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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Ever since the election, there seems to be a torrent of polling that shows Americans in their late teens and early twenties are fairly reactionary (young men overwhelmingly so). I’m old so I don’t know anyone IRL in that age bracket. But something about what the media has been claiming for months now doesn’t seem to sound right. Idk maybe it’s 100% true but it’s something I have a hard time taking the media’s word for. I know we have quite a few users here in that age bracket. What are your real-life experiences (i.e. not online) with this? Do you think this age demographic is actually trending reactionary?

(I do remember digging into the details of one poll, and while it seemed there was more affiliation with Republicans than previous, it also seemed like there were an also very large segment that were openly showing to be further left than the democrats? So maybe more reactionary sentiment but also more genuinely leftish sentiment?)

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

I've been teaching high school and/or college for close to 15 years now, and anecdotally I haven't really seen the needle move one way or the other (at least in that dimension). The one trend that I've maybe noticed is that the students who are more politically engaged tend to be somewhat more radical in either direction--either very right wing or full-on commies. Even that doesn't seem like an especially pronounced effect to me, though.

I think it's more common to see a disengagement from politics, at least for issues that don't affect them directly. That's reactionary in effect since the status quo is reactionary, but the motivation (generally) isn't reactionary. What I see more than anything else is a pervasive kind of despair, whether that manifests as gallows humor, cynicism, ironic detachment, or nihilism. Some kids manage to forge that despair into righteous anger, and some of those manage to point that anger at the right target. Most of them, though, are just pretty checked out. That ends up reproducing the behavioral politics (if not the motivation) of libs.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I'm not from the US, but this tracks with what I've seen

Most are checked out and those who follow politics are radicalized to either extreme

One great bonus in all of this is that I always have gifts for younger kids in the family, they love my stickers

this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
63 points (97.0% liked)

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