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Notes -
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-afd-most-popular-party-among-under-30s/
This trend isn't unique to Germany. In Sweden SD was more popular among the youngest voters than average. Since more young people are immigrants and less likely to vote SD that means young ethnic Swedes are fairly overrepresented voting SD.
In Poland support for Konfederacja was by far the strongest among young people
Le Pen has done well among young people.
Meanwhile, in the US Young people lean massively democrat and in the UK the tories have essentially lost support among young people. Only 15% of young Brits support the Tories while 60% support labour, with greens and libs being the third and fourth choice.
Why has right wing politics become so heavily correlated with age in the Anglosphere, while it is not in other countries? What can the Anglosphere right do to attract younger people?
I think the elephant in the living room is continental vs Anglosphere conservatism- in the Anglosphere conservatism is much more individualist/libertarian, whereas in the continent it tends to be more ‘on your own head be it if you insist on being weird’. One of those can pitch itself better to young voters looking for a leg up.
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If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.
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The problem for the Tories is that they have been sitting in the driver’s seat for the past 15 years. Which makes it pretty hard to blame the housing/immigration/economic situation on the other guys. AfD doesn’t have that problem.
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The Finnish state broadcasting corporation just put out a story (Google Translated on link) on why young people in Netherlands are voting for Wilders. The given reason is, once again, housing.
England has an awful housing situation and has expensive real estate yet has the opposite political divide.
Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.
Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?
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A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.
There is no solution to the housing issue barring radically reforming planning permission in favor of development, and that won’t happen unless COVID II hits and kills (at least) 50% of over-60s.
Well, people who want to build more housing could secede from the government. That's the obvious solution when you have a minority of voters who feel very strongly that the majority is fucking them over.
It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.
Not at all.
In my experience, the average Labour voter (and thus the average voter) thinks that the cause of the UK's economic malaise is that Tories are channelling all the money to their mates, though they cannot name or identify any specific examples of this occurring. Unless "channelling" means pensions, and "mates" means all pensioners in the country, this doesn't explain the UK's budget problems. They just see a government taking in endless amounts of tax, no more services being produced, and assume MPs are personally pocketing the difference.
I guess if I was a Tory I would create some sort of "political moonshot plan" designed around trying to make people understand why housing is stupidly expensive (scarcity caused by laws) and how to fix it (make it legal to build stuff where it is illegal because people voted for scarcity, and easier to build stuff where the laws make it artificially difficult as a more subtle way to create scarcity). Worth a try, right?
Sunak's current political strategy is an ambitious plan known as Net Zero Seats, where he tries to secure an overwhelming defeat in the next election.
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The two main changes (in addition to planning reform) that a government that actually wanted to restore some kind of positive economic trajectory would have to do, namely abolishing the NHS and replacing it with European style healthcare and means-testing the state pension, are so catastrophically unpopular that they can never happen. It is what it is, it’s not like the UK is a failed state, it’s just in slow decline and has been for a long time, still a very nice place to live by any standards.
The low growth low interest rate, low increase in government spending situation we had before wasn't great, but it was sustainable. After spaffing trillions up the wall on lockdowns, however, the economic situation is no longer sustainable. You can project every NHS worship, pension worship, build-nothing worship and debt interest trend out and by the end of the century it results in demands for government spending exceeding 100% of GDP.
If Labour blows another hole in the budget with another 20% increase in healthcare spending that doesn't actually improve healthcare at all, and voters get mad at this for the same reason they were mad at the Tories for doing the same thing (even if they can't identify why it didn't work), who do they vote for next? The NHS Uber Alles Party?
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The difference is that in Europe existing parties tried desperately to keep out ‘new right’ populists almost everywhere so young people still believe things can actually change.
When the AfD joins a governing coalition and turns out - just like Meloni in Italy - to be another center-right party that in practice will do nothing about mass immigration, their supporters will probably abandon them pretty quickly. Le Pen in France is another example, she’s much less reactionary on immigration than people think (only Zemmour was the truly anti-immigration candidate). The Sweden Democrats have strongly moderated too, they’re barely to the left of the Danish Social Democrats if at all.
I do kind of suspect that eventually the voters will get at least some of what they want if they continue to win elections. That may be naive of me.
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Meloni's party has crashed from 26% of vote in the election to... uh, 27% of vote in the polls currently.
Yes, because there is no alternative. In practice Meloni has only seen increases in mass immigration to Italy, she has betrayed those who voted for her on that platform. But that is nothing new; the Tories did very well in 2019 after a decade of overseeing rising immigration but promising lower immigration too, this is common in Western countries.
Poll numbers don’t mean that she implemented her manifesto or fulfilled her promises.
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I might be biased but I feel like support for the farthest right option available always means more than support for whatever else. AfD are the guys most vilified in media. The general sentiment being that if you are voting for them there's something wrong with you.
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If this is the referred poll, 35% of youth are answering "don't know" and "won't vote", and right-leaning parties seem to generally be more popular than left-leaning ones.
