Culture

To follow up on this weekend's post regarding the GOP's dire long-term political future, here's a gem from former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), defending Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

"Obama is detached from the American experience. He just doesn't identify with the average American because of his own background. Indonesia and Hawaii," said Santorum. "His view is from the viewpoint of academics and the halls of the Ivy league schools that he went to and it's not a love of this country and an understanding of the basic values and wants and desires of its people. And as a result of that, he doesn't connect with people at that level."

No word on what Santorum defines as the "average American experience."

Santorum's not on his own here. As the GOP continues to be hostile to the diversity that forms the heart of the American story (either implicitly or explicitly), it is rejecting the citizenship and cultural heritage of wide swaths of the Millennial generation's experiences with this country.

UPDATE: More craziness: John Boehner's turn.

"They're snuffing out the America that I grew up in," Boehner said. "Right now, we've got more Americans engaged in their government than at any time in our history. There's a political rebellion brewing, and I don't think we've seen anything like it since 1776."

The Center for American Progress released a report by Ruy Teixeira this week, "The Coming End of the Culture Wars," in which Teixeira examines the increasing impotence of social and cultural issues in today's political debate.

The report makes a few conclusions that should be familiar to FM readers.

Teixeira views the ongoing millennial boom as one reason for the decline in the social issue's prominence. Given the millennials' socially liberal views on many traditionally contentious social issues, they don't seem particularly "alarmed" when conservative concern trolls warn Americans of the country's leftward shift.

CAP’s Progressive Studies Program’s ideology survey similarly found that 18- to 29-year old Millennials were the most progressive generation by far on a comprehensive 10-item progressive cultural index covering topics ranging from religion, abortion, and homosexuality to race, immigration, and the family. Each item on this index had a 0-10 point range, with the most progressive response on each item receiving 10 points and the most conservative response receiving zero points. Millennials scored 56.6 out of 100 on the index, compared to a range of 46.4 to 52.9 for older generations.

And as more millennials ascend into positions of power and, thus, control the debate, more substantive, quality of life issues will be prevalent, drowning out discussions on issues such as abortion.

Another strong cause for the decreased power of the culture wars is found in demographics.

...The culturally conservative white working class has been declining rapidly as a proportion of the electorate for years. Exit polls show that the proportion of white working-class voters—scoring just 46.3 out of a 100 on the Progressive Studies Program comprehensive 10-item progressive cultural index covering topics ranging from religion, abortion, and homosexuality to race, immigration, and the family—is down 15 points since 1988, while the proportion of far more culturally progressive white college graduate voters (53.3 on the index) is up 4 points, and the proportion of minority voters (54.7 on the index) is up 11 points. State after state since 1988 has replicated this general pattern—a sharp decline in the share of white working-class voters accompanied by increases in the shares of minority voters and, in most cases, of increasingly progressive white college graduate voters.

Along with the decline in white working class voters, the numbers of traditionally progressive portions of the population are on the rise. Single women and professionals headline this group.

It's very important to point out that millennials aren't more progressive due to their increased diversity. Teixeira's report finds that white millennials are more progressive than many of their older siblings and parents.

But it is worth stressing that white Millennials, while not as culturally progressive as their minority counterparts, are still much more progressive than the overall population. Both white college graduate (56.1 on the PSP index) and white working-class Millennials (54.2) are more culturally progressive than older white college-graduate (53.5) and especially white working-class (45.6) adults. The difference between white working-class Millennials and older generations of the white working class is particularly important since it suggests that the white working class as a whole will become significantly less culturally conservative as culturally progressive white working-class Millennials replace conservative older white working-class voters in the electorate. This will severely undercut the popular appeal of culture wars politics, since this segment of the population has provided the bulk of support for such politics.

Teixera concludes by noting that conservatives will most likely continue to inject what they think are divisive issues into the political debate for political gain, though they'll find these efforts to be less successful with time. With the millennials coming into power, the American political dialogue should change for the better thanks to a far more focused discussion of the issues that can drastically improve Americans' quality of life.

• Campus Progress is now accepting applications for the 2009 Journalism Conference.
• The Leadership Institute wants Campus Reform -not so much for production values.
• Politics Magazine lists the rising stars of 2009. What a diverse and interesting group of people.
• Young Dems propose resolution in support of repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'.
• Huff Post: The lameness of the economy, It must SUCK to Graduate Right now.
• Run DC: Hip Hop Caucus engages Capitol Hill.
• SEIU gives Dick Cheney his very own 'Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat' video.
  

