Transcript for:
Youth and Ideology in Politics

oh hello how have you been doing me i've been doing really well actually so well really really well but i think we can all agree i've talked about myself a little too much recently so let's get back to our regularly scheduled content huh i'm gonna go ahead and pause it something that you might disagree with which is essentially that young people are more ideological than old people i would also go one step further and say that young people like ideologues more than basically any other demographic of people by ideologues i mean people whose political philosophy is based around an ideology of some kind rather than maybe someone who just goes into politics to want to go into politics and then develops their political framework around actually interacting with the real world so i wonder then why is that why why are young people more ideologically inclined than older people uh well i have some theories i want to run them by you um if you disagree with what i'm positing uh leave it in the comments we can theorize together so let's use the american 2020 election as an example um if you listen to what boomers are saying about the politicians um about biden and trump um it's it's very like uh you know like trump is mean so i'm not gonna vote for him or or it's like biden seems weak so i'm not going to vote for him no one is saying like oh trump's political ideology is actually more nationalist than traditionally conservative and as a result he doesn't exactly align with my values you can sort of get the idea that they have like an inkling of political theory in their minds but it's not really baked into the psyche as much as it is with young people i would say like every time um a conservative calls trump not a conservative they're like they're they're sort of like you know trump is a leftist you know like in their minds they're saying trump is a leftist because he's authoritarian and authoritarianism is left my point here is that um boomer conception of politics is just [ __ ] uh yes liberal and conservative the two political ideologies the first and most important reason i think the young people are more ideological is the internet no analysis of young people is really complete without first acknowledging the presence of the internet in our lives we grew up on the internet and the thing with the internet as at least the way i see it is it's just it's entirely virtual it's not real it's just ideas and and and abstractions normally an ideology when it manifests in the real world runs into resistance as it manifests as it takes physical form i essentially view ideologies as like spirits or ghosts that inhabit people and manifest through the people and that's not a bad thing we all are possessed by certain ghosts it's just which ghosts you're possessed you can't not be possessed by a ghost you can just think that you're not possessed by the ghost in which case you're completely spooked that's not to say ideas on the internet don't run into some resistance the ideas aren't it's not exactly like brain to brain communication um but it's it's much closer to brain to brain communication than anything in real life and because the internet is all this clown to clown communication uh it's much easier for us to get ideologically oriented rather than oriented towards specific um policies and the granular details especially because a lot of what we're talking about are broad subjects that sort of span across the whole world and and manifest in different forms more specifically the more granular for example um an ideology of social democracy might take slightly different forms in the policies of two similar but ultimately different countries so that's the main thing the internet is mainly just a pure ideology and we spend all our time on the internet and so we get more ideological you know young people it's even politically involved young people a lot of us you know we're not going outside uh well i mean yeah we're not going outside but we're also like not like going outside knocking door to door you know uh saying hello sir hello 50 or 60 year old sir uh i'm interested in serving you as your community leader i'd like to hear your concerns it's it's it's it's much more in our heads it's it's in our own heads and then when we go and we go on the internet and we exchange these ideas it's in other people's heads um so it's like it's it's just head to head you know it's not we're not we're not in the real world touching things biden for example is someone who strikes means deeply un-ideological like that guy is going around touching there's a point where trump says to biden in the debates um you're not even left i don't know what you are and that's pretty uh that's pretty true what is biden's political ideology um loosely it is something along the lines of centrism but the dude is is really just like his political platform is more along the lines of i will work with people i'll shake hands on on both aisles and that is uh i think just definitionally just like broadly centrist and you can't really pin it down more than that biden by the way is doing such a good job of indicting centrism for me that i i can basically just retire like why should i even bother trying to radicalize people when just like the embodiment of centrism is a man whose brain is just melting swiss cheese in like a frog he's not even like one of the cooler radical centrists who are more ideologically inclined like andrew yang for example what might be considered a radical centrist based off of his uh his ideology which is you know more of a technocratic ideology or some would argue like a social libertarianism ideology like there's a lot of ways you can interpret what he's advocating but biden is a lot closer to what i would call boomer centrism which is this kind of idea that um politics is something that happens in the real world and people should be going around and shaking hands and talking to individuals and kind of building your