MAGA courts the next generation of conservatives

Axios

4 hours ago

Amid rising loneliness, economic anxiety and frustrations with the left, a growing share of Gen Z-ers are turning right.
The big picture: The next generation of conservatives are in small towns and big cities, on college campuses and TikTok — and they're minting a new youth culture.
"It's part of this shift among Gen Z post-Covid," says Rachel Janfaza, a youth political analyst."They got really tired of being told what they could or could not do and what they could or could not say."
Stunning stat: Nowhere in the world are young men as lonely in comparison to other people in their country as they are in the U.S., per a recent Gallup poll.
One in four U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day — a higher proportion than young American women (18%) and young men in other wealthy democracies.
Economic anxiety is rampant. "More people who are Gen Zers, more men, than we might appreciate … aspire to a life that is not dissimilar, necessarily, from their parents and their grandparents in terms of the basic opportunity to meet someone, to fall in love, to create a life, have a family, have a home," says Harvard pollster John Della Volpe. "Each one of those things I just mentioned is probably more challenging today."
In the middle of the chaos, many young men are courted by the right and feel alienated by the left.
For a generation worried that typical milestones — like getting a job, finding a partner and buying a house — are out of reach, President Trump's campaign resonated.
"I do think that what Republicans managed to communicate is, 'We like men, and we like the things men like,' whether that's UFC or whatever. And sometimes in politics, making people feel like you like them is kind of important," says Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
"Democrats didn't do any of those things. They didn't say 'we like you, we like the things you like.' In fact, sometimes there's even tendencies to say, 'We don't like the things you like, and we're not sure we like you.'"
Case in point: Aidan Thompson, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Kansas, says he feels Democrats' message is that "the things that make men who they are are inherently evil"
But Trump "seems like he's a billionaire that's just an American, like, he goes to UFC, he eats McDonald's, he watches wrestling and NASCAR, he knows tons of stuff about baseball," Thompson said.
"He gets shot, and he immediately gets up and he holds up his fist like 'you can't kill me.' That's just so freaking awesome."
Zoom out: Although there are more men than women in the conservative youth movement, plenty of young women are part of it too.
By the numbers: 41% of 18- to 29-year-old women voted for President Trump in 2024, compared with 33% in 2020, per Tufts' Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
The intrigue: Many young men and women share similar frustrations with the Democratic Party — including gripes with political correctness and a sense that the left looks down on traditional gender roles.
"The left has become the party of hall monitors, telling me no and giving me lectures," says Raquel Debono, an influencer and founder of "Make America Hot Again," a community of young conservatives in New York City.
"There are a lot more conservative men than women. But people have neglected to mention that we've seen the counterculture rise from the feminist wave," she says. "Women want to feel like women again."
Zoom in: This month, Turning Point USA's Young Women's Leadership Summit brought together thousands of conservative women in their teens and twenties.
A common theme among speakers and attendees was that women should forego higher education and focus on becoming homemakers and mothers, The Cut's E.J. Dickson reports.
"Feminism told women to chase their corporate dreams for their validation while their kids were eating seed oils and their marriages were collapsing," Alex Clark, a conservative influencer and one of the speakers at the event, said on stage. "Well, we're done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop."
Reality check: This brand of conservatism isn't the only option, Debono says.
"What I don't like about the messaging on the right is that so much of the right has convinced young women that they have to give all of these things up to be a conservative woman," she says.
Debono says she looks to working moms in Trump's administration, like press secretary Karoline Leavitt, as evidence that the "trad wife" model isn't the only way to be a woman on the right.