Moving Beyond Trump to a Brave New World

Some Young People Think No Kings Is Old News, NYTimes, April 24, 2026.

On April 14 Thomas B. Edsall published an op-ed entitled, Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?. It provoked a number of interesting responses. Here is one of them:

To the Editor:

Re “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 14):

As a Gen Z participant in No Kings who has been dismayed to find myself quite alone, demographically speaking, at each protest, I have thought long and hard about how this came to be. I believe that Mr. Edsall’s essay accurately underscores many of the contributing factors. Here are two more to consider.

First, the protests evoke an America that my generation feels we don’t know. The No Kings movement centers largely on the idea of restoration — of democratic principles, political normalcy and American decency. Gen Z, having come of age in the Trump era of political discord and the erosion of democracy, has hardly known any of these things.

Second, precisely because the No Kings protests evoke the past, they fail to appeal to our appetite for change. Young people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place. To stand against apartheid, sexual harassment or police brutality is to dismantle the present and construct the future.

While the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.

Juliana Birkenkamp Boulder, Colo.

I understand that response. A year ago I, when the depredations of the second Trump administration were becoming obvious, I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily, Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. That title alone makes Ms. Birkenkamp's point. Here are my opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I understand her second point as well, and share it. I don't want to return to the world of my youth. That's gone, forever. I want to move forward. Just how we are to do that, that is not at all clear to me. The best I can manage at the moment is to imagine where we might be over a century in the future. Here's a glimpse of what might be: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. Here is the abstract from that paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.