You must be present to win
Working outside the Democratic Party (as a blogger) and inside (as a low-level official) is the best of both worlds. You can throw rocks when necessary (often enough) and get state politicians to listen to you. First, because they know you have a hand in getting them elected/reelected, and second because you have a platform for embarrasing them if they won’t.
It’s not a perspective Generation Z shares, writes Annie Lowry. They’ve never known an America that actually works:
“Frustrating” was one word a young progressive activist named Annie Wu Henry used to describe today’s Democratic establishment.
In her mind, Wu told me in an interview, Democrats are falling short in terms of addressing the country’s affordability crisis, eliminating student debt, protecting the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ Americans, and ensuring access to abortion. Worse, she said, they seem to have no viable strategy for accomplishing what they promise, let alone what the country needs. “We tell them our ideas, and they tell us their plans,” Wu said, talking about the strategic differences she sees between the left and the right. “While we can be very upset that the Court overturned Roe, nobody should be surprised. The right has been talking about this for decades, as well as telling us how they are going to do it.”
She’s right. Things really began falling apart in the 1990s. National Democrats have been sluggish to respond to and develop effective counters for conservatives lurch to the right, after lurching to the right, etc.
Miraculously, after a slow start with narrow congressional margins and against implaccable resistance from Republicans, Joe Biden has had perhaps the best couple of weeks of any president in memory. Will it be enough to ameliorate Gen Z cynicism, Lowry asks.
Biden’s approval ratings among the Gen Z cohort has fallen three times more than among Boomers. Lowry’s conversations with political analysts, pollsters, and politically engaged young activists elicited several concerns.
Inflation and the economy are worse for Gen Z than for Boomers still in the drivers’ seat. Secondly, their issues are not Boomers’ issues: student debt, LGBTQ rights and protections. Getting them taken as seriously as the young demand has been a slog, at best.
There’s a third reason so many politically engaged young lefties feel disaffected: These young people have come of age in a time of rising populism, declining democracy, climate catastrophe, and vicious inequality. “This is a cohort that has never felt stable or secure, personally, financially, or physically,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, told me. “They don’t have a moment where they felt great to be an American, or when America was truly united.” These voters aren’t old enough to recall the surge of patriotism after 9/11, he noted; some don’t even remember Barack Obama’s election. But their feeling of vulnerability has made the youngest American adults much more likely than older voters to agree that the government should, and indeed needs to, solve the country’s problems.
Yet Biden and a Democratic Congress have failed to deliver on many of their promises. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court now looks set to gut the administrative state and wind back any number of laws and rights, and will likely keep doing so for decades. Conservatives, through techniques such as gerrymandering, have tilted state legislatures and Congress to the right. The problems are getting more and more pressing, and the government is getting less and less capable, in the eyes of many young progressives I spoke with (a point on which many political scientists, historians, and politicians concur). “The country’s broken, held together with McKinsey slide decks and duct tape,” Beatrice Adler-Bolton, a co-host of the podcast Death Panel, told me.
The youngest Americans will bear the worst consequences of our warming world and our government, which gives disproportionate power to older people in conservative states. And young progressives might not get their say in Washington for a long time, if ever. “On abortion access or raising the minimum wage or gun safety, we have seen the inability of our legislators to enact the policies that the vast majority of Americans support,” Tzintzún Ramirez, of NextGen, said. “Now we have an extreme right-wing Court that is making decisions over the health and the lives of millions of people, with next to no accountability.”
“The question is, is it possible for this generation to hold two seemingly disparate views at the same time: Politics is unable to meet the moment, but it’s still worth voting?” Della Volpe said.
Two observations.
Older Democrats need to stand aside and make way for younger voters to exercise power even if that includes making their own mistakes. Why else bother? I see local Democrats lament the lack of more younger activists in the ranks while they hang onto power past their expiration dates and give the young few routes to leadership in the next decade.
Second, getting Democrats to think outside the box is near impossible. Nationally and locally, innovation (other than tech) draws the side-eye. Not only is that dispiriting for would-be new party activists, it means Democrats often keep doing the same things the same way even if they’re losing. Who wants to do that?
OTOH, counting on older voters to change their ways is a fool’s game. Younger voters have untapped power at their fingertips. And it’s free. That is, if they’ll reach out and take it. Consider what committed lunatic outsiders accomplished (negatively) with the Republican Party in Arizona. Or what a bartender from the Bronx did to Rep. Joe Crowley. The Democratic Party is as vulnerable to savvy, committed progressives. But substantive change won’t happen by throwing rocks from the outside or through non-participation. You must be present to win.
From Netroots Nation-Pittsburgh
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