This Way Up: Bridging the Generational Divide
A New Project for a New Year
The Generational Chasm
It has become abundantly clear that there is a great generational chasm in America.
For the people who were born on the older side of this divide, the rise in political violence is seen as a tragedy, as something abnormal and deeply troubling. In my conversations with Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials, there has been a universally unified response.
But in my conversations with Gen Zers and younger people? The tone could not be more different. More than 30% of current college students think that political violence is justified.
Of course, those of us who have been following the campus calamities these past two years already knew that. But there is a difference between knowing something and understanding it. It is one thing to know that Gen Z is seeped in violence; it is another thing to understand how drastically this violence has shaped the character of our generation.
Gen Z was the first generation to have unfettered access to the internet in our adolescence. We were the first to undergo the identity of puberty at the same time that we were developing and curating our digital personae on Facebook and Instagram. We were the first to watch weekly news reports of school shootings during our high school years, and then watch as the adults who were allegedly our protectors sat on their thumbs and pointed their fingers at each other.
But most importantly, we all grew up in the Trump age.
This Way Up is more than a podcast—it’s a project to bridge the generational divide and restore a culture of wisdom and meaning. If this speaks to you, I invite you to support it: by sharing, lending your expertise, or helping fund the work.
Millennials vs. Gen Z: Two Different Worlds
The line that divides my generation from my brother’s is the 2016 election.
If you were old enough to vote in 2016, you are old enough to remember the world of politics pre-Trump.
The political world in 2015 looked, more or less, like it did in 1985. There were established political parties, candidates were vetted before running, and there was a standard of decorum that was expected of political aspirants.
But most importantly – you had faith in the American political system.
I was 34 days too young to vote in 2016, which makes me one of the first members of Gen Z.
My friends who had put all of their faith and excitement behind Hillary Clinton were devastated, and, in many ways, they felt cheated.
Let us not forget how often we were being told that a foreign adversary had infiltrated our elections and made a mockery of our democratic process.
For many of my millennial friends, Donald Trump’s victory seemed like an aberration, an irrational impossibility in a rational world.
But for me and many of my Gen Z friends, Donald Trump’s victory seemed like an almost divine rebuke of the establishment Democratic order.
Since most young people are, by definition, liberal, the collapse of the democratic party was a watershed moment in our generational development.
Whereas many millennials believed that the old Democratic party of Barack Obama and Jed Bartlett would return, most Gen Zers looked at the party and saw the bloated old remains of the corrupt Roman Senate.
And so, Gen Z was split – there were those who thought the establishment liberals were far too liberal, and they became alt-right for the most part, and there were those who thought the establishment was too conservative, and they became radical Marxists.
But this is more than just the “horseshoe theory” of politics, this is an emotional response from a generation of people who feel, whether they realize it or not, that they were abandoned by their parents and left to fend for themselves.
People who voted in 2016 did not feel this great disappointment because they had participated in the election.
They could not reasonably blame their parents for the result of an election that they themselves voted in.
This is why there is still so much energy among millennials to participate in traditional forms of political involvement – protests, rallies, phone banking – all of the things that a Gen Zer would think are hilariously antiquary in the political world of Donald Trump.
The millennial was raised in an era of techno-optimism that promised an end to war and global conflict. He grew up in the shadow of the collapsing Berlin Wall.
The Gen Zer was raised in an era of economic anger and climate catastrophe that offered no vision of a brighter future. She grew up in the shadow of the collapsing World Trade Center.
And the nature of these character differences is seen most clearly in the workplace — surely, by now you have seen videos of millennial bosses talking about how much they fear their Gen Z employees.
Despite our proximity, we have no shared culture because we grew up in two different worlds. The millennial grew up in parks, and we grew up on Facebook.
The Barbarian Generation
Gen Z was raised on the internet. Now that enough time has passed, we can clearly see the results: the internet has turned an entire generation into uncivilized barbarians who share very little in common with their older neighbors.
We are ill-educated, ill-behaved, and ill-prepared for the world.
We would like to blame someone for this situation, namely our parents, but, deep down, we know that it is not their fault but the fault of society writ large.
But we are not lost.
We are not lost because to be lost implies that there was some direction to which you were originally going – but we were never going anywhere. We were born just a few years after the end of history to a world that didn’t know what to do with us.
Ours is not a lost generation; ours is a stuck generation, stuck inside of a meaningless adolescence, caught between an imaginary past and a dead future, we have been left to hobble along through time, eking out some sort of animal existence in a world that has lost all sense of human purpose.
But in our tragic adolescence may lie the hope for our future.
Civilization and the Canon
We are barbarian children. We have been raised with neither culture nor civilization. We spend more time in the wilderness of the internet than in the civility of society.
But like any barbarian, we can be civilized by culture, but only if we are exposed to it.
Civilization is the process whereby man learns that he is not an animal. The exploration of the human soul has been the great project of western civilization, but we divorced that tradition when we replaced the curated western canon with the haphazard amalgamation of the internet.
The Call to Action
So what is to be done?
We fight back.
We wage a civilized war against the forces of ignorance and barbarism.
We defend western civilization and her canon with reasoned arguments, and we promote healthy living through wisdom.
We bring back the canon.
To that end, The Zionist Voice is embarking on a new project: a podcast called “This Way Up.”
Join Us
This Way Up is more than a podcast—it’s a project to bridge the generational divide and restore a culture of wisdom, discipline, and meaning.
The first season is now in development, and while it will not launch for a few months, the work begins now. To bring it to life, we need your help:
Financial support will allow us to build and sustain the work. (Support This Way Up on Patreon)
Sharing and promotion will spread the message and grow the audience in advance of launch.
Expertise and collaboration from those with skills in writing, editing, marketing, or production will make the project stronger.
If you believe this mission matters, I invite you to join us. Every contribution—whether time, skill, or resources—helps move this project forward. Together, we can set a new direction for our generation.
And so, as always.
Spread Love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
Gen Z needs to stop whining and pretending they've had it so hard when in reality life's been easier for them than any generation before them. They have CHOSEN to spend their lives online. As for politics, for all of the faults of the establishments of the respective parties, they at least kept the country stable and secure. The up-and-coming generation of political leaders in both parties are so much worse and so dangerous to the very existence of America. Extremists on both sides threaten to tear apart the very foundation on which America was founded upon. The don't believe in Americanism. The young democrats believe in Marxism and the young republicans are fascists and neo-nazis. Both sides hate Jews. If our political parties don't return to center right/center left respectively, we are doomed.