Gen Z conservatives are often portrayed by the media as a cohort radicalized by economic despair. They’re depicted as young people priced out of adulthood, lashing out through ideology. That’s the picture you get on cable news and on X, reinforced by both liberals and the oddball Right. But is it true?
Last week, we gathered 20 right-leaning Zoomers in a Nashville conference room for a Manhattan Institute focus group. They were mostly Trump voters, overwhelmingly Christian, a mix of college and non-college, ranging from late teens to twentysomethings edging into thirty.
The general thrust of our discussion was different from what you see online. They were not, for the most part, crushed by economic conditions. Their concerns about housing costs and the economy sounded more like talking points than lived traumas. They had flexibility and mobility and felt little urgency to lock themselves into the life milestones they say they want. Even in a highly religious room, many were less likely to be sprinting toward marriage and family and more likely to be disappointed by the dating market, convinced there just aren’t many “serious” partners left.
Their genuine source of economic discomfort wasn’t wages or rent—it was health insurance. Several participants described going uninsured, avoiding care, or feeling as if they were one accident away from financial chaos.
Psychologically, this group was marked by desensitization, shaped less by fear than by boredom. They were not especially anxious about their own futures. They worried more about what AI and automation might do to other people than to themselves. Politics is entertainment: a stage for mockery, transgression, and performance, not moral seriousness or policy discipline.
That sensibility helps explain their media diets—and their favorite characters. Most like President Donald Trump. Many like Tucker Carlson and other figures who keep politics loose, funny, and combative. Vice President J. D. Vance—named by many as the ideal next president— was treated less as a flashy standard-bearer than as a default assumption about where the party is headed.
This group knows about the online Right’s more incendiary content, but mostly as background noise. About half knew who Nick Fuentes is. Some described him as funny or provocative; others saw him as toxic; none was fully panicked.
Extreme rhetoric often landed like another genre of Internet content—something to be halfheartedly consumed, laughed at, scrolled past, and then forgotten. There was one true believer who agreed with Fuentes’s worldview and espoused explicit authoritarian and anti-pluralist views. But he was an outlier.
That ambient, unserious relationship to politics has a darker side. Moral stigmas—racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny—no longer reliably do the work they used to. After a decade of hearing the same accusations leveled at everyone from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, some see allegations of bigotry as table stakes. In the room, this translated into moments where ugly claims were met less with agreement than with shrugging indifference—more “whatever” than “yes,” but also more “whatever” than “absolutely not.”
Exhaustion, not conviction, also characterized their foreign policy views. Many participants expressed a baseline preference for Israel over its adversaries. But they were weary of being told constantly that the issue must dominate their attention. On Ukraine, the prevailing instinct was simple: not our problem, Europe should handle it. For this group, America First isn’t a specific doctrine so much as common sense.
For many of these Zoomers, life is not especially bad. Some openly referenced family wealth or trust funds. Others still expressed confidence that they would do as well as, or better than, their parents. The looming intergenerational wealth transfer reinforces that confidence. It gives them the freedom to treat politics as a spectacle, not as something with real stakes.
That helps explain their detachment. Their views on family, illegal immigration, and social order largely align with those of mainstream Republicans. But they are not demanding doctrinal or programmatic rigor. They want a politics that feels less uptight and more charismatic—one that can make them laugh as well as make them better off.
For some, that may not come from the Right. One participant named Michelle Obama as his ideal next president. Another—the same one who had praised Nick Fuentes—cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as preferable to Ben Shapiro.
What matters most for them all is not ideological consistency but vibe: humor, transgression, and the sense of being led by someone who can command attention. That preference, more than any specific belief expressed in the room, may prove the most consequential feature of right-leaning Gen Z’s political development.
Want to read the full focus group? Check it out at City Journal’s main website:
I have interacted with many Gen Z Republicans, and my parents and all of their friends likewise are Trump voters. I can say that the overarching theme with Trump's entire coalition is a disgruntlement with a liberal world order that has dominated the entire world since 1991, that has assumed that John Locke's radical-at-the-time liberal values (human rights, liberty, equality, property) are a natural fact rather than a world view that can be dissented with, that the interpretation of these liberal values as left by the elites cannot be questioned, that these liberal values matter more than even essential resources for human well-being such as food, shelter, or healthcare, and that these liberal values must never be dissented from or the dissenter must be pruned from the Earth either peacefully (through hate speech laws or arrests), or violently (through revolution).
The reality is that both liberalism and democracy are not some "ultimate" end state for humanity to strive for, but the symptoms of a low-trust society towards authority, that traumas from the 20th century, its revolutions, and its failed republics (both libertarian and authoritarian) have created a reinforcing effect around liberalism and democracy, and that this resulted in an increasing "educated dictatorship" attempting to stigmatize certain views as "evil" and demand people align their viewpoints with their own, all while ignoring real-world, everyday issues often caused by liberalism such as rising healthcare, education, food costs (culminating in the "Great Awokening" of the late 2010s). And that this educated dictatorship fail to take into account a fact that a low-trust society will naturally not tolerate any top-down social engineering, whether from a traditional autocrat or a woke liberal-progressive ranting about historic discrimination.
Saying you love Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 20th century would often be a signal of supporting an oppressive, anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment system that perpetrated conflict and massacres. Saying you love Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 21st century is an act of defiance and rebellion against an increasingly socially oppressive "liberal consensus"- many right wing Republicans I know meme about Hitler a lot, not because they support his ideas wholesale, but because they want to signal that they are not the type to scold their fingers at "moral stigmas" like racism, antisemitism, misogeny and they want to create a free speech "safe space" from the liberal cancel culture and moral absolutism.
Thinking and Republicans??? I think there is something wrong here