America has entered the era of the post-millennial voter—a generation born after 9/11, now approaching one-quarter of the electorate. For many, that day isn’t a defining national memory but a vague historical footnote. As Rep. Ilhan Omar once controversially described it, it was simply the day “when some people did something.”
This is a generation raised in a dramatically different cultural and educational environment—one shaped more by ideology than history. From grade school to university, progressive activism isn’t just accepted, it’s institutionalized. Students have been taught to protest before they are taught to understand what they’re protesting.
So when Zohran Mamdani, a self-described anti-capitalist and vocal supporter of the “Globalize the Intifada” movement, won the Democrat primary for mayor of New York City, young voters were unfazed. With 63 percent of his supporters holding college degrees, it wasn’t a fringe message—it was the appeal.
What we’re witnessing is the political coming-of-age of a generation untethered from the national narratives that once shaped American identity. Two quiet revolutions—one demographic, the other intellectual—have transformed the university and, in turn, the electorate.
And their impact is only just beginning.
How the campus left found unlikely new allies
Between 2000 and 2010, the progressive movement, long incubated in the academy, became visible, vocal and aggressive. Terms like “white supremacy” and “institutional racism,” now routine, were once jarring. Arguments relied less on evidence than on “lived experience” and “personal truth.” Under the DEI umbrella, phrases such as “microaggression” and “systemic harm” made dissent nearly impossible.
By the next decade, universities actively recruited fee-paying international students, many from the Middle East. They helped bankroll ballooning bureaucracies but also brought a worldview that recast U.S. foreign policy, Israel, and Western ideals as inherently oppressive. A curious alliance followed: Islamists and progressives — otherwise ideological opposites — united in hostility to liberal democracy, Zionism, and American exceptionalism.
From disciplines to dogmas
At the same time, the organization of knowledge on campus changed. Traditional departments, once home to varied viewpoints judged by disciplinary standards, steadily lost ground. In their place, alongside but independent of departments, arose “studies” programs — American studies, Ethnic studies, Gender studies, Postcolonial studies — built around activism rather than scholarship.
These programs hired ideologically aligned faculty, wrote activist curricula, and reviewed their own work for publication. Many of their leaders rose to administrative power as deans, provosts and presidents, shaping hiring and tenure decisions across entire universities.
Middle Eastern studies in particular has been shaped by Gulf-state funding, especially from Qatar. Donor dollars influence faculty appointments, research priorities, and even student activism. Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, anti-Israel activism on U.S. campuses has surged — often driven by foreign students linked to well-funded networks.
Foundational terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” have been stripped of history and turned into weapons against Jews and Israelis. The fact that Jewish communities predate Islam in the region, or lived there continuously for millennia, is ignored in favor of a “settler colonialism” narrative. Absent is Islam’s own history as an empire from Spain to India and its vision of a unified global community under Islamic Law (Dar El Islam).
U.S. history has undergone a similar inversion in American studies programs. The New York Times’s 1619 Project recast America’s founding as the arrival of African slaves rather than the Declaration of Independence. Historians objected, but the narrative stuck. Activists like Ibram X. Kendi found eager audiences in classrooms primed to see the nation’s past through the lens of grievance.
Religious dissenters like the Quakers, who helped shape ideals of freedom, are erased. The global nature of slavery, including its African practice, is forgotten. Britain’s costly abolition of the slave trade is dismissed. The Founding Fathers are reduced to villains. White men are no longer part of a complex national story but caricatures to be rejected.
From campus to city hall
What began as campus trends have now spilled into politics. The ideological re-engineering of the post-9/11 generation has produced not only activists but candidates, not only protests but political platforms.
Mamdani’s rise in New York is the logical outcome: a politician whose anti-capitalist, anti-police, and openly pro-Intifada worldview mirrors the curricula and coalitions incubated in universities. In him, the campus pipeline runs straight into City Hall.
Reclaiming history before it’s too late
The result is a sharp decline in historical literacy. The rise of Mamdani in New York and Fateh in Minneapolis is not a local curiosity. It is the predictable harvest of two decades of ideological cultivation on campus.
The post-9/11 generation, raised on grievance and moral certitude, is only beginning to flex its political muscle. Unless we reclaim our institutions — and restore a shared national story grounded in history rather than ideology — we will see more Mamdanis and more Fatehs, not fewer.
Remedial history, once unthinkable in a serious democracy, may now be necessary. Students must be grounded in the full story of American democracy, its principles, and its allies. Civic education will have to keep pace with political engagement if we are to preserve a shared sense of who we are.
The only question is how far this will spread before Americans are ready to confront it.
Image generated by ChatGPT.