Should there be a large membership organization for youth that lobbies on economic issues that affect them–an American Association of Young People? I can think of three major arguments in favor. First, there are huge and perhaps unprecedented issues of generational equity. The government is borrowing and spending with wild abandon and saving the bill for younger people; and things are likely to get worse as the boomers age. The injustice (and short time horizons) reflected in current policy seem to require an organized response. Second, young people tend to be low political priorities because they don’t vote and aren’t organized to lobby. An “AAYP” would help. Third, it’s important for people to have reasonably positive political experiences when they’re in their late teens and twenties, because Karl Mannheim’s classic theory of development suggests that early experiences permanantly shape people’s civic identity, making them active or passive for the rest of their lives. If young people were more organized as a political bloc, then parties and interest groups would compete for their support, and as a result they would have more experiences of being important and sought after.

There are also some arguments against an “AAYP.” First of all, organizing it would be heavy-lifting. Young people are comparatively hard to organize at all, since they are relatively unlikely to give money and to voluntarily support disciplined organizations. Besides, compared to their elders, they are not too interested in the kinds of programs and issues that involve generational equity–Social Security, Medicare, and the like. For example, only six percent of under-25s (and 3 percent of college students) picked medical care as the top voting issue in the 2004 elections. To the extent that young people do think about Social Security reform and other relevant issues, they certainly disagree about what should be done, which would make it hard to show a united front. In any case, young people may be relatively unconcerned about the impact of these issues on youth because they don’t see themselves as essentially young. They expect to move on and become middle aged, whereas the AARP consituency is “retired” for good.

Some people see the AARP’s model as bad for democracy because it empowers a few experts in Washington to decide what makes good policy and then “sell” their ideas to a huge population using advertising techniques–not very empowering. It’s also a special-interest model, and a clash of special interests does not often make good policy. Then again, if the over-60s have an expert-driven, special-interest organization with 35 million dues-paying, voting, letter-writing members, then maybe youth need one too.

(From Wingspread, WI): I first posted on Jan. 8, 2003, so tomorrow will be the second birthday of this blog. I’ve posted every weekday since then, except when I’ve been away on vacation with my family. There have been 514 entries, total. I’ve already told the story of how I started, but in brief: I was asked to moderate an academic panel on “community in cyberspace.” The panelists included Eugene Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Balkin, and Amitai Etzioni. Although I knew about blogging, I didn’t know that Reynolds and Volokh had hugely popular blogs–which is why they had been invited for the panel. I hastily wrote introductions based on their university web pages, which only mentioned their scholarly and teaching interests. But the conversation turned to blogging, naturally, and I decided to get into the game. Etzioni and Balkin also started their blogs within a month of that panel.

In the last year, some of my favorite moments were: learning that a college class had been assigned to read my post on what it means to be civic; suddenly getting a fair amount of attention for a mini-essay (“What’s wrong with the left, and what to do about it?”); receiving a Christmas card from a reader; and having three academic articles accepted for publication that were entirely composed of assembled blog entries. Speaking of “community in cyberspace,” I’ve also enjoyed my regular commenters and reciprocal visits to their blogs–for instance, Prairie Weather, Brad Rourke, Eli Edwards, In Medias Res, Mike Weiksner, Rick Emrich, Nick Beaudrot, and Anjali Taneja.

Today I’m going to Wingspread, the Johnson Foundation’s retreat center near Racine, Wisconsin. It’s a beautiful building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The nonpartisan youth voting folks will gather there to discuss what to do next. Young people turned out in 2004; we need to keep them engaged. I hope to post something substantive later, but right now, I have to catch my plane.