Erica Williams

Just a day after Erica Williams tried to set the record straight about young people and healthcare, we get this POLITICO piece entitled, "Young adults sit on sidelines of health debate." This title is a real shame, because the article chronicles many noble efforts by young leaders and organizations in working on healthcare reform. It's as if POLITICO came to the piece with the perspective that young people are not involved, instead of investigating the rich involvement on the ground and online. Like, the opposite of journalism. At any rate, what POLITICO may be getting at is that young people aren't visible to older Americans. Fair enough, but that's a two-way street. Erica wrote a great commentary on CNN.com, which is totally read by older Americans. She explains that young people don't want to get involved in the theater of politics.

Young people were such a vital force during the election, not simply because of their own voting turnout but because of their ability to reach out to their elders and persuade them. And what could be more needed now?

But if health care reform matters so much to young people and their voice is so crucial in the debate, why the silence? Why does it appear as if young people aren't interested in the debate that will inform so much of their future?

Well, if we are gauging America's overall interest in the debate by the aforementioned displays of partisan yelling, screaming and death panel-ing at some town halls, no wonder we think young people don't care. Those sideshows were a clear turnoff to a population that voted overwhelming for less partisanship and "drama" in its politics.

Or perhaps it is because this administration did little in the early stages of the debate to engage and activate a "fired-up and ready to go" base of young people that saw health care reform as a top concern at the polls. Obama rarely highlights the fact that reform would provide protections against price differentials that often result in discrimination based on age and gender.

As if to prove Erica's point also translates to journalism, the POLITICO article starts off with this bit:

Getting old and sick isn’t a hot conversation topic for much of generation Y, an age-phobic group that fights time with Botox, suffers quarter-life crises and actually hosts Over the Hill parties for 25th birthdays.

Does these ideas come from a national poll? A focus group of POLITICO interns? Who created Botox, anyways? And why does this characterization make no sense to me?

As we saw in the past few election cycles, young voters respond to candidates that speak about issues. I daresay that MTV/Facebook townhalls asked much more candid and pointed questions than what we've seen in the healthcare townhalls. Young people are taking the high-road, eschewing politics as usual, and doing what the American spirit does best - they are getting it done themselves. POLITICO is just adding to the theater by resurfacing memes about young people that I thought were done away with (but never will?).

Erica's last point about the Obama administration being slow to engage is true. Even while the talk coming out of Dem Congressional leadership is positive, it seems empty without action on their part. FM co-blogger Kevin once mentioned, "young people are not your free intern army," and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said yesterday at the NCoC conference, paraphrasing Tocqueville, "In France, when there's a problem, the people go to the government. In America, they create an association." So, since our party leadership won't put the money or the time into energizing the young voter base around healthcare reform, it's a good thing Millennials are already taking up the cause.

The POLITICO article insists that there is a lack of youth energy, and the below excerpt is my favorite characterization of this point.

One D.C. health reform group representative described a recent health care policy conference where participants from youth organizations were literally falling asleep at the table.

“They’ve got a life ahead of them that seems 1,000 years long. ... They don’t believe they’re going to die. They don’t think they’re going to get sick,” said Center for Healthcare Decisions Executive Director Marge Ginsburg. “They understandably have very little health care experience to draw on.”

Ginsburg’s group tried to run a series of health reform focus groups involving 20-somethings but eventually told its recruiting company to stop taking applications.

“The fact is, they didn’t have much to say,” Ginsburg said, adding that a number of participants assumed most health care reform wouldn’t benefit them for years.

Young and old alike fall asleep at conferences, so I'll leave that aside. More to the point, there is a much more sophisticated outlook on healthcare than whether it will benefit you or not. In fact, young people know that healthcare reform will benefit them right way - their parents' health, as we learned from Roosevelt Institution's Rx Summit earlier this year. Family values are important to young people and they worry about whether or not their mother will be dropped from her insurance for a pre-existing condition or loss of employment. This issue of young people caring not just about themselves, but about their families, is something that is missing from the mainstream coverage of the health discussion. Furthermore, a youth-led group called Young Invincibles is working to combat the notion that young people can somehow do without health insurance (and healthcare reform).

Healthcare reform is full of human stories and policy details, and the point is that there are so many. Black and white frameworks don't do the discussion justice. Some journalists have fallen into that trap, or perhaps created it, restricting their perspective to their own bubble.

Yesterday, at Netroots Nation some good friends of the youth movement presented a panel on the successes of the youth movement and discussed where we go from here in terms of policy and continuous engagement for the young voters that elected Barack Obama.

Here is the Introduction by Jefferson Smith of the Oregon Bus Project and Biko Baker from the League of Young Voters. I'm dealing with a pretty sketchy internet connection as the hotel seems to be stuck in 1999, but as it uploads I'll post here and comment.

Erica Williams from Campus Progress

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.