In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Chavez, and Rachel Janfaza explore whether Gen Z’s political instincts are genuinely liberal, what a renewed liberalism needs to reclaim from the republican tradition, and how to rebuild a culture of public-spiritedness in an age of anti-establishment politics.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University and the founder of American Purpose. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents.
Linda Chavez is the Vice Chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, founded by Garry Kasparov. She previously served in the Reagan administration and has been a syndicated columnist and political commentator for decades.
Rachel Janfaza is the founder of Up and Up, where she researches and writes about the political beliefs and cultural attitudes of Gen Z.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to this live episode of The Good Fight coming to you from the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. I am joined today by Rachel Janfaza to my right. She is the founder of Up and Up.
I’m joined by my good friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama, who is of course the founder of our co-conspirator American Purpose, among many, many other things. Welcome, Frank.
And I’m joined by Linda Chavez, who is the vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which was founded by our good friend Garry Kasparov. Welcome.
So we have serious things to talk about today, but before we get to those serious things, Linda, you told me that you just ran into somebody interesting in the lobby of what I will remind listeners is the Watergate Hotel.
Linda Chavez; The Watergate Hotel, and who did I run into but Roger Stone. Now, Roger Stone and I go back many, many years because, as you know, I was a Republican and served in the Reagan administration. But when I was younger, in my twenties, I actually worked here at the Watergate for the Democratic National Committee, which was headquartered here. And I think it was my birthday in 1972. I actually ran into the Watergate burglars in the afternoon when they were trying to tape open the doorway up to Larry O’Brien’s office, which they were going to go into and steal secrets from later in the day. I didn’t know it until I opened the papers, I think it was a Sunday morning, and saw the fellow I had run into, who looked very shocked when he saw me.
So I told Roger that story, but I also reminded him that he was at CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. He was, you know, the bad boy for Richard Nixon. And among my nefarious deeds as a young person, I stole the plaque from CREEP off the offices. Unfortunately I was not able to keep it. It probably would be quite valuable today. Someone stole it from me. So I reminded him of that, and we said hello to each other.
Mounk: Was it cordial?
Chavez: Yes, Cordial. He knows I’m an anti-Trumper, but he also remembers me from the Reagan years, probably.
Mounk: I love that Washington, D.C. is obsessed with these acronyms—the SAVE Act, the USA Act, whatever. I like that the Committee to Re-Elect the President is CREEP.
Chavez: Very appropriately named.
Mounk: Well, thank you for reminding us at the beginning of this conversation that threats to the rules and norms of liberal democracy are not entirely new in this town. But today I want us to think about what the nature of the threats to liberalism are today and, more importantly, how liberalism can try to refound itself.
Liberalism from its inception was always a radical ideology. Liberals wanted to abolish the Corn Laws, to fight against discrimination against so many groups in society, to fight for the equality of women. They had a vision of society that was radically at odds with the society in which they lived. And in large part liberals succeeded. The world we live in today is not perfectly liberal, but it has very deep liberal elements which help to explain some of the things that are good about our society.
But I think that also creates a danger—the danger that we become too invested in the status quo, where we try to keep everything as it is rather than continuing to have that mission of making the world align more closely with the ideals we have. And so we want to talk today a little bit about areas from culture to immigration to AI, and envisage what a radical liberal agenda, a philosophical liberal agenda, might look like.
Let’s start with culture. Rachel, I’m wondering how you’re seeing this. You are a little younger than the rest of us on the panel. More importantly, you work a lot with young people, trying to understand the political opinions of members of Gen Z. Is Gen Z horribly illiberal, and do we have to be very grouchy and afraid of the future, or can you bring us some good news?
Rachel Janfaza: Well, first of all, Yascha, thank you so much for having me. And it’s an honor to be here with you, Linda and Francis. No, I don’t think that there is grave cause for concern, and that might be controversial compared to some of the headlines that we read about young people and their political beliefs. But when I look at it on the whole, and I hold focus groups with Gen Zers across the country, they reject labels altogether. They’re a very ideologically independent group of young people.
