A Slow but Sure Rise: Youth and Social Conservatism in New Media

This week, I found myself comfortably seated in Provo, Utah, sipping an ultra-sweet coconut cream soda while watching the release of the aptly timed reality series Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This summer I’m on the road for the beginning of my next poetry series, Mountains, with places like Park City, Jackson, Big Sky, and Ketchum on the docket. While these towns will offer liberal oases in otherwise conservative landscapes, they too represent an increasingly cultural nexus away from cities post COVID. 

Just a state away, EDC Las Vegas was in full swing, with its  sensory overload of electronic dance music and drug-fueled excess, a stark contrast to the conservative tranquility of Provo. I found myself scoffing at the festival crowd, which I wouldn’t have done a few years ago- then paused to ask myself why- the show, which in season 1 follows the wives as they venture into Las Vegas, highlighted a striking cultural dichotomy and led me to reflect on Gen Z’s surprising swing toward social conservatism and the strange set of circumstances that have made it possible. 

This contrast between tradition and excess, modesty and maximalism, mirrors a deeper generational shift. In recent years, Gen Z has quietly gravitated toward a new form of social conservatism, not through traditional politics, but through aesthetics, sobriety, and TikTok algorithms. This conservatism is affective, decentralised, and born from a breakdown in shared meaning across a fragmented media landscape.

I came of age during the “girlboss” feminism of the 2010s, a time when social liberalism surged and “wokeness” served as an unofficial scripture for youth activism. I was deeply immersed in this world through the Sunrise Movement and broader climate justice work. I’ve always stayed curious- and after a brief stint in a fraternity alongside involvement in the libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty in 2015 and yearly pilgrimage to their conference thereafter I was exposed to another side of youth politics. I could see young men quietly retreating from progressive spaces. I remember in 2013 writing out all my socio-political identities on a paper wheel to share with peers at a climate summer camp, an early ritual in the canonization of the self in the religion of identity politics. Back then, millennial men were plentiful in the space. But by 2019, the few gen-z high school boys at the same camp were getting in trouble for being “edgy” , a catchall term for anything that pokes at rigid political correctness. I was in a leadership role then, and found it difficult to discipline them; their resistance signaled the start of a larger unraveling. Identity-based social liberalism’s reign had begun to fray.

By 2020, this unraveling accelerated. Wokism peaked with the George Floyd protests, then began its decline. As I was deep in the Sunrise Movement something else was happening. Podcasts rose in popularity as alternative media channels, often challenging the prevailing narratives of 2010s identity politics. Many of these critiques pointed to the absence of class analysis and the movement’s failure to address material inequality. The pandemic added fuel: those who supported lockdowns were increasingly seen as out-of-touch elites. Meanwhile, rural culture re-emerged as an aesthetic and a refuge. As close physical contact became risky, open landscapes and wide roads gained new appeal. National Parks were suddenly in vogue, as were getaways to places like Utah and Montana. Even I found myself briefly moving to Iowa, though still in the liberal bubble of Grinnell, with friends that were peak policers of woke. By 2021 I had left Iowa and returned to a deeply different downtown Chicago, seeing the effects of COVID first-hand.  In 2021 social conservatism stood at 30% of America according to Pew. In 2022 that jumped to 33% and by 2023 to 38%.  While these changes were actually more pronounced for 30-49 year olds, I believe social media is what then pushed gen-z into conservatism in the last few years. 

The Mormon reality show I watched would likely not exist without the explosion of earlier LDS-associated influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, whose homesteading lifestyles have drawn massive online followings on Tik Tok. Their aesthetic of modest fashion, family values, and self-sufficiency now resonates widely. Country music and cowboy boots have gone from naff to mainstream. In 2023, I attended the American Conservation Coalition’s youth climate conference in Salt Lake City, a right-leaning event where I wore Americana-inspired looks drawn from a pre-sent lookbook, cheered at the mechanical bull, and mingled with young conservatives. Today, those same aesthetics are visible in Bushwick and Silverlake-neighborhoods that once represented the gentrification-ridden progressive edge. Urban trendsetters have become cultural followers, donning trucker hats, mustaches, and prairie dresses. With the help of the internet this aesthetic fashion has recently gone international, with places as far as Italy embracing the “Texani” fashion style.

