Zaidane is the president and CEO of the Millennial Action Project.
This holiday weekend Americans will celebrate with hot dogs, poolside parties and firework displays. What they’ll be celebrating is an open question among young Americans like me.
Scroll through TikTok, the town square for Generation Z, and you’ll find over 20 billion views on videos labeled #politics. The vast majority of this viral content directs ire toward the state of our democratic experiment. Celebrations of the star-spangled holiday are tempered with a sobering reality: Only 19.5 percent of young people view the word “patriotism” in a positive light.
It’s not hard to put a finger on why: increasingly slim opportunities for economic mobility, the steady drumbeat of hard-won rights overturned by unelected courts or gerrymandered legislatures, unfilled pledges from the 2020 summer of racial reckoning, recent testimony from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, and widespread bad faith arguments throughout the political spectrum. The lack of patriotism among millennials and Gen Z should be seen for what it is — a rebellion against the complacent promises of America. That doesn’t mean young people hate this country, it means we love it enough to want change. It means we believe that we can do better. And that’s something worth celebrating.
Independence Day is a time when we commemorate the aspirational and unique founding of our nation. This wasn’t the work of one generation and certainly not the work of a small set of delegates from 13 colonies. In fact, some of America’s greatest founders, who brought to life the aspirations we celebrate this weekend, would have never been permitted in Independence Hall in 1776.
When we reflect on America’s founders this holiday, we ought to think of people like Harriet Tubman, who is just as influential to who America is as Thomas Jefferson. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. built upon the American dream and fought for civil rights, Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson led early movements of LGBTQ activism, and Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Jeannette Rankin advocated for women’s suffrage based on the vision that America could be a fully representative democracy. These American Refounders lived in a country where the systems did not work for them, and yet they forced the nation to live up to its founding ideals and built a better future for all.
Millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward patriotism seem to be coming from this same place. It’s not a rejection of our country or national identity, but rather a stirring conviction for what America can and should be. The good news is that young people have not given up on this country. From 2018 to 2020, there was a 266 percent increase in millennials running for Congress. In 2020, the Millennial Action Project tracked 703 millennial candidates for Congress throughout the cycle, compared to just 264 in 2018. An MTV/AP-NORC poll reported that two-thirds of Gen Z feel that their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Most notably, each day, here at MAP, we see young people who not only stepped up and won local office, but who are using their platform to work across the aisle and bridge partisan divides.
Thomas Edison once said, “Vision without execution is just hallucination.” Each generation, we improve on the execution of the vision of America. And I’ve been inspired by how millennials and Gen Z are stepping up to the plate.
So what can we celebrate this Independence Day, when the work of our founding is far from complete? We can celebrate that since the founding of our nation, America is always being refounded, and with a generation of millennials and Gen Z overwhelmingly committed to improvement we have a lot of founders on the job.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.