Summary
With Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, young Gen Z voters like Kate, Holly, and Rachel are grappling with deepening divides with their Trump-supporting parents.
For many, these conflicts go beyond policy disagreements, touching on core values and morality. Parents once focused on fiscal conservatism have, in some cases, embraced conspiracy theories, creating painful rifts.
Studies suggest political divisions are increasingly seen as moral judgments, fostering a “mega-identity” where political views signify personal decency.
For these young adults, maintaining family connections amidst such ideological fractures has become challenging.
This is what we’re going through with my in laws right now.
Parents? My friend volunteered as a poll worker on the University campus here. At his location, 25% of the students voted for the orange fascist.
I say this, as a parent, to people who worry about cutting off their parents if their parents are toxic people:
You owe your parents nothing. You did not ask to be born. They owe you everything. That’s their duty.
Not too strange of a phenomenon if one considers what populism focuses on, the fabrication of divides in order to drive tribal responses from it’s followers.Trump’s rhetoric is only one variety of it that happens to be very effective at creating that divide, those that are swayed shouldn’t really be seen as people that support all of his nastiest views, but as people that have been taken in by that sense of tribalism.
The loss of community is increasingly problematic for individuals in this day in age. There exists too many groups vying for our attention, many of which being communities that span across the globe. And with all these options, local communities may not always seem preferential to these global ones due to comparative size or accessibility. However, they still generally offer much more, and can prevent people from feeling isolated in their lives. Populist campaigns seek to take these people that are divorced from a community, often socially isolated people, and give them a group that seemingly supports them. So long as it’s welcoming, it doesn’t really matter who’s at the head of it, nor it’s beliefs.
I feel the fact that older people that aren’t quite retirement age and younger men being the people that are most likely to vote for Trump kinda speaks to this theory. I feel like these groups are the most at risk when it comes to developing rewarding communities, so a group like MAGA could be appealing to them.
According to everything I’ve read, Trump was voted in by every demographic in swing states and even non-swing states.
I know that it’s a instinctive flex to dump on boomers (with good reason) but this calls for a bit more of a deeper analysis.
Fuentes, Gaetz, MTG, Miller, Boebert, Lake – none of these people are boomers. GenX at most and a lot of millennials. A quick glance through the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Leaders of the Radical Right show a lot in their 30s and 40s. Boomers vote and spend money, but they’re largely too old to be activists in the traditional sense.
