The Youth Governor: the inspiring students hoping to be future politicians
Everyone says they want to see more political engagement in young people, but the popular image of junior politicians isn’t the most flattering. In fiction as the public imagination, they’re creepy little careerists following in the footsteps of Tracy Flick, overachievers whose plucky go-getter attitudes mask a more unsettling ambition in close flirtation with outright power-hunger. What kind of teenager aspires to being a hall monitor for all of America?
With their new documentary The Youth Governor, brothers/co-directors Matthew and Jaron Halmy hope to set the record straight by presenting a humanistic counterpoint. The Culver City natives both took part in the California YMCA’s expansive Youth & Government program in their boyhood years, and their memories of these days of spirited debate and democracy in action are some of their youth’s fondest. The fellow students they met during this time were passionate and principled, leaving a lifelong impact that would compel the Halmys to return as volunteer advisers in adulthood. Surrounded once again by this crackling energy as it courses through a new generation, they saw a vision of hope for the future of the American electorate, and now wish to inform the rest of the world: the kids are, indeed, all right.
“When we were younger, some of the more elementary aspects of this process resonated with us: public speaking, the fellowship and camaraderie,” Jaron tells the Guardian from his home in Los Angeles. “But as we grew older, we noticed that the political calculus of campaigning became more advanced. It all felt more intricate, if not quite real. Kids take it very seriously.”
Today’s Youth & Government model legislature gathers about 4,000 participants representing more than 50 “delegations” divvied up by district, and challenges them to role-play the real deal in the state’s Capitol building. High-schoolers form parties, appoint representatives, and run for key leadership positions complete with a grownup platform and campaign strategy team. In the age of social media, the free-for-all has evolved into a selfcontained social ecosystem, as every day’s events and main characters take on a second life as memes shared through the intra-organizational messaging system Yodel. “It’s so advanced and detailed, this program – there’s committees, chairs, the secretary of state’s office that runs all of it behind the scenes,” Jaron says. “There’s a culture within the delegations. There’s so much story, it wasn’t immediately clear where to start.”
The highest and most prestigious office is that of youth governor, and the Halmys eventually came to accept that their best bet at a workable structure would be following that thread rather than the comprehensive survey they initially had in mind. For eight years, they ambled around the meetings, planning sessions and speeches in hopes of capturing the electricity they felt when they were on the other side, but their footage never quite cohered. (“We did that for so long, I just hit a wall,” Jaron says.) Until 2019, when a crop of enthusiastic candidates gifted the documentarians a race that could serve as both microcosm of and foil to big-league American politics. From a pool of highly motivated competitors, three delegates advance to the final round of voting and face crises not so far removed from the national scale. A rising favorite gets an October surprise when a video of him endorsing a controversial Betsy DeVos position surfaces; a progressive-leaning young woman winds up at the fore of the conservative faction, and must reconcile her beliefs with her base.
“Someone asked us if these kids are more keyed in to issues and hopeful and focused on change than past generations,” Matthew offers. “And our answer is no, every generation of young people is at the forefront of the issues in their time. There’s always going to be a core set of kids fired up about this. What’s different is that Gen Z is playing chess, where we were only ever playing checkers. They’re so advanced in understanding how to effect change and engage with voters. They’re going so hard.”
“People say kids used to care and now they don’t, or they used to not care and now they do,” Jaron adds. “The only thing that really changes is the tools they have. The internet, this messaging platform Yodel, these have a huge influence on how the process evolved.”
Though the directors excluded any mention of Trump – they felt it would be a “red herring” driving the film’s concepts off course – the alt-right nonetheless rears its ghastly head in the film’s most shocking turn. Piper Samuels, the centrist female candidate leading the right-most voting bloc, finds herself the subject of targeted attacks in a private messaging group pinging with misogynistic and antisemitic memes. A contingent of hate-mongers is eating through the party like termites, but instead of embracing them as the future, the leadership carries out the isolation and suffocation Americans hoped for from the GOP. Bipartisan sanity wins out in a scenario that would seem fancifully idealistic if it didn’t really happen. “I think young people are more receptive to love and friendship than adults,” Matthew says. “They’re less scarred by betrayals. I think that’s inherent in youth … Because they watch adults handle the world without being a part of it, there’s something about the spectator’s perspective that gives you clearer vision.”
That optimistic view of the next generation sets the Halmys’ vantage apart from those in comparable works, most noteworthy among them the recent doc Boys State. The film chronicles a similar model government program segregated along gender lines in the heart of Texas, known to the California circuit as a rival of sorts. The precocity of the subjects borders on the off-putting, and the camera looks at their articulation of aggrieved masculinity with a healthy cynicism. The Halmy brothers have refrained from seeing Boys State in the spirit of keeping your eyes on your own paper, but they deliberately staked out a kinder angle on their collaborators. “We didn’t want to drag the kids through the mud,” Matthew says. “As adult film-makers, we don’t want to put them in situations meant to draw out the insanity of modern American politics through them. This really touches them.”
Matthew and Jaron both emphasize how much this all means to the people who make it happen, many of whom have their life-changing road-toDamascus moment there on the senate chamber floor. But even those who don’t go on to a career of handshaking and baby-kissing still learn invaluable skills from public speaking to tactical thinking to communication practices. And though they couldn’t find space for it in the film, the brothers have cherished memories of the nightly fellowship events during which everyone cuts loose and consorts with potential significant others. For an age bracket that tends to organize identity around extracurriculars, this isn’t just an afterschool activity, but a way of life.
“What makes Youth Governor so incredible, and what we wanted to show with this, is the way that the kids really lose themselves in the experience of this simulation they’re performing,” Matthew says. “It’s not real, but in their minds, the competition and its stakes are all real. You get wrapped up in it, and then you go back to your city, and you wake up on Monday morning, and you trudge back to your high school, and you’re like, ‘What is this bullshit?’ And you realize it was one of the most incredible things that ever happened to you.”
The Youth Governor is now out in US cinemas and available on demand with a UK date to be announced