Thomas Friedman on “Generation-Q” Thursday, October 11, 2007
Posted by Lars Almquist in Justice.trackback
I’m not always a fan of Mr. Friedman, but he has impressed me with his analysis of your 20-somethings on college campuses. Particularly striking is his analysis of our generation being ‘too-online’, ‘too virtual’, and not socially active enough in a physical sense, though humanitarian work is booming among our generation. These words are ‘tough love’ for our generation (me included, sadly) who wear the “activist” label on their (red)-campaign GAP t-shirts, and mistake charity for justice and empathy for empowerment. A great paragraph from his editorial follows:
America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that—virtual.
May our campuses find their moral compasses, including their activist ones as well.
For the revolution won’t be televised as long as it’s quarantined to Instant Messenger conversations, and online pseudo-communities.
Let’s continue to get our hands dirty.
I think I’m in the opposite camp, as I tend to agree with Friedman but disagree with him on this point. It seems clear that the form of collegiate political activism has evolved over the past 40 years. The issue in my mind, however, is whether it has evolved in the right way, such that it reflects the political climate we live in. So the real question is how our political climate has changed, right?
I think the short answer to this question is that American politics have become more complicated, and more crowded. Whereas 40 years ago political actors probably consisted mainly of the state, the private sector, a few interest groups, and the citizenry. Now I think there are a lot more NGOs, policy centers, and new interests to factor in. I think the end result is that, since political clout is more thinly distributed, there’s a higher bar for political efficacy. In other words, resources and affiliation with some well established organization is more a prerequisite for effective political participation now, whereas general protest politics or loose coalitions may have been sufficient a generation ago.
I think this trend is most notable when it comes to elected office. Both the financial and the educational bar are probably higher now than they’ve ever been; chances are Lincoln would never be able to jump start a political career today.
If this is true, and there is really a higher infrastructural/organizational/educational bar for effective political activism, maybe general grassroots politics don’t make as much sense anymore. Maybe college kids of our generation are turned off from the obvious ineffectiveness of retro politics. Some of the smartest and critically engaged kids around me, who are probably the ones that will go on to make the most political difference, are not heavily involved in campus activism. For a lot of kids, I think it comes down to weighing short term/long term efficacy. For a lot of people, the way they can incur the greatest systemic change is to establish a great academic foundation right now.
What I would like to see is more academic-based student politics (such as publications) that hug the intersection of these two routs to activism.
-Tim