Why Young Americans Have Given Up on America — And the Four Fixes That Would Win Them Back
Why Young Americans Have Given Up on the Country — And Why They're Not Wrong
Let me ask you something honestly. When was the last time you met a 22-year-old who told you, with a straight face, that they felt optimistic about the country they live in? I cannot remember the last time it happened to me, and I do not think that is an accident or a generational tantrum. I think it is a clear-eyed response to two of the worst presidencies in American history, an economy that has been quietly looting young people for forty years, and a political class that keeps telling Gen Z and millennials to cancel their Netflix and feel grateful about it.
You and I are going to talk about this today the way I wish more pundits would talk about it — without flinching, without softening it, and with the actual numbers in front of us. Because this is The Psycosocial Philosopher, and we do not do vibes here. We do evidence, history, and the uncomfortable conclusions that follow from both.
Two of the Worst Presidencies in American History — And Historians Agree
I am not going to bury the lede. George W. Bush and Donald Trump are, by the consensus judgment of the academic community, two of the most catastrophically failed presidents this country has ever produced. And I want to be clear — this is not a hot take. This is documented scholarly agreement.
The Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Houston and Coastal Carolina University, surveyed more than 500 members of the American Political Science Association — scholars who had published peer-reviewed academic research in presidential politics — and determined that Trump was the worst president in U.S. history. Trump scored 10.92 on a scale of 100. The second-worst rated president, James Buchanan, scored 16.71. The gap between them is not close. What makes this even harder to dismiss is that Republicans and conservatives in the survey ranked Trump 41st and 43rd respectively — worse than Biden by their own admission.
George W. Bush does not escape the verdict either. Historians cite Bush's lowest marks from his most controversial decision: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, built on the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. By the time he left office, the country was at the height of an economic crisis. Bush tied for 12th-worst among all U.S. presidents across the major scholarly surveys. And C-SPAN's repeated historian surveys have placed him consistently in the bottom tier as well.
So when I say Bush and Trump represent two of the worst presidencies in American history, I am not editorializing. I am reading the academic record back to you. The historians convened. They compared notes. They ran the numbers. And this is what they found.
Now let me tell you what those two presidencies actually cost the people living through them.
Bush gave us the Iraq War — a conflict built on intelligence that was either fabricated or catastrophically misread, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized an entire region, metastasized into ISIS, and cost the United States over two trillion dollars that could have funded universal healthcare, infrastructure, and education for a generation. He also presided over the 2008 financial collapse — the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — triggered by the deregulation of financial markets his administration championed and failed to police. Millions of Americans lost their homes, their retirement savings, and their faith in institutions during those eight years. The working class absorbed the damage. The banks got bailed out.
Then came Trump — twice. The first term delivered a $1.9 trillion tax cut tilted overwhelmingly toward the top one percent, a pandemic response so botched that the United States recorded one of the highest per-capita Covid death tolls in the developed world, and a January 6th insurrection that should have been permanently disqualifying in any functioning democracy. And now, deep into the second term in 2026, we are watching tariffs spike consumer prices, federal agencies get gutted, and a generation of public servants pushed out of their jobs. If you are wondering why your 24-year-old niece is researching dual citizenship, now you know.
What links these two men is not just incompetence. It is a shared commitment to upward redistribution — cutting taxes on the wealthy, deregulating industries that prey on ordinary people, and wrapping the whole project in the language of patriotism so that nobody notices who is picking the pocket.
The Numbers on Young Americans Are Brutal
Let me hand you the receipts, because feelings without data are just vibes. The Harvard Youth Poll, which has tracked Americans aged 18 to 29 for over two decades, found in its spring 2024 wave that only 9 percent of young Americans said democracy in the United States is healthy. Nine percent. That is not skepticism. That is collapse.
Pew Research found in 2023 that just 23 percent of adults under 30 reported being satisfied with the direction of the country, compared to roughly half of Americans over 65. Gallup's national pride tracker hit a record low in 2024 — only 41 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of independents under 35 said they were "extremely proud" to be American, the lowest figures since Gallup started asking the question in 2001.
And the leaving is not theoretical. The U.S. State Department reported renunciations of American citizenship spiking to record levels in the early 2020s, and a 2023 Monmouth poll found that roughly one in three Americans under 35 had seriously considered moving to another country in the previous year. Portugal, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Costa Rica have all reported notable upticks in American-passport residency applications. The kids are not just complaining. Some of them are packing.