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When it comes to the question of liberalism, if you look at the core values that matter to young people in this country—and I think this really started to bubble up during the pandemic—it’s things like freedom of speech, individual rights and autonomy and agency, and those are all liberal ideas, liberal values. And so the jargon might go one way or another in the words that we use to describe it, but on the whole, this generation is rejecting those labels outright and really just is honing in on what they believe. And I think ultimately I’m hearing a lot recently that they want to live in a society where it is okay to hold some parts of one party’s platform to be true and at the same time other parts of the other party’s platform. And they reject the fact that that has not been the norm for their entire adult life. So I think it actually is in the culture of Gen Z to be liberal, lowercase-L liberal.
Mounk: So when you get the impression that half of young people are fans of democratic socialists and the other half are fans of men’s rights activists and so on, is that a complete misunderstanding of where most young people are? Is this just a small section of very political people? Is it that they sometimes like quite extreme people, but it’s because those people come across in positive ways that aren’t ultimately related back to those ideologies? Not to compare Zohran Mamdani to the people we just talked about, but when a lot of them like Zohran Mamdani, is it that he’s a very committed democratic socialist, or is it that they just think, you know, he seems honest and seems charismatic and seems like he’s trying to do something good, and they don’t actually buy into the ideology that may in fact be driving him?
Janfaza: So I’ve been asking this very question over the past few weeks in focus groups. First of all, I’ve been asking, who’s a candidate who you think is doing a good job in the country right now? Young people from across the country will name Zohran Mamdani as someone. And then I ask, what is it about him? They say things like hope, change—he is bringing a fresh take. The anti-establishment sentiment is real, but it’s not that they are socialists. So then I ask, how many of you consider yourself to be a democratic socialist? I have not yet found one person who considers themselves to be a democratic socialist. And I have taken a step further and said, can you tell me what it means to be a democratic socialist? I think part of the reason why they’re rejecting this is because they reject labels outright, going back to my earlier point, but they appreciate what he has brought: the energy, this sort of hope-maxing vibe that he campaigned on and is now serving with, and the fact that he campaigned on a vision and is governing with a vision at a time when so many politicians are all about being the opposite of someone else. So I think that is what is resonating from these democratic socialist candidates across the country. It’s in a vacuum of vision from other types of leaders. They are able to share what they do stand for, and not only what they stand against.
Mounk: Frank, what does it take to build a sufficiently liberal culture for democratic norms to persist? If young people have, as Rachel is saying, basically liberal instincts without necessarily having the language to articulate it, if they might be drawn to some politicians who may not be fully liberal but for reasons that aren’t deeply illiberal—how concerning is this? What kind of understanding of liberalism do we actually need to anchor in the wider culture for liberalism to persist through this day?
You could think about two very different positions on this. You might say: if people don’t have a genuine understanding of the logic of our institutions, they’re not going to be able to defend them, and we’re going to abandon them. Or you could say: perhaps it’s fine that people don’t really understand what it is, but as long as they have the instinct that if something is illiberal, if something seems unfair to them, that’s not right—that may be enough to preserve that culture and those institutions.
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think that there’s an important cultural change that needs to take place, which has to do with the question of virtue. Liberalism is built around a theory that there’s no overarching dominant idea of virtue or the good life—as you’ve explained to Curtis Yarvin and characters like that. This arose out of the wars of religion in early modern Europe, and the fact that people couldn’t agree on what virtue or the good life was, and so you settle for life itself—that we should be able to live in peace and tolerate other people.
But this creates a kind of vacuum that has been felt by many people. Your liberal society tells you to be endlessly tolerant, don’t be judgmental. If you say something’s better than others, or you criticize somebody on moral grounds, you’ll find some liberal scold saying, don’t be like that. What makes you think you’re so important or great that you can actually judge people? And I think that that is a misunderstanding of liberalism, because liberalism does not require that you abandon all of your moral priors. And in fact, a healthy liberal society is built around people who do have moral priors. They may not be the same, defined, let’s say, in religious terms—you tolerate people who differ from you, but you don’t say, well, anything goes, I’m just fine with anything.
But it still leaves a kind of hole for people, because they really want something to believe in, and some core that can be the source of community for them. I think that there is an older tradition, older actually than liberalism, that influenced the Founding Fathers quite strongly, which is the tradition of small-r republicanism. Our friend J.G.A. Pocock wrote a whole book about how this idea in a way begins with Machiavelli, and it develops in Europe in early modern times and then crosses the Atlantic and affects the American founding fathers.
