When Millennials Rule: The Reshaping of America

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Published at Smashwords

WHEN MILLENNIALS RULE

The Reshaping of America

© 2016 by David Cahn & Jack Cahn

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-68261-075-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-076-3

Cover Design by Quincy Alivio

Interior Design and Composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

Post Hill Press

275 Madison Avenue, 14th Floor

New York, NY 10016

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Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Introduction

Part 1 Welcome to Millennial America

Safer Streets: A Call for Reasonable Restrictions on Guns

Better Jobs: Solving the Millennial Unemployment Crisis

Less Debt: Make College Affordable

Environmental Protection: Hipster Capitalists Save the Planet

Entitlement Reform: What is the Role of Government?

Immigrant Opportunity: Eliminating the Shadow Class

Less War: A Cautious Approach to Foreign Policy

Reclaiming Power: Tackling the Influence of Money in Politics

Better Schools: Investing in Our Future

The Weed Warriors are Back: Rethinking the War on Drugs

Equality For All: Freedom is Nonnegotiable

Radical Realism: A Philosophy for the Next Generation

Part 2 Court Us If You Can

Be a Champion

Mobilize Millennials on Social Media

Build a Grassroots Army

Afterword: Decision 2016 and Beyond

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Authors

To America’s young leaders,

the buck stops with you.

To the Junior State of America,

for investing in a civically engaged electorate.

Introduction

On a recent afternoon, Jack was riding the New York City subway when an older woman walked on, and he stood up to offer her his seat.

How old are you? she asked, surprised by the gesture. You’re so unlike those obnoxious millennials with poor manners who can’t keep their legs crossed and don’t clean up their own messes, she said bitterly.

Of course, as 20-year-old identical twins, we most certainly are members of the millennial generation, born between 1980 and 2000. Even if the term were based on time spent on Facebook, we’d still make the cut. How could we miss pressing updates on the most recent Kardashian exploits?

But for many adults, the millennial generation is irritating and confusing. "What with their stupid iPhones, and their apps, and their selfies, and their social networks, and their narcissism, and their job-hopping, and their potatoes, and—well, you get the picture," wrote The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham." ¹ The New York Times once noted that among Americans age 40 and older, there’s a pastime more popular than football, Candy Crush or HBO. It’s bashing millennials.

Perhaps nowhere are millennials as mystifying as in Washington, D.C. In 2012, we delivered President Obama his margin of victory.² But then in 2014, we flipped and delivered Republicans a majority in the Senate.³ Millennials support background checks, but oppose gun control,⁴ believe in small government but want to help the poor, and promote social justice but push for cuts to Social Security. Vox concluded that our opinions are incoherent. What’s going on?

Whether older generations understand us or not, millennials—along with our perplexing views—will play a critical role in responding to a unique set of challenges that threaten our way of life.

ISIS is on the rise in the Middle East and terrorists threaten our homeland. President Assad is winning a brutal civil war in Syria, and millions of refugees are fleeing the region for a better life. A tenuous agreement in Iran has slowed a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race … for now. Putin’s Russia is flexing its muscles, with aggression in Eastern Europe threatening a decades long détente. China is asserting its influence in East Asia.

At home, Social Security is on the verge of going bankrupt, as is Medicaid. Universal health care is now the law of the land, much to the chagrin of millions of voters. The struggle to balance gun rights with safety continues to rage in our streets. A new civil rights movement is forming as evidence of systemic racism becomes all too apparent. Climate change threatens to create the biggest migrant crisis in history, upending millions of people across the world. Meanwhile, the War on Drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars and creating a crisis of mass incarceration.

If America today is at a crossroads, it is millennials who will need to make the tough choices to shape the future of our country. Today, we are America’s largest voting bloc, with 78 million eligible voters. Ignore millennial voters at your peril, wrote Harvard’s Maggie Williams.⁵

This seismic shift—from millennials being the laughingstock of every boardroom and newspaper, to being a politically powerful force to be reckoned with—has been a long time in the making.