What Scientists and Economists Actually Say Is Driving It
You will hear a lot of bad-faith explanations for this. You will hear it is TikTok rotting their brains. You will hear it is participation trophies. You will hear it is wokeness, or anti-wokeness, or whichever culture-war club the speaker happens to be swinging that week. I want you to ignore all of that and look at what the actual researchers say.
Economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have documented that millennials, at the same point in their lives as boomers, hold roughly half the wealth boomers had at that age — and Gen Z is on track to do even worse. A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that deaths of despair — suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease — have risen most sharply among Americans under 45 with a high school education or less. That is not a mental-health mystery. That is a class-war casualty count.
Psychologists like Jean Twenge have shown in peer-reviewed work that the collapse in young-adult life satisfaction tracks almost perfectly with the rise in housing-to-income ratios since 2008. Notice the year. 2008. The year the Bush economy finally caved in on the people least equipped to survive it. The American Psychological Association's 2023 Stress in America report found that money and the economy were the top stressors for adults under 35 — not social media, not politics in the abstract, but rent and groceries. The scientists are not confused about what is happening. The pundits are pretending to be.
It Is the Economy — and Republicans Want You to Blame Yourself
Here is where I get a little hot, and I think I have earned it. The Republican answer to all of this — and increasingly the centrist Democratic answer too — has been to wag a finger at young people about their lattes. Stop buying Starbucks. Stop ordering DoorDash. Stop using avocado toast as a personality. Just save harder, work harder, hustle harder, and the American Dream will magically rematerialize.
Let me do some math with you. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the United States crossed $1,500 in 2023 according to Zillow data. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, the same number it has been since 2009 — the last year of the Bush administration. A full-time minimum-wage worker grosses about $15,080 a year before taxes. That is not a Starbucks problem. That is a wage problem, a housing problem, and a healthcare problem stacked on top of each other, all of which trace their roots directly back to the policy environment both Bush and Trump spent their presidencies deepening.
If you skipped every single $6 latte for an entire year, you would save approximately $2,190. That is not even two months of rent in most U.S. metros. The "give up coffee" argument is not economics. It is psychological warfare designed to make a structural failure feel like a personal one. I want you to refuse it every time you hear it.
I Will Think America Is a Piece of Garbage Until These Four Things Happen
So let me put my cards on the table. I am not going to pretend to be patriotic about a system that is eating its young. I am going to tell you exactly what would have to change for me to feel differently about this country, and I think you will recognize every item on the list because you have probably been feeling them in your bones for years.
One: The Minimum Wage Becomes a Living Wage Again
Here is a fact almost no one in modern political media will tell you: the minimum wage was never designed to be a poverty wage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he signed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, was explicit. He said, paraphrasing closely, that no business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. That was the entire moral premise of the law.
Go back further. Adam Smith, the supposed patron saint of free-market capitalism, wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 that a man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. Smith was not a socialist. He was a moral philosopher who understood that capitalism without a wage floor cannibalizes itself. Anyone who tells you the minimum wage was meant to be a starter wage for teenagers does not understand the economics of capitalism and has not read its foundational text.
If the 1968 minimum wage had kept pace with productivity gains, it would be over $24 an hour today, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute. We are not asking for a handout. We are asking for the deal our grandparents had.
Two: Universal Single-Payer Healthcare
Every other wealthy democracy on Earth has figured out that healthcare cannot be a market commodity, because the demand curve for "do not die" is perfectly inelastic. The United States spends roughly 17 percent of its GDP on healthcare, nearly double what Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan spend per capita, and we get worse outcomes on life expectancy, maternal mortality, and infant mortality than every single one of them.
A 2020 Yale study published in The Lancet estimated that a Medicare-for-All system would save more than 68,000 American lives every year and around $450 billion annually. That is not a budget item. That is a stadium-sized funeral every twelve months that we have chosen to keep holding so insurance executives can keep their bonuses.
I do not want a public option. I do not want a marketplace. I want what every other adult country has. Until we get it, do not tell me America is the greatest nation on Earth.
Three: A Truly Graduated Tax Code Where Billionaires Pay Like Billionaires
You probably know this already, but it bears repeating because the propaganda is relentless. In 1944, the top marginal income tax rate in the United States was 94 percent. Throughout the 1950s, under a Republican president named Dwight Eisenhower, it sat at 91 percent. That was the period conservatives now nostalgically describe as the golden age of American prosperity. They never mention the tax rate. I wonder why.
