NOTE: Where I restate Crowder's view on Gen Z (pro free speech and pro gun), I don't necessarily agree with this view. I was only accepting it for the sake of this debate.
Welcome to the new TaraElla Report, where we build the classical liberal values revival, one day at a time, one issue at a time. Classical liberalism is the ideology of freedom for individuals, and that's the lens through which we are going to look at various social issues. If you're a fellow freedom fighter, you've come to the right place, and I highly recommend subscribing. Today, we're going to look at whether Generation Z, young people born after 1997, is as conservative as Steven Crowder recently proclaimed.
Generation Z so conservative. Or at least, Crowder and some other people keep saying this. The reality, however, appears to be more complicated. First of all, we need to define what conservative means. Crowder seems to think that Gen Z is conservative because they support free speech and gun rights, and many Gen Z individuals who vote Republican and support these things are happy to call themselves conservative. It appears that more Gen Z are happy to identify as conservative, compared to millennials. But the truth is, at least for older millennials, libertarian and conservative are considered different things, and many of us consider ourselves libertarian and not conservative, and for good reason. If you want to know what is traditionally considered the hallmarks of a conservative, just go to Conservapedia and have a look. By the way, according to my standards, Donald Trump is not conservative. On the other hand, Mike Pence would be a standard conservative. Since I don't share many of the Vice President's views, I don't consider myself a conservative.
So why are center-right Gen Z people keener on the conservative label, even as they don't on average appear to be more conservative than their millennial counterparts? I guess one important reason is that there are many socialists among those born after around 1990, and socialists love to lump all capitalists as conservative. In the socialist worldview, socialism is the only acceptable path to progress, hence everyone else is conservative by default. And if you are called something again and again, you might as well reclaim that label and take pride in it. Therefore, many Gen Z libertarians and classical liberals have become happy to identify as conservatives.
But I worry that this would erase the difference between classical liberalism and conservatism. Firstly, classical liberalism is more positive than conservatism, as a worldview. Classical liberalism carries the positive outlook you find in thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, while conservatism has a much stronger emphasis on following religious traditions and being reluctant to change things, which is less positive. Personally, I'm somewhere in between these two extremes, perhaps like where Edmund Burke was back in his day. But I do believe in having a positive outlook, and I also believe in keeping religion out of politics, so I'm definitely more of a classical liberal. Of course, socialists still love to call me a conservative, and I get called a conservative from time to time. It's just a fact of life, unfortunately.
