This interview was conducted in early 2024, before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president.—Ed.
Four years ago Americans elected the oldest man ever to be inaugurated as president. That generation of leaders, born during and just after World War II, has held power longer than anyone could have expected when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was first elected in 1972 as one of the youngest senators in history. Four different presidents born between 1942 and 1946 have now served a total of nearly twenty-four years in the most powerful job in the world. It is an astonishing feat of generational persistence.
Near the far end of today’s generation gap is Gen Z, or Zoomers: roughly speaking, those born between 1997 and 2012, who include the nation’s newest and youngest voters. The oldest Zoomers came of age during the Obama administration, but those on the younger end have never known a world without the internet, smartphones, and social media. They have also been steeped in an overheated political culture that is as bitterly divided as any since the sixties.
Like all generations of young people, this one has inspired stereotypes: Zoomers are supposedly entitled, unambitious, anxious, and more likely to socialize online than in person. But some in Gen Z have belied these notions through political activism, leading protest movements against racism, gun violence, and climate devastation. This past spring some Gen Z college students put themselves at the center of the debate over American policy toward Israel and Palestinians.
Finding out how this new generation thinks, learning what makes them different, and understanding their likely impact on our politics are tasks that political scientist Melissa Deckman has taken on in her role as chief executive at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and in her new book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. In her research Deckman supervised extensive surveys and conducted in-depth personal interviews with politically engaged Zoomers. She previously chaired the political-science department at Washington College in Maryland and has taught courses on the roles of women, religion, and local organizing in politics.
Over the course of two video calls from her home in Annapolis this spring, Deckman and I spoke about sclerotic politics, the rising power of women in activism, and the potential of Gen Z. Overall she is optimistic about Zoomers’ ability to help steer things in the right direction, while she acknowledges the difficulties they will face. Will the most-online generation be able to help develop institutions that can make real-world change? “It’s an open question,” she says. “What gives me hope is that young people are more engaged than I was at their age.”
Not all conversations are as linear or succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.
MELISSA DECKMAN
© Charlie Belt
McDermon: It feels like we’re stuck with leaders who have been around for a long time and also stuck in a divisive struggle over what America is about. Why can’t we move on?
Deckman: The problem is both structural and individual. We have a political system that was designed to make it very difficult to pass legislation. Going back to the writing of the Constitution, there was concern that having a direct democracy could lead to mob rule and policies that would be extreme in some way. So our system of government is an indirect democracy with elected representation and a separation of powers: all meant to safeguard liberties and freedoms.
Until the late twentieth century there was an assumption that those operating in this system had a commitment to govern and come up with solutions together. Now, not everyone was a good actor, and many Americans were left out: women couldn’t vote until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920; African Americans were disenfranchised through Jim Crow. But, generally speaking, we had some ideological diversity within the parties and commitment to work together across party lines. And there was a commitment by many Americans, including those in elected office, to abide by important, extraconstitutional norms that safeguarded the liberal tenets of our democracy.
We don’t really have that any longer. In the twenty-first century we have developed a deep polarization between our two major parties. But that polarization is asymmetrical: the Republican party seems to be far more likely to use antidemocratic means to stop certain policies from moving forward. In the last decade we have seen the creation of more gerrymandered districts with safe incumbents, and so the primary is where voters get to choose who their representatives will be. It used to be that the candidates would have to come to the center for the general election to secure moderate voters. That really hasn’t happened as much in recent years. So there’s an incentive for primary candidates to run on extreme positions, given that relatively few people vote in primary contests.
On an individual level we’ve become far more polarized politically. Scholars like Lilliana Mason have examined how partisanship has become part of our social identity. This disincentivizes compromise, because partisans typically dislike the other side more than they like their own. The goal becomes to punish the other side, to prevent them from winning, rather than to produce good public policy. Look at what happened this past February with the bill on immigration being considered before Congress. The bill had policies that conservatives had long been arguing for to address the crisis at our border. But the GOP was unwilling to pass it because they didn’t want to give Joe Biden a political victory ahead of November’s election. That, to me, is a perverse set of incentives for governing.