Apologies for the light (read: no) posting today. I'm taking care of some personal stuff. Tomorrow I plan to blog about the following stories. I figure you can read them directly now and get a head start:

• Taking on the System and the Prop 8 Protests: Kos talks about his new book and how the Prop 8 demonstrations showed us 1) How demonstrations could be relevant in the 21st C; and 2) How a 26 year old from Seattle used decentralized organizing and put traditional LGBT groups to shame.
• Be + Cause Strategies discusses Obama's win and the importance of infrastructure and organizing.
• Progressive States Network tells us why, even in the wake of a national win, we should continue to strengthen our efforts at the state level.
• Next Gen GOP wants to win back the youth vote. Part I and Part II.
• Amplify Your Voice brings us word of another Millennial elected to office with a little help from Facebook.

To quick things you should know about. Anyone out there who attempts to use culture - particularly music communities - to engage voters should read this new report on best practices released by Air Traffic Control, a group that helps artists become involved in politics and social justice activism:

Better Practices: Engaging Concertgoers in Social Action (doc)

As great as these experiences were, I came to question how we can engage concertgoers better and whether it is worth it at all. Gathering staff, materials and volunteers to table can be a huge drain on an organization. So, what do these activities create? How do they turn new audiences into activists? And, while we’re at it, where did the idea of organizations and causes being at concerts come from in the first place?

The advice, practices and “inspired thought” we gathered from almost a dozen of the best and brightest doing this work doesn’t answer all of these questions, but it shows us how we can begin to do it better. It also reminds us of the potential: what we might gain access to if we learn to engage concertgoers better.

The following report breaks down ATC’s learning from interviews that were conducted with experienced professionals from the field of concert engagement. Clear themes emerged that we will explore in-depth. Each focus area can still be studied in greater detail and this will give more insight into how to live up to the potential of engaged concertgoers. We leave that for academics and students looking to study topics of practical and immediate use.
Themes

• Artist & Organizations
• Volunteers & Staffing
• Nature of Engaging People
• Artists’ Shout-outs
• Engagement sequences and follow-up
• Recommendations
• Tools

Good stuff worth checking out if you are in the field of cultural organizing.

Also of interest today in the field of cultural organizing is the launch of the Ultimate College Bowl competition:

Ultimate College Bowl

This is the third or fourth such program attempting to register young people this year that turns the celebrity engagement model on its head to incentivize voter registration.

Following the successes and failures of these projects will be, I think, one of the more interesting case studies coming out of this election. If they are successful, then I think we'll have cracked the nut on a whole new way to more successfully engage celebrities in the political process.

In keeping with my post earlier this week about the need for more investment in communications work within youth organizing, I want to point you all to a 1170 word profile of Television producer/major donor Norman Lear and his youth vote organization Declare Yourself.

Here are the main messages coming out of the piece:

Declare Yourself, which Mr. Lear founded in 2003 to spur 18- to 29-year-olds to vote, strives to register more than two million people by Election Day. A nonprofit organization, it registered about a million voters in the months leading up to the 2004 election, most of them that October, said Aviva Rosenthal, the organization’s director of partnerships.

...

Four years ago Declare Yourself was simply one of many voter-registration efforts, admirable but probably without huge impact.

Message: 1 million voters is "not a significant impact" and by implication, youth in general did not have a huge impact in 2004.

Young people could be more crucial in the presidential race this time around — they played a bigger role than normal in many primary contests, and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has the trappings of a youth crusade. Thus organizations like Declare Yourself are taking on extra weight.

Message: Youth organizations weren't important until Barack Obama showed up. We didn't make him, he made us.

Rival registration efforts abound, but Declare Yourself is perhaps alone in using big media (anything controlled by the five largest media conglomerates) as its primary sales tool. Rock the Vote, which rose to prominence in the 1992 election by teaming up with MTV, comes close with its emphasis on musicians, but it has started relying more heavily on Internet outreach than on television.

