I may have to give my students extra credit just for being born. They’re all “Gen Z” (personally, I’m not a fan of lumping people into these cohorts), and polls are showing some heartening trends.
A new poll demonstrates that younger Americans are decidedly more progressive, less religious, and more likely to describe themselves as LGBTQ than other generations.
In fact, Generation Z adults in the survey were more likely to identify as part of the LGBTQ community than to say they were Republicans.
Now that is hope for the future! I would love to live in a world where gay people outnumber Republicans, while aware that LGBTQ+ people can also be conservative. I would say that Republicans ought to be dreading the future, except that they already do — it’s their nature — but also, Democrats need to wake up and smell the coffee too. They Dems haven’t been doing a great job of securing progressive bona fides.
On political ideology, the poll found that Gen Z voters were more progressive than all other generations, with 43 percent describing themselves as liberal, 28 percent as moderate and 28 percent as conservative — versus 31 percent of adults overall who said they are liberal, 34 percent moderate and 33 percent conservative.
On which party they supported, a plurality of Gen Z’ers said they were either independent or unsure of what party they supported, with 43 percent expressing one of those two views — a higher rate of those combined options than any other generation besides Millennials, among whom 44 percent said the same.
Other good news:
Gen Z voters also expressed less religiosity than Americans overall in the survey. According to the report, 33 percent of Gen Z respondents said they were religiously unaffiliated, versus 27 percent of adults overall. Only Millennials expressed less affiliation with religion than Gen Z’ers, with 36 percent of that generation defining themselves that way.
Hey, atheists: same thing I said about Democrats. If you ignore progressive values, this demographic change won’t help you.
Conservatives, at least, don’t understand what’s going on. Here’s that notorious twit, Tim Pool, making a prediction that conservative Christians will win out, because they “have babies.”
There are a few obvious problems with his reasoning.
- This is a poll reporting an ongoing demographic shift. Since conservatives and Xians have always been enthusiastically fertile, where did all these gay godless GenZs come from? If millennials and GenX spawned all these GenZs, why didn’t their dedication to reproduction produce a generation just like them that swamps out all those LGBTQ+ weirdos already?
- LGBTQ+ is not a uniform sterile mass. LGBTQ+ people have children all the time. They are diverse, they have diverse ideas and desires about childrearing, most of them have all the biological equipment needed. That they are more deliberate and thoughtful about it doesn’t mean they won’t reproduce.
- All people respond in complex ways to their environment. There are signals bouncing around all over in our culture that affect our decisions, and one of those signals is that conservative Christians are simply terrible, ugly, hateful people who make their children miserable. If you want to encourage a more viable ideology, that’s what you have to change. The Tim Pools of the world are only making it worse for Christians by being so repulsive.
I think I’ll just rest easy, knowing the kids are mostly all right.
It’s unfortunate this study will be used as “proof” by the MAGA kooks that the Democratic party are working to “make kids gay”. I also wonder if the increased number of Gen Z people identifying as LGBTQ+ might in part be them being more open about their sexuality, in the same way that some atheists describe being just culturally their family’s faith as being part of it, despite their not believing in it.
To be clear, I meant that the current generation are less hesitant to describe themselves as LGBTQ+ compared to previous generations, despite my wording to the contrary.
I think your flaw #2 is off track – the real point is both straight and gay people are going to have both straight and gay kids. Gay people could do nothing other than make the world a better place and there would still be gay kids being born.
Dan Savage made the point that is now showing up in surveys that there are a lot more bi people than previously believed. By dating statistics, bi people are more likely to end up with someone of the other sex and bi people who did so were never visible in the past.
If personality characteristics were really amenable to Natural Selection, it would be the MAGA types who would be dying out since so few young women want to date a MAGA man.
Surveys have long since demonstrated that religious beliefs are pretty much set in stone by the time you reach your mid-20s. If you’re a non-believer at the age of 25, you will remain a non-believer the rest of your life far more often than not.
But can the same thing be said for political beliefs? The received wisdom is that people grow more conservative as they get older once the fiscal and societal responsibilities start to mount, but is that true? Do the numbers back this up? It’s not something I have looked into myself, so I don’t know the answer.
I ask because while right-wing religious beliefs haven’t been a major factor in politics in many other democratic nations for decades (e.g. the UK), far right-wing politics have clearly been on the upswing in far too many of them over recent years.
So it seems almost certain that far right-wing politics will long outlast right-wing Christian fundamentalism as a danger to the United States. Even now, when the MAGA movement goes on the attack, they focus on safety (“think of the children”) and white nationalism (“brown people are destroying our country”) and rarely resort to “Biblical principles” any more, and having Trump as their leader has only helped facilitate that change.
