this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Besides that a significant portion of the youth is turning hard-right as we speak. Young progressives always think all young people are like them.
That's paired with an even greater portion turning far-left. Overall, Gen Z is far more progressive than reactionary, though there are radical fascists as well.
I haven't seen any data or polling that supports this. A larger portion of young people are "more liberal," but I've not seen anything that says that the extensions of the far, radical right have been met with equal (let alone greater) turns towards leftist political ideology.
Perhaps you just mean center-left people refer to themselves as "leftists" more often? That's more of a result of the shift in the Overton window than any actual groundswell of leftist support.
Check Wikipedia, haha. It's an extremely well known trend that Gen-Z is seeing a rise in actual support for Socialism. The majority lean liberal, but Gen-Z supports Socialism far more than previous generations, as radicalization is increasing in general. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Generation_Z
Thanks for the Wikipedia link.
That you don't see the difference between the hyper-radicalization of the right and the "progressive pro-government" tendencies of Gen Z is precisely what I'm describing.
You spend most of your time on this platform talking about videogames and coffee occasionally punctuated by airy anti-capitalist sentiments. The young--and typically white and male--hard right talk about guns and politics, errant and blind though it is, and they train for revolution.
There is no growing revolutionary sentiment on the left that is meeting, matching, or exceeding the violent revolutionary discourse and "propaganda of the deed" by the right.
We're losing. Hiding behind a hope expressed by a Wikipedia article that maybe this "progressive" and "pro government" sentiment is actually what will pull us out of this death spiral actually makes me more pessimistic about the future.
Go play Starfield.
"Haha."
There's radicalization on both sides, but the general trend is to the left.
What prompted you to dig through my comment history? That's extremely weird.
Well, my point is, no, it's not. One "side" is growing more radical, and the other "side" is being more adamant about their social media comments. Does that seem equal to you?
"Dig" through your comment history? I took 30 seconds, clicked on your name, scrolled a few times, and then came back. What prompted me to do that? To see if your general profile matches the broad Pollyanna ignorance you're expressing in this conversation.
Your point is unsubstantiated, not mine. Radicalization is more common in general among all demographics, but increasingly so for Gen-Z, which is combined with the increased trend to the left. There are more fascists among Gen-Z than normal, but this is in tandem with far more Socialists.
Your 30 seconds of scrolling resulted in a whopping 2 posts worth of comments, I talk about Starfield maybe once a month and coffee maybe 3 times a month, lol.
Call me ignorant all you want, but absolutely none of what you've said has mattered, and has been entirely ignorant this comment string.
Fair enough. I do this for a living, which means that I'm paid to study trends of radicalization through various demographics across North and Central America. I specialize in youth culture trends as it relates to political identification.
I'm not going to expose my identity here, but, what I am telling you is that you are wrong about this.
I think we can be on the same side, I think we probably want the same thing, but your diagnosis and feelings about how "youth culture," specifically "Gen Z" feels politically is riven between extreme radical actors that are willing to commit violence and those that just want a better world.
I want a better world too. But there is no countervailing force to the rise of violent extremism on the right, especially among young men. And pro-government sentiment within the Gen Z and Gen A cohort doesn't change that. If you were looking at the data I see, you would be upset too. It's mostly "progressives" and "leftists" that use those words and do very little with it, and a well-armed reactionary force that are being recruited by large, organized, right-wing organizations.
It's just a lot of extremely violent organizations that are successfully recruiting from M, G, and Z. It's a bummer, but it is what it is. My duty is just to report the data.
Edit: we do, in fact, report our data. And the thing that upsets me most is just how splintered the youth cohorts are about this information. We get the literal version of a downvote from the young people we show this data to. We regularly give presentations at college campuses across the United States and Canada, and the general sentiment is "nuh uh, look at my phone, see how radical we are?"
It is EXTREMELY upsetting. That's the ballgame, really. Wrap it up and head home. No one believes things are as bad as they are because they can pull a community together and have it fed directly to them 24/7 that tells them that's not the case.
What difference does raw data make? Especially when it disagrees with what we call "ambivalent cultural sentiment and belief." When that's the category, cohorts Z and A almost always revert to a belief system built on digital community instead of their physical community, and those tend to be built around what they already believe, and it just serves to reinforce structures of feeling that are not in alignment with the physical conditions and states of the physical community around them.
It's absolutely and unabashedly terrifying to me.
I’m afraid to ask, but I have to. If you extrapolate the data that is available to you, where does the general trend lead you? Riots? Civil War? Fascism?
We can't really extrapolate the data in that way for predictive models. I wish we could! The general consensus around the data set we currently have combining intergenerational data above youth cohorts indicates a higher probability for more authoritarian forms of government, and this seems to be a global trend.
