As the oldest Generation Zs would be 29 years of age, they delve into a world that history has never accounted for before. It would take days of patience to hear a response from your lover just some 200 years ago, and now, if you don’t reply in seconds, you might not have one anymore.

This piece argues that Gen Z’s turn towards left-leaning politics is less an ideological awakening than a symptom of institutional distrust and manufactured desire.

The digital age, the age of information, and the nuances that we have been fed throughout our lives have not only been deceiving but also a mere disappointment while we learn the cruelty of the world as we perceive it. We have been told to work hard because, with hard work and sheer determination, we pursue greatness. “The land of the free, the land of all dreams,” they said. That too, as you might have already seen, is a farce.

Truth is, the ideological shift from our predecessors has only begun over the last decade. It is not due to enlightenment, I can tell you that. No generation before this one has had the tools, nor the privilege, to compare its own life against every other life on Earth. But collectively, as we progress alongside the technological boom of our civilisation, we are exposed to immense information that has never been seen before.

In America, the land of the most polarising politics, the newer generation seems distant from its political parties. Not because of the inherent nature of it, but because of how the material and informational world seems to be more “practical” than “abstract”.

By ‘abstract,’ I mean politics as a set of debates over principle; by ‘practical,’ I mean the immediate, material questions of rent, wages, and debt that now arrive through a phone screen before they arrive through a ballot. In such a scenario, the shift is less a story about young people “turning socialist” than about a generation that is constantly trying to understand a world that they have only seen in the movies.

In a study done by the Institute of Economic Affairs by Kristian Niemietz, the Head of Political Economy at the IEA, it has been stated that, “Supporters of the market economy find it baffling how someone can enjoy all the comforts and conveniences of modern capitalism, and then still reject it. Why would you advocate killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?” If Niemietz is right, then wanting the comforts of capitalism while rejecting its name is, I’d argue, the idea of entertaining one’s true desire for comfort and luxury is, in fact, an endorsement of capitalism.

This confusion isn’t only theoretical; YouGov’s 2016 polling shows it playing out in real numbers. The survey has seen a dramatic change in the rise of socialism. In the same paper, it has been seen that people would often choose the path to socialism or any left-leaning ideas to be more socially “acceptable,” as the nuance of certainty in socialism is that “social responsibility” and “works for everyone irrespective of background and class” are in play. The study even dared to claim that most millennials and, later on, Gen Zs do not know the actual definition of socialism, and they often mistake the definition of a free market economy/capitalism for the definition of a socialist economy/socialism.

That confusion compounds a second, more corrosive trend: outright distrust of the institutions being debated in the first place. According to the Gallup and Walton Family Foundation State of American Youth Survey, it is seen that fewer than one in four Gen Z members trust Congress and the Presidency.

You see, such distrust not only cripples the very foundation of the nation we stand on, but also undermines the sincerity that drives the legislature and the executive to focus on the country’s development. Young people are not becoming more progressive or more conservative. They are becoming more cynical and frustrated, and that is what we need to address first and pay attention to. Since the politics of the free world has experienced polarisation and dysfunction, that experience alone has instilled this cynical notion. At such extremes, you will find yourself in one of the nether regions, not as a choice, but because it will feel much more convenient. Conviction takes effort; cynicism, in a polarised system, requires none. It is the default setting for anyone who has simply been paying attention to what’s around them.

There may be a second root to this cynicism; it is about the idea of desire itself. If the growing trend has been about worldly materialistic desires, the option of consuming these materials and the monetary expenditure has to be affordable in order for any average Joe to accomplish those desires. Or else, it would be futile for you to even want these desires. Slavoj Žižek, similarly, argues that cinema has perverted our idea of desire. Furthermore, he says, “The problem is, how do we know what we desire? There is nothing natural and spontaneous about human desires. We have to be taught to desire.” Žižek means this as an indictment of capitalism, but the mechanism he describes doesn’t actually care which system does the teaching. If desire is manufactured, that cuts both ways: a generation taught to want luxury by capitalist cinema can just as easily be taught to resent the system that dangled it.

If we rabbit-hole on this notion of thought, which I really have to for me to prove my point, an infant does not know whether they should cry about every single toy they see at a store or whether to cry about food. This solely depends on their overall environment and upbringing and what the demand is like. Their environment teaches them to desire the things that are made affordable for them. Similarly, when they grow up consuming films and cinema about royalty, riches, luxury, and simply something unattainable for them, they develop a certain distrust and discomfort towards the very system that led them to witness such greatness in the first place. Which can definitely be a viable reason why they proceed to attack the system by asking for its demise, which is not only detrimental to society but also a cynical position of cognitive disability to comprehend one’s own failure. You may call it a paradox; for me, however, it is simply the lack of self-awareness.

