Why I fear the Zoomers

‘Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony’

‘To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty’. I’ve thought about that quote, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, a fair bit recently. I suppose for my generation, 9/11 was the formative event, which signalled the end of the triumphalist Nineties - although the extent to which it affected us is questionable. Perhaps of far greater importance was the financial crisis which unfolded towards the very end of the Bush-Blair era.

What about those born around the turn of the millennium, the so-called ‘Zoomers’? I suppose it would be the experience of being locked down for a year in order to protect an older generation whose wealth they can never hope to emulate. An already bitter and disillusioned cohort, denied their patrimony by house price inflation, came to adulthood with a period of deliberate social isolation with only the internet at hand - a lockdown that was punctuated by weeks of millennial hysteria over racism.

The intelligent ones would have seen the hysteria for it was - a wild distortion, and realised that the media regularly distorts all sorts of things, and it’s the intelligent ones I worry about. Indeed, when I read the thoughts and worldview of that generation, I feel a sense of dread about what’s coming; perhaps even more so when it comes from the Right.

I only watched a Nick Fuentes video for the first time this summer, an amusingly edited version of a talk in which he rails against Israeli military success. It had been sent by a Jewish friend with strong Zionist sympathies, and it’s very funny – Fuentes is very funny. If I were 20 years old, I might have watched his show, one of many aspects of life in 2025 which I thank God wasn’t around in my adolescence.

After all, most of the things I watched on television – five channels, kids, in fact more like four and half, as the Channel 5 reception wasn’t very good – liked to poke fun at the prevailing morality of the older generation. My favourite comic, Viz, would laugh at the old people whose fault it was that Eddie Murphy’s swearing had to be dubbed over with ‘freak you, monkeyfeather’. Today it’s only natural that young men should wish to offend woke scolds.

But then, of course, something darker might also be happening. Rod Dreher recalls a fascinating, and disturbing, account of his conversations with young Republican activists this week, writing that: ‘Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”’

There is certainly polling to suggest that younger voters in the US are moving to extremes, if you believe polls. One found that ‘explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters’, who are five times more likely to have an ‘unfavourable view of the Jewish people than 65 year olds.’ Since 2018, the percentage of American boys who believe in gender equality has shrunk. Far more worrying is that younger Americans are also much more likely to support political violence. and this is more of a problem on the left.

There does seem to be a broader rightward drift among American Zoomers, and although I’m sceptical about how extensive it is, it’s a notable pattern in continental Europe: in Portugal, CHEGA are at 27 per cent among 18-24 year-olds; in Poland, new president Karol Nawrocki won with both the 18-29 and 30-39 brackets. Similar patterns are found to some extent in France and Germany.

In fact, Britain’s young are now something of an outlier in being so left-leaning, and when the election comes we can expect young Britons to vote in that direction. Even here, however, among 18-24s there is widespread discontent with immigration levels, Farage does has a certain cult following with the young, and Reform are on 22 per cent - way ahead of the Tories.

Radical politics will always have more appeal to those not yet invested in the system. People without property or savings are far more likely to be tempted by the Scrooge McDuck economic theory of the Green Party, a worldview in which ‘the billionaires’ are hoarding money which could otherwise pay for vital public services. Both in Britain and the US, younger generations are far more likely to believe in zero-sum thinking, that the poor are poor because the rich are rich.

But then, why wouldn’t they? My cohort entered the workforce in the economy bequeathed us by Kenneth Clarke, and were not entirely locked out of the multigenerational Ponzi scheme that is housing inflation, nor the related welfare bubble; it’s hardly surprising that those at the end of the scheme feel that they have been cheated, as this video comparing the lives of someone born in 1964 and someone born in 2000 shows.

Just as Peter Thiel said, capitalism hasn’t really worked for the younger generations, even if there is an argument to be made that they haven’t experienced it enough: after all, the areas where life has become most overpriced, housing especially, are the most regulated.

