Kossacks Under 35 is a weekly diary series designed to create a community within DailyKos that focuses on young people. Our overall goals are to work on increasing young voters' Democratic majority, and to raise awareness about issues that particularly affect young people, with a potential eye to policy solutions. Kossacks of all ages are welcome to participate (and do!), but the overall framework of each diary will likely be on or from a younger person's perspective. If you would like more information or want to contribute a diary, please email kath25 at kossacksunder35 (at) gmail dot com
When I agreed to do this weeks Kossacks Under Thirty Five, I had it in my mind to do a quick review of three new political books, each presenting a different perspective on the youth vote. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that would probably be a pretty boring, static topic. I'd be throwing my thoughts out at you telling you what to read and y'all would be agreeing or disagreeing, but I don't think it would be a hugely productive conversation.
I still want to review the books, because I think they're really important, but I also want to open the floor up to all of you much more. I think these books are really important in that they serve as educational tools and institutional memory for young activists in Democratic politics, and they provide a kind of institutional memory for the youth movement itself. They let us know where we've been, bust myths and stereotypes that pervade our thinking about politics and the role of young people in politics, and they provide a much broader sense of what is happening. Together, they provide a fairly comprehensive understanding of what is going on among young voters in in Democratic youth politics.
But at the end of the day, they are just three books, and they certainly aren't the only sources of information on young voters and youth activism. So in addition to having a discussion about these books and their theses, I'd like to preface this by asking all of you what other sources you find useful in educating yourself about these topics? Where do you get your information and how do you yourself spread information? What does the communications backbone of progressive youth organizing look like to you and how can we make it better?
Without further ado, here's my take on three new books: Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority; Millennial Makeover: MySpace, Youtube and the Future of American Politics; and Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.
Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority
In a bit of self-promotion, I'll put my own book up first. And in the interest of promoting progressive communications and ideas networks, I'll note that Susan G and the Daily Kos Diary Rescue is the only reason I even wrote a book. My publishers noticed my diaries as they were rescued and posted to the front page, and it was through that exposure that they found their way to my blog and approached me about writing Youth to Power. Without those diary rescues, I'd probably still be working at my old non-profit job.
Youth to Power is primarily the story of how young voters - mostly Millennials with a smattering of "cuspers" and late Gen Xers - reinvented progressive youth politics in the last 5 years.
In the 1970s, after the disappointing youth turnout at the polls, the Democratic Party and young voters went their separate ways. Politicians thought that young voters didn't turn out at the polls and so ignored young voters, and, being ignored by politicians, young voters retreated into issue activism, joining the PIRGs in the 70's, fighting nuclear proliferation and apartheid in the 80s, and campaigning for the environment and against globalization in the 90s. Meanwhile, the Republicans took the opposite approach. They invested millions of dollars in leadership training organizations like Young America's Foundation and the Leadership Institute. These programs gave us conservative all-stars like Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. They also targeted youth as a constituency and in the 1980s, young people voted first for Reagan and then for Bush Sr.
This situation continued almost unabated (the exception being 1992) until 2004. In 2004, lacking any effective vehicle for youth activism within the party, young Millennials created their own institutions like The League of Young Voters, the Oregon Bus Project, Music for America, Punk Voter, Forward Montana and many more. Internally, the Young Democrats broke from the party and began to recreate themselves as an organization. Aided in part by a few large funders, these groups pioneered new (and revived old) strategies for reaching their peers. Primarily these were peer to peer (face to face field outreach), and culturally relevant outreach that integrated political action into the social and cultural lives of young people.
Youth to Power is a history of these groups - who they are, what they do, how they evolved, and the challenges they now face five years into a movement to remake progressive youth politics. It's a roadmap to the growing progressive youth movement for young person becoming involved.
Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics
If Youth to Power is the practical road map to what is happening in youth organizing, Millennial Makeover offers the view from 50,000 feet and contextualizes the current attitudes of the Millennial Generation within the framework of American History. In this, it owes a large debt to the work of generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe, upon whose theory of generational "cycles" much of their work is based. In a nutshell, that theory, applied to politics, boils down to this:
Every 40 years or so American politics goes through a "realignment," or a period during which the balance of power changes radically, as do the kinds of politics that are practiced. These realignments come in two types - idealistic and civic - each matching the characteristics of the generation which drives them. Idealistic realignments tend to focus on moral and personal politics and are typically characterized by gridlock and inaction in Washington. Political participation tends to ebb during idealist eras, and more voters identify as "independents." Civic realignments are characterized by a greater pragmatism and public participation rates, and greater partisan identification in the electorate. These eras tend to be times in which the government and how it functions are made anew. In both instances, the weaker of the two parties at the time of the realignment tends to come into power, not insignificantly through the help of new communications technologies.
The 20th Century saw two such realignments. First through the GI Generation, a civic generation which remade American government and business institutions in the pre- and post-WWII period through a radical expansion of the role of government in the lives of Americans via programs such as the GI Bill and the New Deal. Technological assistance for Democrats and the GI Generation in that realignment came via the advent of radio, exemplified by FDR's Fireside Chats. This was a high time for the Democratic Party. Approximately 40 years later, it was the Baby Boomers who realigned the country, this time as an idealist generation with the help of their savvy use of the television. The Baby Boomer period, from which we are now emerging, was marked by declining rates of participation, a focus on personal and moral issues (the culture wars), and the ascendancy of the Republican Party, which attempted to minimize the (social and economic) role of government and undo the reforms of the New Deal.
This cyclical realignment has occurred 5 times in our history, and Winograd and Hais argue that the 6th realignment is upon us. With the help of social software (blogs, wikis, youtube, facebook, etc.), Millennials, who are already showing higher and higher rates of participation in the political process and a greater identification with the Democratic Party, will once again remake American politics, from the issues on which the government takes action, all the way down to the means by which it interacts with its citizens.
Party Crashing: How the Hip Hop Generation Declared Political Independence
Finally we get to Party Crashing, which offers an in-depth look at a group of young people that are often (and mistakenly) thought to be a monolithic block - young african american voters.
I'm going to say somewhat less about this book since I'm still in the process of reading it, but so far it offers a fascinating look into the political divides within the African American community between what the author labels the Civil Rights Generation, the Hip Hop Generaton, and the Obama Generation, which roughly (though not identically) equate to Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials.
The bulk of Goff's argument is that race is a much smaller factor in the political identity of the younger two generations, and that the Democratic party cannot keep deploying the same rhetoric on race and hope to continue to win black voters. Goff also notes that within the black community there are huge tensions between these generations and a very different model of activism, with the older civil rights generation relying on a race-based, personality driven protest ethic epitomized by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, while the young generation's political identity is less about race than a number of issues (she identifies class as a much more powerful force in the lives of the young generations). The Hip Hop and Obama generations also prefer a less star-focused, protest oriented activist model, exemplified by the Jena 6 case and networked activism by groups like Color of Change.
Personally I have a few quibles with this book in that Goff frequently discusses the Hip Hop and Obama generations interchangeably, even though they clearly have different characteristics (negative vs. positive views of government, cynical vs. optimistic demeanors, etc.). But I can't stress that if you want to understand activism in the black community, particularly among youth, this book is thus far an excellent guide.
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So those are my reviews/recomendations. Together I think that these books make an incredibly important trilogy for anyone who wants to understand progressive youth organizing today.
So my questions again are these - what other sources are out there where young people like us can learn about progressive youth activism? What vehicles are there for us to share information adn collaborate? How do we get the word out about books like these and projects like Kossacks Under 35 to the larger progressive community (and by default more young people to help us get critical mass)?
What does the progressive communications and idea pipeline look like? What's out there and what's missing and what can we all do?