McDermon: So politics has come to be about winning rather than about accomplishing anything.
Deckman: Yes, and as a result a lot of Americans have completely tuned out of politics. Why would you want to follow politics when nothing is accomplished? Many Americans feel that political leaders aren’t addressing their needs. Younger people especially are feeling this way, and we’re seeing it in the data. PRRI’s recent survey on Generation Z found that more than six in ten Zoomers believe that older generations will never fully understand the struggles that their generation is going through and that Americans won’t be able to solve the country’s big problems until the older generation no longer holds power.
Moreover, people who are heavily invested in politics silo themselves in media environments that only reinforce their viewpoints. They are less and less willing to talk to people on the other side. At PRRI we found that social networks are highly sorted for similarity. Roughly two-thirds of partisans only hang out with people who share their viewpoints or have similar viewpoints, and that’s true on both the Left and the Right. We find a lack of racial and religious diversity in social networks as well. It’s troubling because this breeds mistrust of the other side. It’s not merely that people have political differences; strong partisans increasingly view the other side as morally bankrupt, which gins up an appetite for things that are threatening to our democracy, like political violence.
We have found an uptick among Americans who say it might be acceptable to use political violence because things have gotten so far off track. Does that mean that most Americans are out there committing acts of violence for political purposes? No. But January 6 should serve as a huge wake-up call for Americans. Given our political environment, if a candidate or a political party refuses to accept the results of a free and fair election, these kinds of things can happen.
McDermon: You’ve done a lot of research on what you call the “reverse gender gap.” Could you explain what that is?
Deckman: Historically speaking, although women tend to vote more than men, they have been less likely to protest or contact their congressperson or go to a community meeting. Now, in the last decade and a half, women have caught up with men with respect to these more direct forms of political participation, but they are still more reluctant to run for office.
In 2017 PRRI partnered with MTV to get a sense of Americans’ attitudes about politics and discrimination and race. (Gen Z is the most racially and ethnically diverse generation of young adults our country has ever seen; nearly half its members are non-white.) What we found was that, for the first time, young women were more engaged in politics than young men. Other sources, including more data that I collected, showed the same thing: during the Trump years, from 2017 to 2021, young women were more engaged in politics than young men.
I think there were several reasons for this. One is that Trump’s election and presidency really galvanized a lot of young women. Hillary Clinton, the country’s first female major-party nominee, had lost to Trump, who, of course, had famously bragged about getting away with sexually assaulting women because of his fame and power. Many women were appalled that Trump was elected despite, or maybe because of, his sexist attitudes and behaviors. In 2018 there was a surge of female candidates in response to that. In that same period the #MeToo movement led women of various ages to step up and say that sexual harassment and discrimination are far more widespread than many had thought.
So these young women were experiencing the #MeToo movement in their late teens and early twenties. They were very angry at Trump. They also saw the rise of diverse young female role models like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Young progressive female activists talked about her all the time in my interviews with them. There is something profound about seeing people who look like you taking part in politics. And then, during the pandemic, a lot of young people were stuck at home and using social media as a way to become more politically engaged and to organize more effectively.
Even prior to Trump’s election, however, there was a concerted effort to raise self-esteem among young women, to get them more interested in sports or STEM careers [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—Ed.], and to train them as leaders through programs such as Girl Scouts. I think these efforts ultimately had a spillover effect into young women’s willingness to engage in politics. By early 2022, though, the reverse gender gap had narrowed: young men had caught up with young women in political engagement, though some of our more recent data at PRRI suggests that after the Dobbs decision, we might be seeing higher levels of engagement once again by young women.
McDermon: One vast difference in Gen Z, compared to other generations, is how many of them identify as LGBTQ. Do you think that suggests their political activism may be different or possibly more enduring as compared to their predecessors?
