Framing the "Youth Movement"

Over at her personal blog, Erica Williams, the Policy and Advocacy Manager at Campus Progress, has a thoughtful post reporting on a recent policy summit held by the Generational Alliance, a coalition of organizations from different sectors of the progressive movement (policy, leadership development, electoral) focused on young people. If that sounds rather delicately phrased, it is, and you'll soon understand why. In her piece, Erica makes four main claims, three of which I'd like to respond to:

1. The idea of a "youth" movement is disempowering and may in fact be counterproductive to what we all want to achieve in the policy realm.
2. Whatever this "movement" is, it is stacked with some awesome people who are passionate and smart (no argument here).
3. BUT, we all suck at policy.
4. Obama, not issues, is the main reason youth went to the polls this year.

I agree with some of this to varying degrees. However, I think Erica offers an incomplete overview of each of these topics and I'd like to flesh out some of it a bit more and pushback a little bit in other places. I'd like to address each of them one at a time. In this blog post, I want to talk about Erica's first point:

There isn't and should not be a separate "youth movement" based on age as the main identifier: Erica sums up her concerns here succinctly when she says:

The fact that I opened my post by characterizing the event as a gathering of “progressive leaders of the youth movement” rather than “young leaders of the progressive movement” says something. Reveling in our youth and our power actually does very little to develop and hone that power in a way that creates concrete policy goals and victories. The way to change the perception of young people as they relate to political power and change isn’t to state over and over again who you are (young) but instead to do what needs to be done (change policy, create new structures, enter and innovate the system) while you are who you are.

To my mind, there are two questions here, one of operations and infrastructure, and one of framing:

1. Are we or are we not building new structures, innovating within the system and changing policy? (Operations and Infrastructure)
2. To what degree, if at all, does the term "youth movement" detract from our ability to accomplish our operational goals? (Framing)

Operations and Infrastructure: When I hear the term "youth movement," I don't think of it in terms of a traditional social movement like Civil Rights or even the student movement of the 60's. It wasn't a movement at all in that sense. Rather, it has been a concerted effort on the part of young people to create progressive infrastructure at a time when few in the larger progressive movement or Democratic Party were serious about engaging young people in their activities. The term recognized a deficit in the field, leadership development and messaging work of the Democratic Party and Progressive Movement, and operated as a shorthand for a decentralized effort to create infrastructure to address that deficit.

Six years ago, if you were a young person looking to become involved in progressive politics, your options were fairly slim. You could become a canvasser, burn out within 6 months, and never work in progressive politics again. You could stuff envelopes and answer the phone for a campaign. You could participate in an underfunded College Democrats and a do-nothing version of the Young Democrats, or join a mish-mash of ineffectual campus issue groups.

Today there are at least a dozen new avenues for involvement in anything from electoral work (revamped YDA, Bus Federation, League of Young Voters) to leadership development (Young People For, Center for Progressive Leadership) to policy work (Roosevelt Institute). Erica's own organization, Campus Progress, comes out of this infrastructural boom of the last half decade.

So we are building new structures and addressing a gap in the larger progressive movement that neither progressive organizations and coalitions, nor the Democratic Party, were effectively filling. These structure are successful to varying degrees. I think we've done quite well on the electoral front and in leadership development, less well at policy (though there were far fewer opportunities in the Bush years) and not very well at all when it comes to integrating all of our work into the goals and activities of a larger progressive movement (more on that in a minute).

Framing: It's worth remembering that we didn't necessarily choose to be labeled as young people - that was assigned to us by political hacks, pundits and the media who routinely dismissed the potential power and engagement of anyone under 30. Because of that conventional wisdom, and the apathy of Generation X, young people had a terrible brand in American politics even a year or two ago. That in itself was a disempowering situation that needed to be corrected.

It's also worth recognizing that organizing around an age demographic is not in and of itself disempowering or nonsensical. No one argues that seniors or the AARP are ghettoizing themselves or stifling their own power because they use their age as an organizing principle. On some issues, age can in fact be a good organizing principle. The difference seems to be not in the framing of the organizing, but in the relative political clout of that constituency (or their political brand). That clout is in turn based on the constituency's ability to organize itself and exact a political price on anyone who opposes their policy positions. Seniors voted at a reliably high rate for decades while the youth vote floundered, creating a situation in which politicians depended on seniors to win elections. That created a positive political brand upon which the AARP capitalized in order to provide seniors a seat at the main policy table.

Thanks to the work of the "youth movement" - labeled as such - young people have a revitalized political brand and are now gaining a measure of political clout and respect. Indeed, we made up a higher share of the electorate this year than did those supposedly reliable seniors. It's up to us to translate that electoral power into policy victories and a seat at the table of major progressive organizations and coalitions.

Now, one could certainly argue that in order to effectively accomplish that work, we need to pivot away from the "youth movement" framing. I think the argument in favor of that option goes something like this: the terminology limits us in how we think about ourselves and our work, implicitly and artificially cutting us off from "the big table" (vs. the "kiddie table"). The term may also drive away potential supporters and activists within our own generation who, like Erica, "didn’t move into this segment of my life work to be a youth activist."

It is true that much of our work over the past half decade was sectioned off from the work of the rest of the progressive movement. We've spent the last five or six years building our organizations into sustainable structures, and learning how to cooperate and work amongst ourselves through coalitions (like the Generational Alliance and c3/c4 Tables today, or the Young Voter Alliance in 2004). This has, perhaps, been to the detriment of a greater focus on how we fit into the progressive movement as a whole.

Let's recognize, though, that revitalizing the youth brand was a necessary first step towards becoming a player in that larger progressive movement. Until very recently young leaders did not have the political capital to command the respect and attention of the larger progressive movement as anything other than token supporters. The rest of the progressive movement didn't particularly care about us before this year because we were still a totally unproven political force with a negative brand.

These two concepts - the revitalization of the youth brand and moving our work into that of the larger progressive movement - remain entwined. You can't do one without the other. To the extent that a new frame for our work will break down barriers towards greater collaboration with other progressive organizers, that's a conversation I'm happy to have. Indeed I think Erica is right to point out that it is a conversation we must have if we want to stay relevant and accomplish our policy goals - the very reasons why we started to organize young voters and build all these structures in the first place. But I think that conversation must include the context provided above so that we don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Organizing young people is important - especially at the electoral level. The Democratic Party doesn't do it. The state parties don't do it. Campaigns like those run by Obama, Tester and Webb, which focused on young people, remain anomalies. If we want to continue to build a positive political brand for young people - and reap the policy rewards that come with such a brand - then there needs to be young activists who focus on organizing their peers, however we choose to frame that work.

I'll have thoughts posted about Erica's comments on policy later today, and a response to her claim about Obama tomorrow.