This is bizarrely wrong. I would say that Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself are equally partnering with major media corporations. Both organization's biggest program this year involves online voter registration. If anything, Rock the Vote is the more innovative of the two organizations with new ways to using it's corporate and celebrity partnerships to increase registration. In reading the piece, however, the implication is that Declare Yourself's strategy is in some way superior.

Message: Corporate partnerships and Media are more important than internet outreach.

Mr. Lear toils to line up celebrities who have cachet among young adults. Through his wide-ranging contacts, he has corralled a roster of stars popular with young people to plug the cause, including America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”), Hayden Panettiere (“Heroes”) and Tyra Banks (“America’s Next Top Model”). He said that he was trying to sign up the Jonas Brothers.

One of Declare Yourself’s biggest coups involved the MTV reality series “The Hills.” Mr. Lear and Ms. Rosenthal arranged for a star of that show to mention the registration effort during filming. As it turned out, producers liked the story line so much that they devoted the bulk of an episode to registering to vote.
...
Citing internal research, Marc Morgenstern, executive director of Declare Yourself, said 83 percent of the people the organization registered in 2004 voted. “Yes, young people are assaulted with messages,” Mr. Morgenstern said. “That is why we have an overlapping approach. The cumulative impact gets them to the tipping point.”

Message: Celebrities and media campaigns are the best way to reach young voters.

At the moment, though, he is most focused on Declare Yourself. Whether registration efforts reap votes is a question that the organization cannot answer with precision. And as excited as registration groups, campaigns and others get about supposedly surging interest among younger voters every four years, the gains rarely prove to be substantial. The turnout rate in the last presidential election among voters 18 to 25 was 47 percent, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 64 percent for the overall population.

Message: Young people don't vote and we have no idea how to make them vote in bigger numbers.

This piece is a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we know:

• Young Voters have turned out in larger and larger numbers for the past 3 election cycles, and we were the only age demographic to vote in favor of John Kerry.
• Peer to peer outreach is the gold standard for moving young voters to the polls and it's effectiveness has been proven.
• Celebrity campaigns in and of themselves do not increase youth turnout.
• The internet is a huge and important tool for reaching out and engaging young voters.
• Youth organizations engaged in peer to peer outreach pioneered the tactics and laid the groundwork for Obama's successful youth operation.

This New York Times profile may serve the purpose of raising the profile of Declare Yourself and Norman Lear, but it does very little to advance the goals of the growing progressive youth movement. In fact, it is actively working at cross-purposes to that movement and teaching journalists and anyone who reads it precisely the wrong lessons about youth vote outreach.

Update: The McCain campaign finally posted a version sans Wayne's World clip.
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I wasn't going to post about this, but Mike Myers took it to a new level of awesome, so here goes.

Earlier this week, McCain (as I'm sure you all saw), released a web video attacking Obama for his "celebrity status." It was a decent parody of old school album commercials that insulted the intelligence of young voters, and was basically a ploy to grab some media attention:

In that, it was fairly successful. The video made its way around the web this week, hitting pop culture and politics sites alike. I didn't want to encourage that, so I didn't post about it at the time. We all know that McCain's campaign has gone completely negative and needs to depress youth turnout if he's to have any shot at winning. Why help?

I'm writing about it now, days after the fact, because Mike Myers, who's Wayne's World sketch is used in the web ad, demanded that the McCain campaign remove the video from YouTube or face legal action for copyright infringement. McCain pulled the video, though as you can see others have already reposted it. My bad, the McCain campaign doesn't seem to care. It's still up on their YouTube page, and it's also still featured on their website.

Again, I think this continues to play right into McCain's hands, as the message on his blog is clearly gleeful about the reaction from Myers. It plays right into their messaging. Still, I did want to point out that this is not the first time something like this has happened to McCain. John Hall and John Mellencamp (not exactly paragons of contemporary cool, but pop culture stars nonetheless) both requested that McCain stop using their songs at his rallies, to say nothing of the recent Paris Hilton video. Despite the fact that McCain is one of the most pop-culture friendly presidential candidates in history (just look at McCain's resume on IMDB), the culture revolts against John McCain.

At what point does all this become counterproductive and McCain become reduced to the crazy grandpa in the media and in the eyes of everyone under 40? Or are we already there and is all this aimed at a different audience?

