The Fun Deficit

Why the Left Keeps Losing Young People Before They Even Show Up

61% of young adults report serious loneliness, the highest rate ever recorded in American history. This is not a mental health footnote. This is the political crisis of our generation.

And what is the left’s response? We’re hosting book clubs about Capital. We’re running three-hour trainings on power mapping for people who haven’t decided if they even want to be in the room. We’re perfecting our ten-point policy platforms while the right is building gyms, game nights, and church socials where young men find brotherhood before anyone asks them to knock a single door.

The loneliest generation in history is desperate to belong to something. We keep offering them homework. They keep not showing up. And then we call them apathetic.

Progressive organizing has a joy problem. And it’s killing us.

We’ve spent years perfecting the mechanics of voter contact, fine-tuning our data models, and developing sophisticated theories of change. We can tell you the exact persuasion rate of a door knock versus a phone call. We’ve got training manuals for days. But somewhere along the way, we forgot that most young people don’t want to join a political meeting, they want to belong to something that doesn’t feel like homework.

The right figured this out years ago. They built massive organizing infrastructure around church socials, hunting clubs, and country music festivals. They created spaces where young men could lift weights together, where families could watch football, where people felt like they belonged before anyone ever asked them to knock doors or make calls. The political education came later, organically, through relationships built on shared experience and genuine community.

Meanwhile, the left keeps inviting 22-year-olds to book clubs about Capital and panel discussions on intersectionality, then acts shocked when they don’t show up. We’ve turned organizing into an advanced seminar that requires three years of prerequisite knowledge and a tolerance for jargon that would make a management consultant blush. Then we wonder why our base keeps getting smaller, older, and whiter.

It’s time to rebuild youth organizing from a different foundation. One that starts with joy, community, and culture, and earns the right to talk about politics later.

Meeting People Where They Actually Are

Here’s what we know: Generation Z and young millennials are lonelier than any generation in American history. They’re economically precarious, digitally exhausted, and deeply skeptical of institutions, including ours. And here’s what we keep missing: that loneliness isn’t just context for our organizing, it is the crisis we should be organizing around. The right understands this. They’re not offering young men better healthcare policy; they’re offering them a place to belong. A gym. A church. A brotherhood. Meanwhile, we’re over here with our issue briefings and policy white papers, wondering why nobody’s joining the revolution. Many of them care about their communities, have strong values, and want to be part of something bigger. But their first instinct when they feel that pull isn’t to Google “progressive organizing near me” or show up to a DSA meeting.

They’re already gathering. In gaming Discord servers. At pickup basketball games. For Love Island watch parties. At Tiny Desk-style concerts featuring local artists. In Pokémon Go meetup groups. They’re building micro-communities around shared interests and genuine friendship. They’re just doing it in spaces the political left has mostly ignored or dismissed as “not serious.”

But let’s be clear about something else: The problem isn’t Discord servers or group chats, it’s when we mistake them for the organizing itself instead of tools that facilitate it. An unorganized group chat where people just share memes and complain isn’t infrastructure. But a Discord server that coordinates when and where people actually show up in person? That’s different. The left has spent the last decade becoming extremely online, mistaking digital engagement for actual human connection, and we’re paying the price. You cannot build durable power through screens alone. You need people in rooms together, sweating together, laughing together, eating together. You need the physical presence that makes someone real to you in a way that an avatar never will. Digital tools should get people offline and together, not replace the work of being in the same space.

That dismissal is our loss, not theirs. Because those spaces, the ones where people are already showing up for fun, for connection, for joy, are exactly where organizing should begin.

Think about it: A FIFA World Cup watch party brings together people across lines that traditional organizing struggles to cross. Young men who work in construction watch next to college students. Recent immigrants sit with third-generation Americans. People who’ve never voted and people who canvass every cycle all show up because they love soccer and they want to watch it with other people who love soccer.

That’s the on-ramp. Not a clipboard. Not a ten-page reading on neoliberalism. A World Cup watch party.

Culture First, Politics Later

The organizing model I’m proposing inverts the traditional pipeline. Instead of recruiting the already-engaged to do more political work, it focuses on bringing new people into the base by creating spaces they actually want to be in. Spaces that start with culture, community, and shared experience, and only later, organically, introduce questions of power, fairness, and collective action.

