Who listens when young people rage against the machine?

In a world over saturated with voices, anger offers a way of finally being heard, but is emotion overriding our will to fix the world’s problems?

As key elections play out across 2024, many in civic society will speak profoundly about the importance of institutions and how collectively, we the people, need to bolster them against the rising tide of populism and authoritarianism.

However, the same institutions that advocate for this appear to many young people tin-eared to public sentiment on things like the cost of living, rising wealth inequality and access to affordable housing, secure work and real action on climate change.

It is within this paradox/vacuum that polarisation takes hold and where populists or would-be authoritarians tend to harvest their support.

Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban all may appear unpalatable to sober centrist liberal ideals, yet they were all democratically successful at the ballot box.

In many of these elections, it was the youth vote that catapulted their success, as a protest against the status quo.

Young people are angry, and we are all to blame.

Particularly angry are the young men of ‘Gen Z’.

In January the Financial Times reported that “under-30s are undergoing a great gender divergence.” where men are as much as 30 percent more likely to be ultra conservative than women in countries like South Korea, the United States and across Europe.

Social media content which essentially leverages emotional levers for money plays a key part in this demographic, as a lack of regulation leaves many open to the world of “rage farming.”

However, attributing to much of this, according to Cambridge University is “economic exclusion” caused by high youth unemployment and wealth inequality.

“This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties” the 2020 study claimed.

The defence of democracy may well be the fight of the age, however added to the list of the climate crisis and conflicts across the globe, it may once again be drowned out in the noise.