Deckman: I do. We find that roughly one in four members of Gen Z identifies as part of the LGBTQ community. That level is far higher than among older Americans. And this has really colored a lot of their political views.
A survey I did in 2019 found that identifying as LGBTQ wasn’t necessarily leading to more involvement in politics. But by 2022 it was. There has been an increasing level of support for the rights of LGBTQ Americans, such as growing support for same-sex marriage, in the last decade. But the recent rise of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party is a backlash to that: Ron DeSantis trying to say that Florida teachers can’t talk about gender or sexuality in schools; Moms for Liberty campaigning to ban gay-themed books from school libraries; and the anti-trans bills passed in state legislatures around the country that would outlaw gender-affirming care for minors. The perception that the only recently won rights of LGBTQ Americans are vulnerable has led to more activism among Gen Z.
With women, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling is having a similar effect. The rights they assumed would always be there were suddenly taken from them. Even though that reverse gender gap has dissipated somewhat as young men catch up to women in terms of their political engagement, we’re still finding that progressive young women—women who are feminists, women who support abortion rights and LGBTQ rights—are still participating in politics at higher levels than young people who are Republican or independent.
Strong partisans increasingly view the other side as morally bankrupt, which gins up an appetite for things that are threatening to our democracy, like political violence.
McDermon: Is there a significant far-right vein among Gen Z?
Deckman: The data don’t show one. We are seeing that young white men are probably the most conservative, certainly compared to Gen Z women and non-white Gen Z men. There are some early indications that Trump might be making inroads with young men, even young men of color, although not by leaps and bounds. I’d be surprised if we see lots of young men becoming Republican in the wake of other trends. Democrats should worry more that young people are going to stay home this election.
Having said that, there is a sense that some young men are becoming more conservative with respect to gender as a backlash against the movement to extend rights to trans Americans. For example, we’ve asked in our polls whether people think America has become “too soft and feminine.” In 2022 we found about half of Gen Z men and about 30 percent of Gen Z women agreed with that sentiment. In September 2023 that figure crept up to about 60 percent of Gen Z men. Not surprisingly, people who agree strongly that America is becoming too soft and feminine are far more likely to vote Republican.
Young men are more conservative in their attitudes about social roles for women, and they may be struggling with what masculinity means. But I don’t think that is leading many of them to become Christian nationalists or to join alt-right movements. Gen Z men, in fact, are more progressive than older men on many issues. For example, 59 percent of Gen Z men think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 63 percent of Gen Z men support same-sex marriage rights. That’s certainly not a position of the alt-right or Christian nationalists.
We also find that a lot of Gen Z men are committed to racial equality—not nearly to the extent to which Gen Z women are, though. We asked in a recent survey, “Do you believe or agree today that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities?” While we didn’t publish our results by gender or generation in that report publicly, subsequent analysis shows that 42 percent of Gen Z men agreed with that sentiment, which is similar to the percentage among older male and female Americans. Only about 33 percent of Gen Z women agreed with that sentiment.
McDermon: We’re talking about generations here. I’ve read a lot of articles about Generation X, or Millennials, or Zoomers, and they often seem like they’re—
Deckman: Parsed in ways that are convenient for the story the author wants to tell.
McDermon: Some researchers have been critical of the idea that there is such a thing as coherent generations. What’s your response to that?
Deckman: I think there’s lots of valid criticism about using a generational lens to explain people’s behavior. Social scientists have tried to grapple with what we call the APC effect [age-period-cohort—Ed.], or age, time period, and life cycle. If Gen Z is more liberal on a variety of attitudes, is it because they’re just young, and will they become more conservative as they age? It could be that Gen Z supports stronger social services, for example, because they’re not making a lot of money. When they become homeowners or have kids themselves, they might think, Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be taxed so high. That’s what we would call a life-cycle effect.
But generational analysis is important for a couple of reasons. Jean Twenge, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject, believes that the way generations experience culture during their early years can be formative. Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with this [picks up an iPhone] in their back pocket. So the way that they’re experiencing culture is very different from the way older Americans did at their age. Does that mean that older Americans aren’t on their phones a lot? Of course not. All of us are influenced by changes in technology. But for young people today, it’s really changed their habits in ways that will have an impact moving forward, including with respect to their political habits and views.