Here’s what that could look like in practice:

You organize a March Madness watch party at a community center near campus. You make it free, you provide food, you have a big screen and decent sound. You invite everyone, the political science majors show up, sure, but so do the nursing students, the guys from the football team, the international students, the kids who work full-time and go to school part-time. Half the people who show up just want to rep their school, wear the jersey, and scream at a screen with other people who care. You’re not asking anyone to sign anything or commit to anything. You’re just creating a space where people can enjoy something together.

Next week, some of those same people show up to a pickup basketball tournament you’re organizing. Then a few come to a Cultura y Comunidad night with a live banda performance and local food vendors. Then a retro game night. Over time, you’re not just hosting events, you’re building a community of young people who trust each other, who have shared experiences, who feel like they belong to something.

And here’s the thing: When you’ve built that foundation of trust and belonging, the conversations about power, fairness, and collective action emerge naturally. Because these young people are already experiencing economic precarity, they’re just not using that language to describe it. They know healthcare is broken because half of them can’t afford to see a doctor. They understand labor exploitation because they’re working two jobs while going to school. They get that the system is rigged because they’re living it.

The gaming community that started meeting just to play starts talking about how tariffs affect the price of consoles. The fitness group that bonded over training routines has conversations about health access and the politics of bodily autonomy. The anime watch party crew starts connecting the dots between the stories they love and the political fights happening around them.

You didn’t lead with politics. You led with joy. And the politics followed because you created space for people to think together about the systems shaping their lives.

Discipline and Rigor Still Matter

None of this means abandoning discipline, strategy, or political education. The left’s actual problem isn’t that we’re too rigorous, it’s that we’re rigorous about the wrong things at the wrong time with the wrong people.

We subject brand-new volunteers to three-hour training sessions before they’ve even decided they want to be part of the organization. We lead with our most complex theoretical frameworks instead of our most compelling stories. We optimize for the 5% of young people who are already politically engaged instead of building on-ramps for the 95% who aren’t.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth about why this keeps happening: paid organizers have continued to position themselves as the constituency. We’ve built a professional class of organizers who spend more time talking to each other about organizing than actually organizing new people. The meetings are for us. The trainings are designed for people who already think like us. The language is calibrated for people with organizing backgrounds to signal competence to other organizers. We’ve centered ourselves in the movement instead of centering the people we claim to serve. And then we’re shocked when the people we claim to serve don’t show up, because we built the whole thing for ourselves, not for them.

But once people are actually in, once they’ve built relationships, once they feel like they belong, once they’ve decided this community is worth investing in, then you can build serious organizing capacity. Then you can do the trainings on power mapping and campaign strategy. Then you can introduce more complex political analysis. Then you can ask people to take on leadership roles that require real commitment.

The difference is sequencing. You’re not lowering standards, you’re being strategic about when and how you raise them.

This model requires just as much discipline as traditional organizing. Maybe more. Because you have to be rigorous about:

• Creating genuinely welcoming spaces that reflect the diversity of young people you’re trying to reach, not just the ones who already look and talk like existing organizers.

• Follow-up that builds relationships without being transactional. You’re not collecting contact information to immediately ask people to phone bank. You’re staying connected so they come back to the next event, and the next one, and eventually become core community members.

• Local adaptation within a shared framework. Each community is different, what works to bring people together in rural Wisconsin won’t be what works in Atlanta or Phoenix. But you need consistent principles, evaluation methods, and learning systems so you’re building knowledge across sites.

• The long game. You’re not optimizing for next month’s voter contact goal. You’re building the base that will still be organized five years from now because they’re not just volunteers, they’re a community.

The pathway from “person who came to a watch party” to “person who shows up to a city council meeting” isn’t magic, it’s intentional design. Maybe after the third event, you invite a core group to help plan the next one. Maybe you create a group chat where people coordinate rides and share memes. Maybe you start having informal conversations about what’s happening in the community, the rent increases, the campus parking situation, the local politician who’s being an asshole. You’re not manipulating people into activism; you’re creating the conditions where their natural curiosity about power and fairness has room to grow. The transition has to be organic, but organic doesn’t mean accidental. It means you’re patient enough to let people arrive at political consciousness through relationship rather than trying to download it into them on day one.