Simultaneously, the “sober social” movement has exploded, with first run clubs and now events like alcohol-free day parties being shared widely on TikTok and attended heavily in places like Miami, Austin, Chicago, and now Kansas City. Controversy ensued recently when one of the parties, Cafetón, was criticised for allowing alcohol-even though the event itself happened at a bar.  Health consciousness and economic pressure have driven young people away from drinking out and in some ways from drinking at all. At a recent Gen Z tech event during Techweek LA, I realized I was the only one keeping the bar alive as I sampled expensive Japanese whiskeys while most attendees sipped on mocktails. This was less a fluke and more a reflection of these shifting generational norms and my own identity as a spring 96’ zoomer, often finding myself straddling both gimlet drinks and generational divides.

Abstinence too has also reentered mainstream conversation, alongside critiques of hookup culture, OnlyFans, and ambiguous “situationships.”  Dating has become a minefield shaped by economics, gender divides, and media silos. There's this tension between the desire for egalitarianism and the persistence of traditional expectations like who should pay for dinner. This is compounded by the reality of young men’s finances with more young men out of work or school than ever and gen-z women outearning men in places like San Diego, Washington DC, and New York City. Faced with these contradictions, many have opted out entirely. It’s no surprise, then, that TikTok has become fertile ground for LDS-affiliated influencers who embody the values young people increasingly prize: sobriety, stability, and simplicity. Many of these creators offer a modernised Mormonism, softening theological edges while foregrounding aesthetic and emotional appeal. They sell a version of life governed by order in a world that feels increasingly chaotic.  To be sure, political divides remain- such as support for Republicans and Democrats in the 2024 election among men and women.  However the rise is happening across gender. In 2024, gen-z women supported Trump at 40% compared to 30% in 2020, while gen-z men increased their support  from 40% to 56%. 

Just how this happened can be traced back  to legacy media. Liberal Networks like CNN, MSNBC, and ABC  falsely believed that their hold on truth and legitimacy would hold as social media began to rise-often failing to allow conservative voices and stories in the conversation. While minority conservative outlets like Fox held their ground, that structure itself began to dissolve as soon as new media began to rise. In the early 1970s, 68% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats trusted the news media. By 2023, that had plummeted; only 11% of Republicans trusted mainstream media, compared to 58% of Democrats. This divergence in trust created a space that new media began to fill in the 2020’s and it is a space that has affected young people more intensely with 37% of 18–29 year-olds getting news from influencers in 2025. 

At the Hollywood Climate Summit a few weeks ago, we talked about just this and  the challenge of this moment in inspiring climate action through media. Of a struggling  TV and film industry and the trend towards the biggest new media voices being right of center. While shows like Will and Grace increased support for gay marriage two decades ago, we no longer live in that hierarchical media architecture where knowledge flows down in a uniform decoding process, as it did in print and network television. Recent data has also shown the support for gay marriage reversing, undoubtedly tied to representation in new media . Social change is now governed by Tik Toks and podcasts on YouTube. And while the split between news and entertainment was once broad, new media has also collapsed that, with edu-tainment being a rising form of content consumption. 

When information is broadcast by legacy media like CNN and MSNBC it is decoded and recoded across digital spaces by conservative podcasts like Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson, and decoded again by viewers. While liberal listeners operate from a similar frame of knowledge and engage within the professional “code” or intended reception that these networks intended, conservatives do not. This double decoding, much like gene editing, increases the chance of error.  Without a shared framework of knowledge, de-programmatisation makes oppositional readings more likely. Clips and soundbites become fodder for criticism or conspiracy theories about truth and knowledge. Soon words themselves hold different meanings like “woke” as they are broadcast and recoded across conservative new media. 

This decentralized knowledge architecture is rhizomatic, as concepts circulate fluidly across discourse, continuously decoded and recoded in the national digital cultural matrix. Unlike its analogue counterpart, the digital cultural matrix, through its structure, is an assemblage, where meaning is not fixed but evolves with cultural and political shifts. While  this free-flowing network enables user freedom, corporations still control signal strength. Platforms Like Facebook or X can choose to amplify certain content like we saw with COVID-19 censorship or misinformation in the 2020 election on these platforms, respectively. The issue with these platforms is that the more asymmetry a re-encoding presents-meaning how different its intention and reception is -the more power the message holds under current algorithms, as engagement is driven by emotional responses and profit incentives. This leads to the popularity of categories like “rage bait” or extremism, that intentionally try to elicit heightened emotions that either support or challenge the message being broadcasted and often lead to further algorithmic bifurcation.

