Americans under 40 show up in small numbers for No Kings Marches. Some who have written about the phenomenon say, “They aren’t uninvolved, they just get involved differently,” pointing to online discourse, posts, small donations, etc.
I don’t buy it. For one thing, as a group, fewer than half of the eligible under 40 votes, even in national, high-profile elections. If online discourse and posting is involvement, it’s scattered and far less effective than marching which, at least demonstrates disapproval.
Thomas Edsall of the NYT recently wrote a column attributing low young people involvement in No Kings marches on lower attention spans caused by heavy screen usage. I don’t buy this, either. For one thing, we all have lower attention spans.
The question, “Why don’t they care?” is the wrong one; a better one may be “Why doesn’t this format resonate?”
To the young, a march can feel like “Another performative thing that won’t change anything.” When I talk to young people, I hear real worry about the state of the country and strong disapproval of Trump—two of my own motives for marching. But just as audible is resignation and futility. They seem to feel the system is too captured to change. Many seem to feel no agency at all.
If you are under 40, your political coming-of-age happened in fragmented digital spaces where the unit of action is the post, the donation, the mutual aid Venmo, the boycott. To you, a Saturday march doesn’t feel like the thing to do; it feels like a thing some older people do, one option among many, and not an especially efficient or effective one.
Further, younger people have watched a decade of mass mobilization and drawn a reasonable empirical conclusion that doesn’t align with the experience of older Americans but perhaps should:
- The 2017 Women’s March was the largest single-day protest in American history and then Trump put in place policies it was protesting.
- He’s done the same in 2025-2026 despite three No Kings Marches.
- The climate strikes were enormous, yet emissions kept climbing. The 2020 protests were the largest movement in U.S. history by some measures and produced modest reforms that were mostly reversed.
If you’re young, you probably think, “Marching leads to nothing”—or worse: Marching may look like ineffective cosplay. As hard as it might be for us older people, this may reveal good reasoning, not apathy. It just may be that marches and rallies are 20th-century instruments some of us with gray hair keep reaching for in a 21st-century landscape when other methods are called for, and the people we’re calling apathetic may simply be the first to notice.
And then there is individualism, an affliction we all suffer from, but has made a deeper mark on digital natives. Marching asks that you meld into a crowd, one that you may believe isn’t completely like you. For a lot of older people this is its very appeal—a release from the exhausting work of being a distinct self, a chance to be part of something larger.
But for a generation raised on social platforms, increasingly unchurched, and short on the deep community ties earlier generations took for granted, marching cuts against the grain. They’ve been trained to treat the self as a continuously edited project, where every post is a small act of self-definition and being generic is the cardinal sin. By 22, you’re often convinced that your uniqueness is the most valuable thing about you—your look, your online brand, your take. You may even have come to think that cynicism is cool. To march is to set that aside: to chant words with strangers, carry someone else’s slogan, and stand shoulder to shoulder with people who look nothing like you and whose politics you probably don’t 100% agree with. The cost isn’t a Saturday. It’s the surrender of uniqueness.
Having said all this, let’s not stop trying to connect with the young. We need them and they need us. But instead of asking, “Why aren’t they showing up?” we might want to ask, “What other kind of gathering would feel—for them—worth showing up for?” I’m guessing that seeking involvement by young people in addressing the problems facing our nation isn’t a dead end—it’s a design problem.