I am a member of Generation X. In grade school, middle school, and high school I wrote paper after paper on Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the reasons we fought World War II. We studied what Newt Gingrich was doing, what Oliver North had done, and the status of the Cold War as it was ending. Those assignments were not optional coloring-book exercises. They were the civic equivalent of learning to swim: you were expected to know why the water was dangerous.
To this day I remember why we fought. World War II was not an abstraction about “conflict.” It was a war against industrialized tyranny that murdered tens of millions and sought to extinguish the idea that individuals possess rights no government may revoke. The Cold War was won so we would not forget that communism, whatever its marketing, produces poverty, secret police, and mass graves. The Greatest Generation’s sacrifice was supposed to purchase something more durable than victory parades: a living memory that would make repetition impossible.
But that memory is rapidly washing away. Nearly a third of Americans were born after September 11, 2001. If you include those who were toddlers at the time, roughly 100 million people experience the attacks only as distant history. This amnesia goes far beyond 9/11. Surveys consistently show that younger generations know alarmingly little about the Holocaust or the Cold War. In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 13 percent of eighth graders were proficient in U.S. history. A 2024 survey of college students by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni was just as dismal. Only 31 percent knew James Madison was the Father of the Constitution. Just 28 percent could identify the 13th Amendment as the measure that abolished slavery, and a mere 23 percent recognized the source of the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
We cannot brush these off as mere trivia failures. They are catastrophic failures of cultural transmission. The same students who have every contemporary cultural trend memorized cannot explain why the United States spent a century rejecting both fascism and communism. When younger Americans describe socialism as an exciting new approach to governance, they are not being sophisticated. They are simply revealing that no one taught them about the famines, the labor camps, or the border walls built to keep people from escaping. The Democratic Socialists of America grew from a fringe group of a few thousand before 2016 to more than 120,000 members today, largely by capturing the campus demographic. New York City—the historical engine of American free-market capitalism—recently elected a democratic socialist as its mayor. Recent surveys show adults under 35 viewing capitalism with deep suspicion and socialism with growing optimism. An August 2026 CNBC/Generation Lab poll found nearly half of 18- to 34-year-olds hold a favorable view of democratic socialism. Gallup’s ongoing tracking data reveal the same clear generational gap. Many try to point to Nordic countries as their ideal model. They do this completely unaware that those nations fiercely protect private property and open markets, whereas genuine socialism requires the state to seize control of the economy.
This amnesia did not happen by accident. It is largely the byproduct of our own success. America is vastly richer today than it was in 1945 or 1989. Real incomes, life expectancy, and material comforts have hit historical peaks. Yet the generation inheriting this unprecedented abundance is often the quickest to claim victimhood. Because they have never experienced literal scarcity or state tyranny, younger cohorts mistake the hard-won blessings of a free republic for absolute guarantees. Instead of viewing personal responsibility as the natural price of freedom, they treat cyclical economic tension as government oppression. I still remember the “affordability crisis” of the early 1980s, when inflation ran in the double digits, mortgage rates soared into the upper teens and my parents simply cut coupons, tightened their belts, and weathered the storm. That generation treated hardship as a test of resilience, not as proof that the system itself was illegitimate. Today’s youth seem entirely willing to trade liberty for a promise of state-managed equality and fiscal security. It is a bitter irony to witness. As the country grows more prosperous, defending the very freedoms that created that prosperity suddenly feels less urgent.
Technology has only deepened the void. We have effectively outsourced our memory to our devices. The Google effect is well documented, proving that people remember where information is stored rather than the information itself. There is also the photo-taking impairment effect, where offloading a moment to a smartphone actively suppresses your brain from retaining it. Add to this the total collapse of book reading. The long research assignments that once forced students to wrestle with primary sources have been replaced by searchable snippets and short algorithmic videos. History has been downgraded from a deeply internalized narrative into just another endless feed. The result is not just shallower knowledge. It is a much thinner sense of obligation to the people who came before us.
Combining profound material wealth with digital forgetting is uniquely dangerous for the United States. America did not become the premier global superpower or a magnet for immigrants simply because of its size or natural resources. It reached those heights because of a highly specific set of ideas. We established that rights precede the government, that power must be divided, that citizens keep what they earn, and that no dictator has the authority to redefine human nature. Those ideas acted as a beacon for people who had seen the horrifying alternatives firsthand. Hungarians in 1956, Cubans after 1959, Vietnamese boat people, Soviet Jews, Venezuelans, and Hong Kongers did not uproot their lives for better weather. They came here, assimilated here, because they knew in their bones exactly what collectivism does to the human soul.
If our younger generations forget why those millions fled their homelands, they will never understand why the American experiment is actually worth defending. National soft power—the ability to attract rather than coerce—requires more than aircraft carriers and Hollywood movies. It rests on the credibility of our claim that this country is still a place where individuals can live as they choose. When massive numbers of native-born citizens start treating that claim as an outdated or oppressive joke, the beacon dims. Our allies notice. Our adversaries notice.
None of this is inevitable. Earlier generations also arrived at adulthood with gaps in knowledge; they filled them. The difference now is the scale of the forgetting combined with an ideological current that treats the 20th century’s central lessons as optional. Teaching history as a series of grievances or as a prelude to the present rather than as a record of what actually happened—tyranny’s body count, communism’s economic failure, the specific reasons 400,000 Americans died between 1941 and 1945—leaves students unequipped. They cannot fathom the Greatest Generation because they have never been required to try.
The remedy here is not fond nostalgia. It is the unapologetic teaching of cause and effect. World War II demonstrated the horrifying human cost of totalitarian ambition. The Cold War proved that command economies ultimately crush individual dignity and ruin everyday lives. And twenty-five years ago this September, radical jihadists murdered 2,977 people on American soil precisely because they considered a free and open society an offense that justified slaughtering innocent civilians. The dead, the first responders, and the passengers of Flight 93 deserve to be remembered as more than just another date on a calendar. These are not political talking points. This is the unvarnished historical record. A country that refuses to transmit that record to its youth will eventually cease to be a country that people risk everything to reach. Prosperity bought us time, and technology made forgetting incredibly easy. Memory is our only remaining variable. If we lose it, we lose the very foundation that made our prosperity and our superpower status possible in the first place.
About the Author: Stephen D. Cook
Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals When We’re Finished and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller precision-strike trilogy leading with In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida. This first appeared in RealClearDefense.