All that to say, it’s the political identity of younger generations that matters most in the long run, since the experience of other nations shows that political beliefs are much more likely to evolve and change over a short period of time in reaction to current events. So while the trend is promising, there’s no cause of complacency.
Lets us start an unfounded rumor. Pollution, forever chemicals, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, particle pollution from diesel trucks et al cause children to be born gay. Besides cancers which seem to be rising among younger generations. Chemicals in food wrappers et al, and microplastics.
That way if a panic can be started we might get the homphobes to act responsibly on other fronts.
Historically people got more conservative as they got older for two reasons, 1)they got richer 2)the ones who didn’t died. Considering the herculean effort that the ruling class is going through to ensure young people stay as poor and overworked as possible I don’t think young people will be becoming conservative any time soon.
Did someone say ‘the young ones’?
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=wR3xwENK7Jo
The older people get, the more they have invested in establishing their home. In times past, they became more fiscally conservative to protect their investments. They may not have become more socially conservative, but they voted that way. The last 2 generations reaching adulthood have had far less opportunity to secure their investment with actual real estate, and they are not following the past trend as they do not have that investment to protect. I’ve seen polls from the US, Canada, and the UK all showing the same phenomenon.
I saw a report a few days ago about the gender gap in Gen Z, with females a good bit more liberal than the males.
US xianity is inevitably going to shrink below 50% by around 2038.
They are at 64% of the population and losing around 1% a year.
And the fundies trying to outbreed the normal people isn’t going to work either.
The fundie fertility rate is around 1.8 and they have a deconversion problem. Which means they will inevitably shrink.
They also have another problem that no one saw coming.
In Generation Z, more women than men are nones. Their breeding stock is escaping.
This shouldn’t be too surprising in retrospect. Several types of xianity are quite hostile to women, the forced breeders and female slaver groups. That would be the Catholics and the fundies.
Strangely enough, their magic book has this explained.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
Yeah, this article is from Christianity Today, not the most reliable source.
OTOH, they are more likely to slant their articles in their favor and this data is definitely not in their favor.
Among Generation Z the gender gap is 3% in favor of women being nones.
Good luck trying to make those female nones into fundie breeders.
tacitus @4:
I’m just a statistic of one, but I’ve become more liberal on the way to my current 77 years.
One example: until a year or two ago, I defended capitalism; but I was making the mistake of conflating capitalism with competition. That error was pointed out in a comment somewhere on FtB (probably here on Pharyngula), and so I came to recognize that capitalism is mostly anti-competitive (which is obvious once you notice it). I still think that the ideal expressed in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations would be a pretty good economic system if we could get there, but with a more inclusive list of what counts as common goods (I’d include education and health care, for example).
I’ve always been fairly liberal socially, probably because of the way I was raised. Back in high school in the ’60s I was pretty racist and sexist; but everyone this white male boomer knew was, too; so it just seemed normal. With any luck, I’ve learned a thing or two since then.
The tracking studies on political views seem to show that current forty and fifty year-olds may not have moved more conservative in a significant way unlike previous decade groups.
https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4
different study https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889
Curious about the sample’s geographic demographics? My thought is that in the same way that traditional political polling skews to elderly conservatives (still using land-lines, actually answering the phone, and willing to talk to a pollster rather than “nah, I’m busy making dinner, go away”), I wonder if this survey has an imbalance in favor of suburban or urban youths, ignoring rural regions where, well, they just aren’t trying to find anybody.
It reads more like a warning that they’re getting more religious. The cargo cult that is illiterate cafeteria Christianity is apparently highly adaptable, and atheists will need to confront this torrent of bullshit for the foreseeable future.
Do you really think Democrats will invest the intellectual rigor and emotional pain it takes to look themselves in the mirror and change course? I have a feeling I know what the Infinite Thread spammers are going to do, and what they do reflects the mood of the party. It’s so much easier to go full Blueanon and blame an external adversary like Trump, or Jill Stein, or Russia, or China, or Iran, or Yemen, or Hamas for their blunders and shortcomings.
bill seymour @11:
Funnily enough, I can say the same thing about my parents, who were always liberal, but from their 70s onward, they became more increasingly outspoken about conservatism’s impact on the world. That might be somewhat colored by my moving to Texas (from the UK) and thus living in a more conservative society, but I don’t think that was the only factor.
