Young people confuse politics with fashion

week, it was reported that among 18- to 34-year-olds in Canada, the Conservative party took the lead. Such an outcome would never have been obtained here among most of the twenty something I know is very uncool to be a Tory.

Granted, caring is part of the non-caring aesthetic on Gen Z’s Instagram; support for Palestine is strung together through candid polaroid. Protests for XR, Black Lives Matter and Sarah Everard were well attended; the parliament.uk petition dropped in a group chat is just as weak as the Eventbrite link.

Part of me likes that being progressive is cool. I realized this is how LGBTQ+ and civil rights have flowed into consciousness. But I’m getting nervous because using energy to look right leaves some people too tired to actually do what’s right. Awakened men who turn out to be misogynistic is a trope but every woman I know recognizes the trustafarian men of Shoreditch, who speak of feminism as a kind of witch’s patter to distract from their sleight of hand when it comes to women.

Most of all, I feel uncomfortable that young Conservatives are often social lepers. Vice, the best young people site (about drugs, sex, and so on), has a whole series tagging young Tories, featuring interviews of different types of bespectacled earnestly, as if they were as weird as a meteor shower or a leaf-tailed gecko deserved to be. London Zoo exhibition. The cool left-wing confederacy I think is petty; cruel to a group of people who are deemed to lack compassion because they do not fit that single definition. Because isn’t that the school bully snorting scornfully in a sweater vest, the clumsy jerk who pledged his allegiance to Ayn ​​Rand and Burke rather than Stormzy or Chrissy Teigen? And if you are not invited from the party, ostracized by your peers for holding conservative views, can it be said that you came to progressive views with full and informed consent, in a healthy way for the purpose?

I feel that those who are popularity-obsessed in high school, step over the social outcasts, who loudly show on social media how much they care about the marginalized. They put on as good a political position as they once did on Jane Norman’s bag, so that everyone might see that they had attached themselves to a noblest cause. Some people who were once very homophobic gleam densely, to show their solidarity with Pride.

You might say this is good: cultural trends clearly have the power to change people for the better. But my fear is that anything that is in vogue, including caring for others, can easily go out of style.