America’s new lost generation is looking for home — and finding the wrong ones

A friend who works with high school students recently said to me, “I overheard a group of boys talking about ‘international Jewry.’” He was in disbelief to hear these seemingly mild-mannered kids express views that, not 20 years ago, would have been considered taboo.

What is going on with Gen Z?

I have written elsewhere that Gen Z is experiencing a kind of church resurgence. That remains true. But at the same time, Gen Z is one of the most polarized generations in American history.

Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging.

In 2024, Gen Z — led in part by young activists like Charlie Kirk and Scott Presler — shifted toward Donald Trump. He won 46% of Gen Z voters — 56% of young men and 40% of young women. This led many to expect that a younger, more populist generation would shift the country rightward. But now in 2025, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won 78% of the youth vote in New York City — 67% of young men and 84% of young women. Far from being locked into any one existing political party, young people are more divided than ever.

One cause of this is what I call “nomadic progressivism.” Kids born between, say, 1997 and 2012 have been thoroughly inundated with progressivism and identity politics from birth. They came of age amid several key developments that shaped their moral and social formation:

• The Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015 and the legalization of same-sex marriage.
• The killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of Black Lives Matter.
• The surge of transgender activism that dominated headlines in the early 2020s.
• The appearance of Greta Thunberg and the new climate movement.
• The explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Vine.

We could list hundreds of others, but these movements captured Gen Z’s moral imagination. Each sought, in the name of justice or progress, to undermine the inherited order, replacing the inherited structures of culture with moral and social uncertainty.

Gen Z grew up bullied by progressive ideology, and until the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, there was no visible reaction. Society appeared to be marching unopposed toward progressive utopia. But Trump’s election broke the spell. His first term was marked by protests, the rise of transgender ideology, and a wave of social revolt.

Then came COVID-19. As the left preached “safety,” Gen Z was locked inside, immersed in a digital environment, and wracked by depression and anxiety. Created for engagement and real community, young people were instead sent to their rooms and told to stay there.

This, I believe, is the key: Progressivism prepared the soil for radicalization. It removed the roots — churches, families, communities — that once grounded Gen Z’s moral life. It left young people searching for belonging in a barren landscape.

The philosopher and novelist Simone Weil wrote in “The Need for Roots” that “human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.” When that participation is stripped away, people search for roots elsewhere.

For Gen Z women, that search often led to Instagram and other social media platforms. They heard celebrities and influencers denounce the status quo. They were told marriage was oppressive, men were vile, and independence was the highest good. But that “empowerment” was often just loneliness in disguise.

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Photo by Jeremy Weine/Getty Images

As for Gen Z men, constant ridicule and belittlement left them disoriented. Why invest in a society that despises you? Why build what the world condemns? In this vacuum arose the “manosphere.” Figures like Andrew Tate offered refuge. They told men it was OK to be men — and as they were among the only ones saying so, they had free rein to define what it meant. If honor, discipline, and respectful courtship were only going to get you mocked and condemned, manosphere influencers reasoned that you might as well double down on boorishness, lust, and aggression.

As distrust of the government and institutions grew, young men turned elsewhere for truth. In gnostic fashion, figures like Nick Fuentes promised to reveal “how things really are.” But as Christopher Rufo has noted, it is a ruse. Fuentes exploits the crisis of masculinity to peddle resentment and historical denialism. Progressive Gen Z women, seeking fulfillment in the depths of the online space, are little different from the young men seeking connection and meaning from those like Fuentes.

Gen Z is a generation longing for roots. Its members are trying to find them on the fringes of society, since their own roots were dug out years ago. Progressivism creates nomads. Social systems that seek to reorient reality by means of uprooting history and tradition will ultimately create a rootless and disaffected class in search of belonging. And they will find it in dark places.

The men and women of Gen Z are not uniquely radical. They are uniquely rootless. They have inherited a moral landscape stripped of shared meaning, through which they drift amid ideologies that promise belonging but deliver only bitterness. The progressive order unmoored them; now the reactionary order recruits them. And unless a deeper renewal of faith, family, and community takes root, this generation will continue to wander — searching for the very home that modernity taught them to forget.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.