Why Gen Alpha will make Gen Z look conservative

That warning came from Katharine Birbalsingh, the British education reformer known as “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” during a speech last month at the ARC Conference.Toward the end, she offered a prediction for where we’re heading. Her argument isn’t that Gen Z is the most left-wing generation in modern history — though we may well be. It’s that we were only the opening act. Gen Alpha, she warns, is set to be even more radical and further left. Gen Alpha covers those born between 2013 and 2024, meaning the oldest of them are only around 13. Gen Z runs from 1997 to 2012, with our youngest just turning 14. Barely a generation separates us — Gen Z isn’t even fully out of high school yet — and Birbalsingh already believes the next cohort is on track to be worse.That should sting. Gen Z — “peak woke,” as we’re affectionately known — was supposed to be the generation that proved history doesn’t repeat itself. I’m not convinced it will be. Every generation hears the same line from their parents: We weren’t like that. It’s practically a rite of passage. But Gen Z is different, and not in the way we like to brag about.My generation has the highest recorded rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide in modern memory — while simultaneously taking pride in being the most progressive generation on record. Those two facts sitting side by side should bother you more than they do.So why do we have more problems, not fewer — and what does it mean for the generation right behind us? The answer is almost a century old. In 1922, sociologist William Fielding Ogburn coined the term “cultural lag” in his book Social Change. His theory was simple: material culture — technology, social structures — moves fast. Habits, norms, and traditions move slow. What’s left in between is the lag: a gap where society is living through change it hasn’t actually caught up to yet.Ogburn died in 1959, before the 1960s cultural and social movements ever happened. But he may as well have been describing my generation directly. Gen Z didn’t just grow up alongside the lag — we grew up inside it.Start with the feminist movement and the rise of critical theory in academia, much of it built on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose ideas took direct aim at dismantling the cultural scaffolding of family law, religious institutions, and child-rearing norms. It moved faster than society could absorb, faster than we could emotionally keep up with.Like any real cultural experiment, it should have been treated as one: tested, measured, adjusted based on results. Instead, it got imposed top-down. Academic theory hardened into settled fact within a single generation, treated like common law, and about as easy to question. You’d expect each generation to learn from the mistakes of the one before it. It hasn’t happened. And it’s not just the young who are stuck — the older generations writing policy and setting curriculum haven’t corrected course either. Here’s where it gets more dangerous for Gen Alpha. My generation and the Millennials before us actually watched the old rules be replaced. We had a before and an after to measure against, even if the transition itself left us disoriented.Gen Alpha doesn’t get that comparison. They were born after the new framework — oppressor-versus-oppressed narratives, gender ideology, identity politics — was already fully installed. It isn’t the new thing to them. It’s just the water they swim in. There’s no “before” to notice, and no baseline to measure the damage against.That’s exactly where Ogburn’s theory breaks down when you try to apply it to what’s coming. His model assumes people can eventually see the lag, see where the woke experiment on Gen Z failed, and pull the pendulum back toward balance.Gen Alpha won’t get that chance. They can’t spot a gap they’ve never lived outside of. They’re not correcting a leftward drift; they’re starting from inside it, a generation with no traditional starting point left to return to. Somebody has to break that cycle, and it isn’t going to be the institutions that built it. If Gen Z learned anything from being the trial run, it’s this: Teach people how to think, not what to think, or you end up with another generation living inside someone else’s certainty.WASHINGTON IS FAILING HEAD START. WE’RE EMPOWERING PARENTS INSTEADThat responsibility falls on us, whether we asked for it or not. We’re the last ones with a “before” to compare to. What we do with that memory is the only part of this story still unwritten.History doesn’t repeat itself. But the choices people make within it do, unless somebody chooses a different path. William Nye is a Brisbane-based Australian student and op-ed columnist who writes about politics, culture, economics, and international affairs shaping Australia, the United States, and the wider Western world. His work has appeared in The Spectator Australia and the Washington Examiner.