Often referred to as the American royal family, the Kennedys established themselves as a political dynasty long before former President John F. Kennedy took his seat in the Oval Office. On Nov. 11, Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg announced his bid for New York’s 12th congressional district, which includes the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and all of Midtown Manhattan. Soon after, it was announced that his sister, Tatiana Schlossberg, is battling a terminal cancer diagnosis. Despite what feels like an infamously plagued family lineage, Caroline Kennedy, the mother of both Schlossbergs, has stood watch over her family’s legacy for decades. With Jack Schlossberg’s entrance into the political arena, it seems she may be ready to pass the torch off to her son. Once again, the Kennedys have given America another Jack, and as a fourth-generation Kennedy Democrat, I couldn’t be more excited.

It’s been 60 years since the assassination of JFK. This marked the end of the “Camelot” era of the 1960s, as dubbed by former First Lady, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, who reflected on her husband’s three years in office. It was to be a new age for America. A young, handsome, wealthy Irish-Catholic Democrat was in office, and under his leadership, the United States would prosper. Though we never got to see the lasting benefits of the Kennedy administration, there was a young family tragically left behind: a grieving widow and her two small children, Caroline and Jack.

John F. Kennedy Jr., better known in the press as JFK Jr. or “John John,” was the only son of JFK and Jackie O. He was just three years old when his father was assassinated. A photo taken of him by TIME magazine, saluting his father’s funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, shaped an entire generation’s view of him. It was an image he was expected to live up to. John F. Kennedy Jr. went on to publish George, a cutting-edge political magazine that reflected the climate of 1990s New York City. Just four years after its launch, at 38 years old, JFK Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, tragically lost their lives when a plane they were aboard, piloted by Kennedy Jr., lost connection and crashed off the coast of their family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

And now, eight decades after JFK first entered Congress, the torch has passed once more, this time to his grandson, Jack Schlossberg. At 32, Schlossberg is only a few years older than his grandfather was when he first strode into the Capitol. But what stands out most is not the symmetry of their ages; it’s the sense that, for the first time in a long time, a Kennedy is choosing not just to honor a legacy, but to actively reshape it for a generation that has grown up deeply unsure whether American politics are still capable of inspiring anything at all.

Schlossberg’s announcement, splashed across The New York Times, ABC News, USA Today, Reuters, the BBC and even Fox News, made one thing clear: He is not running as a relic from a bygone era. He is running as a young Democrat who sees New York’s 12th district not merely as a wealthy Manhattan enclave, but as a proving ground for the future of the party, the future of public service and honestly the future of hope itself.

He speaks not in grand abstractions, but in the language of young New Yorkers, by promising to address the cost-of-living crisis, cuts to childcare and education and the erosion of faith in public institutions. He says outright that he is running to “win back the House” for Democrats and that he will fight for the social programs that built the American middle class. His grandfather advocated those ideas in speeches; Schlossberg posts about them on Instagram at 1 a.m. That is the point: the medium, the moment and the messenger, it has all shifted. But the core belief in a government that protects its people remains intact.

A Fordham University student and organizer of the upcoming Fordham Model United Nations event hosting Schlossberg, Mary Hannah Gallagher, FCRH ’28, explained the story of how Schlossberg ended up agreeing to speak on our campus. Improbably, it started with an Instagram story.

“He posted a story saying, ‘NYU Democrats slide up, I want to meet up.’ As a joke, I slid up and said, ‘You can come hang out with the Fordham’s Democrats!’ I forgot about it until I opened my phone on the Ram Van to a DM from him saying, ‘We’d love to make this happen!’ And the rest is history,” Gallagher shared.

Critics will insist that he is untested or that he is leaning on his last name. But history tells another story. Every Kennedy who stepped into public life, from JFK to RFK to Ted to Caroline, did so under a shadow of a legacy larger than any one person. And yet, time and again, they emerged as devoted public servants whose legacies are measured not by their tragedies but by their impact. Jack Schlossberg is not running away from the burden of his last name. He is running toward the responsibility of it.

And I, as a Fordham student and as someone raised on stories of a better politics, am choosing to believe in what that might mean. Not just for the 12th district, but for the country. Because if our generation is ever going to recover its faith in democracy, it will be because leaders like Schlossberg prove, through action, that idealism isn’t naïve, it’s necessary.

For the first time in a long time, America might just be ready for another Jack.

Paolo Liaci, FCRH ’27, is an English major from Montclair, New Jersey.