If you’re a Briton born in 2000, and especially if you’re from London, you will also be strongly aware of a loss of patrimony. You are now priced out of your own city, which has become notably alien, declining from being over 70 per cent white British at the time of Blair’s election to just over a third today. Immigration is not the largest factor in housing cost inflation, although it added about 20 per cent to prices in the first two decades of the century, but it all contributes to a sense of downgrading. As you hand over huge amounts of your salary to your landlord, you will note that a large number of your neighbours are social housing residents, half of them immigrants and a clear majority from immigrant backgrounds.

You have been denied your patrimony, and as Machiavelli famously wrote, ‘men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony’. Among many younger voters priced out of London in particular, there may be genuine bitterness towards immigrants or welfare recipients, but most of it seems directed at the people who squandered that patrimony – their parents’ generation, and in particular the conservatives who went along with these changes.

Much of the prevailing political anger among the younger right is aimed at ‘boomercons’, and their worldview which crystallised in the last two decades of the 20^th century: Atlanticist, vaguely Thatcherite but also attached to the Martin Luther King view of egalitarianism and a civic idea of the nation. These ideas haven’t been discredited as such; they have simply been overtaken by events, appropriate to the demography, economy and geopolitics of the 1990s. They are meaningless to a young man renting in Finsbury Park in 2025.

Older people, owning their own homes in the declining number of pleasant areas the wider London region offers, and no longer competing for jobs, often seem unaware of how grim it appears to younger cohorts, stuck in a Yookay Aesthetics world of high rents and low wages. The core Tory/Lib Dem vote is now in Nice Britain, those parts of the country which seem fine; the rest of it is up for grabs.

Although economics plays a part, another driver of younger voter radicalisation is that the traditional link between conservatism and institutions has been broken; for decades the bedrock of the Conservative Party was the Church of England, and the sharp decline of one was bound to eventually weaken the other.

But most major institutions in Britain have been captured either by radical progressives, or express a sort of soft-liberal groupthink - again trapped in a permanent 1990s - which is so widespread that the people within it actually come to believe it is neutral. The most obvious case is the BBC, dominated by people of a certain generation and irrelevant to many younger Britons, despite their desperate attempts to pander to them. Its supporters tend to be liberals making conservative arguments about institutions, unable to grasp that support for such institutions has collapsed following decades of progressive drift; and when institutions collapse, voters with conservative instincts will move towards more extreme political movements offering security and a sense of group identity.

There are more troubling generational issues. In France there is a great deal of radical right content on TikTok, while 18-29 year old voters in Poland who opted for the extreme right are also heavy users of that attention-grabbing platform. Likewise in Romania, there was a clear link between support for the far-right and TikTok use.

One reason for political radicalisation is that we’re heading towards a post-literate age, with far fewer young people reading books compared to previous generations; oral societies are much more emotional, as well as being far more ignorant of the past. These trends all work against more moderate politics.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact about the coming generation is how sexually polarised they are, by politics and worldview, with young men moving to the right and women to the left. In the 2024 EU elections, the ratio of far-right voting between young men and women was as high as 5:1 in some countries. This is happening across the West, although it is most extreme in South Korea, where notably it is men who have become more radical.

Everywhere else, young female radicalisation is the big trend of the past 20 years, but largely untouched by a media run by middle-aged journalists terrified of their teenage daughters, and inhabiting a popular culture in which young men are the outgroup (and so attracted to socially subversive content). Besides which, average psychological differences between the sexes are one of the unspoken subjects of the age, and so one of the things the media routinely lies about.

Among the characteristics of radicalisation is a far greater intolerance towards people of differing opinions, and the common idea that you can’t be friends with them. Younger voters are far more politically intolerant, but there is a huge imbalance, with younger leftists more extreme. In part this is because politics has come to take the role of religion, with all its sectarian hatred, and especially attractive to a generation suffering far higher levels of anxiety (which, again, is highly asymmetrical.)

