In a cover story in this magazine almost a decade ago, the late Dean Barnett hailed “the 9/11 generation” and held out the hope—nay, the expectation—that they would contribute more to the nation than their parents, the baby boomers:
Well, over the last decade, history has taken its usual cunning and circuitous path. The hope that the 9/11 generation would ride to the country’s rescue turned out to be premature. Young people were attracted to Barack Obama as candidate, and stayed mostly loyal to him as president. But every generation is entitled to one mistake.
And then in 2014 a host of young candidates from the 9/11 generation, mostly Republicans, were elected to office. Some had served in the military and some not, but they seemed to manifest, in various ways, a kind of seriousness and impressiveness of the sort Dean Barnett had seen in a few of their peers. And with Hillary Clinton as the prohibitive favorite to be the Democratic nominee—and what better embodiment was there than the Clintons of so much that was wrong with the boomers?—it seemed that the GOP, by contrast, could become a grand new party, the vehicle of a generation possessed of an ethic of self-government and responsibility.
Then came Donald Trump. It turned out the baby boomers’ assault on the nation’s well-being hadn’t yet spent itself. Indeed, the boomers had saved the worst for last.
Now a new Pew study suggests that almost a quarter of those between 18 and 30 who in late 2015 identified as Republican or who leaned Republican have changed their minds and abandoned the GOP. The Republican party, for all its problems, had a couple of years ago seemed on the verge of being led by a crew of younger and more impressive men and women. Instead it now has Donald Trump at its helm, and the young are deciding that party isn’t for them.
What can be done? President Trump isn’t going anywhere in the near future. But he can perhaps be prevented from defining Republicanism—and for that matter, conservatism—down.
For there is a big difference between a Republican party that allows itself to become a subsidiary of the Trump Organization and a party with leaders who stand against Trump or at least apart from him. There is a big difference between a party that embraces a Trumpian future and one that defines its own future. There’s a big difference between a party of resentment and a party of reform, between a child-like party and a youthful party.
The key to the GOP’s future is not so much the oscillating hourly and daily fortunes of Donald Trump. It is the behavior of other Republican leaders. Do they excuse the inexcusable? Do they defend the indefensible? Do they fail to denounce what deserves denunciation?
So far the signs aren’t altogether encouraging. So far, almost all the party’s leaders have chosen to accommodate themselves to Trump rather than embrace the spirit of the 9/11 generation. These leaders are excused, to a degree, by the novelty of the situation that confronts them and the unusual character of the challenge. But they can’t duck responsibility forever. This is a generation-defining moment.
