Do Millennials Need a "Port Huron" Statement for the 21st Century?

So here's a question: Does the Millennial Generation needs a political manifesto?  Would there be value in a new Port Huron statement?  And is such a thing even possible in today's political, technological and cultural environments, which are all substantially different than the time during which P.H. Statement was written?

I ask these questions because this week I received a message on my FaceBook account from a group called Mobilize.org, an "all-partisan" organization that is intent on creating a new document, called Democracy 2.0, A Declaration of Our Generation, and use it as a jumping off point to engage Millennials in a campaign to "change our government" (whatever that ends up meaning).

This is something that tends to happen every decade or so in American youth politics.  I'm by no means a scholar of these manifestos, but off the top of my head I can think of two recent attempts - Third Millennium in the early and mid 90s, and more recently the Principles Project in 2005.  From what I can tell, Third Millennium took the fiscal conservatism of Gen Xers (balanced budget, fix social security), which was made safe by Clinton's economic policies, and tried to craft a statement that would drive a youth political movement around those issues.  Comprised mostly of young white guys, with a statement of principles written by a smaller group of said white guys, it was not very representative of Late Gen-Xers or early Millennials.  It didn't gain much traction in the cultural zeitgeist, and most people don't even know about it today.  The Principles Project - an offshoot of the now defunct 2020 Democrats - tried something similar, though all drafts beyond the first draft were part of a group wiki, allowing a more collaborative, open creation process.  Even with a more open process, and buy-in from a fairly diverse set (cultural and political) of the [dot]Org Boom youth organizations that were created in 2004, that too gained little traction.

As far as I can tell, Mobilize.org's plan runs something like this.  For the next four months, they will propose a series of questions on their website, the answers to which will be incorporated into a draft statement.  Sample questions include:

1. What currently works and what doesn't work in our democracy, and specifically, what should the role of government be?
2. What characteristics define our generation and how can these traits help us redefine our democratic process?
3. What should Democracy 2.0 look like and what action items must we take now to help create a more citizen-centered approach to democracy?

Added to this statement will be some quantitative research obtained through an online survey.  This document will be considered a first draft, which will then be used to provoke discussions at a number of conferences, the final of which will be The Party for the Presidency - a gathering of 435 local activists, one from each Congressional District.  As part of the Democracy 2.0 distribution strategy, it will be the job of these activists to produce some sort of final consensus which they will then push to other local activists and apolitical folks in their district.  

I think the problems with these types of statements come down to this:  

• They tend to be written by a small group of unrepresentative people.
• As a result they tend to be rather myopic, focusing on specific polity problems of the day of concern to a select few.

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• This in turn leads them to appeal only other insiders, very rarely gaining real currency in the cultural zeitgeist they hope to embody.

Mobilize.org has made some nice steps to try to overcome some of these hurdles - of which they are well aware.  

Calling for feedback on their website, having partners distribute online surveys, using the document as a conversation starter in a number of conferences and other venues, these are all good steps to try to include other types of people and their concerns.  Pulling in local activists from all 435 congressional districts is a nice way to ensure diversity and obtain buy-in and presence from a national constituency.  Even then, the document is meant to continue to morph and adapt at the individual level to fit the constituencies of each delegate.

Whether or not this works will depend on the quality and diversity of their partners and the willingness of the 435 delegates to truly buy-into and incorporate the document and principles into their local work.  If this is going to become more than an insider's document that never spreads beyond those immediately in contact with the Mobilize.org program staff, delegates will need serious hand-holding/prodding, and partners will need to go beyond the usual political suspects and breach the cultural realm.

I'm less enthused with Mobilize.org's identity as an "all-partisan" organization.  It's nice to want to transcend partisanship.  Lord knows it is appealing to a large segment of my generation, as evidenced by the rise and rhetoric of Barack Obama.  But at the end of the day, all major change must come through some government action.  Our government is a two party, adversarial system and for good reason.  The two parties, at their most fundamental level, hold vastly different ideas about the purpose and function of government, to say nothing about the specific issues that divide us.  Any organization or movement that seeks to either change our government directly or use government as a vehicle for change is going to have to declare partisan allegiance.  It will have to become part of an ideological movement, either left or right.  No document that isn't founded upon the principles of one of those movements will ever gain currency to eventually guide those movements.  

People forget, but the Port Huron Statement didn't come out of nowhere.  It was a response to the Sharon Statement, a conservative counterpart put forth by Young Americans for Freedom.  The PH Statement has such longevity because it guided the student movements of the 60s in an ideological battle against the ideas in its conservative counterpart.  By eschewing partisanship, I feel like Mobilize.org has created a different hurdle where previously non existed.

At some level, the folks at Mobilize.org get this.  They are, after all, committed to making this a living document that continually evolves.  The problem with that, is, if this becomes a 435-headed hydra, what kind of consensus have you really achieved? What kind of unified, generationally-specific progress have you realized?  None.  

I've talked with a lot of folks about a Millennial Manifesto for quite some time.  I was tangentially involved with the Principle's Project (as a commentator, avid spectator and conference participant).  I've explored the idea of wikis, collaborative writing, etc.  The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the idea of a statement of document is so 20th Century.  The culture is way beyond that now: too niche to bow to the will of a collective document, and too connected for a centralizing force to really take hold.  

I'm beginning to think that the Millennial Manifesto is already out there.  You can see it in the confluence of music, movies, and activism that is the climate change movement.  You see it embodied in the ethos of a remix culture that is both more open, collaborative, and creative than it's predecessors.  You see it in the blogosphere and in FaceBook Applications, which are slowly opening up our systems of government, creating new structures of participation that Millennials will both help to build and inherit.  

What we lack - what all youth lack - is context.  We need connective tissue - websites like BoingBoing or folks like Matt Stoller to help us understand the importance of Net Neutrality in the continuation of the trends I just mentioned.  We need to structures that will continue to link up issues across media platforms.  Groups that will create channels for Millennial participation in the blogosphere, or new, effective modes of participation through social networks.  We're on the way, but we're not there yet.  If Mobilze.org were to take up that task - contextualizing our ideas within recent history, and helping to create connective tissue between groups who share our principles, our ethos - that would be a worthy project.  However it would also be one that required the adoption of an explicitly partisan agenda.