The political lens through which to look at this topic is actually very interesting. The definition and nuance shown of democratic socialism given by Bernie Sanders, the longest-serving independent candidate in the US Senate: “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal,” he said. Initially, the Mayor of NYC, Zohran Mamdani, followed in his footsteps and won against two of NYC’s oldest candidates. The conservatives did not like the rise of the left, as expected, but their political campaign was so profound that now several other states (Oliver Larkin of US House Florida District 25, Christopher Rabb of US House Pennsylvania District 3, Melat Kiros of US House Colorado District 1, and so on) have experienced governors sharing the same dream under the same political compass. Whether Sanders and Mamdani represent a genuine ideological shift, or simply the most convincing marketing campaign of the same cynicism described above, is exactly the question this piece is trying to answer.

I initially mentioned a notion of thought that is a crucial aspect of this paper to comprehend. Conservatives were too certain of their position as the leaders of US politics, and their distrust of the left (the American left is more right-wing than Eastern Bloc political philosophy) prevented them from questioning it. But the trend is taking that very same position by storm, which led to even the POTUS making a few derogatory remarks against said politicians. You see, the same remarks that were supposed to stop the left from raising their heads high have given it a significant boost that is now too late to address by mere words anymore. The same democratic socialists have begun engaging in governor-level politics at a scale that would have been unthinkable just two or three years ago.

But here’s what I find hypocritical. A survey done by Elson and King (2022) found that around 70% agree that “Competition is good. It stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas.” Similarly, around 60% of them also agree that under a fair economic system, people with higher working capabilities would earn significantly more. Also, another comedic result of the same survey is that “rewards and benefits in society should be distributed according to what people need, not what they produce.” It genuinely begs me to question their definition of competition, as to how they contradicted their previous statement where they seemingly opt for an economic system that is fair and just for people with higher abilities earning more and then come to disagree when the reward system comes into play. To make matters more interesting, Elson and King surveyed again in 2023, with another layer of questions for young adults. When asked whether “people should be able to keep what they produce, even if there are others with greater needs,” only about half agreed; however, when asked whether “the way private property is used should primarily be decided by its owner,” about 70% agreed. Only about one in ten disagreed. That’s a gap of 20% on two questions being very similar: keeping what one produces and deciding how to use one’s property.

This begs a question: was the data given by respondents legitimate, or mostly performative? Because if the question is about what private property is, then it is rather futile to seek answers. So, earlier in this study, the fact that people are seemingly experiencing peer pressure and FOMO regarding left-wing politics can be quite a legitimate claim.

Due to technological advancements since the steam engine, the financial market and the demand for educated workers are shifting rapidly. It is not a matter of whether a government is taking care of its citizens; it is estimated that the lower 5% of Americans today earn more than 95% of all human beings who have ever lived (Whaples, 2022).

Now, coming back to the crux of the discussion we are having today. It is imperative that we have to work with the little information we have at hand, no matter how disappointing it really is. So, if the nature of the surveys proves the stance of the sentiment of Gen Zs, then the definition and the political belief that they so wholeheartedly desire and hold close to their hearts is only a fraction, or perhaps it is capitalism that they openly want to abolish (YouGov 2022). This notion actively shifts every time the question is about whether they would share their share of capital with someone who is earning less. They would rather reap as they sow (Elson and King, 2023). As the evidence above suggests, this is exactly the pattern: conviction that dissolves the moment it costs anything of monetary value to them.

As the battle of “isms” is always a battle of ideas, I think that the ideas and facts are on the side of greater support for the perceived free market and its attributes, and that basic ignorance is one of the underlying causes of the tilt that is seen above. Seemingly, it is not only true in the free market economy, but the tax ratio of the higher brackets is also more formidable and harsh than ever; it is still the abhorrence of the term “free market economy” that is one of the elite problems of the matter.

To be fair to the other side: the fact that tax burdens on higher earners have grown heavier, even within ostensibly ‘free’ markets, suggests the current system is not the laissez-faire straw man its critics imagine, nor is it the pure meritocracy its defenders sometimes claim. It is telling that even as free-market economies impose heavier tax burdens on their highest earners than ever before, the mere term ‘free market economy’ still provokes reflexive contempt, itself a sign of how much of this debate is about branding rather than content.

Gen Z’s political incoherence is itself a symptom of the uncertainty they were raised in; not a failure of conviction, but the absence of anything solid enough to be convinced by. Perhaps that is the one certainty left: a generation raised without solid ground beneath it will always be more certain of what it’s against than what it’s for.