1



UNITED BY FEAR



These are the words and phrases Generation Z uses to paint the picture of the America that raised them:

terrifying

broken

declining

fake

close-minded

divided

aggressive

dystopic

off the rails

a bloody mess

These postmillennials, the roughly seventy million Americans born in the mid-1990s through the early 2010s, suffered—like previous generations—the problems, dangers, and uncertainties of the world. Unlike those in previous generations, however, they’ve enjoyed few of the glories and hopes that define America’s promise.

Baby boomers saw JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinated and cities crumble. They watched their country ripped apart over Vietnam, and they suffered the ideals-shattering betrayal of Watergate. But they (especially white Americans) saw their incomes rise while enjoying the highest standard of living the world has ever known, the American middle class. And with it came Beatlemania and Woodstock, the moon landing, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, Springsteen, and disco.

Generation X, America’s middle child and my own cohort, remembers Americans as hostages; Gen Xers suffered from AIDS (or the fear of it), the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s betrayal of government and his embrace of the “greed is good” ethos, the Challenger disaster, and the Los Angeles riots; but many of us were also there for the “Miracle on Ice,” MTV, the PC revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, for some—particularly white suburbanites—increased opportunity and wealth.

In their formative years, millennials saw the Clinton impeachment, Columbine, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, the First Gulf War, and Kurt Cobain’s suicide. They were also the first to use iTunes and were part of Facebook from the beginning, although they would eventually come to view it as more of a negative than a positive. In 2008, they were the spark that delivered Barack Obama to the rest of us.

Let’s compare that to the life and collective memory of Generation Z.

When the oldest Zoomers were in preschool, George W. Bush won the presidency by less than a thousand votes, amid claims of fraud and suppression. Within a year, the 9/11 attacks occurred. Then there ensued a search for WMDs that did not exist, Hurricane Katrina, and the beginning of America’s longest war. Next, the 2008 financial crisis, the housing crisis, and bailouts for those who caused the crises, while Main Street, which suffered it, was ignored. On top of this, Gen Z endured the opioid epidemic and witnessed the militarization of police and national borders, an explosion of white nationalism, frightening red-alert active-shooter drills and school lockdowns, increasingly frequent and deadly mass shootings, the accelerating and genuine threat of climate change, and a global pandemic and lockdown with a yet-undetermined impact on Zers’ mental health and education. And most recently, a conspiracy-fueled insurgency has been bent on tearing down our institutions and kidnapping and assassinating our elected leaders.

Even the bright spots of Obama’s historic election in 2008 and the official end of the Great Recession in 2009 turned dark. In 2010, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Washington, DC, became a battleground.

The following year, in terms every once-closeted racist heard loud and clear, Donald Trump—and soon Roger Ailes’s Fox News—fully embraced “birtherism,” suggesting that the only president Generation Z really knew wasn’t even an American. “Maybe he’s a Muslim; I don’t know,”1 said our future commander in chief, perpetuating wildly racist depictions of Muslims as anti-American terrorists.

Social media has connected the like-minded in ways their parents who remember CompuServe could never have dreamed of. It helped give rise to the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, to Bernie Sanders and AOC, but it also enabled the rise of bots, trolls, QAnon, Russian interference, and alt-right terrorists, while Silicon Valley titans Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey looked away, counting their billions.

By 2017, researchers had already reported that rates of depression and anxiety, especially among youths, were higher than at any other point in history.2 And then Trump blew everything up, further dividing America, fueling racism, undermining the justice system, destroying trust in science, creating even greater gaps between the rich and the poor, before he oversaw the early response to COVID-19, which has claimed more than seven hundred thousand American lives.