Inside David Hogg’s fearless bet that Gen Z politicians can save American democracy

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Inside David Hogg’s fearless bet that Gen Z politicians can save American democracy

By Devin Gordon

Which city is this? Boston. David Hogg is in Boston right now. He arrived this morning to host a conversation at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, his alma mater. Now, he’s in an Uber, heading to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., where he lives—or at least where he has an apartment with a bed he sleeps in about five times a month. Hogg graduated a year ago, and that August he cofounded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee (PAC) helping to elect young progressives to office. It’s only two weeks into April, and already this month he’s traveled to Austin, Houston, Atlanta, and Orlando, meeting with candidates backed by his organization. Next week, after overseeing the move into Leaders We Deserve’s new 4,800-square-foot office in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood, he’ll be off to Seattle.

Hogg is 24 now. It’s been six years since the world learned his name after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a gunman murdered 17 of his classmates and teachers. Hogg was hiding in an office with a few other students, and somehow, despite his terror, he had the composure and presence of mind to turn on his phone and interview his friends in real time about a shooting spree they didn’t know if they would even live through.

In the months that followed, Hogg, along with several of his surviving classmates, including his younger sister, Lauren, who lost four friends during the rampage, became the public faces of a reinvigorated national movement to fight gun violence. He took a gap year after high school to colaunch March for Our Lives, a student-led nonprofit that organizes protest marches on state capitols nationwide and lobbies governments at all levels to pass common-sense gun control legislation. It now has 17 full-time employees. (Hogg remains on its board.) But as the years passed, the rest of his Parkland classmates got on with their lives, while Hogg threw himself even deeper into activism. He enrolled at Harvard, and unlike most bewildered college freshmen, seemed to have a clear plan about what he needed to do with his time in college, seeking out professors who could school him in the history of “movement politics”—especially conservative movements—so he could understand why he and his fellow progressives keep getting their butts kicked.

“When I was in high school, I felt like all politicians were corrupt. They all sucked. And frankly, a lot of them do,” says Hogg, crunched into the back seat of the Uber. He’s taller than you might expect for someone with such a boyish face—6-foot-1—and so slender, he looks like he could fold himself into his Rollaboard. But after a few years of mostly fruitless activism, “I realized that it’s not enough to point out what’s wrong,” he says. “You actually need to talk about how to fix it. I’ve come to realize that power doesn’t shout. It whispers.”

Whispering doesn’t come naturally to Hogg. He is still seething so much inside that you can almost see the steam burning off him. He has a tendency to monologue with rising intensity, peppering his speech with F-bombs, and he has a particular fondness for haranguing politicians, especially Democrats who chicken out on gun legislation. What he learned at Harvard, though, is that conservatives win because they play the long game, seizing gradual control of state governments, incubating far-right legislation on social issues, from guns to abortion to trans rights, and elevating it to federal law with the help of courts stacked with handpicked conservative judges. This is how they overturned Roe v. Wade. It took two generations, but they got it done. And that’s why, upon graduating from Harvard, at a moment when he could’ve used his fame to unlock any door—Harvard Law, the presidential reelection campaign, the speaking circuit, for example—he decided to put himself in the back seat and start a nonprofit dedicated to creating political stars of the future.

“Our biggest advantage,” he tells me, “is time.” Now, when he sits in meetings with squishy Democrats and smug Republicans, “what keeps me calmer is the fact that, as dark as this might be, we’re going to outlive them. That’s the greatest advantage you can have in politics.”

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I FELT LIKE ALL POLITICIANS WERE CORRUPT. THEY ALL SUCKED. AND FRANKLY, A LOT OF THEM DO.”

Hogg cofounded Leaders We Deserve with a seasoned campaign manager named Kevin Lata to find young people willing to embark on a career path that appears more futile, draining, demoralizing—and even dangerous—than ever before. In the past year, more than 30 members of the U.S. Congress—roughly half-a-dozen senators and more than 25 representatives, ranging from progressive Democrats such as Oregon’s Rep. Earl Blumenauer to moderate Republicans such as Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher—have chosen to get the heck out rather than subject themselves to two more years of intraparty bullying and physical threats from unhinged constituents.

The maturation of Generation Z, though, offers a chance to reboot and reenergize what’s become one of America’s most hostile workplaces. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, 27, is the nation’s first Gen Z member of Congress—his successful run in 2022 was managed by Lata. Frost describes his philosophy of political work as “creating coalitions and being in fellowship with people you feel like truly have the passion versus the ambition.” It doesn’t always turn out to be that way, of course. Frost’s passion helped him land a plum assignment on the House Oversight Committee; but it means that one of his regular job hazards is sitting across the dais from fellow committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene, and when it comes time for roll call, she’s got the votes on her side. Frost has had to get used to losing, a lot, but all that losing reinforces a virtue that’s common among Gen Zers across the professional spectrum: They don’t feel entitled to win. They know it’ll take every drop of their passion to flip the script.

Hogg fights discouragement too. When his spirit flags, he rewatches motivational movie scenes, and his default choice is a sequence from 2011’s Moneyball in which the struggling, cash-strapped Oakland Athletics, assembled by Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane, go on an improbable 20-game winning streak. “Whenever we have setbacks, whenever I’m just tired, frankly, I watch that scene over and over.” In years past, he says, as we glide through a tunnel under Boston, he’d watch it and “envision us just fucking taking down the NRA.” And then it happened. Or more accurately, the NRA imploded. “It’s pretty amazing,” he says. When he watches the Moneyball scene now, it’s the 2024 election he pictures. He feels the adrenaline start to pump again, and he thinks to himself: This is what it’s going to feel like when we win. It’s going to be win after win, after win, after win, after win.

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Leaders We Deserve is helping these young candidates win

The young Americans taking a career gamble on politics are smart, politically engaged, and restless for change. They are following their convictions despite the risks to their bank accounts and personal safety. And they all have help.

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