Millennial Conservatism is Over
The most exciting conservative activists during the Tea Party years were millennial guerrilla videographers, including James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, Lila Rose, and Christian Hartsock. Their viral exposés revealed the left’s inability to live up to its own moral framework.
Unfortunately, though they highlighted the left’s hypocrisy, these guerrillas also adopted the left’s moral framework. Left-wing community organizers were bad because they were anti-woman, abortion was bad because it was racist and anti-woman, National Public Radio was bad because it was anti-Semitic, and pro-tax-hike leftists were bad because they—shockingly—did not actually want to fund the U.S. Treasury.
Because they relied on the left’s moral framework, Millennialcons did not radically depart from prior generations of conservatives. Baby Boomer conservatives asserted two things: first, that the left doesn’t follow its own rules; second, that we conservatives follow them better. The Boomer icon, Saint Ronald Reagan, defeated those godless, materialistic Soviets by spending them into bankruptcy—we out-materialized the materialists, apparently. Gen X conservatives, who adored irony and irreverence, focused on the first point—leftist hypocrisy—and added some media savvy. The cartoon Southpark was (and is) peak Gen X conservatism.
The Millennialcons combined Boomer conservatism with Gen X humor and adopted a more aggressive approach—filming in the leftists’ natural habitat—but millennial conservatism was no break from the past. Democrats were still the “real racists.” The rising Gen Z (or Zoomer) right presents something radically different, however. The best heuristic for understanding this transition is the late Charlie Kirk.
Kirk—a young millennial—started Turning Point USA in 2012. In the early days, Kirk would spend a lot of time telling college kids that nowhere on Earth had communism ever “worked.” What he meant by “worked” is that communism never generated the level of material wealth that his Boomer parents enjoyed under 20th-century Western capitalism—a rewording of the Boomer narrative: Capitalism won because it out-materialized the materialists.
Kirk established a special multimillion-dollar project called Blexit, with the sole purpose of informing blacks that the Democrats are the real racists.
Kirk defended legal immigration because “America is a nation of immigrants.” He attacked illegal immigration because it was unfair to the foreigners who followed the rules before coming over.
Kirk—like conservatives of old—criticized anyone who departed from the left’s narrative on racial, ethnic, and sexual egalitarianism. He supported Israel because of Israel’s embrace of that egalitarianism (“It’s the only democracy in the Middle East” and “they have gay pride parades while their Islamic neighbors execute gays.”)
Kirk spent several years putting Boomer conservatism into a newer, edgier, high-tech package and then delivering it to college kids. He was the quintessential millennial conservative—until he changed.
In the mid-to-late 2010s, right-wing Zoomer males arrived on campus, and they challenged Kirk’s positions when TPUSA rolled into town. Kirk struggled to find common ground with these young men because they didn’t share the left’s moral framework. They posed sharp questions to presuppositions he took for granted.
The Zoomer right rejects the left’s moral framework. They do not believe racism, sexism, homophobia, or anti-Semitism are grave cardinal sins threatening humanity. They do not harbor egalitarian fantasies about race or sex. The Zoomers, furthermore, see no reason to obsess over Israel even if—or, maybe, especially if—it truly is the gayest democracy in the Middle East.
After tussling with the Zoomer right for a few years, Kirk reconsidered his earlier opinions. In the early 2020s, Kirk brought Steve Sailer onto his podcast to discuss racial disparities. He took a harder line on immigration—including legal immigration. He questioned the policies of the Netanyahu government. Most courageously, he proclaimed to a room filled with college women that birth control was vastly overprescribed and turning young ladies into ugly, resentful feminists.
In the final years of his life, Kirk said and did things that signaled a rejection of the left’s moral framework and a departure from millennial conservatism. He was, frankly, saying things Millennialcons once wished they had caught Planned Parenthood employees saying on hidden camera. He was moving toward the Zoomer right.
James O’Keefe, a frequent speaker at Kirk’s conferences, also changed. While his older work focused on leftist hypocrisy, his newer work focuses on leftist absurdity. His school exposés don’t indict left-wing administrators as the real transphobes but, rather, as repulsive groomers.
Older millennials, such as Ben Shapiro (now, in his 40s) and Lila Rose (now pushing 40), struggle to pivot—it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Shapiro still excoriates his listeners to support whatever Israel does and attacks the left (as well as Pat Buchanan) for being racist. Rose still browbeats men and calls abortion racist.
Older millennials remain averse to Zoomer rightism because they cannot untether themselves from the left’s moral framework—a weakness on their part. If they don’t adapt, they’ll learn the hard way that the Zoomer right has no interest in videos about how illiberal the liberals are.
Zoomer rightism’s major flaw is that it is fundamentally reactionary. While rejecting the left’s moral framework, it does not assert its own. The left wins cultural battles because it expresses moral imperatives. The right at first ignores these imperatives with indifference—“don’t tread on me”—but eventually capitulates and adopts them. A more perfect right would no longer cede the moral high ground nor merely throw the left off its moral perch, but would seize that high ground from the left and hold it.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/millennial-conservatism-is-over