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What Gen Z Actually Wants, According to the DNC’s Youngest Member

Milan van Dam says Gen Z is the generation that is most empathetic toward their peers.

Of the Democratic National Committee’s 65 executive members, only one is a high school student. At just 17 years old, Milan van Dam is not only the youngest-ever member of the executive committee but also the youngest member of the DNC.

A student from Potomac, Maryland, van Dam says he’s spent nearly half of his life organizing for Democrats. As the child of immigrants, he found himself naturally inclined toward activism. He’s worked on multiple congressional campaigns and has served in leadership positions with the Maryland High School Democrats and Montgomery County Young Democrats. Now he’s the National Chair of High School Democrats of America.

The High School Democrats of America mobilizes more than 11,000 members across the country in some 500 local chapters. Ahead of the midterms, van Dam and his colleagues are registering voters, making thousands of calls, and passing resolutions within the DNC in an attempt to make young voices heard.

This is no easy task. Van Dam said the Democratic Party can often be out of touch about what issues get Gen Z to the ballot box—matters such as affordability, immigration, and corporate political influences. The party also must compete with Republicans’ increasingly effective ability to target youth voters. Right now, van Dam says, Democrats have taken young people for granted and not met them where they’re at. Long-term work must be done, he says, to invest in young people, in youth organizing, and to frame a vision that resonates with young people.

Van Dam sat down with The Nation to discuss his organizing, the state of the Democratic Party, and the issues that drive Gen Z.

Cate Latimer and Alice Scott: You’ve spent nearly half of your life organizing for Democrats—what prompted you to join this cause?

Milan van Dam: When I was around 12 years old, I got involved with educational policy and did advocacy with the school board. I started advocating for [interactive teaching screens] because I was like, some schools have these screens and some of them don’t. I just became obsessed with wanting the government to work for everybody equally, and I was like, “OK, here it doesn’t. That seems like a problem.” Eventually, I just wanted to know where decisions were made, and I wanted to go there and tell people how decisions should be made, which is like a bit of a bossy teenager kind of thing to do. But I think I just really cared about making sure young people were being represented.

CL&AS: You’re the youngest-ever member of the DNC’s executive committee. How did you get there?

MvD: I think I literally just found High School Dems through Googling “high school Democrats” and joined. I became the first-rank caucus chair, then chair of the Maryland High School Democrats, then I was national vice chair. Eventually I was made national chair.

The year before, we passed a DNC bylaw charter amendment to put the [High School Democrats] national chair on the DNC executive committee. So that was something that I lobbied for the year before as well, not knowing that that seat would go to me at all—that was........

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