Franke: 2026 — a ‘Declaration’ Year
2026: A ‘Declaration’ Year
by Mark Franke
This year I will not make any New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that I don’t have a need for personal improvement in many areas of my life. I do.
Instead, my focus is at the macro level. What should American society resolve to improve in 2026? What is the most important societal problem to address? Finally, how can I contribute toward making things better?
The answer to our most important societal problem is simple: violence, especially violence in pursuit of a political goal. I don’t need to rehearse all the instances of political violence that occurred in 2025. Assassinations were the worst of it but there was plenty of non-lethal bodily violence as well as intentional property destruction, justified in the twisted minds of the perpetrators as noble because it was in a noble cause.
Recent polling provides insight into how American opinion is shifting to an “ends justify the means” way of thinking. Here are just a few examples of this disturbing trend:
There is an increasing acceptance of political violence, particularly among younger generations. An August 2024 survey by Citizen Data found that only 44 percent of Gen Z and 67 percent of Millennials believed that violence against elected officials was never acceptable, compared to nearly 90 percent of older generations. The same report found that nearly half of Gen Z and about two in ten millennials found it acceptable to “forcibly occupy public buildings” or “kill or physically harm” elected officials.
In further support of this trend, a September 2025 YouGov poll showed that among adults under 30, 19 percent said political violence can sometimes be justified, compared to just 11 percent of Americans overall.
It’s not just political violence. A September 2025 study in the journal ”Psychology of Violence” linked workplace burnout and systemic frustration to a willingness to justify extreme violence. The study was prompted by a 2024 poll that found 41 percent of young adults viewed the murder of a CEO as acceptable.
The Edelman Trust Barometer in January 2025 reported that 55 percent of 18–34-year-olds approve of violence, property damage or misinformation as tools for social change. Among Gen Z, 31 percent believe violence is an appropriate way to drive change.
Then there is that tiresome mantra that speech is violence. A September 2025 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that a record 34 percent of college students believe that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable. This represents a 50 percent increase over the last five years. This trend cuts across partisan lines, with increased acceptance of violence by both right- and left-leaning students.
Speech is not violence no matter how extreme. But it can provoke violence in those unstable, certainly a caution to each of us in what we say and how we say it. We all need to ratchet down the rhetoric. An easy starting point is to stop the name-calling as the final word in political debate. Resorting to epithets makes us look like a school playground full of unruly, spoiled adolescents.
Friedrich Nietzsche, hardly my favorite philosopher, summed up this nihilistic attitude quite well when he said, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I, for one, have no intention of staring into the abyss. Rather, I would like to suggest a better way to face our future.
The year 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our foundational document that eloquently expresses what we are about in America. Despite our imperfect implementation of its ideals, it is a worthwhile tool to point us toward true north.
We have the opportunity to use the year to refocus on the Declaration, what it meant in 1776 and what it still means in 2026. We should encourage these younger generations, generations that mine helped raise, to take a moment to contemplate what we are as a nation and of what we are capable. Capable, that is, so long as liberty remains our watchword.
If it comes down to Friedrich Nietzsche or Thomas Jefferson as the choice for a philosophical lodestar, that’s an easy one for me. One’s writing points to a bright future while the other’s points to a dark past that will only get darker. I realize that I am oversimplifying the dichotomy but sometimes that is what it takes.
Most importantly, I realize that the responsibility for promoting this is at least partly mine. This brings me back to my initial avoidance of personal New Year’s resolutions. So I will make just one. I resolve to double down on ensuring that my writing remains positive and optimistic, always with an encouraging outlook on whatever problem that gets my attention.
The abyss can’t gaze back at me if I don’t gaze into it.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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