RECENTLY I posted a Substack celebrating the defeat of Thomas Massie and the increasing strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. I said that it showed that clicks and likes are not votes, and that the influencers attacking Trump have far less effect than they think.
All that was true but there is a significant proviso, which I want to address here. And that proviso is the radicalisation of youth. Youth is not on Trump’s side, in terms of his own longevity nor in terms of which generations are likeliest to vote for him.
And that is something not to be complacent about. In fact, it represents a far more serious issue than Trump’s success or failure. Much as I’m a huge Trump supporter, this issue isn’t specific to who backs Massie and who backs Trump. It encompasses both the political direction of the whole Western world and the mental stability of everyone from 18 to 29.
Polling on the political attitudes of the 18-to-29-year-old voters is devastatingly clear, just as the support base of most online influencers is as well. If youth are politically engaged (and there is a large non-voting element who aren’t, who in many ways might be the sanest of this age bracket) they are engaged as radical extremists in one way or another.
They are either agreeing with Nazi revisionists and self-professed Hitler fans such as Darryl Cooper or Nick Fuentes, and casually adopting the belief that the US is controlled by malign Jews based in Israel, or they are the strongest supporters of left-wing parties that have gone to radical extremes in other ways such as considering abortion to full term normal, or being gender-confused communists who think that Trump should be assassinated.
I don’t intend this article to particularly be about the anti-Semitism issue, save to say that both groups have embraced hating Jews and hating Israel to an extent which indicates their extremism by any traditional definition. Despite my objections to the term Woke Right, James Lindsay is fundamentally correct in identifying the fact that 18-to-29-year-olds who support Hasan Piker or Nick Fuentes are essentially the same kind of people embracing the same kind of politics: the politics of violent, nihilistic, murderous extremism. And he’s right too that left and right lose any relevance as labels when what you are talking about are people who think political murder is OK, or people who think Jews control the world.
Whether it’s an Antifa mob attacking people, a BLM crowd attacking people, a radical feminist crowd attacking people, a person of indeterminate gender with purple hair attacking people, or an incel sitting in a basement and chortling about people being attacked, whether it’s a Save the Planet Green radical attacking people who drive gas guzzlers or a Save the Refugees activist firebombing a Tesla, the basic constituents are that there are more young people doing this, and that the young people doing it share very negative and extreme characteristics almost regardless of the alleged ideology or alleged cause they are protesting about.
Narratives and rhetoric that were Soviet-era propaganda are now ‘mainstream’ party policy platforms, and an open level of support for Jew hatred or for terrorism once confined to fringe figures is now expressed by almost everyone with impunity. Full-on communism for example is no longer something that only an unpopular fringe expresses, and a candidate who combines both communism and Islamism can be elected to run New York. Such candidates are particularly attractive to the youth vote.
In the UK at the moment the Green Party have overtaken the Labour Party (who are hard-left social radicals by any traditional understanding) as the chief beneficiaries of both the female vote and the youth vote. The Green Party believe there should be no borders, no limits on immigration, and that anyone has the right to come to Western nations and live here. It also believes that taxation (at historic highs) is far too low and that the State (at historic highs) should be expanded. They advocate that this can all be accommodated by property and wealth seizures. In other words, it’s a communist platform.
On the surface this might seem a long way from US isolationism, or from incel politics and Groyper-alienated male embrace of Nazism by Fuentes and hatred of women from figures such as Andrew Tate in the Manosphere, but really it is the same thing. Once you discard worrying about whether these movements are left-wing or right-wing and concentrate on whether they are normal, moderate or rational, it’s not just on treatment of Jews that the Horseshoe Effect becomes evident, but on the shared extremism of these positions in terms of backing things that were once unthinkable and obviously immoral. It’s a shared radicalism on gender (hating all men, hating all women, extreme perversions or extreme gender confusions). It’s a shared radicalism on political violence (supporting terrorist groups, demonising rival voters to the extent of encouraging or celebrating their murder) and it’s a shared radicalism on political policy (complete expansion of the State, complete destruction of the family, complete demand for massive changes that don’t actually have overall majority support).
And all of it comes with a surreal combination of vast ignorance, enormous self-blindness, and absolute certainty regarding their own intelligence and goodness. The following exchange between two Massie enthusiasts could equally have come from two young Jeremy Corbyn admirers a few years ago:
I have zero knowledge except my feelings.
Your feelings are so true, dude.
Everyone else are low-information voters controlled by da Joos.
That combination of admission of knowing nothing combined with calling others low information voters is a perfect summation of woke thinking, which is the standard thinking model of the university ‘educated’ 18-to-29-year-olds. We crammed very stupid people into institutions that told them compliance to leftist ideological positions is intelligence. And even if they briefly designate themselves as right-wing, the style of thinking or rather the lack of thinking is the same.
On the non-directly political front, the endless articles on the difficulty of dating and on the collapse of male and female interaction are another indicator of radicalisation of the youth vote and the youth mentality. It used to be normal for young people to settle down quickly in ways that are socially and politically stabilising. It used to be that most 25-year-olds were married with children. Now they are single, embittered, alienated from each other, childless, and screaming into camera about politics, or laughing with each other when someone is murdered.
So what are the characteristics these radicalised youth voters share? Well, they were born into already collapsing social structures. Stabilising influences such as family, extended family, real community and early responsibility had disappeared. Welfare and leisure have done more damage than good. Sexual freedom has been a social and psychological disaster. The removal of real problems has allowed imaginary ones to flourish. And of course the death of faith, or the subversion of Christian churches by communist infiltrators, has destroyed an over-arching spiritual awareness of the value of Western civilisation in particular and stable life according to meaningful and traditional ethics on a more personal level.
Entitlement mixed with ignorance, and extremism that considers itself kind, is the new template of the modern mind, a mind deprived of the stabilising influences of traditional heritage, culture and religion, a mind that is suffused with a superiority complex while imbibing false lessons, then finds itself inferior when looking for work. A mind that was promised it could indulge in any vice without consequence, and then struggles to understand a budget or that wealth and success are not generated by Communist decree. And a mind that rages at all that it lacks, while pressing for the policies that take away what little is left. Thus we get people who complain about low wages or absent jobs while also insisting that open borders (which allow in foreign workers as well as foreign parasites) are morally good.
On economics and immigration and social policy young people are the strongest supporters of the things that have already made their lives worse, and are now likely to demand destructive policies in destructively violent ways.
This article appeared on Jupplandia on May 24, 2016, and is republished by kind permission.
