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From a quick glance at social media, it might seem as if liberalism is falling out of fashion among Zoomers. And to a certain extent, there are worrying signs that extremism is particularly appealing to the younger generations. Liberal ideals — such as individual rights, political equality, free expression, liberal democracy, and sexual freedom — are being increasingly overtaken by regressive, populist, and collectivist ideas. More and more, young people are placing communal values above individual liberty, embracing authoritarianism and political violence, and adopting surprisingly prudish and traditionalist attitudes toward sex and relationships.

Across multiple Western societies, surveys have shown a worrying decline among young people’s belief in democracy. Similarly, polling shows younger generations in the West have a more favourable view of Russia and Putin than their elders. In one 2024 survey, 21% of Gen Z Americans claimed Adolf Hitler had “some good ideas.” Another 20% were “unsure.” An earlier survey from 2023 found that a third of young men had a positive view of Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer arrested on rape, underage sex, and human trafficking charges. Significantly, these far-right political shifts are much more prominent among young men. Indeed, there is a growing political gender divide across the Western world. In many cases, women are drifting to the left, whereas men are moving rightward. The 2024 US presidential election appeared to confirm this trend, as exit polls published by the Wall Street Journal showed a dramatic rightward shift of 28 points among men aged 18–29. Young women moved slightly Republican as well — as did the rest of the nation — but they remained a staunchly Democratic group.

The most striking example is in South Korea, where the ideological gender divide is larger than perhaps anywhere else on Earth. Right-wing sexist movements, bolstered by the current conservative president, have overtaken large parts of the young male culture. Correspondingly, radical-left feminist currents have captured young women. The result has driven the sexes sharply apart and caused a fertility crisis unlike anything the modern world has seen. In 2024, 150 South Korean schools had no new first graders. While no society has been hit as hard as South Korea, we see a similar dynamic playing out across other societies. As young people become less philosophically liberal and more politically polarised by sex, they increasingly stop having sex.

In parallel with this gender divide, we’ve seen seismic shifts in all kinds of relationship metrics. Political differences have driven a wedge in the dating market, and especially on dating apps. The number of dating “red flags” grows by the day, while taboos against workplace romance and illiberal discourse about “age gaps” and “power imbalances” continually shrink Gen Z’s dating pool. Young people are simultaneously harbouring more extreme beliefs while becoming unable to tolerate disagreement. The result is that marriage rates among young people are at historic lows. The percentage of young people who are not dating and not having sex is the highest on record. More than a quarter of men under 30 report being virgins. And while these love-life woes are more pronounced for men, among both men and women aged 22 to 34, the percentage who have never had sex has risen over the past decade.

As Queer Majority has reported, this “sex drought” appears to be impacting only straight people. Gay, lesbian, and bi young people, who deal with different gender dynamics, have actually had an easier time. But that is only one example of the decline in sociable activities among Gen Z adults. Illiberal attitudes aren’t exclusive to politics and extend to personal lives and preferences. For instance, Gen Z drinks less alcohol than their millennial predecessors.

One factor that helps to explain this political and romantic divide is social media. Young men, for example, get most of their information from an online ecosystem dominated by right-wing political influencers. Out of the 10 most-watched live-streams on election night 2024, nine had a pro-Trump bias. The odd one out was Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who cannot remotely be called “liberal” either. Many non-political influencers also came out in support of Trump, such as Logan Paul, Joe Rogan, and Adin Ross, who together have more than 150 million (mostly male) followers across platforms. Similarly, the spread of the incel movement, the normalisation of fringe political beliefs on TikTok, and the wild ideological swings of Twitter have all played an outsized role in shaping — and radicalising — youth politics.

But a broader trend emerges when we look at a more international breakdown of elections by age — one that helps put things in perspective. A fairly consistent variable of youth politics around the world is their opposition to the status quo. Therefore, in countries with strong left-leaning traditions, such as the Nordic nations, we see a stronger support for far-right parties. Similarly, in Germany, young people in formerly communist regions in the east overwhelmingly vote for the far-right AfD. And in France, after eight years of a centrist government, young people split their votes mostly between the left-wing New Popular Front and the far-right National Rally.

So, are young voters destined to reject the liberal status quo in favor of populist extremism? Actually, no. First, illiberalism among the youth isn’t destiny, but merely a rejection of the old balance of power. Whether this rejection is pushed by the common tendency of social media to push distrust for the government, or by the long-standing problems the youth have been facing for the previous decades, such as high underemployment, it’s a nearly universal trend. While this rejection of the status quo might seem worrying when the incumbent party is small-l liberal, it also creates a very liberal generation when the establishment is illiberal. This was demonstrated in the last Polish parliamentary election, in which the conservative ruling party came first nationally, but trailed behind every other party among 18–29 voters, which had an unusually high turnout. Similarly, in Georgia (the country), recent pro-European protests against the Russophile government were led by young people, which polled at 14% approval among Georgian Gen Z, compared to 46% among Baby Boomers.

“But these countries are so different from America, why should I care?” An analysis of the youth vote in America since 1996 (1992 being hard to accurately judge due to Ross Perot getting nearly 20% of the vote as a third-party candidate) shows a shockingly consistent correlation between how long an incumbent party has been in power and the evolution of the youth vote. Democrats lost ground with young voters in 2000, 2012, 2016, and 2024, all elections following a Democratic presidency. Conversely, their best performances among young people were in 2008 and in 2020, respectively, after eight years of a Bush presidency and four years of Trump. It will be interesting to see if recent developments in conservative presence on social media manage to cancel the incumbent effect in 2028. Only then will we know if the rightward shift is here to stay, or if young people will rebel against the conservative establishment once more, as they did in 2020.

Ultimately, social media is a powerful tool of persuasion, one that has been used repeatedly to influence politics on a national scale, not only in North America and Western Europe, but in cases such as Russia’s latest attempts to manipulate Romania’s elections through TikTok. Somehow, social media has turned a moment of unprecedented access to information into one that has fostered a new generation of people more uneducated, divided, extremist, and lonely than ever before. Fixing this isn’t as easy as telling young people to delete their social media accounts, throw away their phones, or “touch grass.” It may have to happen organically, in time, when the misery of politics-as-religion and timelines-as-relationships becomes simply too unbearable, and young people rediscover the joy of liberal tolerance and human connection.

Published May 28, 2025