That’s harder than running a traditional field program. It requires patience, creativity, and a willingness to invest in people before you know what their “political ROI” will be. But if you do it right, you’re not just recruiting for the next campaign, you’re building durable youth power.

The Bigger Tent We Actually Need

The left talks constantly about expanding our coalition, but in practice we keep replicating the same narrow base: college-educated urban progressives who already agree with us about everything. We’ve been trying to activate the already-activated for so long that we’ve forgotten what it actually takes to bring new people in.

Somewhere along the way, the left became a college-educated club that mistakes credentials for wisdom and policy briefs for organizing. “Working class” became a demographic we study rather than people we are and organize with. We hire people with master’s degrees in organizing to reach people who never finished high school. We write reports about economic anxiety instead of creating spaces where economically anxious people want to be. And then we’re shocked, shocked!, when working people don’t show up to our meetings or vote for our candidates.

If we’re serious about building a multiracial, multi-class movement that can actually win power, we need to create spaces where young people across the political and cultural spectrum can find common ground. That means:

• Young men, especially working-class young men who’ve been told by both parties that their problems don’t matter or that they’re the problem. The right is recruiting them through MMA gyms, gaming communities, and bro-coded podcasts. Where’s our counter-offer besides lectures about toxic masculinity?

• Young mothers, who are drowning in childcare costs, working multiple jobs, and desperately need community but can’t make it to evening meetings that assume everyone has free time and no kids at home. The right is building entire ecosystems for them: “Make America Healthy Again” wellness groups, homeschool co-ops, mom Facebook groups that start with essential oils and end with school board takeovers. Meanwhile, the left spends its energy criticizing women who choose to focus on homemaking and family, dismissing “trad wife” aesthetics as internalized misogyny instead of recognizing that some people genuinely want to prioritize that kind of life and view those dynamics as healthy, and that’s a legitimate choice that deserves support and community, not contempt.

• Rural young people who feel completely invisible to urban progressives and who’ve watched Democrats write off their communities as lost causes. They’re not all MAGA diehards waiting to happen. Many of them are just lonely, economically squeezed, and looking for community.

• Working young people who don’t have the time, money, or cultural capital to participate in the organizing spaces we’ve built for college students with flexible schedules and disposable income.

• The politically exhausted and disconnected who care about their communities but have tuned out politics entirely because it all feels performative, polarized, and pointless.

These people aren’t going to show up to a DSA meeting or a Progressive Student Alliance event. They’re not reading Jacobin. They don’t know what “mutual aid” means and they’re not going to learn unless you give them a reason to trust you first.

But they might show up to a Super Bowl party. Or a Verzuz-style R&B brunch. Or a dodgeball tournament. And if you do that well enough times, you might build the kind of community where political education, organizing training, and collective action become possible, not as a bait-and-switch, but as a natural evolution of people who care about each other asking what they can do together to make their lives better.

And let’s be clear: building a real coalition means actually welcoming people who don’t already talk like us, not running them through an ideological purity test before they’re allowed to stay. Yes, this is uncomfortable. Yes, it means some people will get pronouns wrong, use “guys” to refer to a mixed group, or talk about “hard work” and “personal responsibility” because that framework has shaped their lived experience and makes sense of their world. You can either build power with people where they are and move them over time, or you can have an ideologically pristine social club where everyone already agrees. Pick one.

Here’s the thing about coalitions that makes them hard: people show up imperfect. That’s not a bug, it’s the whole point. If everyone already had the right analysis and the right language, you wouldn’t need to organize, you’d just need to mobilize. But lecturing someone on day one because they used the wrong term doesn’t build trust, it destroys it before it even forms. Not everyone has been to college. Not everyone has spent years in activist spaces learning the approved vocabulary. And if we’re being real, expecting people, including those from marginalized communities, to use our language and be on our “level” before we’ll organize with them is just replicating the same classism, racism, and elitism we claim to be fighting. The point is to meet people in their lived experience, build trust through shared struggle and joy, and let the political education happen in relationship, not as a prerequisite for entry.

One more thing, because somebody needs to say it: These are not therapy sessions. These are not spaces for trauma-bonding or processing your feelings about the election. If you want to build a movement, you need to create spaces that are actually fun, not just places where politically engaged people gather to reassure each other that they’re on the right side of history. Joy is not the same as comfort. Community-building is not the same as validation. If your watch party turns into a struggle session or a support group, you’ve already lost the plot.

