Soman Chainani on the Dream of a Young President

Young adult novelist Soman Chainani joins co-hosts Christian Barter and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the impact of age on politics. Chainani, the author of a new novel called Young World that features a teenage everyman’s unlikely rise to the presidency, explains trying to make his premise as plausible as possible using devices like a Supreme Court decision, a split Electoral College, and realistic images. He talks about smuggling civics lessons into the plot, getting young people excited to vote and run for office, and taking his story beyond the U.S. to imagine a global youth revolution and a fictional G-8 of teen leaders. Chainani also reflects on the impact of aging politicians’ unwillingness to relinquish power, particularly as life expectancies continue to rise. He reads from Young World.

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Soman Chainani

Young World • Coven • The School for Good and Evil series

Others

The President’s Daughter by Ellen Emerson White • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 51: Ellen Emerson White on the First Woman President, Real and Imagined • 1776 • Richie Rich • Scandal

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH SOMAN CHAINANI

V.V. Ganeshanathan: Seniors are overrepresented in every branch of government: executive, judicial, legislative. Dianne Feinstein died in office in 2023 at the age of 90. She was the oldest sitting member of Congress. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died a Supreme Court justice at the age of 87. History might be different if she had, perhaps, resigned. Citing two women as examples is also deceptive, because most of the people hanging onto office in this way are men. We’ve got 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, who has been in office, I went down a terrible Wikipedia rabbit hole yesterday, reading about this, he’s been in office since 1959 as an elected official, so he’s been in office since before the US was desegregated. Donald Trump is 80, Joe Biden is 83.

And then I was thinking about how several of the Founding Fathers lived to ripe old age, but if you’ve ever seen the not super historically accurate musical 1776 the Founding Fathers are young men when they’re doing their thing, and that part is pretty factually accurate. So, how did American government get so old? Why does seniority appeal to voters so much?

Soman Chainani: I don’t think it does. I think what happens is young people were not voting for the most part. Who are the most reliable voters? It’s old retirees who don’t have very much to do. So, becoming politically engaged, actually going out to vote, it becomes the day’s outing. It’s the group activity they all do together, and the fact that they just have the sheer numbers to do it.

Then you also look at the fact that life expectancy is getting so long. So you think people are old now, wait until you 20 years from now, when I think we’ll have presidential candidates who are in their 90s, because you also have, with greater life expectancy and health options and all these different things, you have this situation where no one wants to relinquish power. They’re in their 90s, they’re still able to form a functional sentence, and therefore they think they should be senator or president. Also, once you do have any sort of power, you don’t want to give it up. Look at Susan Collins, who said, when she ran, “I’m only going to do this for maximum, she gave a number, I think it was two terms, 12 years, and here she is, like 30 years later.

Part of the pitch in Young World is that young people have the power to throw all these old people out at any point, they have the demographic power, but they have to treat elections the way that old people do, as an outing, as something that we all do on every election day.

Christian Barter: Your protagonist, a high school senior named Denton Young, becomes famous by uploading a YouTube video about running for president. This starts because a girl challenges him to do something about what he’s complaining about in politics. He starts trending, and his reaction is to question whether he should really be a role model. He’s not student government president or an overachiever. Can you talk about his character and his unlikely, shall we say, rise to power?

SC: This has been such an interesting Rorschach test for the book, and it’s been extremely divisive in that there’s a minority of readers who read it, and instantly when he talks about how he’s trying to make this video to impress a girl that he’s in love with, who thinks he’s a do-nothing, that he basically just doom scrolls on his phone, plays video games, hangs with his friends and is not politically involved or active or has any sense of what’s happening in the world, the fact that he makes this video to impress a girl is divisive, right.

There’s this feeling amongst a certain politically engaged set that they want our first teenage president in fiction to be the true young Obama who is involved in the community and organized and doing it for noble reasons. But I just don’t think that’s where the majority of teenagers, especially teenage boys, are. They still think of politics as something for old people or something that they’re so disconnected from on a daily basis. It was very important to me to have this kid be in every man, and to start with the simple basic need of trying to impress a girl felt like the only way this novel could start. I wanted someone who ended up in office that I could take to any teenager in the country and be like, “Here’s a series of dominoes that you will understand now, in terms of how he would end up in power.”

I also wanted it to be super realistic, which comes with the fact that you have a few key elements. You have a teenage boy who’s in love with a girl who’s not in love with him. You have a teenage boy who’s keeping a secret. That’s an essential part of his character; I feel like every teenage boy I’ve ever met, including myself when I was 17, had big secrets. It’s part of being a teenage boy. You’re just naturally secretive in the way that teenage girls are not, because teenage girls like to talk to each other and open up about their secrets to each other, which is what I think bonds a lot of them, whereas teenage boys hold it very close and don’t even confess it to their best friends.

