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.
Except for maybe Netflix, reruns of The Office, Amanda Gorman, Halsey, Simone Biles, and Lil Nas X, Gen Z hasn’t caught much of a break. Even uploading new dance moves or pranks on TikTok was deemed a national security threat, enabling Chinese cyber-warriors.
For most of their lives, Gen Zers have been failed by our nation.
* * *
As I write this in the summer of 2021, nearly half of Generation Z is suffering from depressive symptoms requiring professional treatment. The chronic stress from worrying about school, future education and employment, gun violence, economic insecurity, political instability, personal relationships, and social media has weighed down Zoomers just as they should be preparing to fly. Ellen Burstein and Alan Zhang, two Harvard undergraduates who work on the Harvard Public Opinion Project with me, wrote for The Boston Globe:
There needs to be open conversation about mental health, and families, parents, and friends need to be aware of troubling symptoms in their loved ones.3
Before the coronavirus isolation and stress made everything worse, youth suicide (in ten- to twenty-four-year-olds) was already on the rise in every one of fifty states and was the second leading cause of death for Americans under age thirty-five (as it was for younger age groups, as well).4 From an eight-year period of stability (2000 to 2007), the suicide rate began increasing as Gen Z aged into adolescence. When government researchers compared the period of 2007–2009 with 2016–2018, they found that suicide rates among youths increased by 47 percent.5
Figure 1.1. Suicide death rates among 10–24-year-olds in the United States. Rates per 100,000 population enumerated as of April 1 for 2000 and 2010, and estimated as of July 1 for all other years.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality
Every state saw an increase; in forty-two states the growth rate was statistically valid and not the result of random error. In the other states, suicides also rose, but the change was not statistically significant. At an increase of 110 percent over that time frame, New Hampshire saw the largest escalation by far. The Granite State was followed by Oregon, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Michigan, which recorded spikes of at least 70 percent in youth suicide rates during this period. On the other end of the spectrum are Maryland, Mississippi, and Florida; each of these states also saw increases, but they were significantly below the national average, and under 30 percent.6
Behind these statistics are nearly seven thousand families who every year lose a child before their twenty-fifth birthday.7 Having to confront this cruel reality is why hiring more psychologists or social workers is often one of the more popular responses high school students suggest to me when I ask them how to improve public education.
While things might look good on the outside, or from inside Zoomers’ ebullient Snapchat and Instagram stories, if we’re honest, we know they’re not. The Gen Z social media feed is often a facade covering intense pain, like the struggles of high school student Marcus, from an inner-city neighborhood in Atlanta:
A lot of people have different mental problems and stuff like that, and depression’s a common one, but others have PTSD, and when that triggers, it just turns into a whole different problem, and that caused a lot of suicides. It’s just bad really.
According to IOP polling, for at least several days within a two-week period in March 2021, 53 percent of Zoomers said they had little interest or pleasure in doing things; 51 percent felt down, depressed, or hopeless; 49 percent had a poor appetite or were overeating; 48 percent had trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television; and 28 percent had thoughts that they would be better off dead, or thoughts of hurting themselves in some way. Some 5 percent say these thoughts cross their mind every day.8 While there are certain subgroups of youth that have heightened levels of stress, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts, no group is immune.
Figure 1.2. 18–29-year-olds who indicate that they have been bothered by the following problem at least several days in the last two weeks: “Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or thoughts of hurting yourself in some way.”
Source: Harvard IOP Youth Poll, April 2021
Zoomers are twice as likely as Americans over thirty to be afflicted by mental health challenges like these. The health care system in the United States, and in most parts of the world, is unable to keep up with demand.
Before the pandemic, I met Katherine, a then-nineteen-year-old young woman from one of Georgia’s wealthiest communities. I was interested in speaking with her about current events. She quickly turned the conversation personal, however. In front of two dozen other teens from surrounding schools, she opened up and shared a period of her life that was so dark, she felt incapable of facing another day—unable to make another human connection, she told me.
A gifted student when she was younger, whose peers caught up with her academically by middle school, she was raised by what she describes as affluent “you’re going to Harvard, or some super-fancy school, super-strict parents.”
