The Zoomers Are Flirting With Fascism

Poring over data showing zoomers have embraced the politics of nihilism in surprising numbers, I reflexively want to judge from my Elder Millennial Seat of Wisdom, to tell the young folks that they are wrong and they should feel bad for being so wrong. 

Then I remember what Generation Z has lived through, what they saw at such a young and impressionable age, and I remove my judge’s robe and step down from my seat and tell the zoomers that I get it. You’ve known nothing but dystopian hell. You’ve never known stability, or a life without the buzzsaw of anxiety whirring in your brain, or prospects that don’t get shittier with every passing day, month, year. The zoomers had the misfortune of being born in the declining phases of the American empire. Historically, imperial decline is a tough time to grow up. 

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I didn’t want to believe it because it seemed too bleak to acknowledge, but young folks are open to fascism at rates that should frighten everyone trying to hang on to the republic. Perhaps this shouldn’t offend the senses since democracy has delivered such wretched results in their childhood and young adulthood. How else could a monster be elected to the White House?

Imagine Donald Trump’s scowl greeting you on the walls of your middle school or high school every day. Imagine looking at the face of a fascist game show host, a swindler, a grifter, a felon, a sexual abuser, a living avatar for nihilism, a drooling geriatric man who fantasizes about all-out racial warfare, and knowing he is your president, that he was deemed worthy of the highest office in the land. Imagine how that scrambles a young mind. I see, the mind might say, nothing matters. Good and bad things are exactly the fucking same. How else could such a vile man become the leader of the richest, most powerful country on earth? 

It’s not just Trump’s flukey 2016 election win that has warped the brains of America’s zoomers. Maybe they were born in the early 2000s and have vague memories of the collapse of the worldwide economy and the ensuing economic chaos, including the villains who caused the meltdown being rewarded with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars while working families suffered in ways not seen for almost a century. If they tried hard enough, zoomers – and the rest of us – could draw a straight line from the federal government’s response to the housing market collapse to the ascendant fascism that put Trump in office eight years later. Tragedy begets tragedy begets tragedy. It’s a lesson Gen Z has learned in horrifying clarity. 

Trump The Anti-Hero, The Countercultural Force

"They think of Trump as an anti-hero and not a villain. ... I think it's less about policy and much more about personality," John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, told Axios in September after the latest polling of Gen Z voters showed a creep toward fascism. 

For an American voting in their first presidential election this November, Trump – who has been running for president for half this person’s life – has been normalized. He is what a president is. In this way, fascism is normal to the American zoomer. It's one side of the political coin. On the other is normie-adjacent neoliberalism.

This might not be as bleak as it seems. The liberals and leftists who first encountered Trumpism in 2015 had come of age in a far less radicalized political culture (recall the way Democrats flailed in 2016). They watched The West Wing and all its sappy and occasionally deranged bipartisanship and thought that was the pinnacle of politics: Everyone getting along, every agreeing, all points of view being equally worthy. Politics, for Americans of a certain age, were over. Those who opposed Trump in those early days had seen politics played between the 20s; they were therefore completely unprepared to counter Trump and the coalition of wackos and weirdos and white supremacists who rallied around him on his way to the White House. Politics was suddenly played at the goal line, and all the bad guys needed was one touchdown and the game was over.

A decade ago, these folks thought the Bad Man would be defeated if they simply pointed to enough bar graphs and checked enough facts. Trump and his allies bulldozed through those political norms and the democratic guardrails we heard so much about in those days and introduced an era of Total Nihilism Everywhere All The Time. Nothing, it seems, matters in the current political age. There is no shame, no repercussions, no political gravity that drags down a candidate or elected official for flaunting basic small-d democratic norms.

This is all the zoomers have ever known. They don’t know shit about The West Wing or any of the mealymouthed Clintonian politics that dominated from the early 90s to 2020, and that’s a good thing. Sure, the numbers cited above are concerning – not quite alarming – but my hope is that Gen Z does not oppose fascism with the same weakness and fecklessness as old guard Democratic Party types and the baby boomers and Gen Xers who were unable for years to even identify what Trump was. Zoomers, I think, are more aware of how to break the fascist fever and call out the bad faith endemic in far-right discourse.

It’s not like zoomers’ politics are right wing, or anything close to it. They appear, as a group, not to buy into the far-right lies about immigrants systematically destroying the fabric of the country, or “poisoning the blood” of the United States, as Trump once said in a blood-and-soil flourish that might make your spine turn to ice. 

And even as data shows a slow trickle of young men moving away from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, their political views have not changed since 2020. A majority of these young guys still support universal healthcare and abortion rights and government spending to reduce poverty. But increasingly, they want to vote for the party that will strip untold millions of all healthcare access, end legal abortion in all 50 states, and scapegoat the poor while slashing taxes for those who own boats named for Ayn Rand characters. How one squares this, I don't know.

I would guess – though I certainly don’t know for sure – that the fascist movement holds some counterculture appeal for young Americans in the 2020s. The fascist diatribes pouring out of the mouths of Trump and JD Vance and Silicon Valley billionaires on the vanguard of worldwide fascism might be repulsive for the parents of zoomers who grew up in a far more stable political and cultural environment in which every election was not existential in nature and one could live one’s life without being constantly captured by the political entertainment complex that dominates the rotting corpse of American culture. 

So-called trad posting, as I wrote in 2023, is a symptom of teenagers and folks in their 20s engaging in elaborate online performances designed to trigger culturally liberal Americans who might buck at left-wing economic policies (we’re afraid to lose what little we have) but are perfectly fine with drag brunches and Pride month and were generally supportive of black folks asking for basic rights during the racial justice marches of 2020. 

This flaunting of regressive gender norms as an act of rebellion against Millennials (the greatest generation) and Gen-Xers is childish and stupid, of course, but very much expected. The same phenomenon took hold in the late 60s and early 70s: Some children of the World War II generation would wear Nazi symbols and wonder aloud what Hitler really did that was so wrong. Probably they didn’t mean this – the same way most young women in the 2020s who trad post don’t actually want to be second class citizens – but it made mom and dad angry, and that’s all that mattered. Think of the kids of the flower power generation who in the 80s bowed at the altar of grotesque, unfettered capitalism and lauded Ronald Reagan as an American savior (Alex Keaton, the right-wing economics fanboy played by Michael J. Fox in Family Ties, embodies this phenomenon). Their parents, the first and last generation to truly oppose the naked and brutal exploitation of capitalism, could hardly conceive of a more hurtful turn. Reagan, the dimwitted actor-turned-president who threatened to undo postwar consensus, was their child's hero.

For young people today and in a bygone era, being told that certain politics are out of bounds is the very reason to learn about those politics and pretend to adopt them as their own. It is but a performance, a mask meant to instigate and anger. Look at me, mom, I love Donald Trump. He's a threat to the system, man. It's a nice little fantasy.

Sometimes, however, the mask of playacting is welded onto one's face and there is no way to remove it. That’s my worry for today’s fascist-curious zoomers. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.