Young People Are Getting REALLY Conservative. Here's Why.

In the early months of 2025, The New York Times published a headline that would have felt almost surreal just a few years earlier: When Your Son Goes MAGA. Not long ago, a story like that would have been treated as a curiosity, a fringe cultural anomaly, or at most an amusing reversal of expectations rather than a serious political trend worthy of sustained attention.

For decades, particularly in the United States, the anxiety ran in the opposite direction. Conservative parents worried that their children would leave home for college and return questioning religion, rejecting traditional values, and voting reliably for the left. Universities were widely seen as engines of progressive socialization, places where inherited beliefs were softened or discarded entirely. That assumption became so deeply embedded in political culture that it was rarely questioned.

Today, that model no longer holds.

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried young men by sixteen points, marking the strongest Republican performance among that demographic in generations. While Kamala Harris still won a majority of the young female vote, Trump made notable inroads there as well, narrowing a gap that had long been taken for granted. Across Europe, similar shifts are playing out, with far-right parties gaining traction among younger voters in ways that would have been considered politically impossible even a decade earlier. The phenomenon has become so common that mainstream publications are now offering guidance for liberal parents attempting to understand why their sons have embraced MAGA politics.

Something fundamental has shifted beneath the surface of Western politics, and remarkably, the people who spent the most time predicting generational outcomes appear to have missed it entirely.

The Collapse of a Political Assumption

For years, pollsters and strategists operated under a reassuring theory of generational change. Each cohort would be more progressive than the last, more open to diversity, more committed to climate action, and more skeptical of traditional hierarchies. The only persistent concern was whether young voters would reliably show up at the polls, not whether they would defect ideologically.

As late as 2020, the theory still appeared intact. Joe Biden, despite embodying very little of what might be described as youthful political energy, carried young voters comfortably and predictably. The model seemed vindicated.

Yet even then, warning signs were flashing.

Surveys showed young men, in particular, drifting steadily rightward, a trend that accelerated after Trump selected JD Vance as his running mate, offering a style of populism that framed grievances in blunt, accessible terms rather than abstract policy language. When the final numbers were tallied, Trump had not merely closed the gap with young men; he had won them outright. Several outlets noted that he captured a larger share of voters under thirty than any Republican since 2008.

Crucially, this shift was not confined to the United States, nor can it be dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of America’s electoral system.

Europe’s Parallel Awakening

Across Europe, the same generational realignment is underway despite vastly different political systems and social contexts. In France, more than a quarter of voters aged eighteen to twenty-four supported explicitly far-right candidates in the 2022 presidential election. By the 2024 European elections, support for the National Rally among young voters had climbed above thirty percent, a dramatic increase in just a few years. Emmanuel Macron, once marketed as the youthful centrist embodiment of modern France, found himself losing ground to both the far left and the far right among voters who were supposed to form his natural base.

Germany presents an even starker example. During the 2010s, the Greens emerged as the dominant political force among young Germans, driven by intense concern over climate change and environmental collapse. By the mid-2020s, that dominance had largely evaporated. Economic anxiety, crime, and immigration surged to the top of young voters’ priorities, while support for the Greens collapsed. In the 2024 European Parliamentary elections, the party secured just eleven percent of the youth vote, a decline of more than twenty points, while the far-right Alternative for Germany nearly tripled its share.

What makes this particularly significant is not merely the rise of far-right parties, but the collapse of an issue hierarchy that once defined youth politics entirely.

From Climate Idealism to Economic Reality

Throughout much of the 2010s, climate activism was the defining cause of young political engagement in both Europe and the United States. Greta Thunberg became a global icon before she was old enough to vote, and environmental politics shaped not only policy debates but cultural identity itself. By the mid-2020s, however, that dominance had faded considerably.

This does not mean young people stopped caring about the environment. Rather, issues with immediate and tangible consequences have crowded out long-term existential concerns. Housing affordability, grocery prices, wages, and immigration now compete directly with climate action in ways that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. Importantly, the parties speaking most aggressively about these pressures are not on the left.

Cultural Overreach and the Politics of Silence

The cultural context in which Gen Z came of age matters just as much as economics. Many of the oldest members of this generation entered adulthood during what felt like the culmination of decades of progressive victories. Marriage equality moved from controversial to settled law. Long-standing social barriers appeared to be falling with remarkable speed. The prevailing narrative suggested that history itself was bending decisively in one direction.

What followed may come to be seen as a turning point where progressivism began to overestimate the durability of its mandate. Victories bred moral certainty, and positions that had once been debated openly became treated as settled orthodoxy. Dissent increasingly carried professional, social, and reputational costs.

On college campuses, this shift became particularly visible. Surveys revealed widespread self-censorship, with students reporting that they felt unable to express views that might be considered offensive, even when those views had once been considered moderate or mainstream. Confidential interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 painted an even more striking picture, with large majorities of students admitting they had pretended to hold more progressive views than they actually believed in order to succeed academically or professionally.

These were not hardened conservatives. Many were centrists or left-leaning individuals who simply learned that silence was safer than honest disagreement.

Order as a Political Message

The Gaza protests of 2024 crystallized these tensions. Campus encampments, building occupations, cancelled graduations, and abrupt shifts to remote learning created the perception that institutions had lost control. For the college class of 2024—students who had already lost their high-school milestones to the pandemic—the disruptions felt particularly cruel.

Into that environment stepped conservative politicians emphasizing order, boundaries, and authority. For the first time in years, those themes resonated with a generation assumed to reject them outright.

The Economic Trap Beneath It All

Economically, Gen Z should by all conventional measures be deeply left-leaning. They carry unprecedented student debt, face housing markets that feel functionally closed, and express growing skepticism toward capitalism itself. Yet despite this, they are not flocking en masse to traditional left-wing parties.

They followed the path they were promised would lead to stability. They pursued education, took on debt, and accepted the narrative that those sacrifices would pay off. Instead, they entered a world where homeownership increasingly resembles a retirement milestone rather than a realistic goal, and where living with parents into adulthood has become the norm rather than the exception.

When they looked for explanations, one political side acknowledged the pain directly. Whether or not the solutions offered were viable mattered less than the fact that someone was naming the problem in plain language. In politics, being heard often matters more than being correct.

The Meaning Vacuum

Economic frustration combined with cultural exclusion creates a vacuum, and vacuums are always filled. For some young people, that space has been occupied by religion, particularly forms of faith that offer structure, continuity, and moral clarity rather than constant adaptation. Catholicism has surged among young adults in both the United Kingdom and the United States, while younger Muslims in Europe have become more observant than their parents, defying long-held assumptions about secularization.

For others, the vacuum has been filled by far darker alternatives. Online radicalization, extremist ideologies, and figures who offer permission rather than restraint have gained traction. Once individuals adopt these alternative moral frameworks, reintegration into mainstream political culture becomes exceedingly difficult.

Where This Leaves Us

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this entire shift is the lack of urgency it inspires among those in power. Extremists are condemned rhetorically, but the underlying forces driving people toward them are rarely addressed with the same intensity. A generation was promised stability through a clearly defined set of steps, followed that script faithfully, and found itself locked out of the system anyway.

Whatever one thinks of the populist right, it is at least engaging with that reality. And in politics, telling voters that their lived experiences are wrong is rarely a winning strategy. It is a lesson that many institutions appear slow to learn, even as the consequences grow harder to ignore.

SOURCES

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/19/style/when-your-son-goes-maga.html

https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-gender-and-age-analysis-of-2024-election-results/

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/07/g-s1-33331/unpacking-the-2024-youth-vote-heres-what-we-know-so-far

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019