Over the past five years, we’ve had front row seats to this transition. When we first embarked on our careers as competitive debaters during our freshmen year of high school, we didn’t fully understand what we were witnessing. But over time, as we talked with more than 10,000 young people and traveled all across the country, from Minneapolis to Chicago and Boston, we began to form a clearer picture of what was happening: millennials were forming their political beliefs—and the dialogue they were having was radically different from the one happening at the national level.

Soon, we set out with a much more conscious goal: to figure out how millennials are going to reshape our country’s future. We slept in a train station in Boston, a Starbucks in Cleveland, and flew to the beautiful city of San Jose. Everywhere we went, we challenged a diverse group of young people of different backgrounds—racial, socioeconomic, and political—to explain how they think about the most important issues confronting America today. We organized focus groups and listened to young people argue among themselves.

Along the way, we met a diverse group of young people who helped bring our generation’s views to life. A young woman described being shocked and deeply saddened when her father was deported. A teenager described the struggles of working through school, and coming home to an empty refrigerator. A young man vocally challenged the pro-minimum wage millennial consensus, saying he opposes it even though his mother earns it. A student described fearing gun violence, after experiencing six gun-scares on her campus. These conversations drove home just how uniquely millennials are engaging with some of America’s most complex issues.

With Jack serving as the National Director of Public Relations for the Junior State of America and coordinating speaking engagements in the Northeast, we had the privilege to meet with important national figures, from former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), whose Dodd-Frank law is reshaping Wall Street, and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. After their speeches, we asked these leaders questions about what Washington is doing for our generation. The answer was usually: not enough.

At the same time, we dug into available data and polls. After all, that’s what we spent years training to do as debaters. When we finally synthesized our findings, we discovered much more than just a portrait of the millennial generation. We uncovered an insurgency of young voters who are silently breaking the rules of Washington politics. Instead of buying into the yes-no ideological dichotomies pedaled by talking heads in Washington, our generation unifies around pragmatic, commonsense solutions. In the age of the Internet, millennials have adopted extremely nuanced and informed stances on some of America’s most pressing issues.

Our thesis is that these pragmatic, resilient, and optimistic young people will use their votes to wage a silent war against the Washington elite. By ousting ideologues and voting for politicians who share our values—namely, authenticity, optimism, and tolerance—millennials will usher in an era of reform. Using compromise to implement change, millennials will translate their political consensus into actual public policy and break the gridlock in Washington.

Our friends will disrupt Washington in the same way they have disrupted everything from driving to shopping to television. Just like we replaced cabs with Uber, hotels with Airbnb, and movies with Netflix, millennials are fundamentally reimaging what politics will look like. Instead of accepting Washington as being corrupt and broken, millennials seek new reforms.

Our enemy is not a specific political ideology, but cronyism and dependency corruption in Washington that allows special interest groups to step ahead of the American public in setting the public policy agenda. On everything from jobs, to gun rights, the environment, entitlements, and education, our priorities are ignored, as unions and corporations wield their influence to stifle progress. We oppose the divisive rhetoric used to divide the American public and rally votes, because it prevents progress. The Harvard Institute of Politics reports that cynicism toward the political process has never been higher. ⁶

They’ve been told all their lives to wait in line, explained former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. But they’re of a mind to say, ‘OK, while I’m waiting in line, I’ll blow your stuff up,’ he said. That scene tells you all you need to know about what millennials are poised to do to Washington. … They are going to destroy the old silos, scatter their elements to the wind, and reassemble them in ways that make sense for them and the new century. ⁷

By fighting against machine politicians in Washington, millennials strive to restore reason and hope to American public policy and take back our country’s future.

In When Millennials Rule, we travel from Paris, where a 15-year-old American speaks at an international climate summit, to the halls of the West Virginia legislature, where the youngest elected legislator in the U.S. is fighting to protect gun rights.

