With college football upon us once again, diehard fans may remember—or may be trying to forget—the disappointment of 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions put a serious damper on the season. Games were cancelled, postponed, or held in half-empty stadiums. Top players opted to sit out. Some schools canceled their entire schedule.
The worst part is, we now know for certain what many of us suspected at the time: None of it was necessary. Statistically speaking, COVID-19 was never a major threat to healthy young people, either on the field or in the stands.
That’s why, in the fall of 2021, I was ecstatic to see stadiums return to full capacity, especially in the Southeast. The COVID-19 alarmists were still wagging their fingers and issuing their dire, hysterical warnings, but the college kids didn’t care. With a refreshing and inspiring zest for life, they flocked to the games, rightly unconcerned about getting a cold.
And of course, the warnings proved to be unfounded, as we knew they would.
I remember thinking, as I watched a televised game that September, the stadium packed from field level to nosebleed with exuberant young adults, “I wonder if Gen Z just might save us.” And perhaps they did—or at least are in the process of doing so.
That certainly tracks with my anecdotal observations in the classroom. As a college professor for 40 years, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with multiple generations of students—including, most recently, Millennials (born between 1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2012). And because I teach rhetoric, I’ve read thousands of their papers, providing substantial insight into the way they think.
To be sure, each generation has had its share of good kids and bright minds. In general, however, I found that Millennials presented unique challenges. They were, as a group, the most entitled, judgmental, and arrogant of all the students I’ve taught, often basing an inflated sense of self-importance on scanty evidence.
Essentially, they are the “participation trophy” generation, the unwitting victims of countless artificial “self-esteem building” experiments conducted by the education establishment. These are the kids who were told from kindergarten on how special they were—and, unfortunately, they believed it.
Their essays and verbal comments were often characterized by mindless clichés, shoddy reasoning, lazy arguments, and the elevation of pathos over logos, accompanied by a deep-seated, quasi-religious certainty. Apparently, they felt no need to support their positions with evidence. They were right simply because of who they were: the smartest kids ever. Hadn’t their parents and teachers always told them so?
I’m generalizing, of course. As I said, I had some excellent students during those years, including many I still keep in touch with. Nevertheless, what I just described is reasonably accurate, based on my experiences with thousands of Millennials.
Thus, I have not been surprised to see what’s happening in our country, now that those “kids” occupy positions of influence in government, media, education, and the corporate world. Given what I observed among my Millennial college students, today’s post-rational, fact-free culture, with its toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and intellectual laziness—think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—was inevitable.
By comparison, my Gen Z students tend to be more open-minded, more interested in facts and logic, more inclined to question the status quo, and more amenable to free markets. They also take a more nuanced view of history and are inherently distrustful of ideologues on either side.
Gen Z may be more socially liberal than the Baby Boomers—though perhaps less so than Millennials—accepting things like same-sex marriage and transgenderism as facts of life. But as a group, they seem almost libertarian in their desire to be left alone. They also appear to be drifting gradually to the right, politically speaking.
The data bear out that perception. Gallup reported in 2023 that Gen Z men are almost 30 percent more likely than Millennial men to identify as conservative. And while Gen Z women are typically more liberal than their male counterparts, the poll found that the percentage of young people overall who consider themselves more conservative than their parents is seven points higher among Gen Z than among Millennials.
None of this is surprising, given what our government, led by blue states, did to these kids while they were in high school and college. They were locked out of their classrooms and isolated at home. They were prevented from attending prom, extracurricular activities, and even graduation. As a result, among this cohort, learning loss skyrocketed, as did depression and even suicide.
And with all of that came anger—slow-boiling, righteous, completely understandable anger—along with mistrust of a system that so utterly failed them and a desire to live their lives as they see fit, not according to government mandates.
Anger at the system. Distrust of government. Fierce independence. If you ask me, those sound like the necessary ingredients for a conservative revolution—or at least an anti-leftist revolution—that may, once Gen Z is running things, ultimately reshape, even save, this nation.
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Image by Shafay on Adobe Stock; Asset ID# 962927038