The diversity of Gen Z is another good reason to consider generational analysis. They’re growing up in a world that looks very different from the world their parents or grandparents grew up in. I was raised in a pretty rural county where there were very few people of color. But we have a younger generation now for whom it’s far more commonplace to have friends of different races. This can have long-lasting effects on political views and can build tolerance and support for racial pluralism. Events that happen to you as a young adult have far more impact than the events you experience when you’re older. You’re setting your foundational ideas about what the scope and size of government should be and what your political values are. We know, looking at longitudinal data, that oftentimes those values and ideas get baked in when you’re young. So if I’m a Democrat when I’m twenty, I’m more likely to be a Democrat when I’m fifty or sixty.
Does that mean each generation is monolithic? No. But the experiences you have as you’re developing your political ideas are really important. The fifteen-year time periods we use to identify generational cohorts are somewhat arbitrary, but they do provide a useful lens.
Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with this [picks up an iPhone] in their back pocket. So the way that they’re experiencing culture is very different from the way older Americans did at their age.
McDermon: Zoomers seem like they’re unhappier than other generations. More than half of them report feeling anxious often or almost all the time. And this discontent is more pronounced among Democrats, who report being more anxious and unhappy than Republicans or independents. Is that connected to the motivations for activism?
Deckman: I’ve seen studies showing that the mental-health indicators for younger Americans are dire, and also that mental-health challenges are higher for young women, and liberal young women especially. I think part of it might be that if you are a progressive activist who cares passionately about climate change, this is literally an existential crisis.
I’ve also heard Gen Z referred to as the lockdown generation, having grown up with the threat of school shootings. The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, galvanized a whole group of young people to march in the streets at the March for Our Lives. Those, too, are existential threats. For these issues to lead to someone having worse mental-health indicators is not surprising.
And then there’s social media. Americans are in the midst of what the Surgeon General has called an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. We see clearly that if you’re spending more time online than with other people, that also leads to worse mental-health indicators. It’s a crisis not just for democracy but for the well-being of many Americans.
Many Republican Gen Zers are religious, and if you’re part of a religious community, you tend to have better health indicators. You’re going to church and meeting with people there on a regular basis, and that provides an important source of community. We still haven’t fully grappled as a society with what the pandemic did to us, especially to kids, who lost a good year of social interaction. We need to get back to a situation where we’re spending less time on our phones and computers.
McDermon: The negative emotions we’re discussing could end up spinning people into apathy or disillusionment. Changing the world is hard, particularly once you’re past the vigor and excitement of youth. We get tired and frustrated. I wonder if that’s a likely outcome for the activists you write about.
Deckman: There is certainly a path where an idealistic effort to change society runs headlong into our imperfect political system. It’s hard to get anything passed in this polarized environment, even when the vast majority of Americans are in agreement on a policy. The reality of this can dilute the impact of idealistic young people. It’s a problem we’ve seen throughout American history: How do you sustain that activism?
The Biden administration has made substantive achievements on climate, on infrastructure, on student-loan debt—though, of course, that last one was stymied by the courts. But some highly progressive individuals don’t think that’s enough. Trying to harness that ideological passion while dealing with the realities of making policy is really difficult.
In my analysis younger generations are not trending more Republican, but I do see, potentially, a huge swath of young Americans being disenfranchised and becoming less inclined to vote in general. I think it’s because both parties are putting forth candidates that Gen Z does not trust or has misgivings about. That’s the challenge for Democrats who are trying to get younger people to take an interest in this election.
McDermon: Do young people identify with terms like progressive, liberal, conservative, or with parties?