And before someone asks: “But what about the next election? We can’t just host watch parties while democracy hangs in the balance.” Here’s the thing, this IS electoral work. It’s just electoral work on a timeline that actually builds power instead of renting it. The right spent 50 years building church networks, campus organizations, and social infrastructure. That’s why they win. They’re not choosing between community-building and electoral organizing, the community IS the electoral organizing. A person who shows up to your March Madness party, then your pickup games, then starts planning events with you, then joins you at a city council meeting, that person will vote. And they’ll bring their friends. And they’ll still be organized five years from now when the next crisis hits. That’s worth more than a hundred people you convinced to phone bank once and never saw again. The question isn’t whether we can afford to do this kind of long-term base-building. The question is whether we can afford not to.

The Call to Action

This isn’t a call to abandon serious organizing. It’s a call to rebuild the foundation that serious organizing requires.

For donors: Stop funding the same tired campus programs that reach the same 200 already-engaged students at every university. Start funding creative experiments in community-building that reach young people who’ve never been part of political spaces. Fund the gaming tournaments, the watch parties, the rec leagues, the cultural gatherings that create belonging first and earn the right to talk about power later. Yes, it’s harder to measure. Yes, it won’t deliver you next quarter’s voter contact numbers. But if you’re serious about building long-term youth power instead of renting it every two years, this is the investment that matters.

For organizers: Give yourself permission to start with joy. You’re not selling out by hosting a karaoke night instead of a phone bank. You’re doing the foundational work of building community that every successful movement in history has required. The rigor comes later. The political education comes later. First, you have to create spaces where young people want to show up, and then keep showing up until they’re not visitors anymore, they’re community. But this doesn’t mean fuck off and have a good time while calling it organizing. You still need strategy, discipline, and a theory of how cultural gatherings become civic infrastructure. The point isn’t to throw parties, it’s to build power. If you’re not intentional about follow-up, relationship-building, and creating pathways to deeper engagement, you’re just wasting donor money and your own time.

For organizations: Create room for this kind of work in your theory of change and your budget. That means giving young organizers the flexibility to experiment with non-traditional formats. It means measuring success by whether you’re reaching new people, not just activating existing volunteers. It means having patience for programs that won’t show immediate electoral returns but might, over 3-5 years, build the kind of durable base that actually shifts power.

What We’re Actually Building

The right has been building for decades. They’ve got infrastructure, institutions, and communities that provide belonging, meaning, and purpose, and that also happen to move people rightward politically. They spent 50 years on this. Fifty years of patient investment in church networks, campus organizations, think tanks, and social spaces. And progressives want to see results in one election cycle. We want the ROI report by Q3. We want to know how many voters this FIFA watch party registered. That timeline mismatch is killing us. They understand that you don’t win by constantly mobilizing the already-convinced. You win by creating spaces where people want to belong, and then making sure those spaces are filled with your values, your people, and your vision of the future. More fundamentally, they understand that politics is downstream of identity. When you shape how young people see themselves, as part of a church community, as patriots, as providers, as defenders of tradition, you shape how they understand their interests and their place in the world. The left used to understand this too, but we’ve largely abandoned identity-building in favor of issue education, as if people’s political commitments flow from rational policy analysis rather than from who they believe themselves to be.

The left used to understand this too. Labor unions didn’t just organize workplaces, they organized bowling leagues and summer camps and social halls where working people built community together. The civil rights movement wasn’t just about protests, it was about churches, fraternities, and social networks where Black Americans built collective identity and power. The best campus organizing of the Vietnam era started with SDS chapters that were as much about building counterculture community as they were about stopping the war.

We let that atrophy. We professionalized, we focused on tactics over community, we optimized for short-term metrics over long-term power. And now we’re shocked that young people would rather join a Pokemon Go meet up than a progressive organization.

It’s time to rebuild. Not by abandoning strategy or rigor or political education, but by starting where people actually are, building the trust and belonging that makes organizing possible, and remembering that joy isn’t frivolous. It’s foundational.

The loneliest generation in American history is desperate for community. We can either help them build it, or we can keep wondering why they’re not showing up to our meetings.

I know which one I’m choosing.

---