framework from the ground up rather than the top down young people tend to build more from the top down this brings me to my next point which is just youth in general i do think the youth of today are in a very unique situation because of the internet which makes our our process of forming identities and forming ideologies um very unique very different it's so unique and different that it basically has no parallel in history and uh i know that sounds like oh uh our generation is super special and we're like no generation before us um but i mean to an extent every generation is like no generation before them but we are in a unique situation given that we grew up on the internet which is like i said before just meet space so if you're young you have less life experience you have gone outside less you've met less people you have had to talk to less people you've had to compromise less you've had to have less of your ideas challenged and tested a lot of young people right now ascribe to ideologies that they're not going to ascribe to in 10 years in five years some of them not even until next week it up drug fans i love you so i do think the fact that um young people are more ideologically inclined is probably just because they're young and i think i think maybe this this aspect of why we are more ideologically inclined is true across time i think i think all young people have to be more ideologically inclined because they have less life experiences to refer to so they're working off this bigger idea but i don't know maybe um maybe if there are any ancient ancient people watching me i.e you know the 50 of my audience that is over 24. um maybe you guys can can pitch in here and uh give me your experience you know uh say like the 40 year olds in the audience did were you guys more ideologically oriented when you were a kid and you got less ideologically oriented or like were you always how you were and you just stayed how you were or did you maybe even get more ideologically oriented as you grew like what appeals to me about a candidate is ultimately the ideology that they're uh ascribing to that's just the most viscerally appealing part about a candidate it's less like oh here's this human being and here's this other human being it's more like here's this here's this one arm of an ideology that's possessing this man and then here's another arm of another ideology possessing this man and now they're going to arm wrestler point is that uh this has to do with a kind of ideological renaissance of sorts the internet has uh unearthed some old ideologies um did i tell you i brought back mercantilism memes it's true check it out like mercantilism nobody i don't think you you have ever you'll ever run into a person who identifies as a mercantilist although with the internet now there's probably more people who identify as a mercantilist now than there have been in the last 30 40 years before the internet and that's because it's simply a dead ideology nobody wants to dig it up but on the internet zoomers young people young millennials they've got their shovels and they're like let's go grave digging a lot of what allows a person to ascribe to an ideology is just the knowledge that the ideology exists um you show somebody a framework that they really like maybe maybe that fits their framework a lot better than any of the frameworks they've seen before it's a lot closer of a representation of what they personally believe so they end up identifying as say a mercantilist rather than what someone you know would normally refer to themselves as with that kind of mindset which would probably be something like just a you know if they lived in america a republican because of the two-party system basically everything has to fit one of two frameworks and when you go on the internet you realize there are there are basically infinite frameworks politically you can construct and then the last thing i would say is community um i think i think um it it's i would be remiss to uh to not talk about community i'm very skeptical about using the term community to refer to anything on the internet because you're essentially taking um a group of people who you know in real life who you love and care about and replacing it with some [ __ ] pixels on your screen but uh no mail bombs today community is um uh important for young people there a lot of young people lack community a lot of young people um try to fill the void of community they have in their hearts with um communities online and this you know it doesn't all doesn't normally take the form of ideologies it actually normally takes the form of games they like hobbies you know that's all that's all normal stuff to build community around but you know so is so is political belief that is also a completely valid way to formulate a sense of group identity and to find a community of like-minded people and to develop your ideas and develop yourself so young people are in a position where they need community you know it's it's difficult to um form a group identity in a atomized individualistic society so people obviously look in basically any direction they can to fill that need and uh if adopting a political ideology uh finds you a community of people that are like-minded then you know young people are gonna do that it could also work vice versa you just know a bunch of people who are like you and people who are like you might believe the same politics as you and then you just end up falling into a crowd of people who think like you and that's your community and then your community does happen to be ideologically based based so yeah that's the that's that's the general idea that's what i would say um but you know let me know if you have any ideas of your own leave them in the comments and uh if you disagree with the premise entirely uh you're wrong but greg you're supposed to do comedy videos not analysis oh [ __ ] uh uh i mean uh centrism bad decoy hello my fellow 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