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As I was gathering material on the absence of young people at anti-Trump demonstrations, I came across evidence of powerful technological forces weakening persistence and cognitive tenacity across the board.
Most interesting, the most immediate danger posed by artificial intelligence may not be the futuristic moment when A.I. becomes so smart and so independent of human control — in other words, conscious — that it takes over politics, economics, and the social order.
Instead, it may be the current power of A.I. to undermine persistence, curiosity, and personal effort, encouraging in their place growing passivity and indifference, that poses the more proximate threat.
Before we get to that, though, let’s start where I began, with the question of youth inaction on President Trump, and go on from there.
In May 1970, President Richard Nixon’s frustration with the student protests against the Vietnam War reached a boiling point. “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses,” he told a gathering of civilian employees at the Pentagon.
“Listen,” the president said, “the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it.”
Today, the United States would appear ripe for a resurgence of student activism, beyond the flourishing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus in 2023 and 2024 in particular.
We have a president who has directly attacked the finances and the intellectual freedom of colleges and universities, is building the technology for a surveillance state, undermines free and fair elections, and took the nation into an unjustified war with no explanation, while causing domestic economic havoc.
But one ingredient is missing: a substantial anti-Trump youth movement.
Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University, tracks the demographics of participants in major anti-Trump demonstrations. In a phone interview, I asked what she had found about the mobilization of students and younger men and women.
She replied, “We’re not seeing them in the streets at No Kings events.”
She provided the following data about the three No Kings protests: “At No Kings 1 (June 14, 2025) the median age was 36, at No Kings 2 (Oct. 18, 2025) the median age was 44, and at No Kings 3 (March 28, 2026) it was 48. Clearly, it’s getting older.”
The participants in the initial No Kings Day demonstrations, Fisher wrote, were “predominantly white, highly educated, female and middle-aged.”
It’s not as if young men and women are indifferent to President Trump.
The Spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll found that “younger voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump and plan to vote for Democrats in 2026. Fifty-seven percent of all voters disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance as president, including 68 percent of voters aged 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters aged 23 to 29.”
So what’s going on? I asked a wide range of experts for their thoughts. Some pointed to such structural developments as the explosion in social media usage and public access to artificial intelligence, both of which weaken users’ sense of efficacy and agency.
Those adverse effects are most acute for young liberals, especially young liberal women, suggesting that the political costs of social media and A.I. will be borne disproportionately by the Democratic Party.
Richard Braungart, a sociology professor emeritus at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and co-editor of “Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th-21st Centuries,” argued in an email that over 70 years the United States has undergone a moral and ideological transformation that has created a hostile environment for the liberal activist young:
After the 1960s domination by young people and the political left, the country moved to the political right with the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan, where liberalism (freedom, equality, self-determination, civil society), big government and the public sector were portrayed as “the problem” and the enemy.
America was to be saved, enriched and elevated by big business, the private sector, social Darwinism and economic neoliberalism.
In America, Braungart contended, “We are now living in an autocratic capitalist utopia that won’t allow counter-ideological positions to exist. It is considered unpatriotic in this capitalist utopia to have democratic parties and networks share power.”
Braungart concluded:
There is a widening gap and split between spirituality and materialism in our society today. I grew up in a world of moral and spiritual values (Marshall Plan, U.S.A.I.D., CARE, good government that served the people), which, unlike today, heavily influenced political decisions. Politicians were held accountable for their moral lapses and flagrant violations (Joe McCarthy).
These days, Americans are living in a crumbling moral wasteland, where corruption and raw-power politics rule supreme and are carried out without ethics, morality, personal responsibility, accountability, nor concern for people, the environment and a healthy future for upcoming generations.
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Daniel Ribar for The New York Times
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Click the link below for the complete article:
https://www.nytimes.com
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James' World 2 
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