The rise of conservatism includes you, and yes, I mean you. We have gone entirely too far as a nation—as a people—and recently in our communities, we are seeing a potent rise of this super alt-right conservatism, which is absolutely screaming end-of-days. Now I’m not here to scare you, I think we get enough fear, frustration and idiocy from the person who is currently in office. But I do want to touch on some of the ways that this conservatism may be affecting you, too, because if you don’t know about it, you can’t fight against it. 

To preface, we all know that our Twitter (I’m not calling it X) feeds have been laced with the most inane, irritating alt-right content. From racist, accusatory AI videos, all the way to the simple-minded comments responding as if the videos are real, and even worse, as if the racism is valid. Even as you constantly press ‘not interested,’ it seems to keep coming back onto your feed, creeping in slowly. But the most important thing to note is that sometimes, the craziest far-right content can infiltrate your feed from you interacting with seemingly “normal” posts. 

In the social media-verse, something as simple as the “clean girl” aesthetic should make you wary, as well as the trend’s main perpetrator, Nara Smith. The “clean girl” aesthetic can, very simply, come off as looking “put together” with having a healthy yet expensively simple lifestyle behind it. However, underneath, there is a rocky and problematic history. The “clean girl” aesthetic came to popularity between 2021 and 2022, mostly centering white, smaller women who wore slicked-back hairstyles and hoop earrings. Gladly, they were hastily called out for their behavior, as slicked-back hairstyles and hoop earrings were heavily popularized in the Black and Latine communities long before. But as this aesthetic evolved, it ended up re-infiltrating the Black community, shifting towards silk presses, stud earrings, long hair, and smaller-sized women wearing “old money” clothing or athleisure to give this effortlessly cool, healthy, and simplistically beautiful aesthetic. But the revamped “clean girl” aesthetic often excludes and gives unrealistic ideals of what women should look like. This aesthetic heavily popularized “no makeup, makeup,” in which a woman blurs any imperfections on her skin, and either presses her hair (or additionally gets a sew-in/tape-ins) to make themselves look more “aesthetically” pleasing—essentially, creating a vague blueprint of eurocentric beauty standards. 

When researching what creators within the “clean girl” aesthetic do in their everyday lives, many are seemingly stay-at-home wives and mothers. 

The ultimate clean girl, Nara Smith, promotes and creates content that mainly revolves around cooking for her husband and children. She embodies the same aesthetic with her “low-effort” make-up style and effortlessly healthy, homemade (emphasis on the home) meals. Even Cooking with Kya offers a similar take, her content promoting homemade meals with an emphasis on “cooking for your man.” 

While the “clean girl” aesthetic and its creators seemingly have no political involvement, they are a true reckoning for what is happening within America. We are constantly valuing and promoting conservative content, meaning the original values that many women and people in America worked incredibly hard to move away from. We have created incredibly diverse styles within the Black community, from the way we style our hair to our clothes, yet now we are upholding a similar ideal to that of our grandparents’ time. A standard dictating that women need to be small, have long hair, cook, clean, be the caretaker in an upper-class household, and be as exceedingly close to whiteness as possible. These are the same things that our great-grandmothers likely idealized (then pushed against) when they were younger. 

Now, before I dive in, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a nice house, to not work, and to cook all day, because, yes, many of us would rather take housework over fighting to get a shit job posted on LinkedIn (in some ways, I would like this too). But the issue is that these ideals are a stark signifier that Gen Z is becoming increasingly conservative.

This rise in conservatism within Gen Z involves the fact that a lot of us wish that we weren’t living through current times. That every news cycle didn’t read like a history book, or worse, sound like the end of the world. I think many people want things to be simpler, to be standard, to be like it was way back when. But it is important to remember that it is exceedingly easy to idealize lives you’ve never had. To think back to when your grandmother lived, how she and your grandfather owned a house and a car, and worked only one job that gave him benefits. But if I can be frank with you, those times were not as simple as they seemed. Many stay-at-home mothers endured physical, emotional, and financial abuse. If I can be really honest, your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all lived through some of the worst moments in documented history, and still are.

That’s the thing about conservatism, it’s really just repackaged fear.

And these TikTok “clean girl” aesthetics plus whatever trending conservatism that runs rampant on Twitter are really just created to make you—someone who is (likely) Gen Z and (likely) pretty liberal—feel safe, if even for a moment. It is something familiar, even if not through experience, reinforced through social values, such as whiteness, wealth, and wanting.

It is selling you simplicity in a world full of complexities.

And it’s really easy to buy through the “clean girl” aesthetic; through Nara Smith and her recipes that take literal hours to make; and through Cooking with Kya, who makes it seem like her whole life is being pretty and cooking well. However, historically, these lifestyles were not simple; they were oftentimes filled with abuse, stagnation, and fear. And these repackaged ones are just selling you the good, not the truth. As we continue to move forward as a community, as Gen Z, let’s not seek to recreate our society’s greatest failures, but to fix the world we live in as we watch the mistakes of our ancestors come to a head. Remember, because of the current presidency, Gen Z will have it harder than our parents because, in some ways, this country is moving backwards. And while it seems like there is no way to stop it, there is! It begins with the way we use social media. While many of us use TikTok to connect and explore, we have to be incredibly discerning of what content we are interacting with and with what content our younger brothers, sisters, cousins and friends are interacting with. We find ourselves in a uniquely challenging position, where we possess more social media literacy than our grandparents and a deeper political understanding than our younger counterparts. This makes it our responsibility to ensure that our generation and future generations continue to participate in this world in a way that helps our future, and with the way social media is right now, it is incredibly easy to cause harm. So even though the rise of conservatism may currently include you, it doesn’t have to.