As I was gathering material on the absence of young people at anti-Trump demonstrations, I came across evidence of powerful technological forces weakening persistence and cognitive tenacity across the board.
Most interesting, the most immediate danger posed by artificial intelligence may not be the futuristic moment when A.I. becomes so smart and so independent of human control — in other words, conscious — that it takes over politics, economics and the social order.
Instead, it may be the current power of A.I. to undermine persistence, curiosity and personal effort, encouraging in their place growing passivity and indifference that poses the more proximate threat.
Before we get to that, though, let’s start where I began, with the question of youth inaction on President Trump and go on from there.
In May 1970, President Richard Nixon’s frustration with the student protests against the Vietnam War reached a boiling point. “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses,” he told a gathering of civilian employees at the Pentagon.
“Listen,” the president said, “the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it.”
Today, the United States would appear ripe for a resurgence of student activism, beyond the flourishing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus in 2023 and 2024 in particular.
We have a president who has directly attacked the finances and the intellectual freedom of colleges and universities, is building the technology for a surveillance state, undermines free and fair elections and took the nation into an unjustified war with no explanation while causing domestic economic havoc.
But one ingredient is missing: a substantial anti-Trump youth movement.
Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University, tracks the demographics of participants in major anti-Trump demonstrations. In a phone interview, I asked what she had found about the mobilization of students and younger men and women.
She replied, “We’re not seeing them in the streets at No Kings events.”
She provided the following data about the three No Kings protests: “At No Kings 1 (June 14, 2025) the median age was 36, at No Kings 2 (Oct. 18, 2025) the median age was 44, and at No Kings 3 (March 28, 2026) it was 48. Clearly, it’s getting older.”
The participants in the initial No Kings Day demonstrations, Fisher wrote, were “predominantly white, highly educated, female and middle-aged.”
It’s not as if young men and women are indifferent to President Trump.
The Spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll found that “younger voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump and plan to vote for Democrats in 2026. Fifty-seven percent of all voters disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance as president, including 68 percent of voters aged 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters aged 23 to 29.”
So what’s going on? I asked a wide range of experts for their thoughts. Some pointed to such structural developments as the explosion in social media usage and public access to artificial intelligence, both of which weaken users’ sense of efficacy and agency.
Those adverse effects are most acute for young liberals, especially young liberal women, suggesting that the political costs of social media and A.I. will be borne disproportionately by the Democratic Party.
Richard Braungart, a sociology professor emeritus at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and co-editor of “Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th-21st Centuries,” argued in an email that over 70 years the United States has undergone a moral and ideological transformation that has created a hostile environment for the liberal activist young:
After the 1960s domination by young people and the political left, the country moved to the political right with the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan, where liberalism (freedom, equality, self-determination, civil society), big government and the public sector were portrayed as “the problem” and the enemy.
America was to be saved, enriched and elevated by big business, the private sector, social Darwinism and economic neoliberalism.
In America, Braungart contended, “We are now living in an autocratic capitalist utopia that won’t allow counter-ideological positions to exist. It is considered unpatriotic in this capitalist utopia to have democratic parties and networks share power.”
Braungart concluded:
There is a widening gap and split between spirituality and materialism in our society today. I grew up in a world of moral and spiritual values (Marshall Plan, U.S.A.I.D., CARE, good government that served the people), which, unlike today, heavily influenced political decisions. Politicians were held accountable for their moral lapses and flagrant violations (Joe McCarthy).
These days, Americans are living in a crumbling moral wasteland, where corruption and raw-power politics rule supreme and are carried out without ethics, morality, personal responsibility, accountability, nor concern for people, the environment and a healthy future for upcoming generations.
What this suggests is that students and other young men and women are on the cutting edge of technological developments that are almost certain to pull people of all ages into a web of apathy and impassiveness.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business, who has turned the issue of the detrimental effects of social media into a cause celebre, responded by email to my queries:
When I began my research on social media and Gen Z, I focused on the evidence that it increased rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm. It does, but the effects are substantially larger for young women, and for liberals. Young women on the left fell first and fastest, in terms of mental health, once everything moved onto smartphones and social media, around 2012.
More recently, Haidt continued, he realized that
I vastly underestimated the damage from social media because even larger than the mental health crisis is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay attention, which is driven in part by the explosion of short-form videos since the arrival of TikTok. The average American teen now spends five hours a day on social media, mostly swiping through short videos.
In political terms, Haidt argued,
social media has done more harm to the Democrats than to the Republicans, both by weakening their young people (e.g., their requests for trigger warnings and safe spaces) and also by radicalizing them. They in turn push the party to take more extreme cultural positions, which drive noncollege voters to the right.
