Summary
With Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, young Gen Z voters like Kate, Holly, and Rachel are grappling with deepening divides with their Trump-supporting parents.
For many, these conflicts go beyond policy disagreements, touching on core values and morality. Parents once focused on fiscal conservatism have, in some cases, embraced conspiracy theories, creating painful rifts.
Studies suggest political divisions are increasingly seen as moral judgments, fostering a “mega-identity” where political views signify personal decency.
For these young adults, maintaining family connections amidst such ideological fractures has become challenging.
Yeah I’m not so sure anymore either. I used to buy into this thinking from personal experience, like nobody amongst any generations could have the nuanced detailed discussions about progressive subjects like race and gender and it’s depiction in media as your typical Gen-Z or millennial on Tumblr or Reddit and all those massively popular decent video essayists and science communicators on YouTube, heck even the right wingers used to make fun of millennials for “heckin’ science” and whatnot.
But now it’s like there’s been a change, now everything is so massively anti-intellectual, people unironically say that a paragraph is too long to read in comments they choose to browse, simplicity is glorified versus complexity/reality/nuance.
Perhaps Gen-Z is just far more polarized and radicalised in both directions. If I have to think of the most “lame” thing someone could say in my generation and the most easily attacked position it’s to be an establishment or status quo simp like a milquetoast republican or democrat.