During my appearance on The National Security Hour, host Brandon Weichert made the observation that this generation of political activists, in this instance, young conservatives/MAGA, is very different than previous ones. I tended to agree with him about all the Millennial and Gen Z youth, less as a “generational” matter than as a practical matter.

The arduous problems faced by today’s youth are well documented: the soaring cost of living, tuition, and housing; the liberty- and prosperity-destroying radical green agenda; the absurdities and prejudicial practices of DEI; distorted gender roles; and putting off marriage and having children due to economic concerns, if either or both is even desired. Bluntly, these young people are trapped within a vanishing American Dream, where there is a distinct chance they will be the first generation whose standard of living is lower than that of their predecessors.

Yet when these young people raise their voices to protest and demand solutions to these pressing, all-too-practical problems, they are often ignored or fobbed off with platitudes by politicians and others with the authority to help instigate and hasten change. Having been so brusquely dismissed, they then become prime fodder for extremist politicians and their radical ideologies. If the credentialed custodians of representative and academic institutions will not brook dissent and only blithely advise patience, radicals bent upon destroying the extant establishment are more than happy to pander to them, tempting and steering disaffected youth down the destructive primrose path of socialism or fascism and, ultimately, servitude and slaughter.

On the left, one clearly sees a recrudescence of historically discredited socialism—well, discredited everywhere but academia and the media. On the right, one sees the rise of xenophobic, militant nationalism. Both metastasizing movements of the alienated are united by antisemitism, which both spawns and feeds their conspiratorial sensibilities about the world and the problems besetting them.

Disgracefully, these angry youths have come to believe they are justified in their animus toward the other, especially as both left and right disingenuously and insidiously cloak their hate in ideological guises to render it socially acceptable within their circles and, ominously, increasingly within society at large.

The Achilles’ heel of the rise of radical ideologies is understanding, engaging, and, above all, finding solutions to problems within the framework of our constitutional republic, using the concept of “subsidiarity” as the standard by which all proposals are measured and implemented. In so doing, one can commence by unleashing the power of the citizenry while reining in the heavy hand of big government, big corporations, and big labor, and, when needed, by bringing one or all three of these “Bigs” to heel before the power of the sovereign people. As these practical solutions bear fruit, the practical problems facing today’s youth will ease and end, and their faith in “the system” will be—if not restored—affirmed and cemented as further issues are resolved.

Indeed, this is precisely the situation America and other democratic nations faced at the onset of the Great Depression. Both virulent ideologies of fascism and communism were touted to all generations as the “wave of the future.” The economically struggling worker and the idealistic young were especially susceptible to these proffers of a new society and world.

Yet, such ideological propaganda and proselytization alone were not sufficient to attract the mass adherence of a nation to such hideous ideologies. Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia pointed to how their ideologies had solved practical economic problems for their people. While time proved these alleged economic gains to be ephemeral, they nonetheless formed the foundation for unfortunately oft successful propaganda.

Ultimately, through both domestic legislation, a world war, and a cold war, the free world solved many of the practical problems—both economic and societal—that their citizens faced. Fascism and communism were seen as the anti-human ideologies they were, are, and will ever remain. Freedom was, is, and will ever remain the future. As the adage says, “nothing succeeds like success,” or better, attracts adherents to the philosophy of freedom underpinning it.

Yes, one would hope today’s youth would be less readily amenable to entertaining failed, dangerous ideologies, such as socialism, communism, and fascism. But bemoaning this situation is not only unproductive; it is also largely unhelpful, further alienating the very youths one hopes to bring around to the benefits of free markets and free peoples. Far better to engage them and work to help redress the practical problems confronting them.

For some members of the establishment, this will prove impossible due to their vested interests in the policies they have proposed, implemented, and profited from. This largely explains the institutional inertia in addressing and resolving the pain these policies continue to cause Americans, especially the young. And it is driving the young into the arms of the demagogues—demagogues who, in a bitter irony, promise a “new” society by pimping the failed ideologies of the past. And the more they stray into these harmful, hateful, hidebound ideologies, the further they will find themselves from resolving their very practical and pressing problems.

Writing in The Everyman Commentary, Katya Sedgwick trenchantly revealed one of the fundamental ironies of those youths spouting radical ideologies, in this instance the right’s vile, antisemitic gaggle of Groypers: specifically, how their hubris and historical ignorance prevent them from recognizing that they are an ideological spawn of the hippie, New Left boomers they profess to despise.

“With Boomers, mass culture caught up to these receptive audiences and sold them the idea of youthful defiance. Boomers pioneered teenage rebellion as the normative expectation for each subsequent age group. Since the 1960s, adolescents have been locked into the notion that they must defy their parents and that the style and substance of their disruptiveness are determined by their birth year…

“Liberals and fascists get overly invested in the romanticism of generational change. That’s basically Boomer mentality. This new Conservative position [of the Groypers], on the other hand, is athwart history.”

It is time we all started making history and stopped repeating its mistakes.

In a nation proudly proclaimed to be built upon God-given rights and self-evident truths of human liberty, Americans are called upon to embrace the eternal over the ephemeral, affirm verities over vanities, and to ever inspire ourselves and the world—starting with the rising generation here at home—with what we, as a free people, can achieve.

Such is a practical and philosophical approach that has succeeded—albeit not always smoothly—in transcending the challenges our nation has confronted. Socialism, communism, fascism, and all other inhuman ideological failures will not save the American Dream for today’s youth or anyone.

To save the American Dream, support the American Revolution—a continuing affirmation and advancement of liberty, equality, and self-government. In the “mystic chords of memory” of our free republic’s people rings Lincoln’s rhetorical question and perpetual challenge, “Is there any better or equal hope in the world?”

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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003 to 2012. He served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles, a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.