Don’t blame the internet for youthful disaffection
Material conditions are more to blame than social media
Apparently young people don’t have much faith in liberal democracy. A Channel 4 survey revealed that more than half of Gen Z would prefer a “strong leader was in charge who did not have to bother with parliament and elections”. A third would back military rule, and nearly half would support a violent revolution.
The boss of Channel 4 pointed a quivering finger of outrage at the big bad internet, that wild west of free speech, with its “personalised news feeds” unpoliced by people like himself, and cheerfully immune to the nervous corporate dance around controversial and offensive topics.
… it is important to think more deeply about why young people are glued to screens
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Blaming everything on digital media is a popular pastime across the political spectrum, of course, whether it’s conservatives following Jonathan Haidt in denouncing the teenage smartphone as a vector of mental illness, or liberals and progressives of the Marianna Spring persuasion worrying about Russian bots and online “misinformation”.
Technological determinism is always going to be appealing in a materialistic age in which we tend to look for reductive solutions and see politics as a matter of managerial manipulation. But for all the often sinister power of digital media, it is important to think more deeply about why young people are glued to screens, and why they might have such weak support for liberal institutions.
Many were shocked by the polling, but they shouldn’t have been. For one thing, it reflected findings already out there — a 2022 poll by Onward also revealed that a majority of young people would potentially support an authoritarian leader. Likewise, a Europe-wide surge in populist and far right parties has been driven, as I wrote about in 2023, by a huge wave of support from the continent’s frustrated youth. Contrary to traditional assumptions, the young were often equally or more likely to back parties of the populist right, and when they didn’t, they were still more likely to support radical libertarian or left parties than they were traditional centrists.
The surface answers for why this might be so should also be obvious. Young people, and not just in Britain, have seen economic opportunity decline or stagnate since 2008. In 1990, over half of British 25–34-year-olds owned their own home. By 2022, less than a third could say the same. Growing up in the post 2008 world is more than just unpleasant, it’s potentially crippling, with many young people simply unable to get their lives and careers off the runway. As a result, as one report has found “median wealth among Brits in their 60s was 55 per cent higher in real terms than those of the same age in 2006-08, whereas median wealth for those in their 30s was 34 per cent lower.” The average 30 something is now a third poorer than the generation before them. No wonder young people are angry.
So much for the anger. But why is that anger turned on liberal democracy? Young peoples’ mistrust of the mainstream media and the centrist political class is in some ways born of the internet, but, and this cannot be stated enough — that mistrust is fully merited. From the Iraq War, to party manifestos, to migration numbers, people have been lied to again and again. Sometimes journalists have done an extraordinary job exposing the truth, but sometimes we have been the ones misleading people. During the pandemic, a flood of government misinformation and manipulation was unleashed in order to control people’s behaviour. We were told to mask and socially distance, even outside, long after the limitations of both of these approaches were revealed. Intensive lockdowns imposed often irrational extremes of behaviour, only to just as suddenly and arbitrarily be relaxed as we were given “permission” to go back to normal.
Not only did the media not push back, but the attitude of many reporters was to “believe the science”, which with cabinet ministers hiding behind the government’s science advisor, generally seemed to mean “obey the government”. Papers and broadcasters showed terrifying daily updates of cases, figures that they rarely bothered to question or interrogate. Young people, who early on in the pandemic were revealed not to be at serious risk (another fact that was quietly set aside by those in authority), had to bear the worst brunt of the lockdown. They missed out on school and university, and put jobs, relationships and education on pause for the sake of their parents and grandparents. Older people in rural areas in large houses got to enjoy time with their spouses and long walks in the countryside. Young people were often forced to self-isolate in cramped flatshares, or give up their lives and go back home to mum and dad.
Social media has, for all its dysfunction, brought life and air to a stultifyingly conformist media and political climate. The grooming gangs scandal, which is almost certainly not over, was forced back onto the agenda by the raw chaos of Musk’s twitter. It has become harder to shut people up, harder to control information, and this is a fact the British establishment deeply resents.
Social media is not a trustworthy news source of course, but many young people prefer an unregulated sea of information they know they have to carefully sift, to a polished media machine that systematically manipulates the truth.
If young people are disenchanted with mainstream liberal politics and media, it is because they are a disinherited generation. Not only literally, as they watch the hope of economic progress wither away, but also spiritually. If younger people are poorer and less likely to own a home, they are also more isolated. A 2019 survey showed that over 90% of British 16-29 year olds had never been married. An American survey suggested that a growing number of young people, especially young men, aren’t dating at all. Another survey, from 2021, found that over a fifth of young people have no close friends.
Young people not only have weaker relationships, they also have weaker intellectual and moral commitments
Screens have only accelerated, and to a degree compensated for, a process that was underway anyway, in which young people are becoming poorer, more isolated and more mentally ill. The paradox that surveys show that young people are more liberal on most social issues, even as they express support for dictatorship, is not the contradiction that it appears to be. Young people not only have weaker relationships, they also have weaker intellectual and moral commitments. The shift away from strong community bonds, religious affiliation and patriotic sentiment was already a generational shift amongst their parents and grandparents. Today’s young people believe in very little at all, and are born belonging only to themselves, not a culture or community.
Young people have more individualistic habits and attitudes, and are more “tolerant” in as much as they lack the strong tribal attachments that can lead to bias. This combination of extreme autonomy and intellectual fluidity is not a formula for committed civil libertarians, however. Rather, it gives young people little basis to form wider social networks beyond the family home, and leaves them highly vulnerable to adopting extremely strong identities whether in the form of radical self-ownership (as with the increase in trans-identifying teenagers), or radical ideologies (as with the rise of the populist right online). The adolescent experimental “phase”, itself an invention of the 60s, has expanded, especially in the age of social isolation and economic precarity, into a permanent lifestyle.
Liberal institutions were historically sustained by a powerful hybrid of traditional civic, national and religious identities with liberal ideals. Whilst constitutional liberalism might be enacted at the centre, its moral and aspirational reality was inculcated and passed down in such settings as non conformist churches, working men’s colleges and local party branches. Shorn of these rooted communities, a fully “disembodied” liberalism has become a pure creature of appetite and will, rather than a civilisational project.
Liberalism has never been more culturally or commercially dominant, but as this recent polling shows, there is no longer a reproducing population of native liberals. The liberal inheritance has not been passed on by the previous generations, because liberalism has been all too successful in killing its host, whether that is the civic, national or religious community.
In this brave new world, the marketplace of ideas is radically open to the most Darwinian kind of intellectual competition. Crude avatars of masculinity like Andrew Tate wrestle with the feminine idol that is the tradwife. Scientific reductionism runs free without the bridle of liberal humanism, and young men worship in increasing numbers at the all-explaining altar of race science. There is no closing the gates to the garden, and the forbidden fruit of illiberalism is being consumed at every dinner table.
So what is to be done? There is no path backwards. I won’t confidently predict that this frightening and open-ended revolution in human culture will end in one inevitable outcome. But I will say that those who are rightly fearful of this new world need to look beyond the limits of liberalism, and reengage with our lost traditions. Young people lack attachments to inherited institutions because they have been denied their birthright, both in money and morals. People of my generation and younger need homes to live in, and ideas to live by — ones stronger than the thin gruel of liberal centrism.
