Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assesses vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. Albanese is associate professor and associate chair for research in the Department of Information Science and Technology at George Mason University.
America's elections are under unprecedented threat. From foreign interference in the 2016 presidential race to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the integrity of our democratic process has been repeatedly targeted in recent years. Safeguarding it against future attacks requires an often-overlooked resource: Generation Z.
Young Americans have come of age during a time of unparalleled challenges to our democracy. They have witnessed the erosion of trust in our institutions, the rise of polarization and misinformation, and the vulnerability of our electoral systems to both domestic and foreign malicious actors. This tumultuous introduction to the political landscape has left many in Gen Z both disillusioned and eager to be part of the solution.
Yet when we speak with election officials and their partners about engaging the next generation in their work, the conversation centers mostly on poll worker recruitment and awareness-raising. While these are important initiatives, they fail to recognize the full potential of young people as partners in the fight for election security. To truly empower Gen Z to make a difference, we must invest in programs that provide them with hands-on experience and training, engaging youth to ensure a continuous pipeline of knowledgeable individuals joining the space. The Virginia Cyber Navigator Internship Program, a collaboration between the Virginia Department of Elections and six Virginia universities, offers one powerful model.
After Russian-affiliated actors targeted voter registration databases and state election websites across the United States in 2016, Virginia lawmakers required that local election offices meet minimum requisite cybersecurity standards. However, many officials still lacked the money, personnel, or knowledge to both meet these standards and upgrade their election infrastructure security.
The VA Cyber Navigator Internship Program, which deploys college students with elections and cybersecurity training to help Virginia’s local election offices improve their security posture, was created to address that gap. The students first take an election security course developed by the universities and the Virginia Department of Elections. The course provides specialized training on the significance of voting and the technical issues associated with securing election processes (the authors of this piece co-teach the election security course offered at George Mason University).
Upon completing this training, students are eligible to apply for the internship program. Selected students work as interns at local election offices throughout Virginia for 10 weeks in the summer. To kick off each year’s summer internship, an election security bootcamp is hosted by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. This event brings together all interns, faculty from participating universities, elected officials, and experts such as Chris Krebs, the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Participating election offices benefit from the expertise of the cybersecurity interns, and the interns gain hands-on experience that connects them with academics and elections officials, an experience that could create a pipeline of talent to mitigate the loss of institutional knowledge that occurs when older, more experienced election officials leave the field.
Deploying technically savvy students with specialized cybersecurity training to assist local election offices provides valuable hands-on experience for students while addressing a critical need for officials. However, recent developments at both the federal and state levels raise concerns about our commitment to prioritizing election security. The paltry $55 million allocated for this purpose in the fiscal 2024 federal budget, along with some states' reluctance to collaborate with CISA, suggests a troubling failure to treat the integrity of our democratic process as the national security imperative that it is.
Investing in the education and engagement of young people cultivates a cadre of informed, committed individuals who understand the gravity of the threats we face. We can build a stronger, more resilient democracy that is better prepared to withstand the challenges posed by those who seek to undermine it. This is not merely a matter of good governance but of national security. Our adversaries, both foreign and domestic, have demonstrated their willingness to exploit any vulnerability in our electoral infrastructure.
Strengthening that infrastructure demands fresh thinking and new perspectives — precisely what Gen Z has to offer. The future of our democracy depends, in part, on our ability to inspire and empower young people to take up this cause as their own.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.