In each chapter, another angle of the millennial platform is revealed. What emerges is a full-scale manifesto of millennial political beliefs that is radically different from the platforms of Democrats and Republicans. We find a generation that rejects the partisan dichotomy that offers us bad jobs or fewer jobs as our economic choices, and dead soldiers or appeasement as our foreign policy options.

Do millennials have the resilience and tenacity to win the war for America’s future, or will young people find themselves stifled by the political machine, as so many others have before us?

You be the judge.

PART 1

Welcome to

Millennial America

Social Security is going bankrupt. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten our safety. Our planet is on the brink of disaster. Meanwhile, our leaders line their pockets with dirty money while pounding their chests in ideological wars that enrich lobbyists at the expense of voters. Welcome to Millennial America follows our journey from Chicago to Mineola, N.Y., and San Jose, and tells the story of how young Americans are tackling these problems and re-shaping America’s future.

Safer Streets: A Call for Reasonable Restrictions on Guns

New Haven, Connecticut

We arrived in New Haven, just a few months after the Newtown school shooting, a tragedy during which a lunatic gunned down 20 innocent children. As we walked up the stairs into a Yale University library, we saw dozens of young millennials like us sitting on benches and running around, preparing to spend the next weekend discussing and debating solutions to America’s gun violence epidemic.

But throughout the building there was an eerie undercurrent: this wasn’t a debate topic, not really—it was a matter of life and death. On the streets, one in five teenagers has witnessed a shooting, according to the Justice Department,¹ and more than half of all people murdered with guns since 2010 were under the age of 30, making homicide the second leading cause of death for our generation.²

As a result, for young Americans on both sides of the aisle, there is perhaps no issue closer to our hearts than the issue of gun violence, which has killed so many of our friends and family members. And yet, our generation has not seen any significant gun reform since before many of us were even born.

When asked how they’d solve today’s gun violence problem, millennials say they don’t want to ban guns—semiautomatic or otherwise. In fact, we’ve been labeled as America’s most pro-gun generation. But in the face of so many of our friends dying at the point of a gun barrel, young people want Congress to pass reasonable restrictions on gun ownership to protect our and future generations from the havoc that we’ve witnessed since our childhoods.

We are Dying: Millennials Caught in the Crossfire

David remembers his first experience with gun violence. He was sitting in an office two blocks from New York’s Empire State Building when the shots were fired, but he heard nothing but the buzz of his phone. u OK? he read, checking his messages. Yeah man, what’s up? Another buzz. Shooter at Emp. State. Dude be careful. He quickly scrolled to update Facebook. People thought there was a terrorist attack. Soon his newsfeed was updated with new posts. Apparently a man attacked his former employer over a financial dispute. Nine bystanders were injured in the ensuing shootout.

The most frightening part of the attack was its senselessness, the seeming randomness of it all. In the first of many Huffington Post editorials, David explained: On a more fundamental level, we are shocked by the arbitrariness of the murder. Murder for the sake of murder, murder of unsuspecting civilians, hits us harder than any other crime—it is raw evil. In these unique and public cases, we realize that we, or those we love, could be the victims of these crimes.

Even though David was just 16 at the time, this was not his first exposure to gun violence. David recalls that when he was just beginning public high school in New York, the threat of gun violence was all too real. During routine lockdown drills, students were required to practice their response to an armed invader—the modern day equivalent of hiding under desks from nuclear attacks. Code Blue, Code Blue, a voice would boom over the school’s intercom and like clockwork, students would scramble to turn off the lights, lock the doors, and move away from the windows.

After one of these drills, one of his teachers felt compelled to warn the students about how to respond to an attack. If there’s a gunman in the room, here is what you have to do. Throw the heaviest object, say your book bag or desk, at him and then everyone has to charge him. That’s how you avoid mass causalities, he said. He was not being paranoid. Since the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown in 2013, there have been at least 100 school shootings, even by conservative estimates.³

These drills, while seemingly trivial at the time, along with the prevalence of attacks on schools, have permanently scarred the psyche of our generation. Our friend Lindsey told Jack that she knows what she would do and where she would hide if armed gunmen entered her building, because she’s thought about it and planned out her moves. And our friend Maddie says she has trouble enjoying movies because she’s afraid someone is going to run into the theatre and shoot.

