American Youth bite back.
By Kathy O’Connor
It’s difficult to say, exactly, when the future began to feel less like an aspiration and more like a poorly executed eviction notice. One felt compelled to conclude, watching the seemingly endless, granular erosion of American civil liberties—the systematic dismantling of protections for reproductive autonomy, the punitive erasure of LGBTQ+ youth in schools, the intellectual vandalism of curriculum and libraries—that we were living through a kind of architectural collapse. Not of a single building, but of the very scaffolding that once promised young people, especially those already standing on less stable ground—the BAME, the queer, the working class—a future structured by increasing, rather than decreasing, options.
This particular brand of Trumpian politics is not merely reactionary; it is profoundly, philosophically anti-youth. Because what is being taken away, brick by banal legal brick, is not just a specific right—say, the right to bodily integrity, or the right to read a book with a trans protagonist—but the very premise of self-determination. The political project appears to be the aggressive simplification of the American citizen, reducing the complex, intersectional individual to a controllable archetype. You must be economically precarious, sexually compliant, historically ignorant, and politically docile. The complexity that defines Gen Z’s reality—a complexity encompassing climate anxiety, unprecedented debt, and nuanced identity—is precisely what the establishment, in its frantic search for order, seems intent on sanitizing out of existence.
And yet, this atmosphere of official, engineered chaos is where the intellectual fatigue truly sets in, particularly when considering the peripheral figures who actively celebrate the instability. One is tempted to simply dismiss the likes of Elon Musk, with his unsettling, almost juvenile yearning for the “civil war” he is presumably wealthy enough to watch from a remote, fortified bunker, as a footnote. But his brand of privileged nihilism is a symptom of the deeper moral rot: a desire for society to fail so spectacularly that his singular, simplistic vision of “reality” becomes the only narrative left standing. It is a grotesque spectacle, this fusion of extreme wealth and political puerility.
But the most compelling chapters of any narrative are always about the struggle for a necessary realism. It is in this sense that the rise of figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Jasmine Crockett, and New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani becomes essential reading. They are the ones demanding a politics of the material, which is, ultimately, the only politics that matters to a generation being denied a future. Crockett, with her unflinching, clear-eyed defense of voting rights and economic justice, and Mamdani, with his successful, ground-up fight for affordable housing and workers’ power, are not just performing politics. They are demonstrating that the antidote to chaos is specificity.
This movement is not about abstract utopianism; it’s about a painful, grounded realism—a demand that the government concern itself with childcare, rent, and healthcare, the very things that define a functional life. Young people are fighting back by backing these names because these politicians understand that the personal is not just political, but practical. They are demanding a new architecture for the future, one built not on the shifting sand of cultural grievance, but on the solid foundation of codified rights and economic dignity, which is perhaps the most radical proposition left in America.
