Have millennials moved right, or has Gen Z pushed Democrats off a leftward cliff?

For many years, Republican pollsters and conservative activists assumed, to their chagrin, that millennial voters were forming an exception to what has long been the rule of American politics: People get more socially and fiscally conservative as they get older.

Family formation and wealth accumulation have always tended to push people rightward, but my millennial generation’s later average age of marriage and shakier average bank accounts have long raised questions about whether this rule would hold for us.

More recent evidence suggests, however, that millennials may indeed be moving to the right as we age, just like our parents and grandparents did.

So, conservatives and moderates can now take a deep breath, and rest easy in the knowledge that greater maturity continues to inspire greater respect for tradition and the near universal desire not to let the revolutionary impulses of the young destroy overnight what took centuries to build — right?

Not so fast.

I am 35 — an elder millennial — and I think there are two main reasons to remain concerned about the capacity of social or economic conservatism to gain adherents or shape policy in the decades to come, even if ever greater numbers of the largest generation in American history identify as Republicans.

First, the GOP is no longer socially or fiscally conservative. Although there are notable exceptions, the energy in today’s Republican Party is culturally reactionary and economically populist.

Deep frustration borne of legitimate grievances, both cultural and economic, with the establishment politicians in both parties — from the sneering, orthodox-secular elitism and anti-Americanism of the mainstream media to the off-shoring of jobs that pay a family wage to the abdication of any responsibility for a functional Southern border — have turned the once conservative GOP into a “burn it all down,” revolutionary party. Meanwhile, the Republican mainstream’s willing, if partial, embrace of racism and misogyny renders the GOP wholly delegitimized as a positive moral force.

After all, the Republicans’ current 2024 frontrunner, former President Trump, is a thrice-married adulterer who has been featured in recent media stories opposite both a porn star who claims to have had an affair with him and a journalist who claims he raped her. This is a guy, let us all remember, who spent the first Black president’s eight years in office clamoring to see his birth certificate and began his 2016 campaign by insisting that a judge’s ability to decide cases must be called into question because said judge was “a Mexican.”

Alas, today’s GOP is a long way from the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush. “Vindictive resentment” is now a more fitting moniker.

Second and equally importantly, Democrats are no longer socially or fiscally progressive. Although there are still exceptions, the energy in today’s Democratic Party is culturally revolutionary and economically corporatized.

Cultural and economic progressivism require a reality principal; to be a progressive, one has to know what one is progressing from (i.e., the harsh barbarism of nature, in which might makes right and the strong dominate the weak). The idea that we should, as a nation, offer greater support to those who cannot easily make their own way because of either cultural differences (such as lack of facility with English, or physical or mental disability) or economic hardships (like single parenthood or illness) is the morally demanding core of what was once progressivism.

But today, hyper-protective “helicopter” parenting and the systemic elevation of feelings over facts, both at home and in schools, have left Gen Z more anxious, illogical and emotively solipsistic than any generation in history. As a result, their progressive energy, as harnessed by the Democrats, is now mainly centered on the elevation of words, signs and signals over embodied realities.

The inanity of “choosing” one’s pronouns and the very notion of “gender identity,” for example, is a rejection of basic biological fact and poses an existential danger. The so-called “anti-racism” of predominantly white virtue-signalers who advocate measures like “prison abolition” ironically undermines the avowed truth that “Black lives matter,” since most people killed as a direct result of such “anti-racist” measures are both poor and Black. Finally, the demolishment of academic and professional standards in obeisance to the childish imperative to eliminate winners so that there won’t be any losers is an admission of cultural defeat and the codification of a de facto caste system in which the circumstances of one’s birth are likely to dictate the rest of her life.

So, today’s Democrats are a long way from the “Yes, we can” of Barack Obama. “No, we can’t; and if you say we should have to, you’re a bigot” is now a more accurate mantra.

Like many of the millennials now ostensibly moving to the right, I voted for the first time in 2008, and I voted for Barack Obama. I was then what passed for a progressive: My moderate pro-life positions and Catholic practice notwithstanding, I favored the legalization of gay marriage, a stronger social safety net, and more (legal!) immigration from Central America.

My centrist politics have not changed since then. Only now, I’m what passes for a conservative — at least insofar as there is no longer any space for me in the Democratic Party in which I remain registered.

Unlike in 2008 and 2012, in 2016 and 2020, pro-life Democrats were offered no forum at the Democratic National Convention despite our being one-third of the party. The Overton window on LGBT issues has moved such that my once-liberal views are now definitively outside the comfort zone of top Democrats and their corporate cronies, nearly all of whom were formed together at elite universities like the one I attended. And great liberality on legal immigration no longer cuts it; the concept of having a border at all, in the view of these youngest Democratic voters raised increasingly to defer to their feelings over all pragmatic realities, is now anathema.

So, representative of my geriatric millennial cohort, I appear to slide rightward by standing still.

As the Democrats are driven off a cliff to my left, the Republicans appear to many (in what I maintain is mostly an optical illusion borne of a Democrat in the White House and the Democratic dominance of the mainstream media) closer to the sane center for which large numbers of Americans are longing.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a Young Voices Contributor. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Deseret News, Law and Liberty, Real Clear Books & Culture, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Philadelphia Inquirer.