(Santa Monica, CA)

Raised to study to the test, to volunteer with one eye on college applications and to play the sport with the most scholarship opportunities, Millennials carry that competitive mind-set into the workforce, said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Boston.

“‘They feel like they need to take advantage of every opportunity they have for advancement,” Levine said. “You’re not going to get tied down to someone you just sort of happen to know at this point in your life. It feels like a risk, and there’s a cost for that.”

— Megan Finnerty, “Experts: Young people prioritizing careers over romance,”USA Today (and theArizona Republic), Feb. 14.

I don’t deserve to be cited as an “expert” on the general topic of this Valentine’s Day article (careers taking precedence over romance). In fact, Finnerty had called me to investigate whether young adults are more socially disconnected than their predecessors used to be. Her good reporting on that question was cut at the editorial stage.

But I do think her article covers an important issue. It’s not so much about being too busy or rushed, but rather about delaying activities of intrinsic value until real life begins, which is only after one’s education is complete. Everything one does during adolescence and young adulthood then feels like “preparation.” Thus Lew Friedland and Shauna Morimoto find that many high school students volunteer  for  career purposes. The entire thrust of education reform is ensuring that everyone reaches some kind of finish-line, as measured by test scores, college admission, or a job. No one talks seriously about whether people are having intrinsically valuable experiences for their first third of their lives. And the “hookup culture,” to the extent that it exists, may also be a matter of delaying the encumbrances of a romantic relationship until one is fully prepared for life. I trace all those trends not to changes in people’s characters or priorities but to the new economic reality of individual risk/individual reward, in which one is alone to make one’s way in the market.

After a visit to Duke some years ago one which everyone wanted my views of the hookup culture, I thought:

Oh, come with me and be my love,
For Saturday night–that’s enough.
Next week, I’ve got a paper due,
A service gig, an interview too.
“Come with me”: remember, from our course?
(Also a pun, which I’d better not force.)
Yes, I deleted “live”–but you can stay
‘Til ten. Then I’ll work on my résumé.
Slippers and buckles of the finest gold:
One day you’ll have those, and someone to hold.
But I’m by myself now; the market’s tight;
For now, I’ve got to focus, network, fight.
Wait ’til we’re forty, and then maybe
You can be my love and live with me.

[For ease of reference, here’s the Marlowe original and previous replies by Walter Ralegh, C. Day Lewis, William Carlos Williams, and Odgen Nash.]

O’Hare Airport, Feb. 14

Dear –,

I am excited that you are helping to organize a political reform movement that you frame in generational terms. That is always a valuable contribution—and never more so than today. Thank you for asking me for advice.

Just between ourselves, I happen to be skeptical of generational analysis. Babies are born every second, distinctions among generations are largely arbitrary, and the trends are gradual and often wavy and divergent rather than linear. Many supposed generational characteristics of today’s young people (such as your resistance to party labels) are actually typical of youth at other times as well. When I stare at the data, what strikes me most is the tremendous and stubborn variation within your generation by region, ideology, race, and especially, social class.

When people present me with positive or negative generalizations about Millennials, I often want to push back.

For example: are you comfortable with diversity and difference? Yes, with respect to sexual orientation, but not necessarily with respect to race. An outright majority of young White people wrongly believe that discrimination is worse against Whites than against African Americans. As a whole cohort, you are racially diverse, but Whites and Blacks are less likely to attend the same schools than at any time in the last 50 years.

Are you politically active? Many of you are—but about as many are not. The youth turnout rate in the last two elections was around 50%, which is absolutely typical for elections since 1976.

I say all this “just between ourselves” because it can come across as discouraging. Before they can enter the national debate, young activists are expected to assemble evidence that their cohort is somehow unique. I would say, instead, that the young people of any given moment have the opportunity to define themselves as a generation and to make the reality that they want to see.

For instance, the much-vaunted radical activist generation of the 1960s was not that different, statistically, from other cohorts. In 1970, just 9 percent of 18-29s said that they had attended a political meeting, and less than one in four said they followed the news at all. Both statistics (from the American National Election Studies) declined somewhat in the 1980s, and that trend is worth explaining. But my point is that most young people, even at the climax of the youth movements of the 1960s, were not involved in any of that. Also, some young political activists campaigned for Nixon or belonged to Young Americans for Freedom. Nevertheless, left-oriented, anti-establishment young leaders put their stamp on the whole era by claiming a certain generational identity. They didn’t need statistics, because they wanted to shape reality rather than ride the prevailing trends.