Falling behind in more than one of her classes, unable to find the academic and mental health support her situation necessitated, she was overcome with depression and anxiety, eventually dropping out of high school. Rescued many months later by the grace of a teacher, at nineteen, she was working to finish the classes she needed to earn her diploma. She found it important in our focus group with other teens to reflect and offer hope and some guidance to others who sadly might one day walk in her shoes:
I dropped out because the cause of my depression and anxiety was taking so much of my time that I wasn’t getting any work done. My new homeroom teacher was really, really supportive, and helped me find hope so I could actually get towards (sic) graduating and take that stress off my shoulders. But you just find someone to talk to. Like if you’re not capable of getting professional help, just having someone to talk to saved me.
Generation Z’s American Dream isn’t to own a house and raise a family with an eye toward living more comfortably than their parents. That’s a fantasy in a nation that has mortgaged their children’s future to fund their own present. For many of the Zoomers I talk to, their dream includes an education that prepares them to live a full and happy life, managing four-, five-, and sometimes six-figure student debt, and not having to resort to the back pages of the internet to find the four roommates they need to avoid being priced out of housing after graduation. The fortunate ones, they tell me, are able to save enough money for therapy.
Being conscious of Generation Zers, their stressors, the life they’ve led, and where they will lead us all is far from a trivial pursuit. To inspire them to action, whether it’s in the arena of politics, or any commercial or cultural venture, requires an understanding, if not appreciation, for what has shaped them to this point.
* * *
Competitive, well-fought political campaigns for the presidency are often the prism through which a generation determines what they feel is right and what is wrong in society. Like our quadrennial obsession with Olympic sporting events, there is heightened attention on public policy that just does not exist otherwise. Every four years, millions of young Americans are welcomed into a debate about their future. And while most will not be able to articulate the details of tax, climate, or foreign policy, they are more than prepared to form opinions on which of the myriad issues are of greatest importance to them—and on which side they sit.
Figure 1.3. 18–29-year-olds who strongly or somewhat agree that “the government should spend more to reduce poverty.”
Source: Harvard IOP Youth Poll, 2010–2021
Figure 1.4. 18–29-year-olds who strongly or somewhat agree that “basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it.”
Source: Harvard IOP Youth Poll, 2010–2021
As the group of young Americans eligible to vote has evolved from millennials to Generation Z over the last six years, we have found a cohort that is more engaged, displays more progressive values, and favors a more active federal government.
Whether you praise him or wished he was impeached, it is impossible to overestimate the influence Donald Trump has had on the personal and political development of Generation Z. Transformational leaders, for good and for evil, have that effect. They serve as orienting points or touchstones for generations of youths, allowing for ideas and movements to coalesce into a coherent vocabulary and goal. The Germany of the late 1920s and 1930s saw the indoctrination and rise of Hitler Youth. JFK inspired a generation to service in the 1960s. Reagan created a contemporary conservatism attractive to young baby boomers and Gen Xers in the 1980s. Obama held sway over millennials in the 2000s. And then Trump.
Given the significant levels of youth support President Obama enjoyed in 2008 and 2012, and their preference for a third Democratic term in 2016, President Trump had his work cut out for him if he was to truly succeed in his inaugural pledge to “lift our sights, heal our divisions”9 and establish a rapport with Generation Z. The divisions between his politics and the politics of Generation Z were measured not in feet but miles. In the first Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics youth survey of his presidency, taken within the first one-hundred-day window, only a third (32 percent) of voters under thirty approved of his performance.10 His ratings were underwater with Generation Z regardless of gender, race, geography, and education level.
On trade and immigration—two of the policy issues President Trump seemed most invested in—after several years of stability in Harvard IOP polling, youth opinion turned sharply away from Trump and the Republican Party. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of young Americans who agree that “our country’s goal in trade policy should be to eliminate all barriers to trade and employment so that we have a truly global economy” increased by 12 percentage points.
Figure 1.5. 18–29-year-olds who strongly or somewhat agree that “our country’s goal in trade policy should be to eliminate all barriers to trade and employment so that we have a truly global economy.”
Source: Harvard IOP Youth Poll, 2010–2021
Figure 1.6. 18–29-year-olds who strongly or somewhat agree that “recent immigration into this country has done more good than harm.”
Source: Harvard IOP Youth Poll, 2010–2021
Youth agreement that “recent immigration into this country has done more good than harm” increased by 8 points over the same time frame. In other words, if Trump was advocating for it, young Americans were not; almost every time, Gen Z would lead others in taking the opposite tack.
