Part I - Living Liberally: Reforming Democratic "Youth" Programs

Ed. Note: this was first published on MyDD in July of 2005. Some edits have been made in this version to reference new research or clean up some language.

If you want to get apolitical youth involved in politics, you have to make political participation a cultural phenomenon.

I won't be shy about saying that "youth organizing," "youth issues," or most things that might fall under those rubrics get short shrift throughout the blogosphere. Granted, Kos and Atrios and Chris Bowers have all made efforts to point out what's going on - Atrios posts liberally about Drinking Liberally, Bowers gives Young Philly Politics shout-outs, and Kos has made multiple mentions of Cosmopolity and Music for America on his site - but for the most part, these topics are rarely picked up by the community. This surprises me. According to the 2006 Blog Ads Survey, 15% - a not insubstantial number - of the progressive blogosphere is between 14 and 30. My peers are in the blogosphere, they just don't speak or post from a generational point of view.

That is unfortunate, because "activating" and organizing young voters is incredibly important for the Democratic Party. 2004 was a record year for youth turnout. (PDF) Turnout was up to 51% (from 34%) nationwide, and turnout in swing states reached as high as 64%. It turned out that The Kids Were Alright in 2004. Their participation was a big boon to John Kerry, and as Joe Trippi noted in the WSJ, it saved his ass from McGovern-esque ridicule. Kerry carried young voters by a 10-point margin - a dramatic improvement over Al Gore's split decision with Dubya in 2000 - and the "kids" were only age demographic to break in favor of the Democrats. (The new study to read in this respect is A Gift to Democrats by Skyline Public Works. Look for a detailed analysis of that study soon.)

But to say that Kerry carried young voters is misleading. Many of us cast our ballots not for Kerry, but against Bush. Like a page out of the Daily Show playbook, the reigning ethos among our generation was "John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him anyway." There's no guarantee that my generation, or future generations, will stand by the Dems in '06 or `08. We've got to step up our efforts if we're going to keep them. And we need to - it's about more than Kerry's inability to carry his own generation, or the failure of the greatest generation to vote for the greatest good. 1990 witnessed the highest birthrate since the height of the baby boom. Over 17 million teenagers will turn 18 between November 3rd 2004 and November 2008. Right now Democratic organizations are woefully under-prepared to turn these political new-comers into self-identifying progressives, let alone bring them into the Democratic Party. The Republicans are already stepping up their efforts to rebrand themselves among this next generation in politics. They're staking territory, and unless we can reimagine groups like the Young Democrats and the College Democrats, and retool outreach programs by organizations like ACT and the Democratic National Committee, we could lose this crucial demographic, or - just as bad - fail to activate enough of them to help us carry an election.

Politics is a four-letter word; culture is what happens when you get out of bed

Before we can restructure our "youth" oriented program activities, we must identify the problem (and let me just say that the term "youth" preceding everything in politics involving people under 30 is itself part of the problem, albeit a part that is extremely difficult to remedy when speaking in a meta-context).

At its most root level, it is a matter of perception (world-view, framing; whatever term you want to assign it). For the majority of "young" Americans, politics isn't important in the same way it is for us junkies. In fact, politics is a dirty word. This seems like a no-brainer, but the manner in which "youth outreach" programs of the Young Democrats, College Democrats, DNC, and ACT work reveal that this fact remains deeply unabsorbed. It is a constant that is always in people's minds, but never fully comprehended or accounted for during planning sessions, retreats, and daily meetings.
This should come as no surprise. Politicians and political groups are particularly inept when it comes to operating outside the realm of the established norms of the beltway - canvassers on campuses, "bar nights" where younger folks have to pay to meet a politician seeking their vote (how insane is that - asking an apathetic or apolitical college student or young professional to pay for the pleasure of hearing an earnest pencil pusher or a smarmy egomaniac speak platitudes?!?!?!), if we're lucky, the occasional road trip may crop up.

The problem is that many of the people running these programs view "youth outreach" as basic training for the big leagues. It is their stepping stone to professional work in politics. Not only does this set up a false dichotomy, but it places our young organizers in completely the wrong mindset.

Reaching young voters is vital to the health of our party and our democracy in general and should not be relegated to the sidelines of party activity. What the entire Democratic infrastructure needs to realize is that voters under 30 need completely different programs to increase their participation, not a beta-version of a real campaign, run by an endless series of ladder climbers looking to get to the next rung in their political career.

Case in point, this list of activities was posted on the Daily Kos by a member of the San Fernando Valley Young Dems the last time this topic was raised. It is a list of their group's activities:

• Took bus trips to campaign for 2 California Assemblywoman in swing districts.
• Raised $1000 for the local Democratic headquarters selling buttons outside Farenheit 9/11
• Set up a booth at the San Fernando Valley Fair and saw the world's biggest pig.
• Held an issues summit entitled "The Day After 9/11" highlighting domestic security issues
• Personally interviewed all five leading Los Angeles mayoral candidates.

These are great things, but they are all highly political things. These are not things that most people want to do, these are things that highly motivated activists or pre-professional politicos like to do. I spend most of my day thinking and reading about poli-tics, and I don't want to do half of these things (which is different from understanding the necessity of doing them). Does that make them less valuable or unimportant? No. Do I recommend that Young/College Dems stop doing these things? No. Do I think having a laser focus on these types of activities is bad for Young Dems and bad for the progressive movement?

You bet.

99% of the people out there won't find taking a road trip to canvass for someone they've never heard of in 90 degree weather to be an exciting prospect, and we shouldn't organize local dem chapters or young dem programs under the assumption that it is exciting, or even the most important thing we can do. Putting most of our "youth outreach" energies into projects like these is what keeps us from maximizing our natural advantage over conservatives among younger voters, and ignores our greatest weapon against the conserva-tives - culture.

If we want to build a progressive majority, our coalition cannot be composed solely of folks who drink the Kool Aid. We need to tailor our activities so we can involve the greatest amount of people, and use this larger pool to gradually move people up a ladder of participation that gets increasingly political in nature the higher up you get. This should be the goal of "youth outreach" programs, and this idea should be the basis for every ground campaign and recruitment program geared towards younger voters. The rub here is that we can't force these people to conform to our world-view. 99.9% of them will never be as politicized as we'd like them to be. So in order to succeed, we've got to adapt our own assumptions and ideas into their worldview. This was the realization that made Music for America so successful:

If you want to get apolitical youth involved in politics, you have to make political participation a cultural phenomenon.