In the early 1990s, a powerful new trend swept through American youth sports. Seemingly overnight, kids across the country began receiving trophies, awards, and accolades not just for winning or placing, but merely for showing up.

“Participation trophies” were a cultural phenomenon, and have since become shorthand for the often disastrous consequences of weaponized good intentions. These shiny symbols of sameness quickly became ubiquitous throughout suburban America, adorning mantles and bedroom shelves from coast to coast, injecting its woo-woo pseudoscience into the DNA of a generation-and-a-half of American kids.

This phenomenon wasn’t foisted on our culture by accident. It began in the bowels of California academia, championed by a childless progressive politician with grandiose ideas about human nature, the role of government, child psychology, and the “proper” way to raise the nation’s children.

That politician’s name was John Vasconcellos.

John Vasconcellos retired from politics in 2004 and passed away in 2014 at the age of 82. He is celebrated in Democratic circles as one of the most “successful” politicians in California’s history. But the unintended consequences of his vision created a generation less prepared for failure, less resilient to adversity, and more anxious than any other generation in modern history. It also became a multi-billion-dollar industry that took decades to unwind.

Progressivism often confuses good intentions with good outcomes. And their participation trophies weren’t just harmless, plastic souvenirs—they were symbols of a deeply broken ideology. A delusional worldview. The nationwide policies born of John Vasconcellos’s utopian theories weren’t harmless overreach; they were a generational catastrophe.