Deckman: Gen Z is mistrustful of most institutions. PRRI’s recent Gen Z survey shows that Gen Z adults are far less trustful of news organizations, the federal government, the police, the criminal-justice system, and organized religion, especially compared with older Americans. They are also skeptical of the political parties. Many studies, such as Gallup, find that Zoomers and Millennials are far more likely to reject partisan labels than older Americans. Our most recent data [PRRI Gen Z Survey, August 21–September 15, 2023—Ed.] show that while Gen Z Americans are only slightly more likely than older generations to say that they’re independent, they are more likely to say they don’t know what party affiliation best suits them or declare it to be something else. In my interviews with some progressive Gen Z women activists, many don’t identify as Democrats because they think the party’s not far left enough. In general, compared with older Americans, I’d say we have a very skeptical generation in Gen Z.
But we found mixed data on the term progressive. We had a battery of questions in a 2023 PRRI survey that asked, “Do the following terms describe you: feminist or progressive?” About six in ten Gen Z women say that feminist is a term that describes them. Notably, while Gen Z men are less likely to say that term describes them, 40 percent say that the term progressive does. So it appears, then, that Gen Z women view the terms progressive and liberal somewhat interchangeably.
McDermon: Just as Gen Z women are becoming significantly more likely to identify with progressive politics, isn’t there some suggestion that young men have gone in the opposite direction?
Deckman: There’s a difference between what we call symbolic ideology—Americans saying they’re liberal or conservative or moderate—versus attitudes about specific issues. Some people who say they’re conservative might be far more supportive of policies that promote regulation than the Republican Party is. When it comes to specific issues, whether it’s abortion rights or gun control or climate change, the divide between young women and young men doesn’t seem nearly that big. By many measures younger men are more progressive than older men, especially on gender roles and abortion.
I think women have long been more Democratic than men. Women tend to be in favor of a stronger social safety net. They tend to be less supportive of use-of-force measures, such as supporting war efforts. But in a poll we did last year of Gen Z Americans aged eighteen to twenty-five, roughly, we found that 47 percent of women say they are liberal, compared to 34 percent of Gen Z men. That’s not a huge ideological chasm. Perhaps more importantly, we find that Gen Z men are actually more likely to describe themselves as liberal than conservative.
There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of the “manosphere” on the political views of young men. The Andrew Tates of the world, who espouse very misogynistic ideas, have many millions of followers, particularly among young men who feel left behind, who feel like somehow women are gaining an advantage over men. Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, wrote a book saying that the Left has engaged in a war on masculinity. Richard Reeves has a really good book, Of Boys and Men, about why the modern male is struggling and why it matters. He shows, for example, that young men are far less likely to go to college than young women; suicide rates are higher among young men than young women; and we have a generation of young men who are less likely to be employed than their fathers or grandfathers. Reeves points out that we aren’t really having an honest conversation about what healthy masculinity might look like. Into that void come folks like Josh Hawley and Andrew Tate, who are essentially doubling down on misogyny. The most extreme example is the incel [involuntarily celibate—Ed.] movement, where men who have been unlucky in love are blaming women and spouting horrible, misogynistic things online.
The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.
McDermon: Messages about the empowerment of women can become garbled as they filter down to children. A friend of mine was reading a book to her daughter about women who had done lots of impressive things, and there was a line like “Women and girls can do anything!” And her daughter asked, “Why can’t boys do anything?” That sort of messaging can feel like it excludes boys and young men, even though it’s not meant to.
Deckman: The reality is that women have lots of great opportunities, but once they become parents, those opportunities become more limited. It’s a challenge for them to rise to the C-suite. Fortune 500 companies still are white-male bastions, in part because in many households the division of labor for parents is still unequal. Women often take themselves out of the workforce when they have children. But they are more prominent in many fields than they used to be. Young men growing up today are seeing examples of women who are doctors and lawyers and leaders. That’s very different than when you and I were growing up.
