Does America Have a Future?

Why This Generation is the First One That Could Fix America

My friend Maddie, a nurse in London, went home to visit her dad last week, and there, at a fine restaurant in a tony suburb of Philadelphia, dad took her out for a welcome home meal. During which she texted me, furious: “the rich old people at the next table are going on about how much they hate refugees and love Trump. This is why I moved!! God, America’s finished!”

I couldn’t help thinking that therein lay a small parable which, funnily, strangely, gave me hope for it. Is America finished? I want to answer this question — or at least give you my tiny, limited perspective on it — in a roundabout way, which is to say, to take you through my thinking. (The answer is: no, but.)

The greatest divide in America today isn’t between the urban and rurals or the left and right and so on — the usual stories we’re told. It’s between the young and everyone else. And in that divide lies the one hope America has. Maybe it’s last, best, and truest hope. Let me explain.

Young people reject the three great mistakes America made, wholesale. They think capitalism is a bad joke. They are against bigotry and racism and various kinds of phobia. And they strongly support better rights for everyone, not just for their own groups — whether it’s…