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.