When our 2017 IOP spring survey asked Zoomers for one piece of advice they would offer the president in order to move the country forward, the message two students and I delivered to Trump counselors Kellyanne Conway and Bill Stepien in the White House was clear and prescient: “uniting our country should be the top priority.” Other open-ended responses from our survey included:
I would say that he’s already done a lot to change the way things are handled in our country. But to move it forward we need to work on becoming one as a country.
Be strong against America’s enemies, and compassionate to the American people.
Do whatever you can to ease racial and religious tensions because if not, something terrible is going to happen.
Trump’s unpopularity among young and old alike (he received the lowest ratings for an incoming president in modern polling history, according to Gallup11) was soon demonstrated by a crowd far larger than the one that had attended his inauguration. On the second day of his presidency, between three million and five million people in the United States took to the streets in hundreds of locations to support the Women’s March, a multigenerational outpouring of support for women, organized on Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election.12
The largest single-day march up to that point in US history, the Women’s March was, according to its organizers, a struggle “for the protection of our rights, our safety, our health, and our families.” Unsurprisingly, these were the same concerns Zoomers would express to me in my interviews, focus groups, and town meetings that I held later that year and throughout the duration of Trump’s presidency.
Also, on day two of the presidency, White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted in his first official briefing that Trump had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.”13 It was obviously not true, and after leaving government seven months later, Spicer said that he “absolutely regretted it.”14
Gen Zers’ outrage at what they believed—since the election and transition—to be a plot to strip away objective truth, our rights, and democracy continued into the following week. On January 27, 2017, Trump announced the first of four “Muslim bans,” which prevented individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries from visiting the United States for 90 days, banned Syrian refugees from entering the country indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days.
Soon after, while visiting CPAC,† Trump’s 2016 chief strategist Steve Bannon (who three-plus years later would be the recipient of a last-minute presidential pardon) boasted to those who seemed surprised by the rapidly rising xenophobia from the White House that “It was all in the speeches. He went around to these rallies, but those speeches had a tremendous amount of content in them, right?”15
Speaking in the third person at a campaign rally late in 2015 in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump said:
Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on!16
The old adage that elections have consequences had rarely before seemed more apt. Suddenly borders were closed, decades-long multilateral relationships fractured, opportunities for a more peaceful and just world felt squandered—just as Trump had promised and planned. According to the Harvard IOP youth poll, most members of Generation Z believed administration priorities of building a wall and repealing and replacing Obamacare would do significant harm to the country, their family, or both. And while Trump and his party were enjoying the early spoils of their election victory, 62 percent of Black Zoomers were telling us that they felt seriously under attack, with nearly half of Hispanics feeling the same way.17
The Trump presidency made Generation Z feel less secure in just about every sense of the word; rather than acknowledging this, Trump and his cabinet only exacerbated problems already present. Day after day, young Americans saw their country and government breaking into a million little pieces. We were in “disarray” and headed “downhill,” Columbus, Ohio–area students told me in the late spring of 2017 when I visited.
In addition to enacting that first travel ban, within his first ten days in office President Trump
issued executive orders to scale back the Affordable Care Act and begin construction of a border wall;reversed the Obama administration’s halt on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines;announced his intention to investigate alleged voter fraud from the 2016 presidential election;added political aide Steve Bannon to the National Security Council;initiated his first international dispute, hanging up on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull; andfired acting attorney general Sally Yates, who refused to defend the travel ban, which she argued was unconstitutional.It was, by all measures, as audacious an entry into government service as there’s ever been. His supporters were delighted; most Zoomers were devastated.
