Dispatches from the present
When I read Emily Witt’s new memoir, Health and Safety, earlier this year, the sections I found the most striking weren’t the ones featuring big ideas about psychedelic drugs, Brooklyn’s underground party culture or Witt’s own second thoughts about journalism after reporting on the Parkland school shooting. It was Witt’s earnest indignity in response to the 2016 election.
She writes that she’d “gone to Pearl Art Supplies and bought paint pens and posterboard with the idea that, with Trump taking office, we would be out on the streets every week.” Now, Witt and her social circle of media people and ravers were no acolytes of the 2016 Democrats’ technocratic centrism. (Earlier in the book, she criticizes the “belabored efforts to generate enthusiasm about Hillary Clinton’s ‘poise’ and ‘intellect’” as “counterfeit.”) But these were millennials who’d come of age under Bush and Cheney, and who saw their values reflected in Obama’s vision for the future. They’d cut their teeth protesting the Iraq War and at Occupy. Even when the left rallied behind an unpopular centrist and lost because of it, they saw a path forward. They had hope, and they marched.
That must have been nice.
I’m younger now than Witt would’ve been in 2016, but it’s hard to imagine anyone in my generation reacting that way. We—my friends and I, right at the core of this chronically online, 18-29-year-old demographic—were in high school when Trump was first elected, cast our first votes between Zoom college classes during COVID, and are currently underemployed in an economy that nobody can decide whether to call good or bad. For better or worse, our political lives started in 2016. We came of age during the amorphous political realignment that turned the GOP into populists and the Democrats into the party of college-educated elites. I remember the spring of ninth grade, chickening out of skipping class to see then-candidate Trump speak at a rally in downtown Albany with my friend group of Model UN nerds. That same semester—dipping my toes into progressive politics via YouTube video essays and the Vice Snapchat story—I bought a Bernie Sanders/Public Enemy “Fight the Power” poster. It never came. Just a few days later, he dropped out of the race, and I have no idea where my $32 “donation” (that I had to lie about my age to make) ended up. Instead, we got Hillary doing the mannequin challenge. The rest is history.
Now, staring down Trump presidency number two, magazines are calling Generation Z more conservative than their parents. This is annoying and reductive, but at least in terms of the way young people talk about politics, probably correct. It’s also almost truer the more progressive someone is. In person, in group chats and online, I’ve seen little to no earnest “now the real fight starts” discourse, à la Witt and her friends in 2016. If anything, we’re more inclined to make fun of so-called “resistance liberals” now than we were a month ago. Online, we joke about the blatant election fraud we committed and how we lost anyway. We deflect, roll our eyes and act like millennials were cringe for even holding out hope for Harris.
The sense of optimism around Obama in ’08 has been relayed to us secondhand enough times, with enough nostalgic fervor, that it seems almost like mythology. “Remember when we could be excited about a candidate?” But while girls my age might’ve taken part in the 2017 Women’s Marches with their moms and older sisters, by the time they were old enough to organize protests for themselves—against police brutality in 2020, this summer against the war in Gaza—they were being demonized by centrist Democrats just as badly as they were by the right. After a brief blip during 2020 where it seemed like progressive ideas—about race, about policing, about labor—were taking hold, the 2024 cycle found the party split down the middle (often by age) on these same issues. I remember the first summer of the pandemic, sent home from my freshman year of college, reading bootleg PDFs on my phone while working my “essential” grocery-store job, feeling like I was watching America transform through my Instagram feed. Four years later, those COVID-era conversations about what could’ve been meaningful change amounted to next to nothing.
In those same years, the mainstream left’s self-identification as the anti-Trump party has made them, as Tim Shenk observed in the New York Times, “reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate.” Since I’ve been able to vote, the Democrats have been on the defensive, articulating a platform that amounts to little more than a promise of competency, variations of “Kamala is Brat,” and insisting on being not Trump. Do Democrats really expect nineteen-year-olds, who have never lived in anything but Trump’s America, to hear their empty promises of a return to “normalcy” and get excited enough to swing their undecided friends?
Meanwhile, the sort of subversive political thinking that would’ve once appealed to young people has become almost exclusively the domain of the right. There’s a Silicon Valley-style ethos of “Why not?” to 2024 Trump that wasn’t there during his first two cycles. For starters, look at the company he’s been keeping—Elon Musk eyeing a cabinet position, Mark Zuckerberg making amends in the name of tech-friendly deregulation. Even more importantly, Trump has taken a note from the techno-optimists’ playbook: saying yes to everybody.
