Monthly Archives: February 2008

why are young people voting

Because we calculate the youth turnout rate, we at CIRCLE are getting many press calls every day. We have shown that youth turnout is up dramatically–by a factor of three or four in many states. The main question is: Why?

The answer is not simply Senator Obama, because Senator Clinton has won the youth vote in several states (California, Arizona, and Massachusetts), and about one third of young voters have participated in the Republican primaries. That means that Senator Obama has received less than half of all young votes.

I am boiling down my answer to two parts: the kids and the candidates. The “kids,” i.e., people now between 17 and 25 years of age, are somewhat different from their recent predecessors. If you want quantitative evidence of this change, the best single fact is the rapid rise in the volunteering rate. If you want qualitative context, I recommend our Millennials Talk Politics report. Either way, there is plenty of evidence that young people are concerned, idealistic, and aware of at least some social issues. If they volunteer at a homeless shelter, for instance, they recognize homelessness as a problem.

This does not mean that they are sold on voting and politics as solutions to social problems. One student told us in a focus group, “I have voted every time I’ve been given an opportunity, but I do it more as a symbolic gesture than an actual means of changing something.” This was a common view. Still, students are ready to hear a pitch that a given campaign or candidate might be worth supporting as a way of addressing problems.

Which brings me to the candidates. They are making the pitch–literally contacting young people through grassroots organizing and by making high-profile visits, and arguing that elections can affect social issues. Obama, Huckabee, and Chelsea Clinton have all personally appeared on our campus. It may seem obvious that politicians would campaign to get young votes. However, in the 1990s, there was such strong conventional wisdom that young people didn’t vote that often young citizens were literally deleted from contact lists.

When I mention the rising volunteering rate, sometimes reporters and others ask me whether this isn’t simply a function of mandates. Some schools require community service; many colleges seem to value it in applications. These are valid explanations for the increasing rate of volunteering, but they don’t negate its importance. For young people, experiences tend to cause attitudes, rather than the reverse. Providing incentives and opportunities for service is likely to change what young people value.

tertiary literature

I’ve previously confessed that I’m writing fiction about Elizabethan England. I have read some serious scholarly work for background. I’m also tempted to pick up relevant popular books when I see them for sale in places like airport bookstores. That is why I have recently read Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage; Benjamin Wooley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee; Peter Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague; Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot; and Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh.

I find the demand for these books a little hard to understand. You could call them “tertiary literature” because they are basically summaries of the secondary literature, with maybe a few quotes from original sources and some journalistic writing about locations that the authors have visited for atmosphere. A tertiary book can be interesting if the author has a thesis. For instance Fraser has a view of the Gunpowder Plot that’s interesting. (She thinks that Guy Fawkes really did it, but in a context of terrible anti-Catholic persecution.) But for most of these books, the thesis is simply that the subject is important. Thus, for example, Peter Marshall’s point is that Emperor Rudolf was significant to history. I’m not sure why people would pay money to find this out. These books also tend to be very badly edited, with many misplaced modifiers and other errors. There seems to be a relative shortage of really compelling, literary narrative history for popular audiences.

Obama and the civic populist tradition

Harry Boyte recently had an epiphany looking at the map of where Senator Obama has won primaries or caucuses. Many Obama states–a band from Illinois across to Washington–have strong traditions of civic populism dating back to 1890-1939. Others were crucibles of the Civil Rights Movement in 1945-1970–a band from South Carolina to Louisiana. These were distinct movements but they had more connections than is often recognized. My favorite example is the way that Miles Horton went to Chicago to learn from Jane Addams before he started the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the center that helped train Rosa Parks, among many others. Nick Longo recovers this story in his book Why Community Matters.

Harry’s analysis is as persuasive as explanations based on demographics or primaries versus caucuses. His epiphany is relevant to the outcome of the current election. In states where there is a civic populist tradition, people hear Obama’s rhetoric in a particular way (like a “deep note vibrating in a base drum,” Harry writes). Obama says, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to make change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.” People in states like Minnesota and Mississippi understand that it’s possible to unleash public energies to address serious public problems. So they presume that Obama is talking about public participation after the election–participation in our schools, parks, and neighborhoods.

In other places, however, Democratic voters do not have this frame of reference. When they hear, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (a powerful echo of the Civil Rights Movement), they think that they are merely being asked to vote for Obama or to volunteer and give money to his campaign. In their minds, the campaign is the opportunity to participate–and they are not sure they want to join up. The aesthetic of hip-hop artists and starlets singing along to Obama speeches may not appeal to them. Some may share Joe Klein’s reaction (from TIME Magazine):

the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause–other than an amorphous desire for change–the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

I don’t actually think that this is fair, but the perception inevitably arises when people don’t have experience with civic engagement. The smart strategy for the Obama campaign is to explain how President Obama will unleash the power of the American people after the election–how he will encourage Americans to cross differences and contribute their energies and talents to address social problems. That’s a concrete goal and it requires concrete policies and examples.

what publics do

In Publics and Counterpublics, the influential cultural critic Michael Warner writes,

All of the verbs for public agency are verbs for private reading, transposed upward to the aggregate of readers. Readers may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, etc. Publics can do exactly these things. And nothing else. Publics, unlike mobs or crowds, remain incapable of any activity that cannot be expressed through such a verb. Activities of reading that do not fit the ideology of reading as silent, private, replicable decoding, curling up, mumbling, fantasizing, gesticulating, ventriloquizing, writing marginalia, etc. also find no place in public agency.

One one hand, Warner is right (and brilliantly astute) about the meaning of the word “public” in a certain literature, one in which the German theorist Jürgen Habermas plays a leading role. In this literature, the democratic public assesses, judges, opines, etc. All of this highly cognitive and verbal activity is much like reading–as we teach students to read in our schools and colleges. (It is not like reading in church, or reading a love letter.)

On the other hand, this whole literature misses functions of a democratic people that Tocqueville, Dewey, and many important current thinkers have emphasized (sometimes using the noun “public”). These functions cannot be performed by solitary readers, nor by the “mobs or crowds” mentioned by Warner. They include:

  • Founding and managing associations and institutions
  • Physically constructing public spaces
  • Creating and preserving stories, anecdotes, songs, and rhymes that reflect the culture
  • Raising children to be citizens
  • Filing lawsuits
  • Putting bodies on streets or across entrances to block traffic

I find the notion of “the public” as a body of judicious observers completely implausible, both politically and psychologically. What would motivate people to serve as detached “readers” of public issues? Why would powerful institutions honor their opinions, once they had gone to the trouble of forming them? And how would they obtain knowledge of issues if they never did any public work?

[Disclaimer: I have not yet read Publics and Counterpublics. I came across the passage quoted above in a fine article by Warner entitled “Uncritical Reading,” where he quotes his own book. A major theme of “Uncritical Reading” is the narrowness of our assumptions about how to read, e.g., our rule that one should always interpret passages in the context of whole books. Nevertheless, I must and shall read Publics and Counterpublics to grasp the whole argument.]