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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   25507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-afd-most-popular-party-among-under-30s/

Germany: AfD Most Popular Party Among Under 30s Increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions under which they live—the growing prospect of war in Europe, a precipitously declining standard of living, mass migration, and a bleak future in general—a large number of Germany’s youth now view the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as the party which best articulates their concerns.

Findings from the 2024 Jugend in Deutschland study, published days ago, have revealed that 22% of Germans aged between 14 and 29 years old would vote for the AfD if federal elections were held today, making the rightist, anti-globalist party the most favored among young people.

AfD’s favorability among young Germans has spiked sharply compared to past years, rising from 9% and 12% in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and has come at the expense of the parties in the ruling left-liberal traffic light coalition.

Support for the Greens, which in 2022 stood at 27%, has tumbled to 18%. The liberal pro-business FDP, having largely kneeled to all of the dictates from the Greens and the SPD since forming the coalition, has seen its standing among youths nose-dive even more drastically, plummeting from 19% in 2022 to a mere 8%.

Commenting on the results of the study he helped author, Klaus Hurrelmann, a Professor of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School in Berlin, said:

The assumption that young people are left-wing is wrong. We can speak of a clear shift to the right among the young population. … The AfD has clearly succeeded in presenting itself as a protest party for the traffic lights and as a problem-solver for current concerns.

Among the chief concerns for young people is not climate change, LGBTQ rights, or gender ideology, as the mainstream globalist press might have it, but rising costs and a lower standard of living due to inflation (65%), the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East (60%), and overpriced and scarce housing (54%).

Deteriorating social cohesion, the managerial state’s disproportionate concern for migrants and asylum seekers, the growing risk of an economic crisis, and the prospect of poverty in old age are also worrying vast numbers of young Germans.

Youth sentiments reflect issues raised almost exclusively by the AfD.

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 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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