Why Zoomers Won’t Die For Ukraine

As liberal democracies fall short of their lofty principles, is it any surprise Gen Z won’t defend them?

While Presidents Trump, Putin, and Zelensky struggle to negotiate a ceasefire, the European leaders of NATO’s member states insist on their willingness to deploy troops to Ukraine. But these technocrats stuck a stick in their selectively-jingoistic spokes long ago. After decades of governance by supra-national institutions, cultural deracination, and unwanted mass migration, the generation they propose conscripting are disillusioned with the democracies they would defend. Consecutive polls record Gen Z (1997-2012) as holding their countries in contempt, unwilling to fight to defend them, and flirting with alternative forms of government — including authoritarian dictatorship.

In February, YouGov polling published by The Times found that only 11% of Zoomers (aged 18-27) would fight for Britain; with 41% saying under “no circumstances” would they enlist to defend their country. 41% are proud to be British, 48% believe Britain is a racist country, and 50% said the UK is “stuck in the past”. While older readers may believe the young to be brainwashed against the self-evident goods of liberal democracy, as a member of this cohort I can’t say I blame them. Why should I, or any of my countrymen, die for “democracy” abroad, when my own doesn’t deliver it at home?

When wondering why Zoomers are so reluctant to enlist, two questions arise: Who would be fighting? and What for?

Much of the ensuing commentary was dedicated to lamenting the failures of Britain’s education system, or the laziness and ingratitude of those unwilling to die in a ditch in Kyiv. But, as Adam Wren observed, much of this intergenerational shift in attitudes can be explained by unprecedented demographic, and thereby cultural, change. Although an ethnic breakdown of survey respondents was not provided, we know that Gen Z are the most ethnically diverse cohort in British history: with only 70.9% identifying as white British, compared to 81.4% of over 65s. The ethnic balkanization of Gen Z is the enabling condition of this racial grievance narrative. One woman quoted in The Times — Summer Nesbeth, who identifies as half-Indian and half-Jamaican — recited an inherited American talking point when asked if Britain is a racist country:

“We don’t learn about black history but we [Britain] were built on racism. It’s not right to say we aren’t racist, it might not be blatant but it’s systemic racism and deeply entrenched unconscious bias.”

Unlike the United States, there were no African chattel slaves exploited in order to build the Roman Road, Stonehenge, or Hadrian’s Wall. Hengist and Horsa were from northwest Europe, as were most of the immigrants to Britain between 1066 and 1945, a few Barbary corsairs who enslaved Cornish captives aside. Britain’s ethnic and religious conflicts were intra-national until very recently; with this sudden change in demography being the soil in which the weeds of ideology took root.

This misreading of history might be blamed on a history curriculum which teaches the social justice version of the transatlantic slave trade and American civil rights movement. State education has taught “War” as synonymous with imperialism and twentieth-century atrocities, and therefore to be avoided at all costs. We have deracinated a generation in order to fit them as cogs into a global knowledge economy, and taught them that violence in pursuit of anything but intersectional social justice is evil. The result is cultural, and then literal, disarmament. As C.S. Lewis warned, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.”

If Woke women and the children of immigrants will not fight for this country, and do not see it as their country, who will? It’s no surprise that those most likely to be conscripted — young white British men — don’t want to defend a system which regards them public enemy number one. For the modern managerial state, nationalism is not a stream flowing from past to present, but a spigot to be turned on whenever conflict arises, and off when parochial loyalties prove an obstacle to utopian social projects or the expansion of state power. Our post-nationalist leaders have done all they can to drain the well of Western patriotism dry. As Mary Harrington observed at the last general election, when the Tory party which willingly remade itself in Tony Blair’s image tried to conjure up some nationalist sentiment with the suggestion of national service:

“This uniparty, which comprises every mainstream political representative of the zombie-liberal consensus, views the British nation-state as effectively obsolete. […]

We aren’t a nation, when there’s any question of preferential treatment based on shared history, heritage, culture or ancestry. We are, though, when it’s a question of coughing up to bankroll whichever set of client-group subsidies this iteration of the uniparty would like to prioritise. […] 

You can’t de facto abolish the nation state and then demand the yoof all do National Service.”

The state seeks to liquidate all natural loyalties to family, faith, community, culture, and country, in order to make interactions between individuals, the economy, and the state as frictionless as possible. It pursues a world of total egalitarianism, based on the delusional belief in Blank Slate anthropology: that human beings are fungible, interchangeable, identical units, driven purely by material incentives. In seeking to level all the differences they believe to be evidence of oppression, they have denigrated the fighting-age native male population as patriarchal tyrants, upon whose shoulders rest the burden of unique, ineradicable ancestral guilt. At the same time, they have imported unprecedented numbers of unproductive foreigners, eroding social trust, and demanded their incoherent cultures be appeased and accommodated — else your life and livelihood be destroyed by accusations of racism.

