The Big Delete

America’s young digital natives are reformatting the country and its institutions

This opinion piece was originally published in Canada's Globe and Mail on 10 March 2025

While many establishment American liberals are recoiling at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Donald Trump’s bureaucratic incursions, a growing number of young Americans now appear to be offering a shrug of indifference, maybe even tinged with curiosity.

According to exit polling after the presidential election, and a more recent poll from AtlasIntel, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 – and young men, in particular – are supporting Mr. Trump in surprising numbers. This counterintuitive-seeming reality points to something deeper than the dominance of the culture wars: a fundamental generational rift that may prove more consequential than any red-blue divide.

The United States, then, isn’t just experiencing a political realignment; it may be witnessing a generational paradigm shift.

Unlike their Generation X and Boomer predecessors, these digital natives have never really known a world where the nation-state held unquestioned authority. They came of age as cryptocurrencies challenged central banks, social media platforms outmanoeuvred regulators and transnational tech companies wielded more influence than many governments. In their lived experience, power resides not in Washington, Brussels or Beijing, but in codes, networks and capital that flows effortlessly across borders. In this world view, traditional centres of power appear as quaint anachronisms; the vocabulary of statecraft – sovereignty, jurisdiction, diplomatic protocol – registers as being as foreign as Sanskrit.

The surge of support among young Americans for Mr. Trump is less about MAGA’s nostalgic nationalism and more about seeing Mr. Trump’s promises to disrupt the established institutional order as a clearing ground for something entirely new: a post-national, crypto-based system that renders traditional governance structures irrelevant. By this logic, Mr. Trump’s nationalist rhetoric isn’t the destination; it’s merely the wrecking ball that accelerates the collapse of systems they consider already moribund.

But this is where the generational divide cuts deepest. Many of these digital natives don’t merely see institutional decline as inevitable; they actively celebrate it as desirable. The over-40 crowd, for all its frustrations with politics-as-usual, still largely assumes some responsibility for maintaining social cohesion and preventing complete systemic collapse. The emerging generation, by contrast, has grown up anticipating institutional and systemic failure, amid many crises; now, they’re betting their futures on it. Under this growing and nihilistic paradigm, anything tied to a nation-state is a legacy system to be worked around rather than engaged with: a technological debt to be discharged, rather than managed.

Yet this confidence often borders on hubris. As China’s Red Guards learned during the Cultural Revolution, it is much easier to tear things down than build things up. Any certainty that the world simply awaits these digital natives’ inevitable takeover ignores history’s hard lessons about the difficulty of creating durable systems from scratch, and the importance of the constructive phase that follows the destruction.

Consider the cadre of so-called “DOGE troopers” now employed by the Trump administration: young technologists tasked with making critical cuts across federal departments, despite scant knowledge of historical precedents and the fact that their political theory rarely extends beyond Neil Howe and William Strauss’s The Fourth Turning and the insular meme-politics of 4Chan forums. Their truncated historical perspective blinds them to the cascading consequences of their collapse – consequences that, as history repeatedly demonstrates, typically spiral beyond anyone’s ability to predict or control.

This world view isn’t merely an intellectual curiosity; it has profound implications for America’s future. As this set of young Americans gain influence through technological innovation and financial success, their fundamental rejection of nation-state institutions could accelerate destabilization in ways even they haven’t anticipated. Older generations may not have perfect solutions, but they at least recognize that stability itself has value – and that dismantling systems without viable replacements typically leads to chaos, not utopia.

In this context, the central question in American politics may not be about whether Republicans or Democrats better represent America’s values, or even whether progressivism or conservatism offers superior policy prescriptions. The more important, more existential question is this: Can these divergent world views find sufficient common ground before the gap becomes unbridgeable, or are we hurtling toward an era where disruption reigns unchecked, with no one possessing the will and the means to rebuild from the rubble?

Democracy requires a shared reality and institutional trust to function. If a generation views those institutions as fundamentally irrelevant, rather than flawed-but-fixable, the social contract itself comes into question. Before America can heal its partisan divides, it must reckon with this deeper generational schism – one that threatens to render traditional political remedies as relevant as fax machines in the quantum age.

Rafal Rohozinski is a principal of Secdev Group and a senior fellow at Canada’s Centre for International Governance and Innovation.