In college, Jack remembers thinking about the optimal escape routes from his classrooms if someone were to attack our campus. Again—these are not paranoid thoughts. In 2015, some Philadelphia colleges shut down due to credible threats that a shooter would target one of the schools. Ours did not. But as we trekked from class to class, half the seats in each room were empty. Many professors canceled classes, because students simply weren’t showing up.

But even these drills were not our first exposure to gun violence—not by a long shot. The Center for Media Education reports that by the time young Americans reach elementary school, they have been exposed to more than 10,000 acts of violence, including 8,000 murders on television. By the time they reach high school, those numbers double.⁴

We know that soldiers experience post-traumatic stress disorder when they come home from wars, and this seems to be the case for young people who watch their friends die in shootings. Research indicates that many such young people suffer survivor-guilt and emotional trauma later in life. After these traumatic experiences, many young people have difficulty concentrating in school and their academic performance deteriorates. Unsuccessful in school, they may turn to violence to resolve their own problems, perpetuating a cycle of violence.

Even among those who escape the fate of street violence, many young people still end their lives at the point of a gun barrel. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people, and half of all suicide victims use guns.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the majority of young Americans and nearly three-quarters of young minorities say gun violence may personally affect their lives.⁵

In focus groups we conducted with millennial leaders from across the country, we heard stories about a culture of gun violence. Arizonan millennial Ciana Cronin told us that there have been six gun-scares on her campus alone.

It’s pretty ghetto. I’m not going to lie. We have 2,000 kids on one campus and there’s no safety there, and it’s supposed to be a learning environment [but] that’s not going to happen, she said. Once there were two gangs and they had guns and then they were beating up this kid and then people started firing shots and it was madness, and we were just sitting huddled under our desks and you could hear them right outside.

Yuma, Arizona, native Anne Diaz recounted her own experience. I remember going to Walmart one time. … I couldn’t finish even getting whatever I needed … just because stupid people pulled out their guns in the store, she said. Anne understands why people have guns but is nonetheless frustrated that people take out guns in parks or public places like that.

Cronin and Diaz are among the majority of millennials who recognize the damage wrought on our communities by gun violence and worry that they will be next. Sixty percent of young people fear that gun violence will personally affect them or their communities in the future.⁶ As a result, 70 percent of millennials agree that the gun culture in our society has gotten out of control.

This doesn’t mean that we want to get rid of guns altogether. Just the opposite is true, as we will see. But this context is important for understanding why gun reform is such an important priority for young people who are rising up in protest and demanding real reform from Washington.

Corrupt Politicians: How Washington Stifles Reform

Our generation is not resigned to a fate where multiple people die while you read these words. Yet today, the United States has one of the highest rates of gun violence among its developed peers.

American children and teenagers are four times more likely to die by gunfire than their counterparts in Canada, seven times more likely than young people in Israel, and 65 times more likely to be killed with a gun than children and teenagers in the United Kingdom, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.⁷

But it doesn’t have to be this way: there is legislation that we can pass and there are things that we can do in the United States to emulate our peers, create safer streets, and save lives, millennials say.

Part of the problem is that lawmakers would rather fight each other and promote themselves than save our children. Despite the many constituents who have died in the crossfire of gun violence, Washington legislators have not passed any significant federal gun control legislation since 1994, before some millennials were even born.

And that’s not because the legislation hasn’t been introduced. Since 1994, when a Federal Assault Weapon Ban (FAWB) made it illegal to purchase large capacity magazines with more than 10 bullets and banned the manufacture of semi-automatic weapons defined to be assault weapons, multiple gun bills have failed in Congress. While Democrats and Republicans like to point fingers, both parties are to blame.