Most consequentially, Haidt contended,
years of consuming short videos during childhood and puberty seems to disrupt the development of executive function, which refers to the cognitive processes that support goal-directed behavior.
Young people who watch a lot of short videos (which is most of Gen Z and Gen Alpha) find it more difficult to do anything that is hard, or that requires deep thought, or that can only be accomplished with persistent effort. That would include political activism, especially action in realms beyond social media.
Haidt’s concluding point:
I believe that TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are bringing America a cognitive catastrophe. The diminishment of capability is hitting both sides, but it is the left that most needs its young people to come out and fight for change.
Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of the book “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” suggested in an email responding to my questions that a combination of factors underpinned the relative lack of youth activism:
A key factor is the growth of both depression and pessimism among young adults since 2012. It’s hard to have agency if you’re depressed, and hard to believe that anything you do will matter if you’re pessimistic, even nihilistic.
Another factor, Twenge noted,
may be that the left overplayed its hand on controversial issues such as transgender women in sports, equity versus equality, cancel culture, defunding the police, affirmative action, and so on in a way that alienated many young people even if they were liberal otherwise — that may have turned them off politics and taking action.
A growing number of studies of A.I are finding that usage adversely affects users.
A January 2025 paper, “Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks From Incremental AI Development,” by a team of six researchers makes this point succinctly: “Even incremental improvements in A.I. capabilities can undermine human influence over large-scale systems that society depends on.”
This dynamic, they continue, “could lead to an effectively irreversible loss of human influence over crucial societal systems, precipitating an existential catastrophe through the permanent disempowerment of humanity.”
America could become a nation of the servile.
In their October 2025 paper “Impact of AI Tools on Learning Outcomes: Decreasing Knowledge and Over-Reliance,” Marton Benedek and Balazs R. Sziklai of Corvinus University of Budapest and the ELTE Center for Economic and Regional Studies concluded:
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Uncontrolled use of A.I. leads to a substantial decrease in knowledge. The data indicate an effect likely between 20 and 40 percentage points compared with previous years.
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Open book computer lab setting seems to be among the most exposed examination formats, although psychological models prognosticate that the whole learning process might be affected regardless of whether A.I. assistance is available on the exams or not.
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The reliance on A.I. tools and attitude toward responsible usage seems to also depend on the discipline. Difficult subjects — such as mathematics, which student often perceive as having little practical value — are especially vulnerable to the misuse of A.I.
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Examination of the test sheets indicates that the large majority of students were content to cede control and rely excessively on A.I. tools.
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Overreliance is also reflected in the extreme reactions to the experiment. Even only after a few years of usage, students cannot fathom mastering a difficult subject without the assistance of A.I. tools.
A more recent paper, published this month, “AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,” by a team of five researchers, found:
A.I. assistance reduces persistence and impairs independent performance: After brief A.I.-assisted sessions (10 minutes), participants were significantly more likely to give up on problems and performed significantly worse once the A.I. was removed, compared to participants who never had A.I. assistance.
Effects are concentrated among users who seek direct solutions: Persistence costs were concentrated among participants who prompted A.I. to solve tasks for them directly. Using A.I. for hints or clarifications did not produce significant impairments.
Effects generalize across domains: Effects replicated across fraction arithmetic and reading comprehension, suggesting it is a general consequence of A.I.-assisted problem solving, not specific to any particular task.
Derek Thompson, an author of the book “Abundance” and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, reached similar conclusions in an recent Substack essay, “How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture”:
The algorithmic newsfeed — from TikTok to Reels — is carefully engineered to organize compulsive short-term videos around the user’s revealed interests, for the purpose of maximizing the display of advertising squares. Scrolling has a funny way of immobilizing its user, numbing their mind and producing a kind of disembodied timelessness.
Entertainment and tech companies, Thompson continued, “have gotten smarter about putting consumers into bastardized flow states that leaves people feeling drained and sad rather than challenged and enlarged as selves,” specializing in the removal of “every friction and keep us floating in the lazy river of the scroll.”
As apathy spreads, the ability of authoritarian leaders in the Trump mold to smash Democratic norms and wrest control of elections will grow stronger.
Apathy, in turn, feeds on itself: The more action appears futile, the more likely opposition to the corrupt exercise of power diminishes or fades away.
The notion of Americans as a freedom-loving, can-do people will be replaced by the notion of Americans as submissive and weak.
The collapse of student activism and the lack of a thriving youth movement in opposition to Trump is a canary-in-the-coal-mine warning of the deterioration of American exceptionalism, however imperfectly realized, which a vigorous citizenry relied on to make this country great in the first place.
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