What a small-r republican, as opposed to a liberal, believes is that there is such a thing as virtue, and that virtue is public-spiritedness—that you have to be oriented towards the public good, and that your life is not going to be fulfilling if all you care about is your friends and family and your little closed-in world. And it seems to me we’ve kind of lost that sense. I certainly see it in my students—very few of them actually want to go into public service, although that may be changing. I think that could be changing just in the past couple of years. Really, since the 1980s, they’ve been told that the government is terrible, it’s corrupt, it’s captured, and so they want to stay away from it. If they’re publicly oriented, they’ll go to work for an NGO or a public interest law firm and spend their lives suing the government to stop it from doing bad stuff.
I think that in a way we need to recapture a different kind of culture, where public service is actually seen as a virtue. For the generation that brought about the New Deal and then went on to win World War II, that was a very strong feeling. You had all these very public-spirited people who created the basic institutions that then persisted into the postwar period, and you have very few of them right now. So one of the things that a reconstructed liberalism needs to do is to reorient people towards the idea that there is a greater good. People are always complaining: I’m pursuing this life as a consultant with Arthur Andersen or whatever company, working for OpenAI, but my life doesn’t have any meaning—it’s a good career, my parents are happy that I’ve got a job, but what’s the greater purpose?
I think that one of the ways to reinstill a sense of purpose and meaning is to reimbue people with the idea that we are in a common political project. What a liberal democracy is, is not just having the government leave you alone to do whatever you want. It’s also a public project where we want to actually do things in common. That leads in all sorts of different directions. I’m a big fan of abundance. I think that we ought to have a government that can build things—we ought to have high-speed rail in California. But it’s still related to culture, because I think the idea of building public things is really about reorienting people towards that public-facing orientation, where they’re not just trying to figure out how to maximize their incomes, but they’re saying: what is the public good that we are trying to do? How do I participate in the formulation of these projects? How do I help to implement them?
So I do think that culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum where it’s just a bunch of ideas that float around in the air and one of them lands on your head and all of a sudden you have different ideas. I don’t think you build a spirit of public-spiritedness unless you actually are active in public affairs.
Mounk: One of the really striking things when you look at polling of young people—and perhaps you’ll correct me in a moment—is that the values that they have have really changed. For example, we are now at the absolute top of how much young people care about making money and having not just professional success, but really financial success. And they give relatively less importance to things like personal relationships or making a contribution to a community, and so on. That’s a really striking change that we’ve seen over the last decades.
Now, I think there’s a kind of post-liberal critique, which I think you’re sort of implicitly responding to, Frank, which is saying that perhaps liberalism has always been parasitic on a deeper set of virtues—that liberalism was a response to a very traditional society, and perhaps it had some good contributions to make, but it worked because there was that older set of virtues of duty and of caring about the common good, and that it slowly has eroded them. Now we’re left without any of them, and that’s why liberalism goes so terribly wrong. I don’t believe that. I don’t think anybody on this panel believes that. But what is the response to that, Linda? Is there a way of talking about public-spiritedness, about virtue, about, as John F. Kennedy would have put it, “ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” that still respects the limits on liberalism—which is that the state shouldn’t tell you how to live, and shouldn’t tell you what moral virtues to have, and shouldn’t tell you what religious convictions to have?
Chavez: Well, I actually do believe that for a functioning democracy, you have to be steeped in certain civic virtues. You do have to believe in a sense of duty or loyalty. You have to believe that there is objective truth. You have to be able to feel compassion. A society doesn’t work without people who do not just think in selfish terms.
And when you think back about our society—I’m not a political philosopher, I didn’t even study political philosophy in school—but when I think about our founding, or even liberalism writ large, I think about my own sense that free market economies have produced more benefit, more good, for greater numbers of people than any other. I think back to Adam Smith, but I remember that Adam Smith didn’t think Wealth of Nations was his most important book. He thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments was his more important book.
