Why Covid Won the Youth Vote
By 
Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s.
The paper certainly matches the survey evidence of young Americans. Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the “lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.” In the past decade alone, young Americans’ trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent.
Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people’s Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone. The Norwegian researcher Ruben B. Mathisen has written that “social media [creates] separate online spheres for men and women.” By trading gender-blended hangouts in basements and restaurants for gender-segregated online spaces, young men’s politics became more distinctly pro-male—and, more to the point, anti-feminist, according to Mathisen. Norwegian boys are more and more drawn to right-wing politics, a phenomenon “driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism,” he wrote. Although Mathisen focused on Nordic youth, he noted that his research built on a body of survey literature showing that “the ideological distance between young men and women has accelerated across several countries.”
I think it might be more straightforward… young people faced very minimal risk from Covid and yet (in their own lived experience, if not reality) made substantial social and financial sacrifices for the greater good. I know that sounds odd to say about a group of people who were virtually immune to a disease that killed and sickened millions around the world, but young people by virtue of being young people lack the context to evaluate deviations from the norm. Schools and colleges were disrupted, young people were forced to either return home or stick it out in dwellings that were relatively small to those of older cohorts, and the sorts of things that young people disproportionately do for fun- bars, concerts, parties- were forbidden.
Combine that sense of grievance with the Right calling for a kind of revolution (a Reactionary Revolution), and you’ve got a youth appeal, especially in young men who don’t feel there’s much for them in the progressive worldview, and you get a rightward swing.
Another thought that isn’t quite on the same wavelength but that I’ve been thinking in any case… Covid won the political battle. It destroyed much of the infrastructure of pandemic prevention around the world, with the transnational Right tearing down much of the rest. How much worse than Covid would a pandemic have to be to convince a government to take steps as aggressively as the typical European state took against Covid? The people that a pandemic kills don’t vote, but the survivors do and they hold grudges. The next pandemic… it’s gonna be bad.