How we address the boys and young men, and girls and young women, who are left behind in our society is a problem that’s going to need both parties to help find solutions. There’s a tendency to talk about politics as a zero-sum game—that if women are ahead, it means discrimination against men. We see the same thing when it comes to racial progress: if we promote policies that help ethnic or racial minorities overcome structural racism, there’s a belief that it results in white people having less. The GOP is using that cultural resentment to its advantage. But I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. Women having a piece of pie doesn’t mean less for men. We can make the pie bigger, right?
McDermon: In our culture every election now feels like a national election. Elections for city council end up being about party identification. Partisanship takes over, and the ability to get things done disappears.
Deckman: I wrote a book that came out in 2004 about the Christian Right entering school-board elections in the nineties. Now we’ve come full circle, with Moms for Liberty trying to organize conservative women to run for their local school boards, because they’re convinced there’s an effort to turn their kids into LGBTQ, social-justice warriors. And school-board elections are contentious after the pandemic because a lot of parents were angry about schools being shut down and didn’t think their kids should be wearing masks. There is always a tendency to overreach, though. What happened in the nineties was, once there were majorities of very conservative Christians on a school board, they made policies that weren’t broadly popular, and they were often voted out of office. The same thing seems to be happening with Moms for Liberty: in the last election cycle their candidates did really poorly.
Many average Americans, when faced with extremism locally, have been fighting back. We find there’s a lot of support for having honest conversations about our racial history. You wouldn’t know it from far-right media, but 94 percent of Americans feel like we should teach children both the good and the bad aspects of our nation’s history, versus refraining from teaching aspects of US history that might make some of them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did. Generally speaking, there’s a recognition that our past wasn’t always glorious, and that to move forward we have to have some honest reflection on that.
We also found that there’s broad support for public-school teachers and librarians. I think when you start going after the librarians, that might be a bridge too far. We asked Americans if they believe public-school teachers and librarians provide students with appropriate curriculum and books on American history. Three-quarters of Americans said they did, compared with just 22 percent who believe teachers and librarians are indoctrinating students with inappropriate curriculum.
Local elections are important, and people recognize that you can have an impact on that level. Unfortunately, if you’re Gen Z and you really believe that climate change is irreversible, having your local school district recycle more isn’t doing enough to address carbon emissions. We really do need federal-government policy and regulation.
McDermon: You write optimistically about the power of social media for political activism—how it’s an easy place to organize people, and a single voice can reach millions. But there are concerns about social media’s ability to spread misinformation and radicalize Americans. Are Instagram and TikTok more helpful or more harmful? How do we tell?
Deckman: That’s the million-dollar question: How do we make a social-media environment that’s safe for all of us? It’s larger than just the effect social media has on kids. The spread of conspiracy theories is still a real threat. For example, we’ve asked people if they agree that the government, the media, and the financial world in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation. That’s a core QAnon belief. And we found that even though these beliefs are demonstrably false, in 2021 about 14 percent of Americans strongly supported those views. Last year it was 23 percent. There are still a lot of Americans who are falling for this sort of disinformation.
Should we be requiring social-media platforms to block that kind of misinformation? How about the theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 election? We find consistently that more than half of Republicans, and 32 percent of all Americans, continue to believe that lie. So to what extent can we get social-media platforms to quit sharing patently false information? I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m not a media scholar or regulator, but clearly there has to be some better approach. In political science we compare the elite, top-down influence on public opinion versus whether public opinion is driving political behavior among elites. We often find that what the elites say profoundly shapes the narrative among the general public. And we currently have many leaders who just refuse to acknowledge the truth. They’re perpetuating these lies, which leads to more lies. It’s really challenging to fix this, especially in a country that prioritizes the First Amendment and free speech.
McDermon: If “the medium is the message,” it seems to me that we don’t yet know what the message of a medium like TikTok is. Those networks can pose a lot of unknown risks.
Deckman: That’s a good point. Clearly much of Gen Z’s political activism is taking place online. It’s easy to like a post and pass it on. But the downside of that in a democracy is that citizens are self-selecting into echo chambers that feed their existing narratives.
