activism

The Tucson Citizen publishes a piece partially misrepresenting activism among Millennials (another instance of someone believing the Internet to be mutually exclusive from interpersonal activism).

Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about Louisiana's efforts to undermine its own brain drain, starting with stringent ethics laws and a focus on developing and implementing innovative ideas.

The LA Times has a great essay by Neal Gabler examining Obama's credentials as a "rock star" versus a "movie star," pointing out that the challenge built into Obama's sudden ascent is getting people to not only dream, but embrace their dreams.

CBS has a piece describing the dilemma the McCain camp faces with youth voters: do they sacrifice future branding efforts with Millennials by discouraging turnout among the demographic this year? Or do they engage this demographic, though it's late, and attempt to build toward the future? The latter doesn't look promising:

Between February 1 and July 31, Obama held thirty-two campaign events in college towns; McCain held three. The McCain campaign has yet to publicly announce an official youth outreach or youth vote campaign director. On the other hand, Obama has hired former Rock the Vote political director Hans Reimer. Not surprisingly, young Republicans have complained about the McCain campaign's poor efforts at the grassroots level and failure to make use of existing networks. "They definitely haven't reached out to the younger generation as strongly as I hoped they would," an organizer for the Young Republicans in South Carolina recently told a local newspaper. "It's a big mistake. You've got to create something that people want to be a part of. I'm just not getting that feeling this go-round." A young conservative political strategist named David All concurred, remarking to the Washington Post that "Republicans are sort of talking down to Gen-Nexters, not bringing them in."

Finally, an Iowa television station has a story about the youngest Republican delegate at this year's convention -- seventeen year old Mike Knopf from Dubuque. He's a pretty smart kid:

"...We've got, don't get me wrong, all these old people and they do a great job and they have for 20,30,40 years but it you want to keep a party strong the key is you have to renew your people."

I'm not entirely sure what to write about the conference so far. Policy and issue work is not my usual bag, and this conference feels quite different from the kind I'm used to attending. There are congressmen here and non profit heads. Great activists like Deepak Barghava, and Democratic Names like Simon Rosenberg and Mike Lux are in attendance, as are the usual crazy progressives who bring all their personal baggage to these types of events and use their time at the mic to harangue the panelists. There are also a lot of really smart college and grad students asking complex questions about policy.

Superficially, I'm woefully underdressed (though that's not unusual at these things) and stick out like a sore thumb. More substantively, I just attended a panel on the New Deal called "The Intellectual Underpinning of a Renegotiated Social Contract," featuring the afformentioned Mike Lux, Simon Rosenberg, Deepak Barghava, and Tim Fertik, a Roosevelt Institution fellow. The content was interesting. Deepak noted that the incrementalist, technocratic progressive approach for last 40 years has failed against a values driven, movement and ideas approach of the conservatives, and any attempt to revitalize or create a New New Deal will have to reckon with both that failure as well as the structural racism that was embedded in our society in part by Roosevelt's programs.

Mike Lux made the point that, from a political perspective, reviving the "old" New Deal is not a good framework for achieving a "new" New Deal. Americans are looking to the future, according to Lux, and 2008 is a debate between future vs. the past. Likewise, our rhetoric must be about the future. Deepak's suggestion is that the idea of a shared fate and common destiny for all Americans might be the messaging Rosetta Stone to translate our policy priorities into reality.

These are all well and good (and necessary), and the Roosevelt Fellows that are sitting on panels alongside some of the bigger names in the progressive movement are more than keeping pace. But I can't help but feel a bizarre culture clash at this conference, and its about more than the fact that I'm in jeans while everyone else is in suits.

Most conferences I go to are very much geared towards action - winning elections, defeating conservatives, winning legislative battles, exchanging best practices. This is much more like an academic conference. Everyone is talking about policy, but it's not a vigorous debate. There will be no new policy working its way out of this conference. Rather, it's a gathering of the policy tribes in which everyone is affirming core progressive policy principles. It's a lecture and most people in the room already agree with the thesis.

I have very little understanding of how the progressive policy world works, as a hierarchy/career path to climb or as a machine whose goal is the creation and passage of policy. So I don't have a good idea as to how a conference like this fits into that machine.

With regard to the generational gap here, Margaret Simms, President of the National Academy of Social Insurance had something very informative to say earlier this morning. She said that achieving a New New Deal needs to be a generational partnership, and we cannot pursue a course that set the generations at odds with each other. At the very least, this conference does seem to be a networking opportunity to forge those bonds between the older and younger generations of progressive policy types. That alone is probably worthwhile.

