Karan Gupta is pretty sure he’s woke, but he wants to define the term. The rising senior at University High School backs universal healthcare, stronger social safety nets, and anti-imperialist foreign policy. However, he won’t sign on to the ideological conformity of cancel culture.

“It’s America. People can voice whatever opinion they want,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean I have to agree with you.”

This kind of distinction gets mentioned often at Youth for Common Sense, a club that meets every Thursday throughout the school year at University High to discuss hot-button issues such as abortion and gun laws.

The club was founded last fall by students Calder Law, a Democrat, and David Chen, a Republican. That arrangement is kind of the point. The group exists to get high schoolers with different views to talk to one another about politics without anyone being ostracized or shouted down.

Law and Chen formed the club right around the time conservative activist and Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a September campus event in Utah. Despite students’ range of political outlooks, the assassination drove much of the early interest in the club. The club’s best-attended meeting, and its most unanimous in agreement, was one on preventing political violence, held soon after Kirk’s death.

“All we’ve ever really grown up with is this incredibly polarized environment, where all we ever see on TV is people shouting at each other,” Law said. “What we’re trying to do is actually get people to have discussions with each other.”

Before each meeting, Law and Chen circulate a one-page primer on the topic of the week. A second sheet titled “How to have a political discussion” reminds club members of ways to keep the conversation civil but thought-provoking. Examples include “listen to understand and paraphrase the other person before you answer.” And, “If you feel heated, take a breath before replying.”

If the argument is going nowhere, there’s an escape plan: “Let’s agree to pause this for now.”

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In the last session of the school year earlier this month, roughly two dozen students sat in a loose circle eating lunch — some had DoorDashed from Shake Shack — while offering hot takes on immigration. The primer laid out the context: a 2023 peak of 2.5 million unauthorized border crossings, some 3.5 million cases backed up in immigration court, and the Trump administration’s “Zero Release” approach.

Law opened by asking everyone to outline their views before turning it over to the group. Some ideas drew near-consensus: secure the border, then fix a legal immigration system nearly everyone described as broken, slow, and bureaucratic. Most agreed that the Trump administration has succeeded in securing the border and that doing so is necessary, but also that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was operating chaotically at best and maliciously at worst.

Then it got into the weeds. The most intense exchange of the hour centered on a hypothetical: If an undocumented immigrant gets pulled over for speeding, should that be grounds for deportation?

One student argued that speeding endangers others and that any crime should be justification for deportation. Another countered that roughly 1 in 10 American motorists has a speeding ticket, and holding noncitizens to a standard you’d never apply to citizens creates two tiers of justice. A third pointed out that the crime rate among undocumented immigrants is lower than that of native-born citizens.

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At different points, club members inspired outrage, laughter, gasps, and interruptions, but none lasted long. Acting as referee, Law broke up verbal scuffles before they got out of hand. After all, he said repeatedly, maybe their point would make sense if only they were allowed to finish it.

“It’s not really about winning or losing,” said Miles Krepelka, a rising junior who identifies as a political independent and spent years in competitive debate before deciding he disliked its scorekeeping. “It’s about coming to a common understanding.”

The students mostly agree that these types of conversations don’t happen in their classes. “School kind of disincentivizes this type of discussion because it can create emotions or controversy,” said club member Adrian Kucheria. University High sits squarely in a left-leaning city, making the social or academic cost of holding an unpopular view feel higher.

Chen, the Republican cofounder, has experienced this firsthand. “You have to pick your battles,” he said. He’s never been “canceled” but has decided a few times not to share an opinion in class.

Law said Chen was the first openly Republican friend he’d ever had a real political argument with. “I think that’s true for so many youths across the country,” he said. “They just assume everybody in their neighborhood, or in their school, thinks the same way they do.”

What’s striking is how little care there is for the left-right axis around which older generations organize. Many students called themselves independent, which they are quick to say doesn’t mean centrist and doesn’t mean quietly right-wing — it just means they don’t toe the party line. Gupta, the progressive, thinks “it should be more policy by policy.”

Mackenzie Renaudin, a rising junior, said her views have drifted toward the center over the course of the year because the club kept pushing past talking points. “We can meet in the middle on issues and not just stand completely on one side,” she said.

All this cuts against the story often told about young people and politics — that they’re fragile, siloed, and allergic to disagreement. The students in Youth for Common Sense seem more willing to sit inside a hard conversation than many adults.

Youth for Common Sense is bigger than University High now. Eight chapters were launched this year, from Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire to a majority-Republican club in Texas that the founders consider more a foil to their branch. Eight more are committed to begin in the fall.

Law and Chen give Kirk’s Turning Point USA and other organizations credit for taking civil discourse seriously. What they say is missing is a version for high schoolers who are largely too young to vote and are still forming their political views. They’re also pushing back on the kind of online political discourse that condenses hours-long discussion into one viral humiliation clip designed to minimize and ridicule.

“A lot of people in America have lost the idea that the people they disagree with are also fellow Americans,” Krepelka said. “You’ve got to deal with them.”