‘DYOR.” That’s what they say. That’s Do Your Own Research, for those of us not quite meeting the 13- to 28-year-old gen Z age bracket. It’s a common refrain when one of them finds their truth challenged.

So I set out on some DYOR regarding the report last week that most gen Zers were in favour of the UK becoming a dictatorship. The study, commissioned by Channel 4, has been described broadly as “shocking”, “worrying” and “bleak”. Yet for anyone with daily interaction with that generation, it would probably be better described as – “fairly predictable”.

Far from schools being hotbeds of discussion about critical race theory and gender identity, in the past couple of years teachers have witnessed kids – particularly boys – being attracted to authoritarian ideas and the philosophy of such characters as Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson.

I have steadily/stodgily liberal-minded friends – both Labour and Conservative voting – utterly bewildered at how their teenage children are growing up fascinated by populist, authoritarian thinking. All those years spent faffing over organic baby food and additive-free hummus and now their kids have gone and ingested a truckload of toxicity.

The survey showed that 52% of gen Z thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; 33% agreed that the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”.

So, how did we get here? Well, in the name of DYOR, it’s (almost) all about TikTok. There, the algorithm is serving up young men and boys an endless stream of content, either consciously or subconsciously, promoting strength, “common sense”, traditional ideas around gender roles and incessant railing against wokeism. There’s a reason for Donald Trump’s unhinged attack on “woke policies” in federal aviation, which is the content swirling these social platforms right now.

Pushback from the right against “liberal-elite dogma” and “political correctness gone mad” is as old as time. What is different is how TikTok has turbocharged these ideas into the mainstream for young people – into teens who, by and large, aren’t engaged with politics. Those who previously might have been more interested in drinking cider and getting off with girls.

Almost three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds visited TikTok in May 2024, spending an average of 64 minutes a day on the site. Among those in their early to mid teens, saturation is closer to 90%, and surveys show it is their favoured single news source.

“Blaming the media” is the oldest cliche in the book. But to discuss the causes of the appeal of populism in the young without putting it in the context of TikTok’s capacity for mind control is to discuss causes of drug use without considering how heroin makes people feel. When the Biden administration came close to banning TikTok just weeks ago, it may have been partially on the grounds that the Chinese could use it to dip into our data like popcorn, but it was also on the understanding that it is a very sophisticated tool in a “cognitive warfare campaign”.

And of course the minds of our young people are fertile for this messaging. It is a generation born into austerity, blighted by Covid and a cost of living crisis, taught in overcrowded classrooms, anxious about knifings on the way home and witness to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. They were born into a digital world that values individuality above community, a world in which the media has fractured into a million pieces. The backdrop to their lives has mind-boggling inequality in which the richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70% of Britons – a quarter of adults have savings of just £100.

We have gifted them an inheritance of insecurity and a desire for certainty. Then the tech bros created a business model built on super-serving them simplistic solutions through algorithms, which means any kind of DYOR simply confirms “their” truth and makes objective news harder to find.

So why wouldn’t 47% of them say “The entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”? Why wouldn’t more? Desire for rebellion fades with age – but the march towards youthful populism is gaining momentum. Globally, the popularity of rightwing parties is particularly marked among young people – 16% of German voters under 25 voted for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in last year’s European elections. And in France, 30% of young people voted for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally.

As Donald Trump said proudly when pausing the TikTok ban – it brought him the youth vote. Two-thirds of white male Americans aged 18 to 29 who voted last November chose Trump, along with almost half of young white women.
To a generation of young people, Trump is part president, part meme. A crazy-looking representation of “I take no shit from no one”. And they like it. It makes them feel less anxious.

So how does the left respond to this? We are a generation that never imagined we would need to make a case for democracy; it was one of those things that was just there when you needed it, like Woolworths and phone boxes. Oh…

So, yes, the case must be made. If we need a reminder of why, we saw it vividly this week in the faces of the Jewish people who returned to Poland to mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. That anniversary was marked with solemnity and sadness. But if we truly mean “never again”, we need to mark it with fury and anger that our children are being led away by the Pied Piper of populism.

The problem with democracy is it lacks the razzmatazz, cage-fighting machismo of authoritarianism. And it’s all just a little too reasonable. OK, dull. But if we ever truly believed in equality of opportunity and social justice, we have to put some colour back in its cheeks. We have to now fight for it with authenticity and charismatic voices. The left has to be more passionate, more emotional and more combative – firstly, to physically demonstrate it in a visual world, but mainly because that works way better in the algorithm. It needs strong advocates for solidarity, for fairness and better economic outcomes for working-class people.

For too long, the left has remained insulated from the appeal of populism, cossetted in our echo chambers of complacency. Well, if your kids are gen Zers, be warned – the fight for democracy could be coming to your breakfast table any day soon. DYOR.