Today, the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 400 households in America is, by some ProPublica estimates, lower than the rate paid by a public school teacher. Elon Musk paid zero federal income tax in multiple recent years. Jeff Bezos has done the same. This is not an accident. This is a tax code written by their lobbyists, for their lawyers, against your interests. And both Bush and Trump spent their presidencies making it worse — Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, together represent the two largest upward transfers of tax burden in modern American history.
I want a graduated tax structure where the first dollar of every billionaire's billionth dollar gets taxed at something close to 99 percent. Call it confiscatory if you want. I call it the price of admission for living in a society that built the roads, schools, and patent systems that made their fortunes possible in the first place.
Four: Food, Housing, and Healthcare Recognized as Human Rights
This is the moral floor. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States signed in 1948, explicitly says that everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including food, medical care, and housing. We signed this. We have just chosen, for almost eighty years, to pretend we did not.
In 2023, the USDA reported that 13.5 percent of American households experienced food insecurity. That is roughly 47 million people, including 14 million children, living in the wealthiest country in human history without reliable access to food. Meanwhile, U.S. supermarkets throw away an estimated 30 billion pounds of edible food every year. This is not scarcity. This is policy.
The housing crisis is the same story wearing different clothes. The National Alliance to End Homelessness reported over 650,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2023 — the highest count ever recorded. And that number only captures the people sleeping outside or in shelters. It does not count the millions of people doubled up with relatives, sleeping in their cars, or one missed paycheck away from losing their lease. Meanwhile, institutional investors and private equity firms have been buying up single-family homes at scale, turning what used to be the entry point to the middle class into a permanent rental revenue stream for people who already own everything. You are not priced out because there is not enough housing. You are priced out because your home became someone else's asset class.
Finland largely ended chronic homelessness by treating housing as a right, not a reward. They built the units, assigned the caseworkers, and stopped asking people to earn their way off the street first. It worked. The United States has the wealth, the land, and the construction capacity to do the same thing. What we lack is the political will, because the people who write the policy also own the property.
Until food, housing, and healthcare are floors that every American stands on by virtue of being American, the rest of the patriotic pageantry is theater. You cannot have a free country if your fellow citizens are choosing between insulin and groceries, or between rent and heat.
What You and I Can Do This Week
I do not want you to close this tab feeling defeated, because defeat is exactly the emotional state the current arrangement is designed to produce in you. Despair is profitable. Engagement is dangerous to them. So let us be dangerous.
Vote in every single primary, not just the general elections, because primaries are where the corporate money has the most leverage and the smallest turnout. Support candidates at every level — school board, city council, state house — who have explicitly endorsed a $20-plus federal minimum wage, single-payer healthcare, and tax reform. Join or start a union, because collective bargaining is the only proven mechanism in modern history that has reliably moved wages up against the will of capital.
Talk about money out loud with your friends and coworkers. Salary transparency is one of the cheapest, fastest tools workers have to identify and end wage suppression. And finally, take care of the people next to you. Mutual aid networks are not a substitute for policy, but they keep people alive while we build the political power to change the policy.
You Are Not Crazy for Feeling This Way
I want to end with the thing I most want you to hear. If you are young, if you are tired, if you are looking at your paycheck and your rent and your medical bills and wondering whether you are the problem, you are not the problem. The country has been engineered, very deliberately, over roughly forty years of policy choices — accelerated dramatically by two administrations that historians have now formally condemned — to extract as much wealth as possible from your labor while convincing you that the extraction is somehow your fault.
The pessimism young Americans report in every major poll is not a mental illness. It is a perfectly calibrated response to the data. The good news, and there is some, is that what was built by policy can be unbuilt by policy. Every single one of the four fixes I just laid out has been done somewhere in the world, or done in this country before, or both. We are not asking for utopia. We are asking for math.
If we can fight for that math, generation by generation, vote by vote, paycheck by paycheck, the America that comes out the other side might actually be one your kids are proud to live in. That is the only kind of patriotism I have any time for anymore.
And before you go — if this conversation hit you in the chest, if you are tired of being told the problem is you when the problem is the system, you need to grab my book Can and Will Do. It is the playbook I wish someone had handed me at twenty-two: how to build the mindset, the habits, and the leverage to do hard things in a country that is actively rooting against you. It is not toxic hustle culture, and it is not learned helplessness. It is the middle path that actually moves the needle on your life. Pick it up at CanAndWillDo.com, read it twice, and then go change something. I am rooting for you.
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