In looking at the growing mental health crisis among America’s youth, Derek Thompson describes the epidemic of teenage anxiety as a “tragic mystery” where “nobody knows for sure what’s going on” but potential causes could include a variety of factors from social media to school shootings and climate change to changes in parenting. Ross Douthat just argued the smartphone and tech are to blame. One potential trigger that Thompson and Douthat failed to mention, and which becomes immediately apparent to me as a professor of Gen Z students, is that students today—and notably those on the left—are subjected to repeated calls for nation-changing sociopolitical transformations and this is destabilizing and traumatic.
Students today have no real sense of the pluralistic, consensus-driven politics of the decades prior. Instead, they have come of age in an era when candidates and elected officials habitually call for the complete reordering of American politics and society. Each electoral cycle could fundamentally alter the nation’s norms, practices, institutions, values, and laws to the point where the country now lives in a world of permanent campaigns. Unsurprisingly, this institutional instability fosters deep confusion and anxiety among young adults.
The examples are virtually endless. Leading up to the 2020 election, the New York Times featured a story with the headline, “The election has become a referendum on the soul of the nation,” with numerous extreme electoral statements showcasing a fragile and tenuous civil society. The article quotes then Vice President Biden stating at the Democratic National Convention that, “this campaign isn’t just about winning votes. It’s about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America” and approvingly cites historians like John Meacham observing that in politics today, “people hear it as light versus dark, service versus selfishness, Trump versus the rest of the world.” This messaging has been unending with the New York Times Editorial Board later writing in 2022 that, “January 6 is not in the past; it is every day. . . . [W]e might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.”
Popular leftist leaders, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, habitually use catastrophic messaging. Given their adulation in popular culture, it would be foolish to underestimate the impact of their rhetoric. Sanders regularly calls for radical and extreme political change and incessantly talks about unending dysfunction and danger, urging his supporters to “resist—not only for ourselves but for our kids and future generations. The stakes are just too high. Despair is not an option. We must stand up and fight back.” During the 2019 government shutdown, Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.” Many younger American voters support Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, whose words are fatalistic and troubling and peddle narratives of harm and division.
The impacts of this political environment on my students are powerfully clear. In a December survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of over 1,000 college students, about 67 percent assert that they regularly feel anxious more than half the time. Distressingly, over a quarter of students (27 percent) feel anxious most of the time or nearly every day; another 11 percent state that they are always anxious. When queried about how often they felt stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed, almost three-quarters (73 percent) of students stated that they felt this way about half the time or more often with 11 percent stating that they always feel overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated.
Adding politics into the mix, the findings are even more disturbing. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of liberals report being anxious regularly—a figure appreciably higher than conservatives at 61 percent. As for moderates, the figure is lower at 54 percent, suggesting that politics is playing a role in impacting students’ mental health. Politics is potent in other dimensions of mental health as well. About 79 percent of liberals report being stressed regularly compared to 70 percent of moderates and 65 percent of conservatives.
The political climate should no longer be overlooked as a potent contributor to the mental health crisis among younger Americans today. While social divisions are pronounced, the transformational campaign oratory and governance style in our era of unstable majorities makes any sense of continuity and sociopolitical stability hard to find for Gen Zers. Our students are embedded in a dangerous—almost dystopian—political world of extremes that has seeped into all facets of life and the technology often invoked as a cause is only exacerbating these political trends. Whether it is the fate of American democracy, or the threat climate change poses to the planet, returning to consensus-driven politics and ending habitual calls for extreme change can help ease the mental health burdens of young Americans.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The post Political Negativity Is Harming Our Young Americans appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.