One possible factor is that one of their grandchildren married the daughter of Indian immigrants, and another married the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. Certainly, my brother’s father-in-law, a staunch conservative who once ran as a parliamentary candidate for UKIP (Nigel Farage’s original anti-Brexit party), reconciled with his gay son later in life (after he’d given him grandchildren) so the lives and loves of the younger generation aren’t without impact on the older ones who might be struggling to keep up!
beholder: @14:
Re: landlines. Apparently only 5% of the US population uses landlines these days, and only 2% depend on them exclusively, so even if you account for the fact that landline use is heavily skewed toward the elderly, it’s not going to have much impact on any remotely demographically representative survey, especially since landlines also typically come with caller id and call blocking features these days.
Perhaps more pertinent is how willing each generation is to answer the phone to pollsters. I wouldn’t be surprised if that skews significantly older too, but again, even people in their 60s and 70s are very familiar with the benefits of call screening.
Slightly off topic, but the “getting conservative as they become older” is as much about what specific policy preferences are labelled “conservative” or “liberal” at any one time. For example, in the US of 1961 “allowing anyone regardless of race to own a house in any neighborhood” would have been called “liberal,” but it’s now “moderate,” “not worthy of mention,” or even a “conservative” position.† So it’s at least as much “the label applied to the view” moving to the right as it is the views themselves; it’s very parallel to the “will stay irreligious for life if irreligious at 25” when the label may change from “infidel” to “atheist”…
† It’s “conservative” when one considers the true-left position that “residential housing is is a public good and not something that should be privately owned.” Admittedly, that view is pretty far outside the US mainstream… but it’s a substantial position in Sweden and Germany, to name two examples.
@16: Going back forty years, I’ve always answered pollsters with some variation on “I refuse to answer, and you’d better mark this as ‘refused’ and not ‘didn’t pick up.'”† Or, when contacted for the third time in one evening, on a landline, by one polling service that was seeking opinions from presumptive pro-Contras, some language unbecoming of an officer and gentleman.
I am hostile to the pseudoscience of predecisional opinion polling.
† A polling-response system that does not have an option for “specifically refused” instead of just “no response” is failing a fundamental validation check.
Yes, it is very interesting the way conservatives time and again have used this specificity to whitewash their historical bigotry and prejudices once the dust has settled after losing the latest battle — against votes for women, civil rights, equal rights, and most recently gay rights.
Now they’ve leveled their sights on the trans community, all their past regressiveness, including their recent supposed-implacable opposition to gay marriage, has been conveniently deposited in the memory hole.
On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see the progress, but why do they always have to make it so fucking hard?
There was a discussion on one of the shows that are part of Meidas Touch on youtube on this and the general conclusion was much the same, but with a small problem – standard media mostly refused to talk about anything Biden has done right, but social media sources are reporting even less of it, and most Gen Z get their information from the internet now, and not via some “media news website”, but via more active, faster paced, sources. Yeah, I mean literally stuff on the level of TikTok videos. Sadly, the right wing nuts, at least among MAGA, sort of get this, and engage with those sources, if incompetently, but Biden and Democrats seem to be utterly clueless about it. This has led Gen Z voters to be in a category that hates Trump, and everything he, and his MAGA people are trying to do to people, since that is spread all over the place, and it takes less that a minute for the latest idiocy from their mouths to land in a social media post, showing them to be sociopathic, but with virtually zero engagement from Biden and the Democrats in the same sphere the Gen Z guy they had on commented that he literally talked to someone at the same freaking high end college he is attending, who literally, again, knew she despised Trump, but also had absolutely zero clue what Biden has done in the last 3 years, especially any of the positive things.
This is bad. Because, it ends up looking less like a choice between someone that needs to to better, but is at least trying vs. a bunch of lunatics, and more like one between lunatics and someone who has done literally nothing at all since elected. It just doesn’t occur to some Gen Z to look past the social media they watch, to ask what the F is actually happening in the rest of the world, and if no attempt is made by sane people to promote themselves on those places (or have someone do it for them) we have to purely hope that they will vote Biden purely in the hopes things don’t get worse, not because they is any hope they might get better (despite the fact that they have, even if many of us think its not quite enough).
See also: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia
I’d put the key graph in here, but not sure how to embed images in comments.
So per the video, the woke mind virus is real… so the GOP refusing to mask and vaccinate presumably helped it spread.
chrislawson @21:
I thought it could be done with the HTML <img> tag:
putting the URL for the image in the quotes. For example, to embed one image in the About the Author bit on my own blog, I’d use:
That gives me (with the actual angle brackets):
which didn’t work when I hit the Preview button. Let’s see whether it works when I post the comment. If it doesn’t, then I guess WordPress doesn’t allow commenters to embed images.