And I do think that you need that kind of basis, and I think we’ve lost that. It began to unravel, I think, in the sixties, and certainly progressed all the way through to the present. It’s not taught in school anymore. It isn’t just that we don’t teach basic civics—how the government operates, what branches there are, the Constitution, the Declaration. Those things depend on certain moral sentiments. And we’re loath to do that. I think liberals in particular are loath to do that, because they don’t want to acknowledge that there is at least a universal set of moral sentiments or values that are conducive to liberal democracy, and that without those, you don’t have the building blocks.
Mounk: Rachel, I’m struck by the debate that we had ten or so years ago when Jordan Peterson became a huge shooting star and attracted a lot of young followers, and was vilified in all kinds of ways for it. It always struck me that, in a sense, his rise—which I did see with some concern—was broadly our fault, the fault of us liberals, because he was speaking to young people, giving them a vision of how to lead their lives, which is not my vision, but which was a substantive vision, which made a real offer to them. And I think a lot of people who are more moderate, a lot of people who are philosophical liberals, didn’t do that. We didn’t say: here is a really deep, meaningful, ambitious way to lead your life, formulated from that kind of liberal perspective.
So do you think that young people have models for how to lead their lives that are in tune with the kind of liberal virtues that Linda just spoke to, or do they have to look to looks-maxxers or various other interesting figures, to have some kind of vision of how to lead their lives?
Janfaza: That’s a great question. I think the reality is that the social media ecosystem is so saturated that there is no one visionary leader for anybody, because there are just too many people whom someone can listen to. Micro-influencers who don’t have many followers might be the most followed person by one individual, and so it’s very messy. But I think when I ask young people, who do you most look up to and respect when it comes to values and who you want to build your life based off of, most of the time they say someone who they have an intimate relationship with—whether it’s a teacher, professor, a parent, a grandparent, a friend, someone in their community.
I think there’s a real opportunity there to make that more mainstream, that those are the people who young people are looking up to. I think we tend to sensationalize and focus on the fact that yes, there are very popular social media content creators, streamers, influencers who have very loud voices and very big followings, but even if they do have a huge following, they are not followed by all young people, and yet every young person does have someone in their life whom they have modeled themselves off of. So when it comes to the values that are most important, and where young people are getting their inspiration from, I just think it’s not monolithic. There is no one clear answer right now, in part because their entire childhood and adult lives have been shaped by so many different voices. There’s no one source of information, and Linda mentioned the need for objective truth, and that is really hard to find right now.
Mounk: Frank, if I locked you into a room and forced you to write a book called Twelve Rules for Liberal Life, that was meant to give young people guidance about how to lead a meaningful life, written from a broadly philosophically liberal perspective, what would you tell them?
Fukuyama: Well, the first thing they’ve got to do is figure out how to get out of that room.
Mounk: Well, you’re in the room, they’re not in the room. You’re in the room until you’ve given them that advice.
Fukuyama: I don’t know about twelve virtues. I do think that there’s a particular problem with young men right now, and it is really true that they don’t have appropriate role models. I think those exist in the literature. Harvey Mansfield, who was my teacher at Harvard, wrote a book on manliness. And it was widely derided by the usual suspects as being a kind of celebration of a bad kind of masculinity. But it wasn’t. It really derives from Machiavelli’s understanding of virtù, which Machiavelli himself understood as a masculine virtue, but it was very, very different from the kind of toxic masculinity that is out there on the internet right now, because it had to do with ideas of virtue, of service, of nobility, of the ability to be courageous and use your strength, but to use it for public purposes—because Machiavelli was indeed one of the founders of the theory of modern republicanism.
I think that if there is a way of reviving that understanding among young men about how to be both male but also virtuous in that Machiavellian sense, I think that would be very good. Take something like risk-taking. This is something I wrote about—my least-read book, called The Great Disruption, which I published in 1999, is actually all about gender relations. I didn’t realize it at the time how important this was. There are substantial differences between men and women. For example, young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five commit eighty percent of all the crimes in the world. And this is culturally invariant, right, so it does seem to be rooted in biology, where young men are programmed to take risks. If you think about human evolutionary history, there’s probably a good reason for that—if you’re hunting mastodons or saber-toothed tigers or whatever, you’re going to have to take certain kinds of risks that women are not going to have to take, raising young people. And you can’t have a society in which you don’t have people who are willing to do that kind of risk-taking.
