We Can't Win a People-Powered Future Without Young People

The momentum of the status quo can be a powerful thing, even for those of us working to change it. As an organizer and educator, listening to young people is a critical way that I keep myself honest about the urgency and stakes of my work. In this spirit, I spent a few days in Michigan last week meeting with young progressive allies across the state. I wanted to hear directly from the generation whose worldviews are already shaping what comes next.

Part of my trip included a stop at the Michigan Union—the same place where President Lyndon B. Johnson outlined his vision for a Great Society 60 years ago—and it was hard not to feel the echoes of that moment. The students filling that room reminded me that greatness still depends on moral clarity—the kind that demands empathy, urgency, and imagination.

We need that boldness again, not as nostalgia, but as the foundation for a response this moment demands. If we’re looking for boldness, young progressives are an essential voice.

As in generations past, the student left remains “the most reliably correct constituency in America.” Over and over—often at great personal sacrifice—they’ve held the line on what is moral, only to see institutions and leaders catch up. Columbia University is one example: It once worked to crush its 1968 student uprising, and now it markets that same protest as a symbol of its “activist Ivy” legacy.

Far too often, young people have been treated as “nice to have” in the strategy of a progressive ecosystem—when they’re not being painted as an actual threat to the success of the progressive movement. This time, instead of treating students’ moral conviction as a challenge to pragmatic politics, what if we saw it as the foundation of any civic movement capable of meeting this moment?

Listening to the Generation That’s Getting It Right

My time in Michigan crystallized my understanding of something that’s been building for more than a decade. Far from giving in to resignation, the student left today—alongside their millennial predecessors—feels a profound sense of betrayal toward the leaders, institutions, and organizations whose choices have enabled the twin economic and authoritarian crises we are confronting.

In my time thinking about what drives the student left, I have yet to come up with something shorter or clearer than “People like people / They want alive people,” lines in a song by The 1975. Progressive young people are looking for honesty and emotional intelligence from leaders who are willing to fight for people—while also being alive to, or energized and animated by, their concerns.

When you live under the current status quo—students snatched off the street, a climate crisis denied, families left to the whims of the market—isn’t empathy for that pain, and honesty about its scale, the bare minimum we should expect from our leaders? That’s the spirit that should guide how progressive institutions and leaders approach policy: starting from what is necessary, not what polls as popular.

For instance, in a recent conversation I had with students and organizers, one student told me: “People [in my community] were more scared of poverty than death. They were trying to escape a certain condition of life by working themselves to death.” To the student left, the question isn’t whether a minimum wage increase is popular or which mechanism makes it happen; it’s that our economy makes working yourself to death seem necessary. They want their leaders to name that violence and refuse it.

The students in Michigan saw the country’s deepest divide not as ideological, but economic. They pointed to complacency in Washington as proof: Most political leaders have the wealth to weather a crisis, but most people do not. As one student put it in another conversation: “When eggs are more than an hour of minimum wage work, it doesn’t matter to me that inflation is less bad here than across the world.”

That’s why having conversations with young people on the ground around the country is vital—rebuilding trust in democracy requires listening to the people whose future is on the line. Young progressives aren’t just a constituency; they’re a source of institutional renewal. Unbound by the habits of the past, and with a clear moral compass, they can help us imagine what government could be if it finally worked for everyone.

And we know that the student left of this generation has never known “normal” times: Their adolescence was shaped by COVID isolation and uncertainty, their college years shaped by the horror in Gaza and increasing repression at home. Now they face a job market that can’t deliver stability, rents that defy reason, and debts that will define adulthood.

And yet, despite it all, they are building new forms of solidarity, imagination, and civic courage. They remind us that moral clarity is not naive—it’s the starting point for renewal. If we’re serious about a people-powered future, we have to meet their urgency with our own.

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