I'm doing a lot of reading about Power Shift, Step it Up, and other elements of the new climate change movement. It's long overdue for me to start following that stuff more closely here at FM. As part of that research, I just stumbled across this spoken word performance from the Power Shift conference:

Regular readers know that we don't like Tom Friedman around here, mostly for reasons well-stated here. He has regularly criticized young people for not taking action on the issues of the day, typically defining action as "yelling and screaming on campus quads with witty signage." So I was surprised to read his column on climate change in this weekend's edition of the New York Times.

Last week, I also met with two groups of M.I.T. students who blew me away. One was the M.I.T. Energy Club, which was founded in 2004 by a few grad students discussing energy over beers at a campus bar. Today it has 600-plus members who have put on scores of events focused on building energy expertise among M.I.T. students and faculty, and “fact-based analysis,” including a trip to Saudi Arabia.

Then I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

Shocking as it is, Friedman is giving props to young people for organizing effectively around the issue of climate change on the campus of MIT. Not by waving signs, but by building shit that actually prevents global warming. Either Friedman is slowly learning two things that we all know already - that activism can be a cultural and social experience, and that young people today are pragmatic and working within and through institutions to accomplish change that his generation has thus far been unwilling to make - or he is somehow managing to keep his head from exploding from the cognitive dissonance of his two world views.

Katie Andrews is a Field Organizer, based in Columbus, OH, for the ONE Campaign. I invited her to tell us a bit about the One Campaign and what they're up to.
--Alex

So, you may have seen the ONE white wristbands or ONE shirts in the community but do you know what ONE really is? Well, I am a Field Organizer for the ONE Campaign (www.one.org) and cover the region of Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, Kansas and Missouri. I am here to give you the gist of what ONE does and how you can help locally if you choose. Basically, ONE's goal is to build a constituency of Americans in the U.S. that are concerned and take action on global issues to ultimately eradicate extreme poverty (people living on less than $1USD/Day) and global disease. The take action part is really the key--we need to make sure that not only are people knowledgeable about global issues such as clean water & sanitation, education, trade justice and global disease but people need to call, write and meet with their legislators to make sure that a real change can take place in U.S. policy to have a positive impact in the world.

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a youth-directed non-profit that trains, mobilizes, and elects a new generation of progressive leadership in good ol' MT.

Jake Thorn wrote earlier of the ideal way to organize on Facebook

A temporary group, geared for a short-term purpose, action-oriented, discarded as soon as the group’s goal has been accomplished.

The unfortunate part of this statement is that it is a self-reinforcing "doom loop" that exacerbates one of the most difficult aspects of organizing Millenials.

Anyone who works with young voters knows the difficulty of building identification with an organization. At Forward Montana, we have our own members and interns regularly ask, "What are you guys doing next?" The notion of ownership, membership, and involvement is a bit foreign. And this makes the task of building infrastructure insanely difficult.

Originally posted at Lose the Label and then Daily Kos.

Facebook is a mindbogglingly underused organizing tool for student activists. We’ve discussed this at Lose the Label before, here, here and here. But I wanted to make a post that more explicitly spells out how the tool has been used, how it can be used, and also speculates on why it hasn’t been used to its maximum potential.

The Senate is preparing to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. This is a chance to strip some very harmful law from the act which prevents students with drug-related convictions from receiving financial aid. Students for a Sensible Drug Policy have a novel video modeling what it's like to do the activism:

I think this is probably a really smart thing to do: video yourself doing a little lobbying, and I hope it works. This rule is one of the most counterproductive, knee-jerk pieces of "law and order" legislation out there. It was passed in 1998 under Clinton and is a particularly good example of how ineffective and culturally insensitive his "third way" really was. Check out the personal story from Jesus' General, who got busted hooking up some informants w/pot in 1979:

Bumped: because this turned out to be a pretty hot topic and its getting towards the bottom of the page - Mike

Not to be a naysayer, but I think one question we need to grapple with is “what happens when Bush is no longer on the ballot?” Turnout and activism among young voters is up, but will it stay up? After 2008, and we “throw the bums out,” will Millennial turnout continue to rise?

I ask because this came up in a conversation last week with Fred Gooltz wherein Fred explained to me the concept of the Fishladder, which I’d never heard of before.