Dear Boomers: Here’s What Gen Z Conservatives Want You To Know

A conservative is someone who, to borrow the famous phrase of National Review‘s William F. Buckley “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” With the rise of the Soviet threat, that phrase and the hundreds of articles published in Buckley’s magazine became generation-defining. Almost 70 years later, young conservatives, growing in the Trump era and lacking the nostalgia of our Boomer parents, have been asking ourselves a pertinent question: what the heck are we yelling at?

Stuck in the ’70s, many of those who came before us find themselves “yelling Stop” at radically different things. Unlike what some of the Boomers may initially think, the difference in our yelling doesn’t originate from Gen Z conservatives falling in love with progressive orthodoxies—although a portion has. Gen Z conservatives are not adopting the views of their liberal peers. What we are doing is responding to the unique ills we detect in the unique times we find ourselves in. Our lack of focus on some of the policies cherished by Boomer conservatives is better attributed to prioritization than rejection.

The mission statement of National Review was once the mission statement of conservatism writ large, which included propositions such as “we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side” in fighting “the growth of government.” Back then, pro-business and pro-America were almost exclusively seen as synonymous. Back then, leftists talked more about unionizing than about inculcating DEI ideology. Back then, cultural preservation was not the animating spirit of Republican politics; institutions weren’t completely overtaken and the status quo was acceptable. It was “morning in America” indeed, until it wasn’t.

Irritable as the term may be, opposition to wokeness, for instance, has become one of the principal attractors of conservatism for young people. We are all in part a product of our environment. Boomers’ conservatism was understandably marked by different perceived threats and it concentrated its energies on those—mainly, defeating the communists. Gen Z now simply concentrates its energies on threats the Boomers never encountered in their youth.

We find ourselves in an environment where declining community and radical individualism, not fear of government collectivism, engross our dissatisfactions. The mere size of government is not something that we lose sleep over, not because we think more like communists, but because we have seen conservatives before us fail to conserve anything beyond market fundamentalism.

Even if it sounds counterintuitive, in the eyes of Gen Z conservatives, conserving the conservatism of our parents may be the least conservative thing to do. The values-neutral liberal order many Boomers love to appeal to is dead.

Progressives have wielded government power, and wielded it well, to a point at which refusing to use such power in the name of principle has become masochistic. The battle of ideas Boomers experienced on the college campuses of yesteryear is not there like it was before. The leftists we meet on campus don’t “agree to disagree”; they’d rather just make us agree. The reality is that whenever a Republican says “I think the law should stay out of it,” like Nikki Haley did when asked about legislation on sex-change procedures for children, Gen Z conservatives don’t think, “yes, individual responsibility! Small government rocks!”

The culture and institutions that held this country together are vanishing. Hence, if we can use some government power—with prudence, of course—to strengthen them, so be it. Boomer conservatives grew up hearing that the more government grows the more chaotic things will turn. Though this idea is theoretically coherent, here’s the issue: if you let the government expand, it will be hard to reduce its size, but if you let anti-American activists dictate policy and spearhead culture without restraint, forget about tax rates, America won’t be America anymore.

Boomers still have melancholy—but we don’t. We have been made to want to conserve something that we never knew, which is why we are so starkly positive-visioned. We don’t know what living in an America without ubiquitous and suffocating progressivism feels like. We just know, maybe in part because of the Boomers’ stories, that this country is heading in the wrong direction and that playing the same cards won’t change that.

If “yelling Stop” means sticking with the belief that government inaction is in itself virtuous, Gen Z conservatives disagree. We want radical change because we face radical circumstances and if Boomers had grown up in the America we have, they would want it too.

Juan P. Villasmil is an Intercollegiate Studies Institute editorial fellow at The Spectator World.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.