It’s been conventional wisdom that younger generations emerge more progressive than their predecessors. “The young people will save us,” has been a sentiment often shared by elders, albeit problematically, as they’ve watched new movements build power. But this summer, we’ve reached a breaking point: that is not true anymore for Gen Z men.

MAGA has captured older men, especially older white men: according to recent polling data, about half of its movement is over the age of sixty-five, and more than 60 percent is white, Christian, and male. More surprising is the stark gender divide that has emerged among American youth: over the past twenty-five years, the partisan gap between young women and young men has nearly doubled, and Gen Z women are today a whopping twenty-three points more liberal than their generation’s men. It’s a regressive trend, with Gen Z men proving to be more conservative than millennial men.

It’s also an apparently rapid trend, at least when it comes to Gen Z men’s views on gender: 49 percent of Gen Z men said the United States had become “too soft and feminine” in 2022; just one year later, that number jumped to 60 percent. And all of these trends are only exacerbated when lasering in on white Gen Z men in particular.