Nope, didn’t work. I guess PZ can delete this comment and #23.
On the other hand, I’ve noticed that WordPress sometimes doesn’t like <img> tags without the alt attribute:
That doesn’t seem to work either. I’ve noticed other HTML tags, e.g.,
<sup>(superscript), that don’t work in comments but work just fine in main posts.I’ve just learned that the
<code></code>tags (which I put around the <sup> above) work magically yielding a red foreground, but the old<tt></tt>tags (short for “teletype” which should yield a fixed-pitch font) don’t.[image tags do not work on this platform, other than for the owner — neither do list tags etc. A restricted set of both markup and markdown. They did (as well as other tags such as font styles etc) in the old SB platform, but some of us commenters got a bit carried away.]
This arbitrary lumping into arbitrary generations is ridiculous and hopefully just a fad. These generational nicknames don’t even have agreed upon boundaries. I’d much rather just people say “people born in the 21st century” or “people now in their teens and twenties” if lumping must be done.
Jaws @ 17, one common failure to process information within context is social changes.
Some will perceive a moving of the goalposts, never realizing that it’s only the movement of the chains to mark a new first down line.
@ beholder :
What’s your answer to that? I presume its a no? If they don’t or do so only partly not going as far as you want what then? In a binary political system – setting the destructive role of thrid party spoilers aside and getting real until systemic refoms are made – then either :
1) the Democratic party loses to Trump and there’s a serious risk that the USA becomes a dictatorship or collapses into civil war. Is that what you’d prefer?
OR
2) The democratic party wins and Trump and Trumpism is defeated by a party that is at least within spitting duistanc eof realityand science and compassion for others. It won’t be utiopia , it won’t make everyuthing better but it will be something that provides the world withstability and oh yeah, perhaps a slowly changing SCOTus that shapes the future for the better not worse.
Who are these “spammers” here? Do you include me? Blueanon = what exactly huh?
@ ^ PS. Beholder If your answer is yes to that first question then what do you think will happen? Change course in what ways with what results and what odds of suceeding?
What would you like to see most what do fear will happen most and what’s the most likely and probable scenario here in your view please?.
Conservative: ‘It all went downhill when the corded ware culture gave way to the hallstatt culture’.
Also, what is that gay “iron” thing?
StevoR @ 30,
So, one realistically has only two choices.
1: Surrender, let them do what they may, we’ll eventually win out.
2: Concede and let them do whatever they want, we’ll eventually win out.
3: Acquiesce and allow them to do as they place, we’ll eventually be victorious by being non-confrontational, lest they become violent.
Wasn’t that Chamberlain’s method of dealing with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s?
@#11, billseymour,
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations explicitly states that education, roads and canals (infrastructure), a fair judicial system, and national defense is where the monarch should invest their increased revenues in order to generate a virtuous circle helping every citizen.
The first 4 books of The Wealth of Nations deal with why monarchs shouldn’t grant monopolies, but the 5th book deals with where the increased revenue generated by regulated competition should be spent. That 5th book is generally ignored by people who claim it is their bible (and they don’t understand the first 4 books either).
As Robert Reich among others points out, the Free Market by itself doesn’t exist.
It is a creation of humans, specifically, the…government.
And without eternal vigilance, the Free Market inevitably collapses into cartels and monopolies.
@34: It’s equally important to remember that the purpose of The Wealth of Nations is to argue the moral case for individual responsibility by the powerful/rich, often summarized as “enlightened self-interest.” The problem is that the Hayeks and von Miseses and their accolytes and allies reject the first word, forgetting that non-enlightened self-interest is ordinarily congruent with simple greed — and is merely the economic Maxwell’s Daemon. They don’t know any chemistry or physics, either so they don’t know why that’s Bad.
Or maybe they’re equating “enlightened” with “under the influence of the Lightbringer”… on second thought, that would be a good thing, right?
@wzrd1 @33,
Have you ever heard of the “excluded middle” fallacy? We may only realistically have two choices for President, but that doesn’t mean that we only have two choices for action.
Where in your options is “place your vote for the party and the individual that, over the last few decades, have shown themselves vastly more likely to respond to coordinated, targeted, and determined voices speaking on behalf of social injustices, especially given that the alternative poses an existential threat to the United States itself — and then work like mad to make them listen”? All of your options involve surrender or acquiescence, which shouldn’t even be on the table right now, and certainly wasn’t implied in the post you replied to.