Teen Spirit, Protest Theater, and Participatory Democracy

In a column called Grand Theft Politics, Joshua Glenn reviews Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, by Stephen Duncombe. If you can ignore obnoxious references to Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy, it's a really interesting article all about the Democratic Party's (next to non-existent) relationship to culture, and what a new participatory politics might look like.

On the relationship to culture (and what that means for our politics):

After Reagan's re-election, the Democratic Leadership Council was formed to unburden the Democrats of their '60s-style ideological baggage. The New Democrats borrowed planks from the Republican platform and eschewed Dionysian spectacles like large peace rallies in favor of studying, lobbying, and regulating. Throughout the 1990s, Apollonian progressive figures such as Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore tut-tutted about rap music, violent video games, and action movies without pausing to reflect on why suburban middle-class youth might enjoy those phenomena. Our leaders seemed out of touch, even inhuman.

I think this is on point. I've just started re-reading Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. It's an account of how Democrats lost their connection to culture in the 80s and 90s, and the consequences of that loss for the party. Written by Danny Goldberg, a music executive (Nirvana) and political activist (ACLU), it's a pretty amazing story that I highly recommend. When the MFA gang was getting together, this book was a pretty big part of our initial thinking. In it, Goldberg makes similar points to Glenn. Allow me to cram 6 pages into 2 paragraphs:

This isn't exactly a culture war so much as a disconnect between the progressive political leaders and the culture of the people they want to lead . . . the insulated consultants and pundits who have enormous influence . . . and . . . are much more tuned in to other mavens in Washginton than what Americans are really thinking.
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It's not just the loss of younger voters that should concern Democrats, it's the loss of youthful energy and innovation -- the loss of teen spirit, embodied in a popular culture that almost inevitably is created by the young and then spreads . . . it is impossible to imagine the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, the women's movement, and the struggle for gay and lesbian rights without the powerful catalyst provided by the energy and inspiration of the young and their popular culture. The Democratic Party and the left will either heed that message or find themselves doomed to more decades of cultural victories and political defeats.

Based on the Slate article, Duncombe, holds similar views, as well as some interesting thoughts on how the Democrats might recover that Teen Spirit:

If progressives ever want to set the national agenda, Duncombe insists, they must embrace what he calls dreampolitik, a politics that "embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form." With the exception of street activists at the far fringes—he praises Billionaires for Bush, Critical Mass, and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping—progressives remain convinced that "their sense of superior seriousness will win debates, convince the public, and lead them back into the halls of power." Talk about fantasy! Witness the last presidential race, when stagecrafted spectacles that associated President Bush with military prowess trumped the sober-sided efforts of John Kerry to win debates and votes.
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The people who built the New Deal and led the civil rights struggle are now engaging in old-fashioned, top-down political practices. These days, whether you attend a rally, sign a petition, or forward a MoveOn e-mail, it can be a disempowering experience. Duncombe is not contemptuous of the traditional anti-war demonstrations against Iraq, but, he argues, obscured within these and other well-intended political actions is "a philosophy of passive political spectatorship: they organize, we come; they talk, we listen."
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Duncombe's answer is something he calls the "ethical spectacle." Unlike the unethical kind of spectacle, which conceals a rotten state of affairs, and which demands passivity and acquiescence from spectators, an ethical spectacle promotes progressive ideals of egalitarianism and inclusivity. It models at the level of form what progressive politicians promise in the content of their speeches: demonstrating the ideals of its participants, none of whom are relegated to the role of sign-toting spectator.

It's an interesting theory. For years now, based on my own personal experiences with the movement, I've come to dislike protest politics. Mostly that dislike is based on a feeling that protests accomplish little, but my assumption has always been that they are a fully participatory element of our political process. Maybe that's not true - at least in terms of large scale protests of the kind created by ANSWER and UFPJ (certainly not for MoveOn, whose members votes help steer the course of the organization). It seems like that's what Duncombe is suggesting.

On the whole, though, I don't buy it. I don't see too much difference between someone who marches or attends a protest and brings a sign vs. the Billionaires. To be sure, there is a difference in commitment and creativity and product, but not in the underlying substance and meaning of the act.

We can all agree that myth-making is important, and its something that the Right has used to their own advantage spectacularly. Fred offers up a good myth of our own that the Left should be promoting to unify our coalition and explain our values to the country. But at the end of the day, spectacle requires both a viewer and viewed. Their is passivity built into that system as well.

Manufacturing new spectacles that exemplify our values, but which are always outside and apart from real life, does not offer a longterm, sustainable solution to the loss of teen spirit, the (still) broadcast nature of our politics, or the Left's lack of cultural relevance. Rather, we need to work to change the institutions that have real social capital, and use them as an outlet and power base for our political goals and values. That's why organizations like Living Liberally are so important. Rather than manufacture a spectacle out of whole cloth - one that is forever ghettoized in the minds of Americans to a non-normal act of "protest" or "political theater," we need to reawaken the political awareness of social and cultural institutions that are common place, everyday, and woven deeply into the fabric of the lives of Americans.

Doing that - at concerts, at bars, through comedy and film and YouTube and MySpace - is what will make our politics more participatory. To be truly successful, it will require an abandonment on the part of Democrats of their endless disavowal of pop culture (all while hypocritically taking the money of cultural icons). If Democrats embrace that, they will go a long way toward reclaiming that teen spirit they lost so many decades ago, and maybe we'll see a truly participatory model of politics and governance emerge from within the party.