Esquire Magazine found itself under fire this week for putting not a controversial celebrity or model, but a teenaged white male on its cover. Esquire assured readers that this was but the first in a series of profiles that would examine American life, but critics were still baffled at the decision, in this era of intersectionality and representing marginalized voices, to open with the story of life as a white boy in Wisconsin’s Trump Country. (After all, in the words of the philosopher Homer Simpson, “I’m a white male, aged 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are.”)
The profile itself follows a young man named Ryan, who navigates worries about what he can and can’t say, can and can’t do, without getting in trouble in 2019. He plays XBox, likes his girlfriend, and wants to be a water quality engineer. He has started to avoid social media, because the few times he has tried to engage in political commenting, he feels he has been smacked down and been told his views don’t matter because of his race and gender (in a way, foreshadowing the reaction to the article itself).
In the article, the reporter follows Ryan to his government class, where the teacher leads students through a frankly disturbing exercise where students must sing along to songs about being liberal or conservative. The “conservative song,” written by another teacher at the school, is a polka about celebrating the death penalty and nukes while “hating social programs” and gay marriage. In class, the ideology test Ryan takes places him as a “conservative-leaning moderate,” and he notes that he doesn’t have much of a clique these days, because many students in his school have sorted their social lives along political lines. Most lean to the left, and though he is a hunter himself, he doesn’t want to hang out with what he calls the “guns and trucks” Trump kids.
I want young Americans to get engaged in politics. Yet everything in the Esquire piece is heartbreaking and seems destined to make the country worse. Exposing teenagers to the news and getting them to think critically about politics and current affairs is a good thing; songs like the one in Ryan’s class, paired with the pervasiveness of partisan news and toxic social media “debate,” are instead heightening divisiveness at exactly the time of life when kids are already prone to dividing themselves.
In Tina Fey’s 2004 cinematic masterpiece, “Mean Girls,” the main character is taken on a tour through the cafeteria as each clique is identified — art kids, band geeks, wannabes, varsity jocks — and none are overtly political in nature. High school has long been a period of life marked by cliquishness (and its side effect, social isolation), and throwing hyperpartisanship into that cauldron seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
As a longtime advocate of more civic education, activism, and debate programs for teenagers, even I find myself uneasy about the notion that kids are segregating themselves and bullying one another based on political views. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt note in The Coddling of the American Mind, there has been an abrupt shift in the last few years in the way the rising Generation Z approaches political debate and division, an approach that often seeks to shout over and silence others rather than to foster debate and understanding.
Though it has been suggested that millennials would be pragmatic and open to compromise, the generation coming behind them is coming of age in a whole new era. Given what we know about how lifetime political behavior is powerfully shaped by events happening between the ages of 14 to 24, this will have long-term consequences. If the anger and division of the adults these days is seeping down to the kids, there’s a real chance that Generation Z will differ from the millennials in that they will be more deeply divisive in their approach to politics and will carry that through their lifetimes.
It’s not hard to imagine a “Mean Girls” 15th-anniversary remake where the cafeteria tables are full of teenaged Bernie Bros and “MAGA” Dudes, yelling at each other in the hallways about politics. And it’s not hard to imagine the toll that could take, on high schoolers themselves and on the country they will one day inherit.