The state has made immigrant “communities” their client groups, by granting them redistributive welfare benefits and special legal privileges at the expense of the natives. A shrinking pool of productive young professionals are paying an increasing tax burden. A quarter of the working-age population are receiving disability benefits rather than working. Aspirational Zoomers are squeezed in a vice between the demographic Ponzi-scheme of pensions and socialized medicine for Baby Boomers, and social housing for foreign nationals and their dependents.

Paths to career advancement are barred by prohibitively expensive housing costs, and laws like the Equality Act (2010), Companies Act (2006), and Charities Act (2011) mandating the state and private enterprise exclude them. New guidance by the quango Sentencing Council instructs judges to give less punitive sentences to women, members of “an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community”, and transgender people. Royal Air Force recruiters dismissed capable applicants as “useless white male pilots” in order to meet diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) quotas. Many white men might agree with the proposition, “Britain is a racist country”, in the YouGov polling, given the laws and state discriminate against them at their expense. If this is, as Europe’s leaders insist, a “democracy,” why should they want to defend it?

When they voted to change their fortunes, they were betrayed with more debt, more migration, and fewer opportunities. No wonder, then, that Gen Z is desperate enough to turn to a dictator in order to circumvent the perceived sclerosis of Parliamentary democracy. 52% told Channel 4 that the UK would be governed better by a “strong man” with the power to ignore Parliament and elections. This followed an Onward survey in 2022, in which 61% of 18-34s said that “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections would be a good way of governing this country”, and in which 46% said that “having the army rule would be a good way of governing this country”.

Last year, I warned on Triggernometry that Zoomers will be political revolutionaries, and that the choice is not whether we get a revolution, but which kind of revolution we will get. While insulted white men may envision Franco-esque military rule, the women radicalized by pathological compassion into Woke progressivism will embrace an egalitarian surveillance-state. They are more likely to comprise the 75% of 18-34s who think that “having experts, not government, make decisions, would be a good way to run the country”. Furthermore, the share of under-24s in diasporas from Muslim-majority countries — Bangladesh (46%), Pakistan (44.8%) — are almost double (26.6%) that of white Britons. How many respondents heard “strong-man” and had a caliphate come to mind? Case in point, Zoomers are divided on which kind of authoritarian rule they would prefer; but most agree that democracy has run its course.

While those concerned blame “online pied pipers who wilfully subvert truths”, this was a precedent set by self-styled liberal democracies. Lockdowns taught a generation that the government can dissolve the public/private with a press conference. Arbitrary mask mandates, clown-cars full of COVID marshals, and compulsory vaccination comprise a large share of their lived experience. The state can no longer say something is out of their hands after taking control of everything, without warning, for two years. Any reluctance to enact revolutionary aims, whether they code left- or right-wing, reads as reluctance by a state who can do something, but decides not to. It follows, therefore, that someone sufficiently virtuous, or ideological, can seize and wield power to those ends themselves.

Curiously, we aren’t seeing the same discontent with democracy in the US. Zoomers are more enthused about the second Trump administration than American Boomers. The reason that Trump’s popularity is intolerable to the ruling political establishment is that he doesn’t abide by their definition of democracy. Trump doesn’t represent the rule of faceless administrators forcing Americans to accept lower living standards and racial derision as a transition stage to egalitarian utopia. MAGA has morphed into a youth culture of dubbed “Yuppiefuturism”, or, as detractors call it, “casually cruel Trumpers”. Traits include returning to traditional beauty standards for both sexes, celebrating wealth as a corollary of success, and deliberately transgressing Woke political correctness. This vibe shift toward a culture of excellence, attractiveness, and freedom is envied by many Brits: with 32% of UK voters aged 18-24 willing to vote Trump, compared to 16% of over-65s. It is aspirational for a generation who feel that they have little to lose by engaging in creative destruction. No wonder then, since Trump took office again, America has had its best military recruitment month on record while Europe struggles to fill barracks with the lowest levels of troops since the Napoleonic Wars.

My elders will not like to read this, but anytime they mention Putin being an existential threat to Britain, the eyes of anyone under 35 glaze over. Neither they, nor I, are particularly fond of his brand of strongman governance. But for those with no property, few prospects, no investment in a civilizational narrative, surrounded by strangers, and frustrated by the deaf ears of “democratic” politicians, warnings of war in Europe mean little. They are unbothered by history un-ending, because, since the triumph of liberal democracy, they have seen diminishing returns.

Calls for conscription are a tacit admission that the state has stripped its settled population of any cause for which to fight. Rather than clutch at pearls with every poll, I suggest fixing the causes of Gen Z’s dispossession in the first place.