Our government can’t currently be trusted. Take a second to think about our government right now; what’s happening and what they’re doing. The tariffs implemented by Trump, or government agencies using ChatGPT…. Yes, you read that right, according to CNBC, “Government agencies can deploy ChatGPT Gov in their own Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government Cloud, which sits on top of Microsoft’s OpenAI Service platform. This is so the government can manage its own security, privacy and compliance needs.”
It’s not uncommon to be questioning the ways in which our government works, and with these newer generations finally getting old enough to vote and speak their mind about politics, what’s happening right now is going to lure these generations away from trying to fix any of it. Instead, the problem will continuously worsen since the same leaders will be in place while people are too scared to try and do anything. Soon enough, with Project 2025 already checking off boxes, it’s hard to say how much time we have left before we even have rights.
Another problem we have with our government is the way they diminish young voters’ confidence in voting, and while young voters apparently had a broad and decisive impact on the 2020 election from research done by Berkley Institute for Young Americans, the same institute feared that there would be a very low young voter turnout for the 2024 election. Now, as an up-and-coming young voter myself, I 100% agree with how politics today are luring my generation away from wanting any part of it. Part of why there is so much distrust in the government is because many feel that the voting process is rigged, or no matter who they vote for, it won’t make much of a difference. This is exactly the case for one student Naomi Witt, who says she can’t trust the government because she feels “we voted for the wrong president and Congress is very Republican right now, so I just don’t trust it.” Same with another student, Katie Leonardo, who feels “there are a lot of things being said that are kind of questionable that I don’t really agree with, and I think there could really be some improvements [to our government]”. It’s clear we– as in Gen Z and the generations to follow– don’t have any trust or knowledge in what’s going on with our government. Sometimes it’s hard to choose our voice when it seems that everyone else is choosing it for us.
The fear is that these younger generations won’t know what to do or decide once it’s their turn to jump into the political field. According to an article by The Conversation, “boomer and Gen X generations will exit and no longer be part of American political life. They will be replaced by millennials and Gen Zers, who are less likely to define themselves as strong Republicans or Democrats.” But why? Because we don’t trust our government, simple as that.
These younger generations aren’t the only ones with serious concerns. I wanted to get my dad’s input on how much he trusts the government, and what its future will look like. As a government worker for the last 30+ years, I knew my dad would have an informed and worthwhile take. He replied, “Absolutely not. It’s because I am working in the government, and I see it every day. There is contradictory information coming from the government, and there’s misinformation, and there’s a lack of information,” and “for the next 4 years…not promising. It’s going to be the same thing as the president’s last term: there’s going to be inconsistency, and it’s going to take us a long time to get back from this. Hopefully in 4 years, we’ll have a ‘change of the guard’, and we can recover.”
Americans shouldn’t be concerned about whether these new generations will be able to define themselves to a political party, and instead be concerned with why that’s so important to some people, especially because less polarization could lead to further unity. Have people really lost hope in our generation already? What we should be worrying about is the “contradictory information, misinformation, and lack of information” from the government (as my dad would put it).
The fact that some people have already fully put their hope into Gen Z to “fix” this is situation is completely delusional; I can’t even decide what I want to wear the next day, so how could someone like myself be expected to fix problems that senior generations have created? Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we won’t try, because we have to. However, like with everything else Gen Z touches, we’re going to resolve it in our own way. It doesn’t matter if someone is a republican or a democrat; what matters is how we will change the current state of our government, and help reverse the damage.