Trump has plugged into something here, a sense of entitled excitement about technology, money and the future. Talking to people (men) my age and older, I hear a common refrain: “I don’t like Trump, but at least he has a vision.” What that vision actually is seems to take a different form for each individual. Trump has cobbled together policy promises geared at otherwise single-issue voters (the pro-life wing, the tough-on-immigration crowd, the “anti-woke” online, whoever is still clinging on to crypto) and Frankensteined them into an ideal of what America can be. I’ve watched friends and frenemies from high school, people who five years ago would’ve had nothing in common, slowly but surely coalesce around this new Trumpism. The GOP ticket this year offered something to all of them—the free-trade economics students, the /pol/ trolls, the assholes who pretend to know what they’re talking about when arguing for arming Israel and abandoning Ukraine. It’s a platform that is inclusive to the point of being incoherent; some of it is pure bullshit, sure to crumble under the slightest pressure or scrutiny. But the power fantasy that it represents marks a major transformation of the MAGA movement: with the help of powerful friends in tech and “alternative media,” it’s rebranded itself from critical to constructive, from reactive to future-facing.
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Witt is not the only author to have recently written about the Obama years. Vinson Cunningham, whose autobiographical novel Great Expectations is based on his experience as a junior staffer on the 2008 Obama campaign, speaks even more directly than Witt to the seeds of political disillusionment in the core of Gen Z’s psyche.
The novel’s narrator, David, falls practically by accident into a fundraising job where he acts as a liaison to elite donors for the campaign. Organizing events in mansions on Martha’s Vineyard and in New Hampshire dive bars, he’s moved by Obama’s ability to move others, but never completely falls for his promise. In the months leading up to Election Day, David watches as the campaign devolves into gossip about who will be saved by Congress’s rescue package and the few “nitpicked qualifications” that distinguish Obama’s Recession policy from the Republicans’. At the same time, opposition to the Iraq War, an early pillar of Obama’s popularity, discreetly disappears from the platform. By the novel’s end, Obama has all but won, yet David’s connection to him, and to what the campaign symbolizes, is at an all-time low.
In the last pages of Great Expectations, David watches the victorious Obama take the stage with his family in Grant Park on election night. “He looked grave and classical,” thinks David, “like some ancient ideal modernized.” Yet as Obama speaks, even with the crowd of supporters roaring all around him, David can’t help but be skeptical. “I wanted to be fazed, but I wasn’t.” Thinking about the campaign, David feels an uneasy distance growing between himself and the other young people cheering in the crowd. As for Obama himself, David realizes: “he mattered and didn’t.”
He mattered and he didn’t. Is there any better way to sum up the promise of 2008 and the long shadow it casts over the past twenty years of Democratic politics? My generation was too late for young Senator Obama, the reformer. We weren’t there for the speech at Grant Park. Instead, we got the Obama who bailed out banks, whose Affordable Care Act has been challenged, watered down and steadily dismantled since before it was passed, and who, in Witt’s words, “flew away from the White House toward a future of NATO summits, paid appearances at Cantor Fitzgerald conferences, and kitesurfing with Richard Branson.” The version of Obama that depresses David at the end of the novel—all the folksy optimism stripped away to reveal his center-left careerist core—is the only one we ever knew.
And then, while we were still in high school, we got Trump, and with him, the Democrats’ regression into a party whose main promise was to restore a normality that most of us barely remember. Which raises the question: What would excite Gen Z liberals? There’s talk online about who could be the left-wing Joe Rogan. As if the progressive equivalent to the Zynternet is just lying dormant, waiting for a good figurehead. I read these opinion columns, these Twitter takes, and want to move out of the country. Four years out from the next presidential race, Democrats are already looking back, artlessly copying what worked for Republicans. If they want to have a chance in ’26 and ’28, Democrats need instead to recognize their biggest enemy isn’t the MAGA movement, but their own ideological stagnation. Young voters, regardless of where they sit on the left-right spectrum, are always going to prefer a politics of “yes, and…” to one offering nothing but the past.
Photo credit: Oleg Yunakov (CC / BY-SA 4.0)