Youth cohorts are some of the most strongly correlated demographics that align with pro government stances. What that means is that while governments in the western hemisphere continue to exert more control over the social lives of the nations within which they hold sway, young people, for this data means younger than 35, tend to still feel that state governments should be in control and support the idea of state control.
That's generally normal, however there has been a big flip in young people that express anti-government stances, and that does tend to be overwhelmingly from political ideologies that we might typically think of as on the right.
We have limited data for the past century, but most analysis done has shown that the general majority of anti-state positions held by youth in the western hemisphere were typically left-leaning after about 1918--to be sure, world wars tend to dramatically reorganize political thinking among youth.
Nevertheless, anti-state youth sentiment generally decreased following major wars. That is not the case anymore, and that is actually a huge swing from even the 1990s to now. Most young people are extremely pro government and pro state. Historically we would call that reformist, so I would characterize the young "left" as reformist and the young "right" as radical, broadly speaking.
In terms of riots and civil war, if you mean the United States or Canada, no... at least probably not how you're thinking. The chance of civil disturbances continues to increase. But Civil War in North America won't ever look like the history books. It will be asymmetric and non-continuous. If you're waiting for the "beginning of the war," there won't be one.
As we like to say, there will be no declaration of war. There will only be a recognition of when it ends.
Thanks for your time and interpretations. Hope your work and data makes a difference.
Appreciate it. Data is always subject to change with more data, and we live in a time of dramatic shifting sentiment around political ideologies. A result, I think, of the climate crisis and the rise in social media since about 2013 or so. Obviously social media existed before that, but there is a pronounced shift between about 2013-2015 in the data sets for reasons that remain under discussion with our analysts.
That’s easy…
That’s also when the Internet Research Agency went online.
Indeed. And also after Facebook researchers posted their findings about manipulating both emotion and behavior of users with their feed in the 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Simpler time then, it would seem! Lol
So far, you've creeped a few of my comments and extrapolated incorrect conclusions from a tiny amount of data, and haven't provided any numbers. Even if you are telling the truth, the fact that you felt confident enough to say the majority of my comments are about Starfield and coffee when they're the vast minority, means your data and the conclusions you draw are also highly questionable.
You'll have to forgive me if I call bullshit.
I forgive you. 😊
If you're creeped out by people looking at the publicly available data you freely release every day, do it less.
Another belief of M, Z and A: it is ok for corporations and businesses to access all their data and run analytics on it, but they find it upsetting when someone reminds them of the data they give away.
"OMG, you scrolled twice on my comments? So creepy."
I scrolled twice on your comments after the Wikipedia link. The majority of the posts were about videogames.
That's cool, I like video games too, but you can literally look at 20 comments back from your Wikipedia comment and see that I'm right, so idk what to tell you.
Majority means more than half, you know?
See, this is the exact bullshit I'm talking about.
The video gaming comments are from today. The vast majority of my comments are not about gaming. You extrapolated from one day's worth of data and figured it sound enough to claim the majority of my comments are about gaming, which if you were at all qualified to analyze data you'd know is obviously stupid.
I am not, in fact, okay with corporations harvesting my data, which is why I try to avoid proprietary software wherever I can. You individually scrolling and then making a judgement call based on comment history is equally creepy.
So yea, I don't know what to tell you. All you've done is display a total lack of knowledge of statistical analysis and creep my comments, neither of which accomplished anything valuable.
Lemmy isn't like Reddit, so you can actually see who downvotes. I'm getting a kick out of watching how much time you're spending going through my comment history and downvoting everything! Lol
I've gotta crash out, it's been a long day. Enjoy! 🤣
👍
Pollyanna Principal. Nice reference
🥰
Normal thing to happen when the enthusiasm of youth is blunted by betrayal and rejection and defeat.
Like, fuck Fascism, but I can't really blame a guy who has soured on the whole "Hope and Change" thing. Then having your brain hooked up to the YouTube algorithm of Andrew Tates and JBPs just blasting away all the braincells that aren't killed by booze and vaping...
The allure of Fascism is the promise of a big ethnic club to end your sense of alienation and despair combined with a near-to-hand enemy you can lash out at with the consent of the police. The Methamphetamine of ideologies - powerful highs and hard crashes. Its what you take when you're scrambling at the edge of a psychic pit.
Damn, that hit hard.
Who's JBP?
Jordan Peterson but for some reason they'd say Andrew Tate's name but not his lmao
Just didn't feel like typing the whole thing out. Had half a mind to call him "Kermit" but I figure that's a bit too deep a cut around here.