So you don’t want to breed it out of human beings, but you have to orient that risk-taking towards things that are actually socially constructive. I think that articulating what a model of that would look like is important. The traditional understanding, for example, of a citizen soldier embodies something like that—that you would take up arms and risk your life on behalf of the whole community, but it was a very pro-socially oriented kind of thing, and we have somehow lost any sense that that’s a virtuous kind of life to live. Now, how you recover that, I think, is difficult, because you’ve got a lot of competing gods out there. But at least as a model of what you would want a virtuous person in a liberal republic to look like, I think that would be something like it—at least for part of the population.
Mounk: Linda, shifting the ground somewhat—we’ve been talking, in a sense, about who we should be at the deepest level, in terms of how we identify ourselves, what our values are, what we might have in common in a society that is meant to be deeply fragmented and diverse in terms of our ideas and our religions and our origins, but that perhaps could be united by some kind of common virtue. The other question is about who we are in a more literal sense—who is here in this country, who should be here in this country, who should not be here in this country. How should we treat people who have been here for a long time, who perhaps make real contributions to the country but who don’t have a legal title to be here?
So how should we think about reaching a settlement on this question of who we are, on this question of immigration, at a moment when we seem to be more divided about it than ever?
Chavez: Well, I think this has been a big divide for a while now. Immigration clearly is the driving factor in populism, not just here but around the world. I think immigration as an issue is quite different in the United States than it is in Europe. First of all, we are very fundamentally an immigrant nation, more than any other country I can think of. There are a few other examples—Argentina, Israel in a certain sense, where it’s an ingathering that creates the nation—but this has defined us from the beginning. And we did quite well for 150 years with open borders. We basically let anybody come, and we were eager to expand territorially and to create a sense of nation. We were willing to welcome all comers.
We didn’t really start seeing pushback until first against Asians, specifically the Chinese, but then in the early twentieth century, a push against Southern and Eastern Europeans. And that’s when we began to restrict immigration. So in 1965, we dramatically loosened the laws that had been put into place in the early twentieth century, and we became much more welcoming again.
But because the numbers of people we were bringing in were fixed and pretty static—they were based on family reunification, so they expanded a little bit—it wasn’t a rational system in the sense that we didn’t look at the country’s needs. There are times when you need more people, times when you need less, and we didn’t have to really deal with that, because there was a kind of flow of people that met the market but came illegally, that didn’t go through the system of legally immigrating to the United States, mostly from Latin America. Obviously, we share this big border with Mexico, and it worked for quite a while.
But starting really in the 1990s, we started to see a kind of nativism rising up again against this flow of mostly Latin Americans. And it was driven, as all of these periods have been, toward restriction, by the fear that these people were not really going to become Americans. I love to talk to audiences and hear people say, well, my grandparents came from Italy the right way. And they came before 1924, and the right way was: we had open borders. People don’t understand that. They were all Sicilian peasants, and the gap between them and the population at the time was actually greater than that of Mexican immigrants who came. So the point is, we had a market, and it worked because of illegal immigration.
Some of us, including myself, thought, well, we really need a revised legal immigration reform. We need to revise our law, make it more rational, look at skills in addition to family reunification. But unfortunately the nativist antagonism that built up—and these weren’t nativists in the sense of people who trace their family back to Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, these were people who came in the early twentieth century, but they were very fearful.
And then I think what dramatically affected this was the Biden years. I remind people that in 2015, when Donald Trump descended the escalator and talked about rapists and murderers, all these bad people coming in from Mexico, “not sending its best,” we were actually at a 50-year low in illegal immigration. The flow was not great at that time. It actually got much worse later. But I think a lot of liberals, including myself, underestimated the fear that the chaos at the border, which occurred particularly during the Biden presidency, generated. And that gave Donald Trump his opening. Sure, the economy was a big factor, and people were hoping they’d see an economy like that of 2017, 2018, the pre-pandemic economy. But fear about immigration was a large driver in this election.
