Lately, it has become fashionable to diagnose the younger generation with every political defect imaginable. They are labelled as impatient, intolerant, distracted, ideologically shallow, seduced by algorithms and incapable of sustained civic engagement. If they protest, they are reckless. If they withdraw, they are apathetic. If they distrust institutions, they are cynics. Such judgments are often confidently delivered by those who built, inherited or presided over the very systems now losing credibility. Perhaps, the real question is not what has gone wrong with the youth, but what has gone wrong with democracy.To understand the political mood of the Generation Z, or Gen Z, one must first understand the world in which they came of age. They did not inherit the post-war optimism that shaped earlier political imaginations, nor did they grow up in an era where prosperity seemed expandable, institutions appeared stable or progress felt inevitable. Instead, most young people have spent their formative years amid democratic backsliding, intensifying inequality, broken promises on climate change, perpetual wars, polarised societies, a once-in-a-century pandemic and an acute cost-of-living crisis, making even ordinary aspirations feel remote. Now, they confront the added anxiety of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping the labour markets, before even entering them fully.They were taught the language of rights, inclusion and sustainability, while watching governments repeatedly fail to honour these very commitments. They grew up learning about the ideals of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals while witnessing a world unable, or unwilling, to meet them. Previous generations inherited treaties, welfare compacts and the promise of a better future. Today’s youth have inherited the rhetoric of those promises, but little of their substance. It is therefore misleading to describe young people as ‘politically indifferent,’ as many are not indifferent at all, merely unconvinced.Recent research supports this distinction. A 2025 study by Protect Democracy and the Centre for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), examining how the Gen Z views democratic life, identified three broad tendencies observed among young citizens. The first group values democracy in principle but participates only passively. The second remains detached, expressing frustration through minimal engagement. While the third is actively dissatisfied, eager for change, yet vulnerable to more radical or anti-system responses if no meaningful avenue for reform becomes available. This evidence does not suggest youthful irrationality, rather a looming legitimacy crisis.Hannah Arendt argued that political power is not a possession governments hold by default. Power exists when people act together, continuously renewing public authority through participation, and vanishes when they disperse. Once popular participation withers, institutions may retain force, procedure and spectacle, but they lose their vitality. Consent becomes thinner, trust becomes more fragile and democratic systems get hollower.This description increasingly fits many democracies today, including India, where the picture is more nuanced than the lazy caricatures of disengaged youth suggest. The “Youth and Politics Survey 2024” by Lokniti-CSDS found substantial levels of political interest among younger respondents. A significant share described themselves as “very interested” (36.1%) or “somewhat interested” (42.6%) in politics. However, when asked if they were registered in the voters’ list, more than half of the respondents answered in the negative, citing that they “did not get the time” as the primary reason while promising that to register the next time. A young person juggling precarious employment, exam pressure, family obligations, long commutes, rising rents and economic uncertainty may care deeply about political affairs while lacking the stability to participate. A worker in the gig economy, unsure of the next month’s income, does not possess the same civic bandwidth as someone cushioned by wealth security. A citizen navigating inadequate healthcare or chronic financial stress is less able to devote energy to organising or sustainably involving themselves in the public sphere. Democracy often assumes citizens are free to participate but we tend to ignore the fact that liberty comes with ulterior conditions. Among those conditions, education is paramount. Across many societies, civic education has steadily weakened. This erosion does not always happen through dramatic censorship or headline-grabbing decrees. Sometimes it arrives quietly: through textbook simplifications, the sidelining of historical facts and dissenting political thought and the relentless privileging of narrow vocational learning over humanities and social sciences.The result is profound. Young people are taught how to compete instead of being trained to think critically about how institutions function. They are rarely shown how laws are shaped, how rights are defended, how budgets are prepared or how democratic systems can be reformed from the below. Democracy, then, appears not as something citizens can steer, but as a ritual performed out of their field of influence. In this vacuum created by a lack of civic literacy, manufactured outrage and manipulation get ample chances to sway opinions. Identity conflicts become easier to aggravate and historical grievances are selectively remembered. Politics becomes a theatre of reflexes: eyes trained to see only curated realities, with mouths repeating slogans mistaken for convictions.Older generations often respond by condemn the youth of being gullible or angry. However, oftentimes their inclinations are well-founded. If young people distrust politics, it is because they have watched empty campaign promises dissolve election after election. They have witnessed corruption being repackaged using euphemisms, incompetence being defended as messaging and symbolic gestures substituting structural change. They have been presented with branding rather than representation and spectacle instead of accountability. No number of hashtags, youth festivals, internship schemes or leader-centric outreach campaigns can solve this pervasive problem, if the root cause is not being addressed. Can we do something to narrow this widening gap between promise and delivery? Public trust dissipates when governments repeatedly pledge endless promises that never materialise. Credibility depends less on grand declarations than on consistent execution and transparency. Young citizens need real political choices, not recycled binaries with a new packaging. When every election feels like a contest between stale factions targeting a renewal of tenure, disengagement becomes the rational, and even expected, response. There is a pressing need to remodel the civic education system. Students need to understand not only the architecture of government but also the methods by which citizens can challenge and improve it. They should know how municipalities work, how legislation is scrutinised, how misinformation spreads, how protest movements are developed and why it matter that institutions function well. It is imperative that we stop ignoring the importance of economic vulnerability as a factor impacting engagement with democratic processes. Secure housing, healthcare services, dignified work and assured and stable income are not simply welfare concerns; they are preconditions for meaningful citizenship in any democratic society.Lastly, let us reimagine a political culture which treats scepticism as feedback instead of treason. The greatest danger we face today is not that the Gen Z harbours some hidden nihilistic instincts, but the belief that democracy itself is performative, incapable of correction or irrelevant to material life, reinforced by repetitive democratic failures. Young citizens are often described as angry and maybe they are. But righteous anger can be informative, signalling that the governed no longer see themselves in the institutions that claim to represent them.Alviina Parvez is a Grade XII student from Noida, India.