen as ineffective, "not doing enough", out of touch, and/or bogged down by infighting/corruption. This creates the desire in parts of the electorate for someone to cut through the crap and take charge. A "strong leader," if you will.

Social media, I think, does play a role - and I feel that right wingers were much faster/better adapting to it and effectively connecting with younger voters in a way that they didn't feel patronized or talked down to.

[Jacob]

If I can offer counter factual to the whole "the established parties aren't speaking to immigration concerns and that's why young men are turning against them" line of reasoning:

In Denmark anti-immigration rhetoric is mainstream in the big traditional parties, and for decades it's mostly been a competition on who could take the harshest anti-immigrant position. The Social Democrats basically went hard to avoid losing voters to the Danish People's Party (the pensioner and xenophobia party), and have succeeded in maintaining their grip on power.

So in Denmark, we're seeing the same split with young women flocking to a party on the on the left flank, with young men flocking to a party on the right flank.

The interesting thing, however, is that the leftist party gaining the support of the young is essentially the bastion of classic social democracy (with enough of the progressive social issue positioning in the mix to be palatable to leftists, but it's not the focus) - which works because the actual Social Democrats have become Labour Hard Right essentially in terms of economic policy (they just got rid of a stat holiday over the objection of the unions, and regularly talk about the need for people to work harder). In spite of Denmark's reputation, the social welfare model has been continually hollowed out over the last many years of Social Democrat prime ministers.

On the right side, the darling of the young male voters are (a bit uncharitably) internet meme libertarian/ economic libarals. Their posture is all about cutting social services and the welfare state, lowering the tax burden so people can spend their own money, and selling those positions via tiktok messaging. Immigration and identity politics are not central to their messaging at all.

Basically anti-immigration and cultural identity issues are not the attraction for the parties, because those are core to the status quo parties.

[Josquius]

IMO the immigration obsession of some is basically just an outgrowth of economic unease.
It's not for nothing that the biggest brexit /racist party votes tend to come from poorer areas: areas with lower immigration than the norm.
On the other hand the areas with more immigration and better economies.... Tend not to go that way.
Immigration is just an easy scapegoat and far right politics is all about playing the victim and choosing convenient scapegoats.

Traditional parties are completely right not to just fall into the hysteria and instead to focus on the root problems.
The problem is their failure to ensure equitable economic growth.

Also hasn't been mentioned but another key problem is in education. Both in critical thinking skills and not falling for these simple solutions to complex problems being spread online, but also in economics. Getting a grasp of the idea that we don't live in a zero sum world and someone else having something doesn't mean you don't get something, that a larger population can lead to a larger economy and a bigger pot to share.

[Tamas]

As a counterpoint I present you.. the current Tories. They just drift the edge and (try to) drag the center with them

And they're polling at 20%

Yes but they are still one of the two major parties and almost certainly going to remain so. It just shows FPTP isn't a guaranteed moderating coalition-building force.

[Sheilbh]

Yes but they are still one of the two major parties and almost certainly going to remain so. It just shows FPTP isn't a guaranteed moderating coalition-building force.

Sure but they're being punished by the voters. Elections are the corrective force in a democracy.

Also I don't think coalition building or big tent politics necessarily means moderate or centrist politics. It depends on what coalition you build.

One other point on Europe, specifically, is the anti-politics stuff and I think the decline since the end of the Cold War of party democracy is also part of this. Even in the 80s political parties in Europe had millions of members they were a part of society and different strands for different parts of society - that has largely disappeared. So the parties became the property of someone else - at best, a far smaller minority of political obsessives. I think young people have never grown up in the post-war European style mass membership party democracy. Parties have never been anything other than a box you cross at election time (interestingly the FdI in Italy are possibly an exception to this - perhaps because they actually have a link to 20th century Fascism which was mass political?).