So now we’re at a point where we have to make a decision, we have to do something. Trump got elected saying he was going to deport people, deport everybody. And basically what we’re seeing now is people being shot in the streets—people who are here legally, US citizens, being shot by ICE. I think there’s a kind of revulsion at that. But we still haven’t seen, out of Congress, which is where this has to happen, Democrats who are willing to sit down with Republicans—because they’re fearful too—and come up with a rational immigration policy that takes a look at what our needs are. Because we’re heading into a birth dearth—we have a birth dearth already, but by 2056 the US population would begin to shrink in absolute terms, and this is going to be dramatically bad for the people who live here now.
Fukuyama: Linda, tell me if I’m wrong, but another thing that happened in that decade of the 2010s was that a lot of the people coming into the country discovered the asylum law.
Chavez: Yes, absolutely. I had sort of hoped that in the last year of the Biden administration we could see some fixes on asylum law, because it was being exploited. People were coming for economic reasons, and that’s a perfectly good and valid reason—we need to figure out a way to legally admit those people—but it’s not what the asylum laws were made for. I initially thought that the way Biden handled it—let’s take all of these asylum seekers, give them a path to come in, have their interview, and then wait their turn for their immigration court hearing—that that would work. But it didn’t. What it did is that Governor Abbott and others, shipping all of these asylum seekers to cities like Chicago and Denver and New York, was brilliant. It made even liberals and liberal politicians say, wait a second, we can’t deal with this.
Mounk: So we talked about the United States and immigration in a way where the case should be somewhat easier in the United States, because the country has such a long history of immigration. I do think that most Americans recognize at some level that immigration is in the country’s DNA. The case that immigration is the key driver of the rise of populism is probably even stronger in countries in Western Europe, for example, where that really is at the very top of the political agenda.
One of the strange things is that there’s a lot of cycling in political and public opinion about immigration. You see in the United States that in 2015 there is a strong anti-immigrant mood, and that’s part of what gives Donald Trump the opportunity for his political rise. When he comes into office, you have the kind of thermostatic counter-reaction to that, and opinions become more pro-immigration. The Biden administration goes in and hugely misunderstands that mandate, loosens rules in such a way that you’re going to have an unprecedented number of people coming across the border, and then opinion swings right back. And now, going back to that liberal instinct, seeing the way ICE is operating in American cities, with agents that don’t identify themselves, that carry out often arbitrary stops and in many tragic cases end up killing people, you see opinion become very pro-immigration again.
One way I think about this, Frank, is that perhaps what most citizens want is something that is very reasonable. I think what large majorities of democratic citizens want is often reasonable, but it’s just impossible for governments to deliver. They want real control of a border, they don’t want illegal immigration, they want us to be able to set the rules for who comes in when, which is a perfectly legitimate set of aspirations to have for your country. And at the same time, they don’t want state cruelty. They don’t want to see people in Maine or in Texas or in other parts of the United States shot by ICE agents. They don’t want little children to wash up on the European shores of the Mediterranean because they were trying to come across. And it’s very hard to do both of those things at the same time. So when governments are overly lenient, they say, hang on a second, look at this chaos, we don’t want that. And when governments crack down, whether in the gratuitously cruel way of a Trump administration or even in a smarter, more targeted way, they say, well, look at all these cases of injustice, that doesn’t seem fair, let’s loosen up. That’s why we keep going back and forth. Is there some kind of principled solution to this?
Fukuyama: Look, as Linda knows well, there was a principled solution to it. It involved a trade where you would exert real control over the borders so that people could not simply come illegally. You really had to do that with a national ID card of some sort, because so many of the undocumented people actually weren’t crossing the border—they were visa overstayers—and you had to have a way of catching them. So on the one hand, you have real control over the border, but for the people who had come in earlier years and had built families and were not criminals and were hard-working people, you had to give them a path to citizenship. I think every major comprehensive immigration reform proposal over the past several decades has involved that trade: you really control the border, but you also have a path to citizenship. And the path to citizenship was just an absolute no-go for Republicans.
Chavez: I think that’s correct. By the way, even though philosophically I’m opposed to the idea of having a class of people who are not able to become citizens, I think as a one-time compromise, if it was what was needed in order to get real, serious immigration reform and give legal status to the people here, that’s something that ought to be at least debated.