I don’t hold them up as a model for you, by the way, because I think their agendas were somewhat problematic and are now obsolete. I am simply arguing that it is possible to form a generational identity regardless of the data. The place to start is with your own ideals and values; your job is to persuade other people to agree.

Couldn’t we say that at any moment? On one hand, yes, we could. I am now in middle age, and I hope to be working with young people in five years and in 25 years in similar ways. I don’t expect them to be fundamentally different from you.

On the other hand, no—every generation is not the same as every other, any more than any individual, or school, or town is the same as all the rest. All cohorts have subtle individuality. Their particular circumstances affect them in unique ways. Our attitude should be one of appreciation, welcoming the new group to public life. And to appreciate people is to pay close attention to their individuality. You don’t have to look for evidence that people born within an arbitrary 20-year window are starkly different from their predecessors. But you can safely assume that they have their own special assets and contributions.

Why think in terms of age at all? If you Millennials are so diverse, and if you are basically in the same boat as us older folks, why should we even want a youth movement? I will offer you three reasons.

First, deliberate youth activism is always necessary because older people monopolize power and influence and do not yield it willingly. To achieve a healthy turnover in public life, the young must open space for themselves.

Second, a beautiful feature of human life is that we are born. We start over afresh. Even though we know that trends and problems will persist, the world is given a new chance with each new cohort. Their entrance is a blessing on the whole house. Another beautiful feature of human life is that the older cohorts don’t just die off as soon as the new ones arrive. We can transmit experience and exchange perspectives over many decades. But that exchange only benefits us older people if you young folks come on strong and proud.

Finally, this is a critically bad time—not so much for the society or the economy as for our political institutions, which lurch from one self-made crisis to another. The Millennials’ stance of independence and pragmatic problem-solving is, I think, more a function of being young than of belonging to their particular generation. My cohort of Gen-Xers felt the same way in 1990. But this is a moment when we especially need the perspective that always accompanies youth: the stance of impatience with political games and stale debates.

I shared my initial skepticism about generational analysis because I sense that you are analytically serious and don’t want to operate on the basis of a myth. But I mean to be the opposite of discouraging. You don’t need statistics to show that you are more tolerant or more active than your predecessors in order to win a place at the table. That place is your birthright.  Nor are you constrained by what the survey data may say about your generation’s opinions. You have your own opinions and you are entitled to express them. We need you to express them. Just let me know if I can help.

Best, Peter

(Elon, NC) In his Feb. 8 Washington Post op-ed, David Cole makes the argument that finally meets my intuitions about the drone strikes.

Cole, a strong civil libertarian, argues that it is not illegal or intrinsically wrong to order the death of Americans:

Killing is not like torture. Torture is never justified, even in wartime. But killing is an integral, if unfortunate, aspect of war. Targeted killing is therefore not inherently illegal; after all, it beats the tragically untargeted killing used in the World War II bombings of Dresden, London and Hiroshima.

Nor is it always forbidden to kill an American. If a U.S. citizen were fighting alongside al-Qaeda on an Afghan battlefield, would anyone question the right of U.S. troops to shoot and kill him? And President Abraham Lincoln violated no constitutional guarantee by authorizing Union troops to fire on American citizens fighting for the Confederacy.

We could add many precedents. Virtually every administration could provide examples. For instance, under President Jefferson, the United States fought Algeria, and (according to Wikipedia), “[Commodore] Preble attacked Tripoli outright on July 14, 1804, in a series of inconclusive battles, including a courageous but unsuccessful attack by the fire ship USS Intrepid under Captain Richard Somers. Intrepid, packed with explosives, was to enter Tripoli harbor and destroy itself and the enemy fleet; it was destroyed, perhaps by enemy guns, before achieving that goal, killing Somers and his crew.” A fire ship that actually entered a harbor would have a high probability of killing noncombatants and citizens of noncombatant nations; a drone strike can be targeted more precisely.

