The Atlantic published a fascinating piece yesterday by Derek Thompson. In it, he discusses the radical shift in the voting patterns of young people in the United States.
What he found is that COVID and BLM basically shoved an entire generation of people to the Right. He writes:
For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.
So what exactly is happening? Thompson suggests that this is essentially a reaction to government overreach during COVID, that the bizarre institutional failures during COVID — ranging from the idea that proper political credentials brought about riots in the streets and protection from a COVID attack to the idea that kids had to be locked out of schools — shoved an entire generation of young people to the Right and radicalized them.
And this, of course, is true.
This is evidence too that people are incredibly variable and vacillating when it comes to their politics. Exogenous events can shove entire generations of people one way or another.
This has happened several times over the course of my lifetime. I remember after 2001, a brand new security boom prompted people, particularly suburban moms who had traditionally voted Democrat, to suddenly vote Republican.
Then, COVID apparently shoved many young people to the Right. Wokeness shoved many young people to the Right.
This is a good reminder to everyone in politics that while you may think the pendulum will never shift back over to the other side, it absolutely will.
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And thus, two points ought to be taken from that.
First, politicians ought to be very careful with their use of political power. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t move fast and break things. It means they should be very careful not to set a trip wire that is going to blow up.
Second, they have to move with alacrity when they get to power; the Left always does, and the Right rarely does. This is one of the differences between MAGA and prior conservative Republican movements.
Prior Republican movements took that first bit of advice — “move cautiously; don’t break too many things” — but they neglected the fact that if you don’t break enough things, that if you don’t move fast enough in breaking up things, you don’t get enough done and the Left comes back in.
And when the Left gets in power, they move fast and they break things.
Barack Obama was not shy about using his power in 2009-2010 in order to shove forward Obamacare and a vast expansion of the federal government. President Trump is doing precisely the opposite.
On Tuesday, President Trump set about issuing a number of new executive orders. Some of them are incredibly consequential. One of them is just a reinstatement of his stated purpose, which is to create more governmental transparency. He issued an executive order titled Radical Transparency about Wasteful Spending, which reads:
The United States Government spends too much money on programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people. For too long, taxpayers have subsidized ideological projects overseas and domestic organizations engaged in actions that undermine the national interest. The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest. The American people have a right to see how the Federal Government has wasted their hard-earned wages.
I therefore direct the heads of executive departments and agencies (agencies) to take all appropriate actions to make public, to the maximum extent permitted by law and as the heads of agencies deem appropriate to promote the policies of my Administration, the complete details of every terminated program, cancelled contract, terminated grant, or any other discontinued obligation of Federal funds.
Again, this is all part and parcel of the DOGE approach to American government.
As part of that, President Trump also issued an executive order on Tuesday “ensuring accountability for all agencies,” the goal being to re-enshrine the unitary executive theory of the federal government.
In the Constitution, there is no unelected fourth branch of government that is sort of half-run by Congress and half-run by the executive. If Congress delegates power to the executive, it is the job of the executive to perform those powers.
That means if an executive branch agency exists, that executive branch agency is headed by the president of the United States. That was the point of this particular executive order. It states:
Previous administrations have allowed so-called “independent regulatory agencies” to operate with minimal Presidential supervision. These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the President, and through him, to the American people. Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the President.
These practices undermine such regulatory agencies’ accountability to the American people and prevent a unified and coherent execution of Federal law. For the Federal Government to be truly accountable to the American people, officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people’s elected President.
Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials’ accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch.
This is a restatement of the constitutional principle that the president runs the executive branch. All the pseudo-shocks from Democrats on this particular point stems from their long-standing assumption that an independent agency would be run by Democrats. They always assumed that “career bureaucrat” meant Democrat.
There was, in fact, a deep state. It was permanent political appointees who were supposedly insulated from any Republican president who would take power.
And now, Trump is saying no, that’s not the way this is going to work.
As part and parcel of that, President Trump announced on Truth Social, “Over the past four years, the Department of Justice has been politicized like never before. Therefore, I have instructed the termination of ALL remaining “Biden Era” U.S. Attorneys. We must “clean house” IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence. America’s Golden Age must have a fair Justice System – THAT BEGINS TODAY!”
There’s a lot of hue and cry over this, but this is not, in fact, a rarity. President Bill Clinton fired 93 U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office in 1993, and when Barack Obama came into office, he cleared out many in the justice system who had been appointed by George W. Bush.
This sort of change-over of career bureaucrats in these particular agencies, including the DOJ, is not a rarity; it’s a regular part of American government.
It’s only Republicans who are chided about this.
And this time, we don’t give a damn.
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