Young, hip, and conservative: A different slant on New York

In New York's bohemian haunts, a movement of new conservatives is growing in reaction to what they see as liberal dominance in art and culture. Their work reflects a nation in flux.

It may not be surprising that many people who live in New York City feel they live in a very special place. 

It’s a city with layers of myths and, frankly, a lot of tired, hoary clichés. But though it has become a lot more like the rest of the United States in recent decades, it still looms large in the American imagination. Some people are annoyed by New York’s sense of self-importance. Others are enlivened by its promise that here is where you can make it big.

The writer E.B. White captured (and invented) many of New York’s myths in his 1949 essay, “Here Is New York”:

“New York is to the nation what the white church is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up.”

This symbolic promise continues to draw creative people “arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart.”

This week’s cover story by Leonardo Bevilacqua, who was born and raised in lower Manhattan, explores some of the old bohemian haunts of generations past. This is where the former music venue CBGB helped give birth to punk rock, where the beat poets once flourished, and where the Nuyorican Poets Café still flourishes today.

This story, however, reports on a movement of new conservatives – musicians, writers, fashion designers – who are reacting against what they see as liberal dominance in art and culture. They bristle against the idea of moral censorship and the stifling effects of “cancel culture.”

But this isn’t just a New York story. Generation Z teens are twice as likely to say they are more conservative than their parents compared with millennial teens 20 years ago, according to an analysis of 2023 data from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation conducted by Rachel Janfaza, a journalist who focuses on young people and politics. This youthful conservatism, too, is translating into more interest in traditional faith, especially the older liturgical traditions of Catholicism, both in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. 

From music to film to fashion, the youth of lower Manhattan have often sent up white plumes saying the way is up. Millennials may have left organized religion in unprecedented numbers, but a new generation in New York’s avant-garde is finding that to be transgressive today is to be conservative.