When the bi-monthly issue of Harvard Magazine arrives, I turn immediately to the obituary section. It’s not creepy. On the contrary, it’s celebratory – so many interesting lives that unfolded in such interesting and diverse ways. Although the tilt is definitely toward privilege, there are many examples of lives of service and devotion to tikkun olam, repairing the world.
But this month, I was eager to move past the obits because the cover story’s subject intrigued and troubled me. The cover illustration showed three students in cap and gown, with the center figure displaying a red MAGA hat under his mortarboard. Below it the title read, “Gen Z’s politics are shifting (even at Harvard).” The data from the 2024 election was already the stuff of bad dreams – the growing percentage of younger voters going for Trump, particularly among Blacks and Latinos, but it was hard to swallow the fact that this was also true among college students, especially those at Harvard.
Let’s be clear that the majority of college students as well as Blacks and Latinos still lean left, but the Democratic leads are shrinking. How to account for that? The article’s author, Nina Pasquini, has an intriguing and convincing theory. Let me start by confessing that I’ve never mastered the boundary ages between Baby Boomers, Millenials, Gen X, Gen Z and other fine distinctions that haven’t even registered with me. However, Pasquini has educated me to understand that Gen Zers are the youngest cohort, including high school and college students and recent college graduates.
Pasquini posits that Gen Z actually includes two distinctly different groups – those who were still in high school when the pandemic hit and those who were in college or beyond at that point. The conservative turn is concentrated in that high school group who have now moved on to college. They were trapped and isolated during the Covid years, angry about the arbitrary restrictions imposed by the government that caused their isolation, while those in college were often out of the house, sheltering with others in their cohort. Their high school years coincided with Trump’s first term, so their politics were shaped by opposition to what he represented.
In addition, that younger segment of Gen Z spent their time in isolation surfing the web, especially Tik Tok, encountering all manner of conspiracy theories and pro- Trump rhetoric. They arrived in college with more negative views about government and about authority in general. Like all theories, this one is built on sweeping generalizations against which you can pose convincing counterexamples. Nonetheless, it strikes me as a plausible explanation for the measurable shifts in political alignments and for the growth of conservative organizations and activities on campus, about which the author presents some anecdotal support.
It’s important to note that this “new conservatism” doesn’t map neatly onto party lines. For example, many students newly on the right still support a strong safety net for our most needy populations. That doesn’t automatically signal unquestioning support of President Trump. The situation remains fluid. A lot depends on the direction the administration’s policies and actions take and what new forms of conservative and liberal thought emerge in response to domestic and global development.
A lot of those obituaries I referred to at the top were of people who predated even the Baby Boomers. Many were WWII veterans. I’m left to fantasize about the stages their political views passed through. Ditto for all the generations that followed. It’s way too early to tell where those Gen Zers will be in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years.
I want to take a slight turn here to reflect on a different line of thinking that this article raised for me. The signal event around which the piece pivots is the pandemic. I’m too old to tackle this task, but there’s a major book that needs to be written about the ways in which the pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives – social, political and economic. I’m particularly interested in its differential effects on each stage of childhood and adolescence. In this piece the focus was on teenagers and young adults, but we can begin in infancy and work up the age ladder to trace the impact of those two critical years, beginning in March 2020. As we can see in the Gen Z piece, we have to search out the indirect effects of the pandemic. It’s obvious that high schoolers became more depressed as a result of their isolation (our granddaughter, for example, was in the third grade, not yet entangled with her peers, as she is now that she’s in high school and therefore spared some of the greatest pain) but it’s not so obvious that it would affect their politics. Tackling that project will require someone who is a non-linear thinker and who has more years left on their calendar than I. Volunteers?
