Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has not been as specific as Delaney, but Buttigieg also talks about national service as a way to bridge social divides. “We really want to talk about the threat to social cohesion that helps characterize this presidency but also just this era,” he said last month.
And last week, Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts congressman, announced his proposal, which includes a specific program for climate change. Moulton also went into detail about the benefits that participants would receive, including tuition at public colleges or a job-training benefit of up to $24,000.
I think Moulton is right to get specific about these benefits, because Americans under the age of 40 don’t deserve to be lectured about the idea of sacrifice. Many of them have already sacrificed.
“American millennials are approaching middle age in worse financial shape than every living generation ahead of them, lagging behind baby boomers and Generation X despite a decade of economic growth and falling unemployment,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg recently wrote. “They have less wealth, less property, lower marriage rates and fewer children, according to new data that compare generations at similar ages.”
An ambitious service program — more ambitious than anything proposed so far — could have two big benefits. It could help restore a sense of national purpose for many young people, and it could also address the current intergenerational injustices.
“Presidential, congressional, state and local officials should endorse the idea of at least a year of national service, not as a legal obligation, but as an increasingly widespread cultural, political and moral expectation for all able, young Americans,” write Stanley McChrystal, the retired Army general, and Michael O’Hanlon in The Hill.
In a graduation speech at Ohio State University, Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post noted that Donald Trump spoke positively about national service during the 2016 campaign — but that his proposed budgets would slash AmeriCorps funding.
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, calls national service a necessary complement to new social benefits, like Medicare for All. “The Democratic Party is strongest when we challenge the public to give, not just promise the public more of what they get,” he writes in The Atlantic.