So, you have those elements of his character. Then I had to think about how this could realistically happen. How could you end up with a teenager in office? And I thought to myself, “Well, simple demographic power. If you had enough people write in a teenager for a protest vote, that could mess with an election.” So you have this kid make a viral video trying to impress a girl, telling people “You’ve got two old zombies running for president who are in their 70s and 80s, no one wants them, they’re corrupt, and we don’t have a third option because we don’t have a third party in America who could possibly represent youth. So instead of voting for either one of these candidates and voting for the lesser evil, in this case, there’s two evils, so just write me in instead to protest. And also get me a date with this girl.”

He ends up starting, unwittingly, this movement of writing him in for office as a way to revolt, and also to reclaim the right to be young, the right to be a teenager again, the right to not have to think about politics, to not have to think about all the things that the girl is telling him he has to think about. This leads to him getting 55 million votes. It prevents either candidate from getting to 270 And then I think the real part that can happen in real life is you would have chaos. You’d have the Republican and Democrat trying to steal the election from each other. You’d essentially have anarchy because no one has actually reached that electoral level, and now the whole system can be corrupted.

I came up with this scenario where the Supreme Court, in order to force the old Democrat and Republican candidates to work with each other, makes the kid president for 24 hours, essentially almost as a joke, to be like, “Listen, this kid’s going to stay in office unless you two can figure something out.” And they work out a compromise, they’re going to announce it, and then, in that 24 hours where they’re working this out, eight other governments around the world fall to teenagers in their own kind of violent revolutions, and that’s how you get this young world, and that’s all in the first 25 pages of the book.

VVG: So when you’re figuring this out, of course, like the legal requirement to be president is you have to be 35. I’m curious, when did you start with the premise of the teen president? When did you figure out how to actually make this happen?

SC: I’ve had the idea for a teenage president for more than 10 years now. I just felt like it would read like Richie Rich, you’d have a kid scootering around the White House on his little scooter with his sunglasses, and I’d rather die than read that story. It’s just so dumb, especially in a time when politics is so serious. It’s life with life or death for a lot of people. I thought the only way I could ever do this is if it was really real. Seeing just how anarchic the government has gotten, and how loose the Supreme Court has gotten with its way of doing things, and how political they’ve gotten, that started to seed things in my mind.

Then I think the key was to come up with this idea of such a strong movement that it runs internationally. You have other countries running their own coups with their own teenage leaders. Now it’s not just about America, but it’s about the world. That’s, I think, what excited me most, the idea that he’s just one of a group of leaders, meaning that him becoming teenage president wasn’t the whole book, in fact, it was just just a little bit at the beginning.

VVG: I don’t know if we’ve ever discussed this book, The President’s Daughter. I’m so obsessed with this book. It was a young adult book in the 80s about the teenage daughter of the first woman president and it’s hyper realistic. Your book is now in conversation for me, with that book, but that book is really about the U.S. It’s about the political pressures on the first woman president and on her teenage daughter. You basically portray a League of Youth Nations. So, why was this so important for you to do? Because once we have all of these players, it becomes like a thriller.

SC: I want young people to not just be engaged in politics, I want them to run the world. I mean, it’s the opposite of what these very old people who only elect very old candidates are thinking, which is, as you get older, you start to accrue wisdom, and you look at young people, and you’re like, “You don’t understand anything.” This is why you naturally support older and older candidates who are your age, because you sympathize with their level of wisdom and believe in it. I’m the opposite, I’m the outlier, where I’m like, “Okay, we have really messed things up, and the future is looking increasingly messed up, unless young people come in and actually shape the way they want the world to look. We actually need a revolution, politically, and also just in terms of how we live.”

I felt like it wasn’t enough to have a young U.S. president, you actually needed the whole world run by young people, so they could have this conclave. To me, the book was going to center on this group of young people meeting and being like, “What does the future look like?” Part of me was like, “Okay, there’s this kind of utopian vision of all young people coming together from around the world and coming up with a plan for the future.” And then you know the devil on my shoulder was like, “There is no way that’s what would happen. You get young people together, and young people, politically, when they’re in power, are going to act a lot like old people. You’re going to have some who are doing it for themselves, and some who have secret motives.” This idea of having to figure out why everybody’s in it was the key to it. The fact that a group of a league of young politicians might look a lot like the history that we often don’t learn.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy.