How to Teach the TikTok Generation That America Isn’t China
The kids are right to be concerned about our country’s direction, but social media-fueled despair won’t help us.
This piece is a part of The Next Move’s Back to School series.
Read this note from Garry Kasparov on why we’re covering the campus crisis:
With all the talk of a ceasefire in Ukraine, it's easy to forget about the ceasefire that's about to expire on America's campuses.
Free speech, deportations, federal overreach, hostile foreign influence and political extremism all remain potent issues as millions of Americans head off to college in the coming days.
Caitlin Forrest is the director of the Frontlines of Freedom program at Renew Democracy Initiative.
Scroll through TikTok.
“I have come to realize my mental illness is America.”
“America sucks and the world knows it!”
“Living in this country, in the United States, is a fucking shame. It’s disgusting.”
If this were your algorithm, what would you think of the American experiment? The answer: Not much, probably. Fewer than half of all US Zoomers think democracy is the best form of government.
They’re not exactly clamoring for an authoritarian alternative, as some have speculated. More accurately, they don’t believe democracy can hold up its end of the bargain. They’ve embraced nihilism. They get dragged into false equivalence. They catastrophize.
Between the TikTok propaganda pipeline and the fact that young Americans’ experience with politics so far is, well, really bad, it’s hard to blame them.
In my conversations with students and educators, I’ve come to appreciate that we’re fighting a multi-front war in shoring up democracy for the next generation. The toxic stew of social media bile and constant political crisis manifests in three main challenges:
An inability to disagree: Students can’t disagree without becoming disagreeable. They often assume ill will or lack opportunities to practice navigating differences productively.
Identity over ideas: Younger Americans put their immutable characteristics front and center. Because identities are rigid, focusing on them leads to rigid thinking. It’s easier to change your mind than to change who you are.
No context: Most Americans—Gen Z or otherwise—have never known anything but freedom. Like a fish in water, they don’t realize how unique their situation is. It’s easy to catastrophize or decide democracy isn’t worth defending.
Look, after reading this you might want to tell the kids to just touch grass. But if we’re going to turn things around, we need to reclaim lost ground from the bad actors who feed on that cynicism. And we have a secret weapon in that fight:
Political dissidents.
I run Renew Democracy Initiative’s Frontlines of Freedom (FOF) program. We have a network of over 100 dissidents from more than 40 different countries, and for the past three years, we’ve been bringing them into the classroom.
People who’ve survived oppressive regimes know that liberty is not a given. They’re not giving up on America because in many cases, it was America that saved them and offered them refuge. They can give students a powerful reality check.
No, China is not “just as free” as America
In one of our programs, we heard from some high school students who thought that China—a single-party communist dictatorship—was “just as free” as the United States.
It’s easy to get lost in a debate with someone who believes that there’s no difference between the US and China, especially if they’re a fired-up teenager with a spicy social media algorithm whose frame of reference for the world begins in 2016 or 2020. You could throw out all sorts of statistics, facts, charts, and history, and it would never stick.
Seeing is believing. A dissident’s lived experiences under tyranny can change a student’s entire perspective. Hearing from a Hong Kong protester who took immense personal risks to challenge the authorities illustrates the distinction between American liberty better than any documentary or textbook ever could.
It also provokes curiosity and humility. A student who realizes that, no, China is not “just as free” as America will realize that they might be off the mark on some other things. They might then be more open to hearing from peers with dissenting points of view.
The most powerful endorsement of FOF’s work I’ve ever heard came from a student enrolled in our accredited dissident-taught course at Johns Hopkins University.
This course really changed my perspective.
When was the last time you heard an opinionated college student admit that they changed their mind about something?
Something to fight for
Of course, the point of FOF is not to beat students over the head and tell them that they’re all wrong and that everything in America is going great. It very clearly isn’t.
We increasingly hear stories about US government actions that carry disturbing echoes of our dissidents’ experiences. But hearing why dissidents still look to the United States as a beacon of liberty inspires optimism.
This fall, we’re bringing my friend Evan Mawarire, a pastor who led a movement to overthrow a four-decade dictatorship in his native Zimbabwe, on the road for a campus speaking tour. When students hear that Evan chose America when he had to flee his homeland, the lesson is not that everything here is fine. It’s that millions upon millions of people around the world think Americans have something worth fighting to save and to improve. Students are right to be concerned about America’s direction. It’s what they do with their energy that FOF is trying to change.
The algorithm gives American students reason to retreat into their bubbles. To feel depressed and resigned. By putting a human face on bravery and an unshakable belief in democracy, Frontlines of Freedom gives those same young people a reason to get up and fight.
P.S. If you’re a student or educator and want to bring Evan Mawarire or another dissident to your school this fall, email me at fof@rdi.org! You can watch his Freedom Masterclass to get a taste of what he has to offer.
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More from The Next Move:
America’s Campuses: The Next Frontline Against Authoritarianism
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Great idea having dissidents from authoritarian countries speaking to high schools. But watch how quickly that gets shut down when your own dictatorship finds out about it.
Very good but depressing essay. Do you think today’s youth don’t believe in democracy because they see what’s happening now AS democracy?