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US conservatism is more tightly connected to religiosity than the hard-right parties popular with young people in Europe. I know several young people who are critical of migration, concerned about crime, skeptical of the transgender movement, and opposed to critical race theory, who nonetheless dislike and distrust Republicans because of their strong assocation with evangelicalism. I personally hate to say it, but abortion access is popular among young people and our Lord and Savior isn't.
Bizarrely, I also know young Southern Baptists who went woke, and are moderately hip on gender identity and sexuality issues. I actually have a strong suspicion that within 80 years, respectability politics and the evangelical drive to 'meet people where they are' will result in most big evangelical churches going the way of the mainlines. Traditional Christian morals will probably be the purview of a small minority in insular communities. "I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Ba'al..."
By contrast, among European conservatives, Christianity isn't very popular. In fact, my general understanding is that European conservative parties are typically less religious than the center, where Christian Democratic parties are very strong -- essentially being the mainliners of Europe. European conservatism is typically blood-and-soil, not God-and-guns or even throne-and-altar. They're nationalist with ethnic undertones (except in France), and combine that with a commitment to social welfare. They believe in using the government to provide services to citizens, and hold that the best way to afford this is to limit citizenship to natives and a small group of deserving immigrants. They're nationalist, but also kind of socialist. Hm.
I think opponents of this worldview are kind of right that there are similarities between it and the National-Socialism of Nazi Germany, which was also skeptical of religion and committed to both ethnonationalism and social welfare for the ethnos. It at least lies in the quadrant of skulls and crossbones which has been poisoned by memories of mustache man. But I don't see the irredentism, the genocidal hatred, or the fanaticism of fascism in them. I think there are occasional glimmers of such things -- I recall a discussion on here a while ago about Finnish? politicians saying the n-word in texts and joking about racial superiority. But the situation in Finland re: black people is lightyears away from the situation in pre-war central Europe re: Jewry, and I don't see these as driving motivations for continental European right-wing parties the way they were last century. I see more opposition to recent immigrants causing real, observable problems in society, where the solution doesn't have to do with loading people in camps but in deporting people committing crimes and not taking in new ones.
Even in Anglosphere Europe, the appeal in recent times has sometimes been "let's stop participating in these globalist enterprises/admitting culturally-incompatible migrants so we can fund our social welfare." Such a message was famously emblazoned on a bus. This combination is clearly appealing to many voters, and the unique thing with the Anglosphere is it isn't very appealing to young voters. For the UK, I would pin blame on austerity (however needed) for young voters' skepticism of the Tories, though I think that goes hand-in-hand with a feeling that the Tories represent upper-class Etonian elitists, not the needs of average people.
And across the pond, there are many bread-and-butter issues where the Republicans' traditional fiscal conservatism alienates young voters. Health care reform and workers' protections are the big ones; there are a lot of young people who feel like their lives are controlled by large corporate employers who don't do right by their employees. There are also many who, because of policies of said large corporate employers, struggle to maintain health insurance; they are angered by Republican opposition to even incredibly moderate reforms like Obamacare (even if the most popular component, the parental-health-insurance-under-26 rule, was supported by Trump), and many believe in a single-payer system.
My views on these issues form the biggest divergence between myself and the Republican party. I even support a lot of fiscally-conservative things you might not expect -- I think supply-side economics is a great idea, I oppose wealth taxes, and I think 'pricing gouging' during emergencies provides an economic incentive for people to supply needed goods to a disaster area! But I think there are areas where more needs to be done to make sure Americans have a good quality of life, and aren't exploited by unscrupulous megacorporations or buried under mountains of medical debt.
Of course, it's also possible that I'm full of shit, and talking about a continent I know nothing about based on little more than internet vibes. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
I would agree that the kind of "right" that appeals to the young is definitely the hardline, bordering-on-fascist sort, not dry conservatism. The young want a Great Cause and an Enemy, not milquetoast or cautious policy and definitely not "listen to your parents".
Do you think they'll mellow out as they get older and become libertarians? Or will they just be consumed by nanobots along with the rest of the human race?
Dunno about libertarians, but most of the young mellow out at some point. I wasn't only talking about Gen Z/Alpha, after all; this goes back at least to WWII (note that the actual Nazis had Angry Young Men willing to take to the streets and beat people up, something which you haven't really seen from "rightist" movements since until very recently).
Well, I sure hope not.
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At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.
All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.
While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).
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I think an answer that is both Americentric and true is that the culture war is waged first and foremost in English, and only can perfectly fit to America and countries more like it. The (dominant left wing angle of the) CW is something I've decried as being an extremely insidious corruption of many ideas that most people would agree with - at least they'd agree with the motte. Then the bailey gets snuck in and your average person is neither equipped nor inclined to work to decouple those from each other. As I specified that these are mostly left wing "arguments" - by which I mean streamers, ad campaigns, astroturfing on reddit, twitter, youtube, ecelebs in general inundating the general public with some toxic corruption of a more palatable left wing idea - you can make those receptive to them extremely resilient to dissent, but only if the arguments are constantly modulated to fit the current zeitgeist. Otherwise you fail to resonate with the general population at all, and the spell is broken. Not cleanly or instantly, but the absolute stranglehold can't last.