It's great seeing groups like Music for Democracy picking up the mantle of the work that Music for America and Concerts for Kerry did last cycle. Culture attracts -- often more than straight-up politics -- so we have to learn how to use culture to serve as a vehicle for progressive community.

In that spirit, we've been doing more reviews and cultural commentary at Living Liberally. Music for Democracy may dig the bands that are Rocking Liberally as posted by Seth Pearce. And we're seeing more happening on the big screen too -- two reviews posted in the past two days will give you hints for your 4th of July cinema-going.

The first is Gonzo, a documentary on Hunter S. Thompson that will be released in select theaters starting tomorrow. As Brooke Olaussen reports at Screening Liberally:

Everything you could want in a documentary film is in this one. By bringing you the mood and life-force of Gonzo, the film enchants, both visually and philosophically. The multiplicity of voices/interviews, footage, photographs, and songs transports you into the scene, as if like Alice you stepped through the looking glass. The soundtrack, Johnny Depp’s narration of Thompson’s writing,and interviews with friends and family guide you through Thompson’s wonderland.

The second sure success this weekend is more mainstream fare: Wall-E about a lovable scamp of a robot who has an environmental message tucked into his gizmo-goofball gaffes. As Mazhira Black writes:

For those of you who think that WALL-E is a kid's film you may find yourself eating your words. It is great to see Disney using it's power for good rather than evil. Some of you may remember some of the social faux pas in the Disney closet: the racist movie we don't talk about, Song of the South, the subtle anti-Arab lyrics in the song "Arabian Nights" of Aladdin, and of course the good old belief that a woman should lie down and wait for her prince to come and rescue her from her dragon guarded castle in order to achieve happiness.

The jury is still out on whether Disney has gotten the PC bug or the Disney-Pixar marriage has given the Disney folk a younger more open outlook on the world. One thing is for sure, if their movies keep moving in a WALL-E direction then I will have no qualms with raising kids in the arms of the mouse.

Let us know what you're watching, reading and listening to -- if you like it, chances are somebody else will too. And if you share tastes, you may share politics as well.

• At 9pm Eastern tonight I'll be blogging at Daily Kos as part of the weekly Kossacks Under 35 series. I'll be blogging about the three new books reporting on the youth vote this year.
• The CT legislature passed a law allowing 17 year olds the right to vote in a primary if they will turn 18 by the general election. - Rock the Vote
• Nancy Scola explores the brief history of Facebook's role as a social change agent, both the good and the bad. -AlterNet
• Micah Sifry doubts allegations that the Clinton campaign raise $10 million in 24 hours this week. - TechPresident
• Republicans in Arizona are looking to ban ethnic student groups and associations. - DailyKos
• Ben Adler reports that Obama lost young white voters to Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania. - Campus Politico
• The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a brief look at the Harvard IOP survey results. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• The Arcade Fire and Superchunk are playing at ealry get out the vote rallies in support of Sen. Obama in North Carolina. - Merge Records
• Voto Latino discovers that Jenna Bush may not vote for John McCain, but then again, she doesn't really pay attention to politics anyway. Awesome. Way to be a role model Jenna. - Voto Latino

I thought this was pretty cool. Green Owl Records has gotten together with over a dozen artists to make a compilation CD on behalf of the Energy Action Coalition.

These kinds of things can be great fundraisers for cash strapped organizations if you have the artist connections and can swing it. When MFA did the Future Soundtrack for America in partnership with Barsuk Records, MoveOn and McSweeney's, we raised over a quarter million dollars for our 2005 budget. I know that Punk Voter also sold over half a million copies of its Rock Against Bush compilations, though I'm not sure how much money that raised directly for the organization.

Here are the participating artists:

The Appletrees -"Look up to the Sky"
Feist - "Honey Honey" (BBC Session)
Harper Simon - "Henrieta"
Young Love - "Underground"
Muse - "Knights of Cydonia" (live)
The Exit - "Hey Man"
Of Montreal - "Feminine Effects"
Pete Yorn - "Old Boy"
The London Souls - "Someday"
The Citizens Band - "Fortune Teller"
Violens "Trance Like Turn"
Bloc Party "The Prayer" (Hadouken remix)
School of Seven Bells "Trance Figure"
Deerhoof "Plus 81" (BBC Session)
Juliana Hatfield "Back To Freedom"
Satori "Intimate Revolution"