After Citizenship: What’s Left for Young People
By Anthony Bernier / July 2024
Have we become complacent envisioning our young people as citizens in a
democratic culture?
Every adult alive today grew up under political skies we felt were, like climate,
never changing. Like the seasons, we took for granted that election cycles would
come on the regular and would produce what they always produced: agreed upon
results. Winners would win; losers would concede. We assumed confidence that
elections would determine leaders in an ongoing churn between the lines of the
political playing field.
But it’s dawning on more and more of us that big things like this do change.
Ice caps melt.
Rain stops falling.
And democratic culture erodes before our eyes.
My question is this: is it imprudent to begin thinking of young people not as
citizens in a democratic culture but as subjects to a king or an authoritarian?
When we exchange the “Pledge of Allegiance” for the Ten Commandments,
what form of society do we imagine for young people? When elections no longer
end the matter of who is and who is not elected, how do we imbue young people
with volition, initiative, and confidence in a fair process for making community
decisions?
When elections are “settled” instead by who is threatened more, intimidated
more, run off by political violence, as we saw on January 6 th and in an assassination
attempt, in all honesty how can we hold out the notion of wanting youth to “mature
into adulthood.”
What does “adult” even mean if the “rule of law” is simply just a phrase we
inscribed into buildings once upon a time?
What does “adult” mean when the obligations and imperatives of citizenship we
once owed to one another under a shared social contract are coerced into fealty to
The One?
It’s one thing for today’s adults to fret about the future we see changing from
what we once knew. It’s our fault, after all.
But it’s another to imagine how the institutions we created to raise new
generations will need to re-imagine the young people forced to deal with those
changes.
Who would they be after citizenship ends?