The Republican base voted for President Trump three times because they wanted change.
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But the base says, I am tired of Republican sloganeering and clip farming at hearings while doing nothing of substance. Young adults look at the power that the Republican Party was given in the 2024 general election and see that they don’t even care enough to pass a simple election security bill. Republicans who do care tried to sneak it into other bills, however, even that strategy (which always seems to work for Democrats) didn’t go anywhere.
One major divide within the base seems to be seething resentment between different generations of voters, amplified by a click-driven social media ecosystem, though the grievances are real. We can’t let these attitudes eat us alive, because the stakes are too great, especially as we approach the midterm elections.
To head some complaints off at the pass here, let me say that we must be able to make generalizations about generations to study patterns and trends over time. Some people are extremely sensitive to their group being generalized. “You can’t say Gen Z loves socialism, I’m Gen-Z and I hate socialism!” or “Boomers aren’t entitled! I’m not entitled!” But if we can’t have these kinds of discussions without getting our feelings hurt, we can’t have any macro-political dialogue at all.
Readers have been warned; I am now going to generalize.
Socialism is gaining popularity with young voters, along with some very disturbing anti-American social baggage, and the response from older generations is usually to accuse them of being simply entitled. Time and again I have seen conservatives point to GDP growth or the fact that inflation is rising more slowly now than a few years ago (which is good and true) and then declare that young people have it easy. This is not productive.
Immigration, offshoring, DEI, and social media all have contributed to a different ecosystem than the 1980s Reagan era. For example, young men today are applying for hundreds of jobs with no callbacks whatsoever, not because they have a bad resume, but because all major job boards are flooded with thousands and thousands of applicants, many of which are outright fake. This will only get worse, potentially, with AI being more accessible to the scammers of the world.
The response from young people is to blame the Baby Boomers, who, to be fair, make up a large portion of our electorate, and voted as a block for many of the squishy politicians and policies we suffer under today. Older generations do bear some responsibility in this. But the broad resentment from young people while refusing to take responsibility for their own choices is also unfair.
Yes, there is that retiree who just wants to bash the kids, whose mind is locked in an impenetrable shell of “I got mine, you must not work as hard as me, otherwise you’d have yours.” Similarly, there are inconsolable Gen-Z men who reject any advice that suggests they ought to change something about how they are approaching the world (or their spending); they feel like victims, and they want to continue to feel like victims.
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Broadly, Republicans do two things badly. First, when we ought to be smart, punchy, and political, we give overly nuanced and detailed lectures. When the time comes to give explanations, we scold young people for not knowing the answer already, even while acknowledging the public education system’s brainwashing operation.
Empathy, so often misused by progressives, is the ability to picture something from someone else’s perspective without “strawmanning” them.
The generations need each other, need to empathize with and work together, to save the country from the real problem: far-left Democrats. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called democratic socialists, who, as far as I can tell, are some of the most extreme leftists we have ever dealt with. Thousands of leftists set to social media to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Incredibly, 71 percent of Democrats polled supported imprisoning Elon Musk for his work with DOGE.
We don’t need to completely agree on who is to blame, or every detail about what went wrong, to agree that the country is in desperate need of saving.
The fact is that older generations have experience and institutional knowledge and make up most of the much-needed potential donor class. Younger people just don’t have the disposable income. But what young people do have is energy and a bigger stake in what happens. Due to each election cycle, we will feel the effects of policies passed today for longer. Successful political change cannot be accomplished without both ends of the age spectrum.
Resentment is not a good political strategy against your own side; if it spreads, it could sink us for good.
Linnea Lueken ([email protected]) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. X: @LinneaLueken