To be sure, while "airtime" and "provocativity" are currency in the digital attention economy, signal strength alone will not ensure decoding within the professional code. Consider the previously mentioned Sunrise Movement, or other climate activists like Greta Thunberg. Their media presence is strong and have had repeated virality but are usually focused on clicks and views, while not accounting for the power of oppositional decoding  in new media. When concepts like the “Green New Deal”  become viral they go under this recoding process and soon become symbols of extremism, eco-communism, and government control-ensuring policies with the name will never prove nationally viable. 

Understanding polysemy and the evolving digital cultural matrix then  is key to using storytelling and the arts effectively for social change. While there is no way to control the steady rise of social conservatism, as it may be driven by an increasingly uncertain world order and the human need for coherence,  I think social-changemakers must look to this landscape when producing media, and being aware of the current media architecture. When we understand how concepts can be mapped across this architecture  and that the meaning we give content is not fixed but rather gains meaning after it is produced, we begin to be able to create different narratives that  then have real consequences for culture and politics downstream .

Take the term “woke,” for example. It sat floating around the media landscape and different micro-communities on Tumblr and Twitter, drifting through niche discourses without gaining broad traction for years. Then, in 2020, suddenly, it was everywhere. While there’s a kind of hyper-modularity in how it gets used, it quickly became a cultural touchpoint, a stand-in for everything and nothing, carrying with it a potent emotional charge. As it circulated across legacy media like Fox and CNN, and across new media like Tik Tok, X, and Truth Social it was decoded and recoded again and again, gaining steam through the nation’s attention ecology and economy.

The symbol didn’t gain meaning through reference, but through resonance: its power emerged not from what it originally meant, but from how it made people feel. It absorbed the emotional atmosphere of 2020: rage, shame, hope. It invited reaction, which kept it alive. It split audiences and pulled them into algorithmic engagement loops. With each decoding, its meaning shifted. Still, it persisted, echoing back into mainstream institutions and shaping decisions in boardrooms and government offices. By 2025, it was written into legislation that vehemently opposed it. 

Similarly, as new media has become increasingly visual, less anchored in longform, more governed by the looped, compressed grammar of Tik Tok and YouTube, aesthetics themselves too have become emotional placeholders. Gen-Z has grown up in a world of constant scrolling, often consuming multiple media forms simultaneously, and so they are a perfect case study for affective projections in visual media. Prairie dresses, cowboy boots, mocktails, and strict gender roles are affective signals, offering a kind of placeholder for longing, for order, for something stable in a world that no longer is. These affective-aesthetic forms carry weight. They quietly align users with conservative values, even when no explicit ideology is invoked. 

Many deft young social media users have realised this, but fail to understand just how these architectures hold so much power. While some critics can map the pipelines from the aesthetic to the political, like certain categories of content that push individuals into conservatism, we must recognise emotion as the main driver in media architectures. Its unique ability to supercharge the visual and linguistic into cultural shifts have real political stakes. It’s this I think that has led to not just a social but a political shift to the right in young people.  With Gen Alpha entering high school, and their reputation as Ipad Kids, this trend is not going to reverse anytime soon. However, what can change is how new media responds. Instead of continuously pushing concepts that have academic or technical origins, perhaps it can begin from emotion and map how that media will travel across the fractured landscape, understanding that there is little control in how that content will be consumed, recoded, and remixed. The audio-visual landscape of new media is this ever changing architectural structure, rhizomatic, unstable, and emotionally charged. There’s no returning to a media ecology governed by logic or shared reference. But there is room for creative counterprogramming: media that understands the rules of affect and the dynamics of circulation. If we want to interrupt the conservative drift, we don’t need louder ideology but stories, images, and sounds that offer coherence. That’s the work ahead: not to reassert control, but to learn how to produce media that offers narrative and structure, that can be supercharged by hope and desire into and across the media landscape.