Hi there, gen Z person here. Things are bad but remember that, as always, you only see and hear about the vocal minority. No matter how poor American education standards are, it is irrefutable that Trumpism could not exist without idiots from all generations. The education paradigms we are emerging from cannot possibly be worse than those which produced tens of millions of conservatives and hundreds of millions of nonvoters. This is specifically because of those gen X leftists and millennial teachers you mentioned. We aren’t competing as generations–failures of the past become the lessons of the present because older generations also have smart people. So how do you know gen Z won’t do even better? Everything else aside, growing up under fascism creates widespread discontent. I’d say from personal knowledge that for every one gen Z kid that believes in the system are five who at least recognize it’s broken.

Now, I won’t pretend to be particularly optimistic either; things are bad. However, I also want to believe that we can and will do better. And maybe I’ll be wrong, but at least I haven’t given up hope.