No more apologies for how often I update. I'm a busy lady. So moving right along, I had a birthday recently. It was absolutely wonderful, quite possibly my favourite birthday ever. Three dear, dear friends from undergrad came into town and we did all the things we're best at: we baked, we ate, we made silly jokes, we watched TV, we danced, we made fun of ourselves, we laughed a lot. It was everything turning 24 should have been. And by that I obviously mean that I pretended I was 20 again, with no one to miss.
One of the best parts of the weekend was going dancing at The Black Cat to some banghra music mixed with hip hop and 90's pop. There were a bunch of people from my grad school there and one girl who actually knows how to dance, so we all just imitated her or thought back to the last Bollywood movie we had seen. Turns out they do these nights once every 6-ish weeks, so I will definitely be back. As should everyone else.
My thought for this post actually comes from one of my classes (academia inspiring further reflection?! Shocking!), specifically my class on campaign finance. We had a guest speaker, Ellen Weintraub, one of the commissioners on the FEC, and she was fascinating. Her closing point, though, was basically that her job didn't matter. She essentially said that if young people just voted and cared about politics, the amount of money spent would stop mattering because people would be researching issues on their own and politicians wouldn't think it was worth it to spend so much on cheesy advertising campaigns. It sounded mostly like she didn't know how to make a clean exit out of her presentation so she went for a classic liberal position, but anyway, that's not the point. The point is, she posed the question to our class, "Why do people your age not vote?!" and it rather stumped me. Well, first I just thought, "lady, of all groups of people to address that to, are you really going to ask a group of Georgetown graduate public policy students in Washington, DC? Really?" But then I started thinking...why don't people my age get more involved as a rule? Even in 2008, a year we got SO excited about young people's involvement, they still did not even come close to the involvement of the electorate over age 65. (Thanks for the Obama win, guys!) Involvement among 18-29 year-olds has been increasingly dismal since about 1960.
So here is my theory, in bits and pieces, so far.
Watergate fundamentally altered the way my generation and late Gen X views politics. I think that's why we have such a disconnect from the Boomers. To us, politics is pure functionality - we've been overwhelmed with transparency, and it's a pretty disgusting picture, but oh well, that's how it gets done. There is no romance. Politics is no place for values, beyond efficiency and efficacy. This has two main implications.
1. The personal lives of candidates is pretty irrelevant. Nixon was a Quaker, and he almost single-handedly brought down the executive branch of our government. Clinton was a cheater and a sleazy politician to the core, but also insanely intelligent - he kept us at peace, he reduced the deficit, he created AmeriCorps, he reformed welfare. I'll take the cheater any day. I think that's why, in the 2000 election, you saw Bush trying to push his "I go to church every week" schpiel, and a lot of older people getting excited, and a lot of younger people saying, "and...?" Even young conservatives cared infinitely more about his voting record and his emphasis on compassionate conservatism than any professed religion. And when it came out that Obama hadn't even attended his own church enough to know what the pastor was saying, we saw a bunch of boomers and early gen-x-ers up in arms, and most gen-y-ers wondering why anyone thought otherwise. Of course religion is just a box politicians check off - you can't survive in politics and actually put some system of beliefs above yourself. You can see this even in discussion of the founding fathers. Honestly, you could craft a pretty coherent argument that either a) the founding fathers based large chunks of the constitution on Judeo-Christian principles and held to those principles themselves; or b) the founding fathers purposely separated themselves from any religion because they were largely Deists, secularists, Masons or some combination - hence the vague "not-quite-Christian-not-quite-anything-else" type language. In my experience, which side of that argument you choose is pretty strongly linked to age. Either way, the founding fathers are everlasting symbols of what politicians should be, the symbols are just entirely different. For boomers, the founding fathers infused their personal lives and personal faiths into everything they did and created. For Gen-Y-ers, the founding fathers may or may not have had some vague belief in something or other, but they kept that firmly away from their political actions, and they expected the same of future politicians.
2. Voting and political participation doesn't change things. Ok, it's possible that Obama is going to change all of this, and maybe the generation after mine (Z? Right?) is going to vote up a storm. But I'm going to assume they won't, because they, too, have CNN (and MSNBC and Fox News and etc etc, I'm just using CNN because Don Lemon is such a fox). CNN tells you way in advance who is going to win, what everyone thinks about everything, and it seems everything is decided ahead of time. And since any idealism or romanticism about politics has long since gone out the window, what exactly is the point of voting? The fact is, even if every young person in America voted, we would still not out-number the boomers, so from an efficiency standpoint, voting is not an optimal use of time.
So there you go, Ellen. Two weeks after class, I have an answer for you. You're welcome.
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