President Lincoln directed a war that caused the death of 258,000 American citizens who wore Confederate uniforms, plus an unknown number of civilians killed in bombardments, burned cities, sieges, etc.

President Clinton ordered Yugoslavia bombed (for human rights reasons, which I supported). Human Rights Watch estimates that up to 528 civilians were killed. Three Chinese journalists were killed when NATO, using a CIA map, mistakenly hit the Chinese Embassy. Again, a drone strike could work better than a bomb.

This is not to say that it is smart or effective to use frequent drone strikes in countries like Pakistan and Yemen. I think that is probably counter-productive, on balance. But, as Cole writes, “when it comes to the particular legal issue [of] whether it is legal to kill Americans with drones,” this is the main problem: “the government [can] kill its citizens in secret while refusing to acknowledge, even after the fact, that it has done so.” Secrecy prevents even the after-the-fact accountability that would allow US citizens to decide whether our government has acted wisely and justly in our name.

It seems to me that the fix is fairly straightforward (although unlikely, given the politics). By statute, Congress should require that every American government action known to have caused deaths be publicly disclosed. A delay for national security reasons is fine, and there could even be a provision to allow exceptions (e.g., to protect sources)–subject to a federal judge’s review. But blanket secrecy is unacceptable.

Today, the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), CIRCLE, Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, and Mobilize.org have released the Millennials Civic Health Index. It paints a comprehensive picture of young Americans 18 to 29 and describes the diverse ways in which Millennials are taking action in their communities beyond the voting booth, online and offline, across different regions of the United States.

Some headlines:

• this generation of Americans represents a potent civic and political force – comprising a national voting bloc of 21.3% of eligible voters who are playing a critical role in our democracy and driving community action nationwide;
• education is strongly connected to civic engagement—some indicators show a college graduate is four or five times more likely to engage than someone without a high school diploma;
• Millennials are hard hit by the economic crisis—62.9% are currently working, of which 31.2% work on a part-time basis—with potential implications for civic engagement;
• some surprising trends–while engagement typically increases with age, 22-25 year olds have lower levels of social cohesion and volunteerism than older or younger peers. And, while education predicts most forms of engagement, young people without a college education are more likely to help their neighbors on a regular basis.

The full study can be found here. To hear a press call on the release today at 10 am Eastern, please dial 866-889-3913  and enter password YOUTH.

Melissa Bass has published The Politics and Civics of National Service: Lessons from the Civilian Conversation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013). This book originated with a CIRCLE grant and two CIRCLE Working Papers (numbers 11 and 12). It is a great achievement and truly essential reading for anyone who is interested in civilian national service as an instrument for social reform, civic education, or strengthening communities.

Because Bass describes three federal service initiatives that originated, respectively, in the Depression, the 1960s, and the 1980s, her story also provides an excellent opportunity to think about broader changes in the definition of “citizenship,” the aims of government, prevailing ideas about education, poverty, youth development, and the environment, and the relationship between state and market. Although the Civilian Conservation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps share certain common features, the differences are perhaps more illuminating. No one in 1932 would have thought to promote “social entrepreneurship” with competitive grants to NGOs that place many of their volunteers in white collar nonprofit jobs. No one today would envision housing young men in racially segregated federal work camps to study American ideals while building dams and laying telephone lines.

The interest of the book is not merely historical or analytical. To revive ideals of active, responsible, and inclusive citizenship requires supportive institutions and policies. When designing these policies, we must be attentive not only to how they may affect their participants and beneficiaries, but also to how they will fit into–or alter–the broader political system. Most policies have feedback loops, either strengthening or undermining themselves over time. The CCC, for instance, grew to almost 100 times the maximum size of VISTA because it was understood as a jobs program in the midst of an unemployment crisis. But it was quickly killed when the economic situation changed. In contrast, AmeriCorps’ decentralized model creates a network of grantees that lobby for the program’s preservation–but the grantees are far too small and weak to expand it much. (Despite its breadth and diversity, AmeriCorps remains one fifth the size of the CCC in a much bigger country.) Michael Sandel once called for a “political economy of citizenship.” Anyone who takes up his challenge should pay serious attention to the lessons of Melissa Bass’s book.