The Democrats, with their holier-than-thou stance of moral superiority on gun control, have fought for years to violate the constitutional rights of American voters by heavily restricting gun usage and banning weapons which they deem too lethal for civilian use, much to the chagrin of Republican and Democratic millennial voters.

Despite cries that young Americans are hippie liberals who want to abolish guns, the majority of millennials oppose outright gun control, according to Pew Research polls.⁸ In fact, almost two-thirds of high school and college students have themselves considered owning a gun in the future.⁹

Though some millennials may not agree with all of Saira Blair’s views, the college junior who is the youngest person ever elected to the West Virginia State Legislature does raise resonant arguments.

I was raised in a household where we have guns and have learned to properly use them, she told Teen Vogue. Blair spoke for the majority of millennials when she said, I fully support the Second Amendment. I believe in protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty. … Firearms allow our law-abiding citizens to protect themselves and their families.

In stark contrast with these views, one of the key tenets of the Democratic Party’s platforms on gun control has long been the reinstatement of the 1994 FAWB (which expired in 2004), based on the argument that the semi-automatic assault weapons banned by the bill are military-grade and without civilian uses.

One police chief said that the weapons contain military features that are designed specifically to increase their lethality. Ian Michael Deutch, a National Guard staff sergeant who returned home, alive and unwounded, from Afghanistan, is an often-cited victim of semi-automatic weapons. While responding to a domestic abuse call as a deputy sheriff in Nevada, he was shot and killed by a criminal who used an assault weapon to pierce his body armor. He was finally safe in our country. And somebody here kills him, his mother told Congress.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), who has long been one of the bill’s most vocal advocates, points to data that indicates violence falling during the Clinton-era ban. Meanwhile special-interest groups like the Brady Campaign argue that the ban caused a 6.7 percent dip in murder rates while in effect.¹⁰ A group of NYU professors found in their research that the end of the ban exerted an unanticipated spillover on gun supply in Mexico, and this increase in arms has fueled rising violence south of the border. They link at least 239 deaths to the ban’s expiration in 2004.¹¹

But the issue is not as simple as Democrats try to paint it; the evidence on the effects of the 1994 ban is largely divided. A nonpartisan study by Christopher Koper, a criminology professor at George Mason University, among other research, has found that the ban had a negligible effect on gun violence. We cannot credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence, Koper wrote. Koper argued that gun violence literature is politicized and concluded that a reinstated ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be too small for reliable measurement. ¹²

But regardless of which research is correct, many of the young people we spoke with don’t think the ends justify the means when it comes to the FAWB. Millennials say that while banning all guns might hypothetically reduce violence, doing so would violate constitutional rights. Likewise, with assault weapons, the solution is not to violate rights but to place reasonable restrictions on ownership.

For this reason, polls show young people opposing the assault weapons ban by the largest margin of any demographic, with 70 percent of young Americans supporting ownership of assault weapons, compared with 51 percent of all Americans.¹³

The right to bear arms shall not be infringed, period. That’s very absolute. The U.S. Supreme Court has not nuanced that at all. Additionally, something is supposed to be a crime if it violates people’s rights. Buying an assault rifle doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. Making it illegal does violate people’s rights: their right to buy arms, their right to trade. It’s a slippery slope, said Steven Adelberg, a young Republican from Arizona. It’s funny because an assault weapon ban a) doesn’t work, and b) incentivizes people to buy handguns, which are far more problematic.

Abhay Ram, a Democratic high school student leader from Chicago, agreed. A gun is just a tool. In the hands of a soldier, it’s a tool of liberty. In the hands of a criminal, it’s dangerous, he said. It’s wrong for the government to have all the guns and ban them from the people.