Many young men, it is true, do seem ‘lost’ in some way, easy prey to political entrepreneurs and lifestyle gurus who might not take them down the path of righteousness.

Earlier this year, Mana Afsari wrote about the ‘sensitive young men’ she found at the National Conservative convention. She described the younger NatCons as ’New Romantics. Young men looking for meaning, guidance, purpose and use, for a world where they could belong. They needed a role in a political future.’ Many seemed attracted to the ‘greatness’ Donald Trump promised, an ideal that has always attracted lost young men. Some also displayed a deep personal attachment to Trump, one young man believing that the ‘extent to which they were trying to stop him represented the extent to which people have tried to stop me.’

I don’t think you need to be a psychologist to suggest that Trump represents a paternal figure to many young men who lack one; Jordan Peterson certainly was, the sort of older man who has your best interests at heart, who is loving but authoritative and provides clear guidance. Trump is perhaps more likely an amusing, half-dotty grandfather, but this need for a secular saviour, if widespread across society, is not especially healthy.

It’s not just that so many men are growing up without fathers, but that parental authority has declined, so that even when young males have fathers around, they perhaps resent or disrespect them, especially when – as is with the case with so many young Rightists – those fathers are complacent Blairites whose mental map of Britain is still stuck in the Britpop era.

Afsari also cited the importance of Francis Fukuyama, who was widely mocked after 9/11 by people who never read his book, which was actually a warning about what would happen if democracy became a battle over status between groups.

‘Men seek not just material comfort,’ Fukuyama wrote, ‘but respect or recognition, and they believe that they are worthy of respect because they possess a certain value or dignity. A psychology, or a political science, that did not take into account man’s desire for recognition, and his infrequent but very pronounced willingness to act at times contrary to eve the strongest natural instinct, would misunderstand something very important about human behaviour.’

This battle for recognition between groups – ethnic minorities, immigrants, women, and the various components of the LGBT alphabet soup – now dominates political life, a trend which reached its nadir in 2020 when so many were locked down. Unlike economic growth, status competition really is a zero-sum game.

This competition has been encouraged by an older generation who never had to suffer the downsides of a zero-sum game in which younger white men were fated to be the primary losers. When an old institutional duffer, assured of his pension, explains that people like him need to make way for new ‘voices’, it’s not them who are making way, but struggling twenty-somethings who see themselves as victims of discrimination. (And when you look at institutions like the BBC, have those new ‘voices’ improved the output of the corporation?)

This is worth remembering when one considers growing evidence showing that young people are losing faith in our democracy. A YouGov study found that only half of young people in France and Spain believe that democracy is the best form of government. Earlier this year a survey for Channel 4 found that a slight majority of young voters preferred a ‘strong leader… who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.’

The report cited ‘one 25-year-old male participant from Penryn, Cornwall,’ who ‘told pollsters that he felt “targeted” because he was a “regular straight white man who has had a cultural advantage in the past. It’s swinging back the other way, to a point where we potentially risk discriminating against us in favour of people in minority groups.”’

If democracy is merely a battle for status between competing groups, then it is not necessarily the best means for delivering good government; it has no intrinsic value, especially to a generation for whom the European wars are a distant memory. This declining faith in democracy is heavily driven by economic factors, and ‘the breakdown of the social-democratic compact’, but Fukuyama’s idea of thymos is a central factor.

It all points to a very toxic combination: a generation who will grow up notably worse off than their parents, unable to afford homes, raised online, and who have come to inhabit rival worldviews which do not recognise each other as legitimate, and within a culture in which zero-sum status competition predominates. Where does it lead?

Nigel Farage, in a recent interview with The Times, tellingly made the comment that ‘Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone.’ Or as another young political activist told Dreher, ‘The truth is, Nigel is really the only thing standing between Britain and fascism.’ I’m not sure about fascism, but something bad is coming, fuelled by a Freudian sense of rage against the elders. And who can blame them?