“It is deeply peculiar,” stated Zoe Strimpel in The Sunday Telegraph. The youthful era may hardly be extra woke, with their calls for for secure areas and noisy concern for each form of injustice. However they appear additionally to be “more and more authoritarian”. A stunning new survey by Channel 4 discovered that 52% of Gen Z (13- to 28-year-olds) are in favour of the UK changing into a dictatorship, whereas 33% suppose we might be higher off “if the Military was in cost”.
But if you concentrate on it, their responses make sense, stated Sam Ashworth-Hayes in The Each day Telegraph. Gen Z have grown up in a democracy “that appears unable to ship its primary features”, with wages stagnant, dwelling requirements falling and the median home worth greater than eight occasions the typical revenue. Given the world they’ve inherited, the true shock “is that the numbers are so low”.
Raised throughout austerity and “blighted by Covid”, Gen Z have definitely had a tough journey, stated Alison Phillips in The Observer. This has left them receptive to ideologies that deliver a way of “certainty” to their world of “insecurity” – and within the digital world, “populist, authoritarian” factors of view are all too straightforward to seek out. Nearly three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds use TikTok.
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And boys, specifically, can shortly be drawn into a web-based world the place “Pied Pipers” corresponding to Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson and Jordan Peterson present a poisonous brew of machismo, ultra-reactionary politics and “incessant railing towards wokeism”. To show the tide, we liberals want to go away our “echo chambers of complacency” and defend democracy with the identical ardour because the populists: we must be “extra emotional and extra combative”.
I would take this survey with a pinch of salt, stated Polly Toynbee in the identical paper. It is in all probability extra “a spasm” – a mirrored image of the final gloom now pervading the nation – than a thought-out view of how society must be organised. The truth is, I would see it primarily as proof that Labour ought to “speed up its manifesto pledge to provide 16- and 17-year-olds the vote”. That will incentivise politicians to handle Gen Z’s wants, whereas giving the youthful era a much bigger stake of their future. Younger folks “want extra democracy, not much less, and shortly”.
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