A popular narrative suggests young people are liberal and getting more liberal. Thus, social media buzzed when a chart surfaced in spring that seemed to suggest 12th-grade boys had become overwhelm…

While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a “matriarchy.” However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss

  • nymwit@lemm.ee
    50·
    1 year ago

    In the 2022 Monitoring the Future survey, the largest group of senior boys, more than two-fifths, claimed no politics at all, answering the liberal-conservative question with “none of the above” or “I don’t know.” Nearly one-fifth identified as moderate. Only 36 percent selected liberal or conservative as an ideology, and only there did the trend emerge.

    I’m not as sold on “trending conservative” as I am “undecided on political ideology” +/-60% didn’t say liberal or conservative.

    • 🗑️😸@lemm.ee
      42·
      1 year ago

      When I was in high school I was convinced I was conservative. It actually was the reason for a relationship ending at the time. But after I graduated I realized how left leaning I actually was. No one knows who the hell they are in high school.

      • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
        5·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, me too. Though I was taken on by the whole “radical liberal left being oversensitive” thing. I thought of women as equal, but the “femimazis” were extreme. I thought non-heterosexual and non-binary were a bit odd, but they can do what they want, why should I care, but I was the “LGBT propaganda” was too much. I thought people fleeing from wartorn regions deserved another chance, but the “sjws are just letting anyone and everyone in, and they can do whatever they want because otherwise it would be racism”.

        I would call myself right wing, but practically all of my opinions were very far from it because my youtube overloaded brain thought that the “left” were just a bunch of idle people getting looking what to get offended by today. Only later at uni did I find out how overblown the whole “SJW” youtube thing was, and how much more insane and damaging the other extreme was.

        And I believe that this is very much the case, people in school aren’t “right wing” because they carefully thought about life and society, but because all they hear about the “left” is this comically exaggerated notion that they’re touchy freaks who just want to scream how they’re oppressed by everything. Ironically, what got me out of the stupid right wing youtube company was left wing youtube with hour long videos exposing how that “SJW” narrative is just manipulation. But by the time they make one long detailed video exposing some false story, 1000 more of them pop out.

        Honestly, the large portion of the internet is just poisonous, especially youtube. The sooner people learn to think and examine sources (use the internet), the better off we’re all be.