I think this only can truly happen in the US and our closest countries culturally (the UK and Canada), not only due to the above but also the fact that the vast majority of worldwide media is either from or related to America. My favorite example is the thought-terminating cliche "donate to black trans women". That makes no sense in the vast majority of European countries, because black people are just a tiny fraction of the population, especially integrated ones, and you can't make an appeal to someone's sense of fairness when none of those black people were slaves, or historically discriminated against in any way. Contrast that with the US context where guilt over all of that most certainly has a place in the public's consciousness, and it's much more likely to land.
Now, certainly there are wider schools of left wing thought that are more generally applicable, and have arguably been more popular in Western Europe; but those are less likely to be extreme or have that stranglehold over your terminally online population. Consequently, those downstream of any of the media the terminally online influence are not fed this riveting and completely relevant culture war. What remains in the public consciousness is this weird distorted holdover of 90s neoliberal thought (I've often lamented that something seems to have completely frozen the political elites, but this is not the central point of my response): Immigration good, world police kinda bad, health care good, guns bad, violence is not endemic to our society, number must go up at all costs, etc. None of this is really all that compelling except health care and being against the world police idea. It certainly doesn't hold the vitriol that American politics does.
So, when you combine those geriatric neoliberal policies with the consequences they bring (e.g. wow these migrants really seem to be causing a lot of problems), and the messaging is not able to sustain it, what do you get? Genuine grassroots support for something, anything different. Wow, there's a part called "Alternative for Germany" that's talking about these exact issues the establishment is ignoring? Sign me up!
Contrast this with America, which is much larger in scale, and arguably a lot more atomized due to its multicultural nature. This compounds with the effects of the terminally online world, meaning a lot of people's perceptions of issues that are not right next to them are completely detached from reality. It's just some streamer, or tiktoker, or AI generated youtube video that even tells them about these things. A young leftist from a hip neighborhood is likely never to see actual race crime, or when it does - as was the case when Ryan Carson was stabbed to death - the feed of content is so strong that they are completely immunized against looking at what happened critically. The hold on them is just too strong.
I will say that I disagree somewhat with the idea that America's young are overwhelmingly democrat. Everything I've seen has indicated that they are splitting along gender lines, with democrats still having an advantage, but only in the aggregate. I can also, emotionally and with no evidence, say that I've felt an extreme rupture in our society between the messaging and reality. I think things like the migrant bussing and ever-expanding nature of activist thought (a self preservation measure - if they don't have something to fight for, do they have jobs anymore?) have soured a lot of people on assumptions they've made. Will it be enough to change the zeitgeist? I don't know. I do know that the American right wing has utterly failed in having unifying figures that are anything short of embarrassing. I don't have a solution for that.
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The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.
In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.
Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/podcast-episode/voting-choices-of-young-people-shifting-to-the-left/qevszl5rb
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.
The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.
I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.
Is this actually true? In Germany in 2019, 40% of children born had at least one parent born abroad, the situation has accelerated further since then.
In the UK in 2021 77% of the population were White British or Irish. In Germany only 71% of the population have no “Migrationshintergrund”, however that 29% category does include remaining returning Ostsiedler. Nevertheless, I would assume the native percentage in Germany is around 75% or so too. 25% of Swedes had both parents born abroad or themselves immigrated, while an additional 10% had one parent born abroad and one in Sweden (which includes many people of immigrant descent). So again, Sweden is likely less than 75% native, although many migrants are Finns. Perhaps 75% of Australians are ethnically European according to most estimates.
So again, neither Germany nor Sweden retain a higher percentage of their indigenous populations than the UK. They are likely whiter due to differences in migrant country of origin, but not considerably so.
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Canada is an Anglosphere exception as well. Young people are basically equally likely to vote conservative as the old.
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Short answer: The two-party system. I think there are young people in the USA who would vote for AfD but who wouldn't vote for the Republican Party. The Republicans suck in a lot of ways and are shackled to interest groups that make them unappealing to most people under the age of 40.
I think there are also a lot of young people in the USA who would vote for a far-left party in a parliamentary system but who have strong objections to voting for the Democrats - lately we've seen a lot of pushback from this bunch over the Israel-Palestine issue.
Yeah, this is probably a large factor. One of the main splits in Continental Europe is less that "young are right, olds are left", but rather that the olds vote for traditional boomer parties (social democrats and Christian democrats, and equivalents) and youngs vote for new "challenger" parties (right-wing populists and greens/new left parties, often split by gender). As dissatisfaction with the pensioner-focused boomer parties that wish to stay the course even while Europe is mired in 15 years of no growth and little development grows, the right-wing populist parties derive particular benefits due to several reasons (center-right parties have generally tended to be a bit more popular than center-left ones, right-wing populists are better at appearing to center-left voters than challenger left parties to center-right ones, the Greens in particular have become quite "pro-system" in recent decades etc.)
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