People (not from the countries I’ve been talking about - primarily Sweden, where I live) have got angry at me for suggesting it, but the youth of the rising far right in much of Europe is noticeable and alarming. Young = Left feels like the fighting-the-last-war false assumption of this cycle.
One got off at my tram stop. Hours later I saw another one, shaven-headed, on my way home from a reading. Then, on my way to a friend’s flat, I saw two more, barely out of their teens, by a main railway station. It’s a level of far-right activity that is new and very concerning.
An american person blocked me the other day for just posting actual statistics from here in Sweden showing this trend. People are very married to the idea the young people are innately left wing, and it’s painful to adapt to new evidence.
Polls in the US have shown gradual drifting of young voters to the right, and much of the left/liberal reaction has been ‘these polls are wrong, because young people are hard to poll’, and maybe they’re right, but there is no shortage of evidence for the trend elsewhere.
(I was angrily told that the same trend couldn’t be true in the US because civil rights and social integration are so strong there which, as you can imagine, presented me with a situation I had no idea where to begin with.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I am and will continue to be delighted for the anecdotal and documented examples of this in Northern Europe to be proven anomalous, insignificant and temporary. Of course.
Also, I think competitive nationalistic, or I-told-you-so-ist interpretations of polling and political trends are not only deeply boring and incurious, but pretty unhelpful too - things don’t change/not change because of what you personally want. This stuff is actually real and actually interesting.
The replies to this are beyond what I can reply to at this stage, but quite a lot of them seem to imply that young voters are now the *main* driver of far right politics. No, not that either. Just a trend shift (in the case of Sweden, 18-29 overtook 30-40 in their far right support, for example.)
oh, american liberals are insufferable like this, the leftists here do recognize this dangerous trend. we get blocked and fought with by liberals all the time, probably even more than conservatives, really
(I bet the list of people blocking me is 75% democratic party members that believe if everyone thought joe biden was perfect then fascism would just go away)
In the UK it’s being held back by the level of genuine, seething, contempt for the Conservative Party which just overrides everything else - people I went to school with in 2014 who were at-best-neutral on Gamergate are 100% Labour next month - but if Reform stick around, it might break the dam
It’s really hard to say, but it feels hard to separate thinking about it from the prominence of incalculably popular (particularly among boys) online figures who are, to all intents and purposes, populist right wingers. If it does emerge as a trend, there’ll be no shortage of places to look for why.
There’s definitely some awful figures online.
In the UK the lack of prospects to work hard, do well, get a decent job and a home, etc would play a part I’d have guessed. Are there similar problems in Sweden?
But prevalence does seem to be greater in young boys/men than girls/women doesn’t it?
TBH, it was typical exceptionalism nationalism, which I’ve noticed is bizarrely common when talking about countries outside the US even from purportedly progressive people. It’s always deeply weird.
(I think the implication is that ‘Europe’ is monocultural and is in the throes of a reaction to immigration which the US moved beyond during the 1960. Which is deranged.)
Has the U.S. moved beyond immigration reactions though? Certainly not from my vantage point given the scaremongering as of late. The whole manufactured southern “border crisis” thing nonstop in some news channels.
One of our two major parties in the US wants to deport every undocumented immigrant, which would be like, 5% of the workforce. And that doesn’t include the legal immigrants they also want to deport.
So, no, Americans haven’t moved on from it.
Pattern in the US seems to have been “boys go right, women move left.” Rightwing attacks on abortion and birth control seem to be a driving factor, for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately a lot of the content they’re ingesting from YouTube/streamers/influencers displays Trumpism/bullying and whatnot as “based!!” And as much as young people know right from wrong, that stuff seeps in and it’s easy to go along with a crowd. It sucks!
I think two things can be true. In the American context we've seen polls be off at an increasing rate since 2018. I watched a video today that said in the late 90s, response rates were 36%. In 2018, they had dropped to 6%. We're seeing a significant non response bias favoring fanatical support.
So you get a right wing that looks stronger on paper than it actually does at the ballot box. However, teenagers aren't becoming normal, chamber of commerce Republicans. The ones who go right, go fascist.
At the end of the day, someone who begrudgingly holds their nose and votes Biden but isn't happy about it and doesn't make Biden their entire personality counts the same in the poll that matters as the MAGA cultists.
this feels anecdotally correct-there isn't really a tendency towards "most teens are becoming biz republicans", there is a tendency towards "young people tend to duplicate their parents, maybe more liberal on some issues and similar edpol tendencies, but the right-wingers go full Paradox Hitlerite"
This is not and been debunked to death. Young men in the US are about as conservatives as they’ve always been. It’s only white young men that tick upwards, a decreasing demographic.
I'm concerned, but FYI it's not just polls in the US. We have recent election results suggesting the opposite trend. And the polls showing that the trend among young voters changes quite a bit when you filter for likely voters. I think that's the rational counter-argument
It wasn’t a poll but an inference from the EU parliamentary elections this year (which is an imperfect measure - the next general election would be better)
But like-for-like you can see the rise in support for Sverigedemokterna between 2019 and 2024, which saw them overtake their neighbouring…
…age group in support for SD for the first time.
Support for the biggest party, the social democrats also grew during this period, probably mostly from losses from the centre party, who cratered, so it’s not a simple picture, but the rise in far right support is significant.
What will be interesting is to see whether the rise in SD support sticks around in the next general election, which is what would make it a real trend, and could actually have an effect on the makeup of government potentially.
Also, the fact the support for the conservatives (M) grew for that age group during the same period makes me think that the move rightward for the youngest voters could be a bonafide trend, rather than an odd blip.
I am open to this argument, but it isn't actually showing up anywhere. Democrats youth vote has beaten the ratio of the 2012 election in three different cycles.
It’s going to be interesting to see. My suspicion is that the US probably will continue to buck the trend elsewhere but there might be a little tightening, or maybe just a lower turnout in the lowest age category.
Who knows though. It feels like there could well be a few surprises in these results, and there’s still plenty of water left to go under the bridge before they arrive.
As they have elsewhere in counties who are seeing a change in vote distribution in that age group. It’s fine to dismiss polls but over the last decade ‘this hasn’t happened before’ has been a shaky thesis for doing so!
(NB my thread is more about the change that is measurably taking place in some countries in Northern Europe, and it seemed pertinent to mention opinion polls in the US that correlate with it. Like everyone else, I have no idea what will transpire in the US election.)
Setting aside polls, it also hasn’t really shown up (yet) in any real world election. Not saying it never will! But for now the shift right among youth, in terms of actual results, is only anecdotal/theoretical.
This is what the word ‘elsewhere’ was meant to denote, but I probably should’ve been more specific. Germany and Sweden are interesting cases with solid evidence though. Not really dig into France.
