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.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.