Gen Z vs democracy

Two years ago, I wrote in these pages that Gen Z weren’t quite as anti-establishment as we’d have you believe. We didn’t really have the guts. But now in the wake of Trump Part Two, a looming economic crisis and a new government, the atmosphere has drastically changed. I went to a university event. The speeches implored us to protest. The old conventional politics don’t work any more. It was time to take to the streets and fight for what we hold dear.

The mood was more radical and unsettling, as I found myself recalling the various stories that have been circulating about Gen Z favouring dictatorships. Channel 4 has reported that over half of Gen Z would support a strong leader who didn’t have to “bother” with elections. As unbelievable as some have found that, looking around at a room of politically engaged young people, I found it easier to believe. We’ve tried elections – the argument goes – we’ve voted for change and signed all the petitions we can, but nothing’s changed. Impatient, more people are becoming disillusioned with democracy and are turning away from it.

I asked a friend for her thoughts on how we had shifted from feeling as if meaningful change was within our grasp, to now seeing protests and dissent as our only option. It had all happened so fast – had we just grown up? No, she said. The problem was the rise of populism and the influence of billionaire oligarchs, which had corrupted the political system. She likened the far-right to a mythological Hydra: every time you cut one head off two grew back in its place. No matter what we do, she complained, we can’t stop the rise of populism or Farage.

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Reform is becoming alarmingly popular among Gen Z. As I lamented this with some friends, we rattled off names of guy-friends who had slowly become more sympathetic to Farage and his blight. Disillusionment has sent people out looking for more extreme answers to our problems.

As I talk to friends in this group, they seem to swing between apathy and anger. As one of my friends put it, many people “can’t be arsed with the whole voting a good party which turns out shite”.

One morning, before the summer break, as I was heading out the door for class, I was stopped by a flatmate trying to make sense of what had happened to the stock market. She had invested some savings, but apparently Trump had done something and everything had taken a turn for the worse. Very quickly my bag was back on the floor, as I tried to explain what was happening.

Somehow Trump’s global trade war and the economic knock-on consequences of that hadn’t registered on their radar. And that was no accident, in fact it was part of an active choice to ignore the deluge of pessimistic news stories. One friend said she had stopped following the news because it was too overwhelming. Another said she was scared that what was happening in the US would happen here.

When I talked to them about their views on democracy, they just seemed worn down. Politics, it seems, isn’t going to save us. They were doubtful that a dictatorship would be the answer, but some saw it as a possibility. “It would save the decision-making process,” one friend shrugged. I think she was joking. Another flatly told me that democracy just doesn’t seem to be working anymore, “Money trumps democracy,” she explained, and because we don’t have any money, “we don’t have any personal power”.

Back at the university event, two young people on stage were imploring us to take to the streets and I noticed that some of my other friends had wandered off. Having lost interest in yet another diatribe against the current state of the world, they’d headed to the bar. There seems to be a widening gap among Gen Z, between those who are engaged and those who have given up. The politically engaged are becoming frustrated, and those who are less tuned in are becoming more and more exhausted. But neither seem to fancy democracy as a viable solution.