Give people legal status. I would not want to see this be an ongoing process. I would want to see it much like the ’86 amnesty was a one-time deal—that if the price of getting Republicans to go along with giving legal status is that you’ve been here a certain number of years, and a majority of people who are undocumented in the United States have lived here more than a decade... The guy who was killed in Texas last week had lived in the United States for thirty-five years. And that’s not unusual. That’s actually quite common. There is a concept in the law of desuetude, where a law that is not enforced and is ignored for many, many years should pass away and become ineffective. That’s sort of where we were with legal immigration. We’ve known for decades how many people we had here, more or less, and how long they’ve been here, and we did nothing about it. So this idea that suddenly, in one year, we’re going to start deporting people, rounding up two thousand people a day, which is Stephen Miller’s quota—and, you know, as a former Republican who was opposed to quotas, I’m fascinated that quotas are the big thing in this administration, all sorts of quotas, including quotas for deporting people. So that would be one compromise that I think liberals have to at least consider, if it could be an honest deal that would give people some sense that we could have a path for legalization, if not citizenship.
Mounk: Rachel, is there any more agreement among Gen Z Americans about immigration than there is among older Americans? And how do you think we can talk in a broader sense about what borders mean in a country, and how to treat people who are in this country, in a way that might be able to forge some kind of consensus?
Janfaza: I think part of why we saw young people swing to the right in 2024 was because of immigration, and young men in particular—that was a top issue, along with the economy. The way this is manifesting as a political issue for young people, it is an economic issue, because young people are scared of one thing, and it’s not having a job. So for them it’s very much—there was very much a buy-in to the fear-mongering around the idea that immigrants are taking jobs that would be yours otherwise. I think this is very much related to the conversation around AI too, and how that is now an anxiety-producing issue, because it goes back to the same idea of jobs.
So I think the issue is intersectional with a lot of other political issues for young people. But then again, Yascha, you brought up before that there has been this action, reaction, culture, counterculture that has brewed throughout history, but especially in the past ten years, very quickly, back and forth.
Mounk: Do you think social media is speeding that?
Janfaza: That’s exactly where I was about to go with that—young people move at the speed of the internet, and nothing stays a trend for more than literally twenty-four hours or less. That is translating into their politics. I think it’s why this generation is as swingy as it’s shaping up to be. The immigration conversation is a part of that too, because we saw this movement to the right in 2024, and many of the young men who voted for Trump, with immigration as a core concern, saw what happened in Minnesota with ICE shooting American citizens and said, hey, that’s not what I voted for. When did that become okay? That’s part of the reason why they’ve retracted and are moving away from him.
Mounk: Just to stay on that theme for a moment—imagining that Democrats win in 2028, and perhaps they even have a trifecta—do you think there’s a danger that an incoming Democratic administration, both in immigration and more broadly, is going to overstate its mandate, is going to think, look, we’ve always thought that young people are naturally progressive, and there was a weird moment in 2024 when they helped elect Donald Trump, and perhaps we’ll deny and ignore that a little bit, but now they’ve swung back to being progressive, and whatever we do, they’re going to be on our side. Then, by the summer of 2029, they’re going to be swinging back to the other side.
Janfaza: Well, I don’t think that defection away from Trump is automatically a swing towards Democrats from young people. Democrats are not doing well with young people right now, and even if young people aren’t in favor of Trump, it does not mean they’re suddenly progressive again.
Mounk: But I think a lot of Democratic consultants believe that, even if you’re rightly pointing out that it’s not the case.
Janfaza: Yes. When it comes to the mandate that a 2028 candidate needs to govern with, but also needs to campaign on, it’s just more practicality, more willingness to actually work with the other party. Part of the frustration and the distrust in government from young people right now is because they don’t see any meaningful action. Where we see glimmers of hope and trust in elected officials is at the local level, where young people can feel the intimate effect of actions being taken, whether it’s regarding city infrastructure or housing policy or education. This might sound totally out of tune with the trope about young people, but this is what I’m hearing, and it’s where they’re actually able to see effective government. So I think there’s a lesson there that any candidate in 2028 needs to learn from, and this is actually something young people are asking for: to make their life meaningfully better, to make it feel like there’s progress happening. They just don’t see that happening right now at the national level.
In the rest of this conversation, Linda, Francis, Rachel, and Yascha discuss how artificial intelligence will impact employment, how AI is influencing young people, and how to fight for a philosophically liberal culture. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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