This doesn’t mean young people agree with the obstructionist, do-nothing approach of National Rifle Association-backed Republicans who stand in the way of reform. Rather, millennials think both parties are part of a broken system. Republican lawmakers highlight the importance of enforcing laws already on the books and working to put criminals behind bars. For millennials, that’s a good sign—but the view that any regulation at all is the beginning of a slippery slope toward a ban on all guns is not persuasive.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney explained the Republican platform on gun control in a 2012 speech. We need to distinguish between law-abiding gun owners and criminals who use guns. Those who use a firearm during the commission of a crime must be punished severely. The key is to provide law enforcement with the resources they need and punish criminals, not burden lawful gun owners. ¹⁴

If Romney stopped here, millennials would nod in agreement. But he went further. Romney promised not to support adding more laws and regulations that do nothing more than burden law-abiding citizens while being ignored by criminals. But most regulations do a lot more than burden law-abiding citizens: they can help prevent the mentally ill and felons from getting weapons. In our quest for safer streets, young people seek a balance between burdening law-abiding citizens and protecting other citizens from gun violence.

Republicans often argue that Washington should prioritize increased enforcement of existing laws over passing new laws. David Lampo of the Cato Institute, for example, has said that the Columbine High School shooters violated more than 20 existing firearms laws in the process of building their stockpile of weapons.

So it seems rather dubious to argue that additional laws might have prevented this tragedy, he explained. Likewise, the NRA believes that it is important to protect the right to be armed, arguing that restrictions do little to actually reduce gun crime.

There is data to support this hypothesis. A 2010 National Academy of Sciences meta-study found no link between gun ownership and crime rates.¹⁵ Analyzing 253 journal articles, 99 books, and 43 government publications, the authors learned that the overwhelming majority of the research found no correlation between rates of gun ownership and crime. Conservatives note that gun ownership today is at an all-time high, with the number of guns increasing by 90 million since 1991. Violent crime has fallen to a 35-year low, with a 49 percent decline in murders.¹⁶

Intransigence on the right is driven, in part, by the excessive influence of the National Rifle Association. The power of the NRA comes down to money and influence. The NRA spends 15 times as much on campaign contributions as gun-control advocates, and its annual operating budget is approximately $250 million. More importantly, NRA members are extremely invested in their cause, tying gun rights to core American principles like freedom and liberty. The NRA is able to mobilize its members to write letters to their representatives and exert their political muscle to oppose even the most reasonable of regulations.

The problem is that the NRA uses its power not just to protect against encroachments of the Second Amendment, but also to oppose any and all gun restrictions—even ones supported by the overwhelming majority of its members, like universal background checks. A full 87 percent of non-NRA gun owners and 74 percent of NRA members agree that all gun purchasers should be required to undergo a criminal background check. Yet the NRA continues to oppose this policy, calling it ripe for abuse. ¹⁷

It might be convenient to think that banning guns will solve our entire gun problem, but millennials say that is not just naïve—it is patently false and has been empirically disproven. Not only that, but it presents a dangerous threat to our constitutional freedoms. Ironically, millennials are simultaneously the most pro-gun and the most pro-gun reform generation in America.

The Millennial Consensus

Millennials are hardly anti-gun. A majority of millennials opposes gun control, believing that the right of law-abiding citizens to own and carry their firearms should not be infringed. But as rational, reasonable voters, millennials believe that the federal government should impose reasonable restrictions on ownership.

Fifty-nine percent of young voters say Congress should implement reasonable restrictions on gun sales. This nuanced perspective is a sharp contrast from those of the Democratic and Republican parties. As opposed to blocking out the other side, our generation seeks a middle ground solution. Now.

There is a consensus among young voters that the government must act immediately. In a nationwide survey, millennials ranked gun control as a leading issue that they would consider on Election Day, second only to student loans. Millennial leader Levi McBride told us, The Gabby Giffords and Sandy Hook shootings were the two biggest events in shaping our opinions on gun control … especially because Giffords was a government official. … The fact that a shooting like this could happen was huge. These tragedies left us demanding a government response.

At the top of our gun reform wish list are restrictions that prevent high-risk individuals such as former felons and the mentally ill from owning weapons. We see such reform as a congressional prerogative: 92 percent of 18-29-year-olds support universal background checks, a Center for American Progress poll