I am reading a forthcoming book about a whole set of academic programs–centers, certificates, majors, and minors–devoted to service or civic engagement. I am struck that the numerous authors in the volume cite virtually no living intellectuals who are associated with political or social movements.

Some of the authors are overtly hostile to Big Ideas, grand narratives, and large-scale movements. One endorses a “militant or radical particularity, knowing a place in its fullness, with its contradictions, its conflicts, its questions, what it means to be a citizen in that place.” Several write strongly in favor of complexity, enduring relationships, listening, and questioning. The major authors whom they cite most frequently tend to be proponents of pragmatism, of learning from particular and personal experience, and of open-ended conversations: John Dewey, Miles Horton, Paolo Freire, Parker Palmer, C. Wright Mills. The one ideology that is discussed frequently is “neoliberalism”; but it emerges as a shadowy enemy without a specific parallel on the left.

I am sympathetic to these values and also happen to believe that none of the available ideological movements of the present moment is going anywhere. But I would note that the implicit strategy of community-based, open-ended, non-ideological, relational politics is very difficult. It is much easier to participate in politics if you can join a political movement that provides values, diagnoses, prescriptions, strategies, networks, inspirational stories, living leaders, candidates and party slates, regular news reports, organizational supports, cultural expressions (from songs to clothes), and potential career paths. If you have to make everything up by talking with diverse people in your own community, the cognitive and motivational demands are extreme.

When we compare today’s student activists to their forebears, it is important to recognize that their world has dramatically changed because ideological movements have collapsed. Fifty years ago (early in the Kennedy administration):

• Some young activists associated themselves with Marxism, in one of its versions from revolutionary communism to Liberation Theology or European-style social democracy. Today, Marxism lives on college campuses only as scattered reading assignments.
• Other aligned with the liberalism of the New Deal and New Frontier. Liberal values have actually grown more popular among young Americans, but theirs is now basically a defensive or conservative posture, dedicated to protecting or possibly expanding the laws and institutions that were built between 1932 and 1968.
• Still others joined the Civil Rights Movement, then at its apogee and heading toward both triumph and disintegration.
• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, and some students were gravitating toward the nascent environmental movement, widely seen as in crisis in 2012.
• Just a year later, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and by then some young people were beginning to create Second Wave Feminism. But in 2008, just 14% of Americans (of all ages) said that they considered themselves feminists. (PDF)
• Finally, a few activist students and faculty endorsed the libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman. That movement remains vital today, but it draws only a small minority’s support.

Now we ask our young people to go into a community, listen, observe, and figure out for themselves what to do. We are asking a lot.