Where Was the Millennial “Resistance” When We Needed It the Most?
“I believe that the president has learned from this case…I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future.” So spoke Senator Susan Collins days before President Trump’s acquittal in the Senate.
Less than a week after Trump allegedly learned his lesson, he interfered in the federal sentencing of his former associate, Roger Stone. He afterwards asserted on Twitter that he has “the legal right to do so.”
In light of this new transgression, the impeachment trial is starting to look like the last chance we may have had to rein in a Commander-in-Chief that is now completely off the chain. And looking back, one is forced to ask: Did we do everything we could have? Did we make our voices heard when we needed to the most?
I am afraid we did not.
For amid the cacophony of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate — with endless hours of political commentary, commentary about the commentary, and never-ending punditry from a host of professionals and quacks alike — there was one group whose voice was conspicuously absent: millennials. For a generation — my generation — made notorious for its vociferous condemnation of countless campus speakers and its boycotting of companies like L.L. Bean and Equinox over their ties to the president, you would think that the impeachment trial of Trump would have once again roused us from what feels like our increasingly nihilistic apathy. And yet, on the eve of one of the most consequential votes in modern American history, we, the self-proclaimed “woke,” were oddly, uncharacteristically, quiet.
At previous watershed moments in our country’s history, the young generation has risen up en masse to make itself heard. In the Fall of 1964, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which saw thousands of students defending their right to free expression (and which resulted in hundreds of arrests), captivated the nation and redefined American student activism. In October 1967, an anti-Vietnam War movement begun by students at the University of Michigan culminated in a 100,000 person march on Washington — at that point the largest anti-war protest in history. Less than three years later, student protestors at Kent State literally laid down their lives over the American expansion of the war in Vietnam into Cambodia. More recently, in 2014, students from 80 U.S. colleges participated in a protest over the Obama-era construction of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, resulting in the arrests of hundreds.
By contrast, a mere 200 people, according to USA Today, were at the Capitol to protest the outcome of the Senate trial on February 6th.
Given the rich history of American youth activism, it is discouraging at best and disquieting at worst that the generation renowned for its cantankerousness failed to materialize at such a critical moment as Trump’s impeachment trial. What impact could we have had if, amassing in crowds of thousands or tens of thousands, we were able to physically represent the 72 percent of Americans who were in favor of calling additional witnesses? Would Mitch McConnell and his band of lackeys been so easily able to dismiss the overwhelming bi-partisan support for additional witnesses had thousands of truth-seeking citizens marched within spitting distance of the Senate chambers? Would the perennially equivocal Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have joined Mitt Romney in voting for impeachment had crowds of supporters been audible from within the Capitol?
“Millennials may be the most educated generation in American history, but our exceptional inactivity at this historical crossroads has revealed us as possibly being the most demure.”
We will never know, because we weren’t there. We treated the acquittal of a renegade president — whose conduct Mitt Romney described as an “appalling abuse of public trust” — as a forgone conclusion, and in doing so, forsook our responsibility as the arbiters of a brighter, fairer future. For all of our talk of social justice, equality, and positive change, we failed to walk (or rather, march). Millennials may be the most educated generation in American history, but our exceptional inactivity at this historical crossroads has revealed us as possibly being the most demure. As the self-proclaimed champions of the “resistance,” there was precious little resisting going on when it mattered most. Whether or not our apathy is a sign or a symptom of the ages, it is a sad harbinger of the times to come.
With a newly vindicated and highly vindictive president on the loose, I only hope we can find a way to rouse ourselves in the tradition of those who came before us. It was our parents’ generation that acquitted President Trump in the Senate, but the legacy of this acquittal is ours. Our inaction in the face of an unprecedented assault on our republic by an unhinged and freshly emboldened president is our legacy too.