Can Gen Z take those social-media platforms and actually build an activist infrastructure that gets people out to vote or protest? And can they build the sort of long-term institutions that are required for governing and making substantive change? It’s not enough to be angry about something online or sign a petition about what your city council is doing. It’s about getting someone on the city council who’s going to advocate and budget for your priorities.
I interviewed progressive women during the pandemic, and many said, “I started this organization online because I had time to do it.” As we’ve gotten back to a more normal life and interacting face-to-face, will those organizations actually translate into meaningful change politically? Some progressive organizations are using social media in ways that are quite clever and are drawing attention to issues. There have been lots of clever uses of social media to get women out to vote for ballot initiatives to counteract some of the impact of the Dobbs decision. But is the success of these efforts dependent on an extreme situation? The Dobbs decision was a sea change. A lot of people who don’t pay attention to politics woke up and said, “Wait a minute. There are consequences to who you put on the Supreme Court.”
McDermon: What do we know about the news sources that young people use in addition to social media? I assume they’re not reading the newspaper.
Deckman: No, they are not. At PRRI we’ve asked for years, “What television news source do you trust most?” It’s a helpful question to ask older Americans, because if they’re watching Fox News, or even something to the right of that, they tend to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. But we’ve noticed that very few young people are watching television news at all. Other studies show that they’re more likely to get information from YouTube or TikTok. We’re still trying to figure out what that means for our politics because, again, you have the echo-chamber problem. People are just filtering out any viewpoints that don’t reinforce their already-held beliefs.
Gen Z is really the first generation that is developing their own news sources. They’re making their own content, for better or for worse. Some people say it’s good because you’re hearing more-diverse voices. Gen Z is a generation that cares a lot about narrative. They want to see themselves in the stories that they’re reading. They’re very big on sharing their own experiences. And they feel that older Americans just do not understand what their views are. To give you one example: We asked Americans to what extent they agreed with the statement “Older generations will never fully understand the struggles of younger Americans.” And 64 percent of Gen Z Americans agreed with that statement, compared to 59 percent of Millennials. Gen Z Americans are also a lot more likely to say that “we won’t be able to solve the country’s big problems until the older generation no longer holds power.”
The downside of only using TikTok or Instagram as your source of news is that it’s often a mile wide but only an inch deep. Nor does it provide a balanced view of what’s really happening.
McDermon: Let me adopt for a moment what might be the most dire outlook for Gen Z: Large portions of the planet will soon be uninhabitable because of climate change. There will be widespread global conflict over resources. It’s already too late to do anything about it. No one currently in power cares, because they will be gone before the worst happens. The world as we know it is coming to an end, and what follows will be much, much worse.
My question is whether it is possible to build a political movement that will animate people who believe they have such dim prospects.
Deckman: This conversation is a downer, man. No, I see your point. This kind of doomsday scenario is constantly being spread online, about the planet becoming uninhabitable and people’s rights being taken away. Will it have a demoralizing effect on younger people? As I’ve said, their mental-health indicators are very low. Girls are not doing well, especially young girls. Gen Z women are more likely than men to experience negative emotions on a regular basis. Interestingly, people who are less religious are also more anxious about the state of the world. A lot of social psychologists have noted that the markers of adulthood have started occurring later in life. People are likely not to get married until they’re older, if they get married at all. They’re living at home longer. I don’t think this is necessarily good for society, for many reasons.
Does that mean that young people will just give up? I don’t think that’s the case. What gives me hope is that young people are more engaged than I was at their age. My hunch, based on talking to activists themselves, is that they’re cultivating habits that will lead to more engagement in politics over time. Sure, there’s a lot of demoralization. But I tend to be optimistic about younger people. I think a good test will be the upcoming presidential election. Because of the president’s handling of the Gaza war, a lot of young progressives are saying they’re not going to vote for the Democratic Party ticket. Those folks are not going to vote for Trump, either. Will they stay home? We’ll have to see.
