The kids are never going to forget.

Maybe Democrats should think hard about the future of their party instead of lecturing future voters about their slogans.

I often joke with fellow elderly Millennials/young Gen-Exers about how we’re doomed, forever, to scream into the void about the George W. Bush administration in a post-Trump world. Trump is an unprecedented evil, we’ve been told, roughly one million times. But, W. and co. actually stole an election; normalized torture; opened Guantanamo; started wars; created today’s refugees crises that have upended the internal politics of most countries on earth—if I keep going this will be a criminally run-on sentence, but there’s plenty more to add.

And then Trump happened. Overnight every “pundit” and even the worst architects of Bush era policies—including Bush himself!—were redeemed for the grand moral act of not being Donald Trump. Around 2017, I had a job news writing that involved tracking cable. I watched a segment on MSNBC in which former Bush speech writer Nicolle Wallace joked with Michael Chertoff about “known unknowns” and felt my soul leave my body. I couldn’t stomach Michelle Obama and W’s goofy schtick: it felt like they were laughing at those of us who thought human rights atrocities were more significant than saying the right stuff on TV. Humans are emotional, I get it: Trump makes liberals viscerally sick (and also insane in some cases, like with some aspects of Russiagate.) Bush is “likable”! It’s a quality that, even back in the day, allowed him to escape the level of vitriol directed at Dick Cheney.

But I’ll never accept the idea that what happened under Trump is worse than W. (caveat: with the exception of immigrant and asylum seeker rights). There’s a very obvious reason for this. Can you guess what it is and how it might apply to our current moment?

2000 was the first election I could vote in. I remember where I was when the Supreme Court called it for Bush. On 9/11 I blissfully walked to class on a warm, sunny day, unaware until I hit campus. “History is fascinating until it happens to you.” my Latin American history professor told us. “Then it’s terrifying.” We had an assembly where students were encouraged to talk about their feelings. I remember that almost everyone said something to the effect of “This is horrifying. But we shouldn’t start a war.” In the years after, it’d have been hard to find a person on campus, even the perpetually annoying breed of contrarian, who didn’t oppose the Iraq war.

Anyway, my point is obvious. I was a political kid in high school, but it was the 90s, so that meant being mad about the Moral Majority and figuring out feminism. The aftermath of 9/11 is what what made me permanently fuse my identify, professional and social life, to political and social justice issues. I think too much is made of the “leftie young people become conservative as they age”—my friends are all hippies—but there’s just something different about the way you absorb injustice, violence, and the world’s insanity in your 20s.

Also, we were right, but grubby slimeballs like Christopher Hitchens not only told us we were wrong, they did it with condescension that suggested they had the superior intellect to handle ambiguity. They were wise statesmen who understood complexities of history and the world; anti-war protestors were dumb college kids and little old hippie ladies. But this kind of gaslighting, for lack of a better term, helped further entrench anti-Bush sentiment and leftist politics in young people in my social and professional circles.

What’s happening now, to people in their teens and 20s, is what happened to us, but on crack. We had gruesome images in newspapers and TV and in reporting by lefty media. We had psyche-wrenching, nauseating scandals like Abu Ghraib.

Now, nonstop social media feed pours into everyone’s brains at all waking hours. The news comes at beyond warp speed. Abu Ghraib was the scandal for months. Today I saw a death toll surpassing 10,000 and a WHO announcement that confirmed doctors in Gaza are performing amputations without aneasthesia.

This is the political reality: for the next 60 years, the most politically engaged US voters will have images of dead kids burned into their brains. And a feeling of betrayal of humanity by a gray, feeble, amoral administration that didn’t even pretend to try to stop it. When I wrote “gray” I was reminded of the leadership of the Soviet Union before its collapse. For decades, the country was run by ancient, out-of-touch regime appointees, who had an overly rosy view of the Communist party’s inevitability …. I’ll leave it at that.

So, instead of lecturing the kids for their slogans or griping about how Tik-Tok has a pro-Palestine bias (you numb-nuts: like all algorithms TikTok gives you more of what you’ve already engaged with) or I don’t know, trying to shut down every University in America, all the adults in the room need to accept the reality that Israel’s response to the horrific Hamas attack is what has politicized young people, not Jan. 6th or Joe Biden’s energy policy.

P.S. “At least it’s not the other guy” worked for Democrats in large part because the atrocities of the Bush era made us feel like even a tepid dork like Mitt Romney would bring catastrophe. That ship has sailed. (*note: a reader observed that this is confusing, since the other guy is worse. I could be wrong—it’s been known to happen—but my thinking is just that “the other guy is worse so you have to hold your nose and vote for the Democrat” may not be as salient of a message to voters born after Bush v. Gore).

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