By the beginning of month six, Trump had told the country of his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, reminding an already anxious nation, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”18 Ironically, Hillary Clinton beat Trump handily in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, 56 percent to 40 percent,19 and in 2020 Biden would win 60 percent of the vote there.20
Trump would find public opinion staunchly opposed to this action, as was the case for so many of his acts in office. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that opposition to Trump’s exit plan for Paris outpaced support by nearly a two-to-one margin, 59 percent to 28 percent. Among the under-forty cohort of Gen Z and millennials, opposition was marked at two-thirds.21
* * *
While the norm-busting transition and early months of the Trump presidency were jarring for many, for Generation Z—whose members became politically conscious during the age of “No Drama Obama”—the change was seminal. In a January 2019 article for Pacific Standard, Jared Keller explained:
Two years later, the physiological effects of the Trump administration aren’t going away. A growing body of research has tracked the detrimental impacts of Trump-related stress on broad segments of the American population, from young adults to women, to racial and LGBT communities.22
Other studies confirmed these insights, showing how major sociopolitical events can affect individuals’ psychology and physiology, with age-related vulnerability as a factor.23 “Although young adults usually think of stressors as the personal problems, imminent threats, or daily hassles that penetrate their everyday lives,”24 Fordham University professor Lindsay T. Hoyt noted that her 2016 study “suggests that macro-level events (at a national scale) can influence their health and well-being.”25
Through social media, Gen Zers have been exposed to, and feel a connection to, the climate and their peers in all parts of the world. As children, the world for baby boomers and many Gen Xers often began and ended on their block; for Gen Z, there is no limit, and with this brings an unparalleled understanding of humanity and empathy. Therefore, attacks on the environment, whole groups of people, and Muslim bans are fundamentally at odds with who they are.
As if existing as an adolescent isn’t challenging enough in itself, especially with the enhanced pressures created by mobile phones and social media, the nature of our politics added a dangerous and toxic level of anxiety. Higher levels of cortisol, a pathway to headaches, sleep problems, digestive ailments, concentration impairment, anxiety, and depression were forming a “pit of despair” in millions of Americans, according to Keller.
Transitioning from the calm, thoughtful assuredness of President Obama to a reality-show president elected without majority support was a most unsettling way for Generation Z to come of age. I came face-to-face with this anxiety and uneasiness during the first in a series of in-depth conversations I hosted with small groups of high school and college students from across the country that summer of 2017.
When I asked my standard question, “What unites us as Americans?” Katie, a nursing student from Southern Illinois, quickly answered, “Fear unites us.”
Before I could even follow up with “Fear of what?” she continued:
Let’s see, fear of death. Fear of our rights being infringed upon. Fear of the future for our kids. Fear for our family. Fear for our health.
Chris, a rising college senior from Northern Kentucky echoed her sentiment. “The thing that really brings us together as Americans,” he said, “is being afraid and paranoid of ab … so … lute … ly everything. Sandy Hook and the club shootings, when those happened, everybody lost all of their shit at the same time. This is happening to everyone!”
Fear for their future. Fear for our future. Fear was on its way to seizing the soul of the next generation before most of its members reached adulthood. In dozens of similar conversations from that moment forward, the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I witnessed in Columbus were impossible to miss. To this day, few moments in a focus group have had a greater impact on me than when I asked for an explanation of what older generations don’t get about Generation Z. Grace, a biology student about to turn twenty-one at the time, told me:
An older generation would not understand walking into a classroom and thinking about how easy it would be for someone to shoot it up. The same daily weight on an adult’s shoulders over bills or taxes is what children feel about living or dying.
While many in Washington and on cable TV were fixated on the seemingly bizarre notion of using psychoanalysis and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove President Trump from office his first summer in Washington, it was apparent to me that our attention should instead be on the fragile mental health of Generation Z.
Not long ago, young people told me that “opportunity” was the thread that connected us as Americans; by 2017 I was reminded that it “now divides us because not everyone can have it.” For Generation Z, fear, stress, and anxiety were the dominant forces shaping the generation.
The young people I spoke with that summer spent surprisingly little time railing against President Trump, however. Generation Z recognized and voiced more quickly than others that it was structural deficiencies in our institutions, and not any one individual, that were to blame for the position in which they, and our nation, now found themselves. Trump was a symptom, not the root problem, they would tell me. The failure of older generations of elected officials from both parties to address myriad concerns related to systemic inequality, and an economy leaving too many behind, were among the ailments these young Americans sought to cure. Generation Z is introspective. Its members are comforted and not burdened when they challenge our leaders, traditions, the meaning of exceptionalism, and even themselves.
In what the Republican Party might one day consider a cruel twist of fate, Donald Trump single-handedly removed one of the most challenging barriers to political engagement. Generation Z learned a lesson that some never do. Its members now know extremely well the difference politics can make in the health of our democracy—and also in their own day-to-day lives.
Things would get far worse, however, before Gen Zers could begin to make them better.
Copyright © 2021 by John Della Volpe.