Younger people have historically not voted in large numbers. They move around a lot and don’t think to register. Some states have made it harder to register to vote, for political reasons. But, generally speaking, once you cultivate those habits, you tend to keep them throughout your life. I suspect that as this generation grows into adulthood and has kids, they will care about their schools and their communities, and I think you’re going to see more engagement, not less.
McDermon: What are Zoomers’ main concerns in the political realm? I think of problems like shortages of housing, jobs that don’t seem like careers, not being able to start families, a sense that they don’t have a path to success.
Deckman: In our recent Gen Z report at PRRI we did ten focus groups that dove deeper into the priorities Gen Z cares about, and economic anxiety was a through line. Some economists might find that paradoxical, because we have a booming economy, especially compared to the rest of the world. Since the pandemic, economic indicators have been very good, but younger people who are trying to move out of their parents’ basement and into their first place care deeply about the high cost of housing. Student-loan debt is also a huge issue.
Economic anxiety is the most important issue for Gen Z as a whole. We see this among young Democrats and young Republicans: How do I pay back my college loans? How do I find a good job that actually provides benefits? Young people have the sense that they can’t make the living they want, and that they will do worse than their parents did financially.
What gives me hope is that young people are more engaged than I was at their age. My hunch, based on talking to activists themselves, is that they’re cultivating habits that will lead to more engagement in politics over time.
McDermon: Where do we start to connect across the generational divide? Does there need to be an outreach, or do we build some new kind of coalition?
Deckman: It’s becoming harder and harder, because the places where people find community are disappearing. Church attendance is declining, for example. There are some estimates that 15 to 20 percent of churches will close over the next couple of decades.
Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, about the decline in institutions that bring Americans together, came out around the end of the last century. He saw television as the culprit. People were entertaining themselves at home, so they were less likely to join bowling leagues. There’s been a decline in the memberships of the fraternal organizations and, with both parents working, a decline in people just hanging out.
New research shows that young people are less likely to see friends on a regular basis compared to our generation. My generation hung out face-to-face all the time, not through a video game or a text chat or Snapchat. I think the big challenge we face as a society is how we can bring people together. I’m not sure what the answers are. We’re seeing some consensus on regulation of social media. We have some studies showing kids on average spend as much as five hours a day on social-media platforms, and we all recognize that’s not healthy. Jean Twenge likens it to how we all finally recognized by the seventies that smoking is bad for kids. So we decided to put regulations in place that make it less accessible to young people. Of course, adults are also on their phones too much. I think that’s part of what’s causing this atomization of society.
McDermon: Is there something in your research about gender and age and political trends that surprised you?
Deckman: That younger people especially are committed to a vision of America where the governing structures reflect what America actually looks like: a multireligious, multiracial democracy. And younger Americans have more-diverse friend groups and are surrounded by more examples of diversity.
Americans overall prefer the nation to be made up of people who practice a variety of religions. Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of PRRI, wrote a book called The End of White Christian America that came out in 2016. He found the fastest-growing religious group in this country is people who are not religious or are religiously unaffiliated. There are still lots of Christians of color, but because of immigration patterns in the sixties and seventies we also have more Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims. Many older white Christian Americans don’t recognize the country that they see today. It’s more diverse, less white, and less Christian, and that’s challenging for them. The other side of that equation, though, is that younger Americans are living that promise of diversity. The question is how to keep them involved in our political system to uphold those values of pluralism, given their mistrust of all kinds of institutions.
The other reason I’m hopeful for the future is contact theory—the idea that you can change your mind about people once you’re exposed to them. For example, we know that Americans are far more likely to be supportive of laws protecting LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage when they have friends and family who are LGBTQ. And if someone has a close friend or family member who’s transgender, they’re more willing to support policies that safeguard the rights of those Americans. As we diversify as a nation, that’s potentially a very good trend. Younger people are embracing a bigger picture of who is truly American. But that same diversity is threatening to some people who are currently in office. And we may elect again a populist president who bashes immigrants and has a limited idea of who counts as American. Can we move past the legacy of racism and discrimination? That’s the challenge before us.
