Summary
With Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, young Gen Z voters like Kate, Holly, and Rachel are grappling with deepening divides with their Trump-supporting parents.
For many, these conflicts go beyond policy disagreements, touching on core values and morality. Parents once focused on fiscal conservatism have, in some cases, embraced conspiracy theories, creating painful rifts.
Studies suggest political divisions are increasingly seen as moral judgments, fostering a “mega-identity” where political views signify personal decency.
For these young adults, maintaining family connections amidst such ideological fractures has become challenging.
I’m gonna claim that is millennials really hit the sweet spot of technology advancement that, like you said, forced us to learn things and think critically. Working in IT, I now have to continue to help the older generation understand computers but also teach the younger generation how to use computers. It’s been tablets and mobile interfaces for a decade now, and nobody has learned how things work.
I do think the generation that’s about to reach adult hood seems to be more well adjusted emotionally that any other I’ve experienced. A lot of schools do include basic programming courses and all do common core math, so hopefully that will be the difference maker for critical thinking. I think the 20-30 year olds right now could be the most problematic politically going forward.
Schools being effective might become far more difficult in the next few years, especially if Betsy DeVos gets her claws into it again.
And isn’t that the real point, after all? Effective schools (especially if they don’t just treat it as a school-to-work program, but instead, teach actual critical thinking and give people the skills - and the will - to be autodidactics with an actual liberal education background) would probably mean less Republicans.
Well, I sure hope that’s true, but nothing about critical thinking requires any math or programming. I value both those things as well, but I don’t think those skills alone are going to help us.
I seem to remember that engineers actually tend toward being right wing, so it’s quite possible that a lot of them learned engineering almost as something more like a trade school and never broadened their minds at all in the process, and basically side-stepping both critical thinking and media literacy. It’s been my anecdotal experience as well: going to uni, I noticed many engineers who might have excelled in a very narrow area - math, programming, engineering but utterly incapable of grasping some rather basic critical thinking concepts and who tended to be rather reactionary. In fact, many of them would try to tell me how much they loved Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, as a for instance…