We’ve got politics on the brain these days. Local politics that is, the kind you can actually have a tangible hand in shaping. This fall’s off-year election is getting a head start with City Council primaries and signature gathering for a variety of thought provoking initiatives.
Take a look at Exhibit A: The Spokane City Council. Hardworking, well-intentioned people all around. If memory serves correct, Council President Joe Shogan even took a voluntary 10% pay cut last year to donate to services for the hungry and homeless. He might be a little crotchety and gruff at times, but you certainly can’t argue with that generous spirit of self-sacrifice.
Exhibit A: The Spokane City Council
Personal qualities aside, I’ve always wondered how our City Council might look and function differently if it directly reflected the demographics of Spokane voters. It would be like the Miniature Earth project, but for Spokane instead of the entire globe, and calculated for seven people instead of one hundred.
The most obvious changes would include at least two more women on the council, and maybe even a person of color. Less obvious would be things like the number of Councilmembers living in apartments, not having children, not being married, or even people single with children, for example. It would be interesting to crunch all the numbers and see how things turn out, and even more interesting to see if it had an effect on policymaking.
Then there is the issue of youth. Young people have clearly been left out (and/or left themselves out) of the political process. The average age of a Washingtonian is 36-years-old, but out of 147 state legislators, only 16 are under 40. In our family friendly city, youth typically means kids… of the non-voting variety. When you bring up “young adults” everyone gets uncomfortable and starts cracking nervous jokes, a practice which itself ironically “gets old fast”. In our youth-obsessed culture, no one wants to admit that they are increasingly over-the-hill.
Fresh-faced former Councilmember Brad Stark
But isn’t youth just a state of mind? Just because you are “young on paper” doesn’t mean you are “young at heart”. Since there is an established negative voting trend for young candidates, might there be pressure for young politicians to “age up” in their behavior to avoid criticisms of being “inexperienced” or full of “youthful (read: dismissible) idealism”?
On the other hand, putting young people in office could represent more than idle identity politics. Studies show that young people are more tolerant, less homophobic, and tend to lean left overall.
Related Links:
- “Searching For Democracy: Young America – Reaching out to young adults.” A 2004 election blogging project from the Spokesman-Review.
- Example of running (almost solely) on the youth issue: Vote Mike Mercer
- “Parsing the Generational Divide for Democrats” A 2008 election report from NPR.
Tags: Identity Crisis · Political Surprise · Social Observations · Videos · Young People10 Comments
10 responses so far ↓
Young people tend to “lean left” because they are fresh out of 12-20 years of public high schools and colleges where leftish ideology rules the roost, and hence where they have acquired Newspeak versions of history, economics, and ethics (to the extent they have acquired any coherent grasp of those subjects at all, of course).
Most cultures rely on and defer to the elders of the group for advice and guidance in matters of public policy, because of their experience and broader perspective. Given the unfortunate educational experiences of most American kids it would make more sense to raise the voting age to about 45.
this reminds me of a discussion on the economist’s website that i was reading this week. someone quoted hegel, ‘the owl of minerva flies only at twilight.’ the quote was posted, intending to argue that wisdom only comes with age. its a misquotation, but in any case i think it is a good example of many people who ought to reprioritize what they seek in a leader/representative.
hegel’s true intent (i think) was to say that wisdom comes too late. older, wiser leaders base their decisions on experience that has already happened. this is important, but it must be balanced with anticipation/aspiration towards the future. forward-looking communities are absolutely dependent upon a batch of young leaders amongst their ranks. its implied that such young leaders would know their history, so a lack of crusty ‘ol wisdom shouldn’t be much of a downfall.
I think to simplify the generational gap to a matter of Left versus Right downplays the significance of the differences we have in both style and substance to other generations particularly the Boomers.
More than being proponents of “leftist” politics we tend to be post-partisan – team players who are reasserting the need for cooperation and shared values. We are pro-dialogue. A huge departure from the culture wars of the 1980’s and 1990’s which we had front row seats to as we grew up.
Too often this leads to us avoiding politics and government – dismissing them as inherently the partisan messes we watched growing up – and instead we attempt to shape our world for the better in the private or non-profit sectors.
Many of our generation (I’m 25) are already making serious contributions in these fields (particularly in Education), but ultimately I hope that we will take the same pragmatic problem-solving skills and apply them to our Government as well.
John,
Hope you realize my dig about raising the voting age to 45 was tongue-in-cheek.
But . . .
“More than being proponents of “leftist” politics we tend to be post-partisan – team players who are reasserting the need for cooperation and shared values.”
In that sentence you illustrate and affirm the distinction you’re trying to dismiss (although “left” v. “right” doesn’t quite capture it). The “left” (and much of the “right” also) is enamored of the ideal you just articulated — “cooperation and shared values.” But that ideal, which is as old as Plato, is not realizable in civilized societies comprised of millions of persons. It is an atavism, a relic of our tribal, primate heritage. Civilized societies are “societies of strangers” — communities of persons who have little or no shared experience, who differ radically in their interests, tastes, preferences, perspectives, and goals, but who happen, by accident of birth, to occupy a common territory. There are no values shared by all of them; although almost everyone can find others with whom they can cooperate for specific purposes, there can be no global cooperation. Civilized societies are not tribes, not “big happy families.”
All the destructive “isms” of the 20th century aspired to the ideal you cite — they were all attempts to transform, usually by force, the society of strangers into some semblance of a tribe, in which persons are not longer unique individuals all pursuing their own idiosyncratic conceptions of happiness, but merely exemplars of a tribal identity, obliged to further the alleged goals of “society” (as articulated by its ideologues).
You need an ideal that reflects the actual structure of the society in which you live.
Oh, please. (And take this in the same good humor that your remarks are delivered with.)
First off, I’m not sure I should take your remarks at all seriously when you essentially pull the Nazi card (although you deserve some credit for not coming out and directly saying it at least).
People who live in the same places have a great deal in common with one another. This is particularly true in America and other “civilized” nations where people have a greater sense of mobility and a choice about where they live.
In fact, one of the more perplexing problems we face is the self-sorting taking place (a la Richard Florida).
But more to the point, regions tend to share assumptions. Certainly there are disagreements (and this is nothing new), but that doesn’t make everyone living in their own little world (and nor is this an acceptable ideal). We should yearn (as I believe many in my generation do) for neighbors (Mr. Rogers deserves at least some of the credit).
Being pro-dialogue or pro-community (which the partisanship of the ongoing battles of the 60’s have worked so hard to destroy) doesn’t mean I want everyone to think exactly alike. What it does mean is a willingness to believe that we can work together, that compromise is possible, that pragmatic common-sense solutions are most likely to lead us to the answers to our most pressing challenges.
I live in the Valley so I would not be able to vote on the race anyway but now I can openly campaign against Jon Snyder based on the preachings of the Spovangelist. He’s a white male over 40. Disqualified!
Dear Chairman,
Your interpretations of my preachings are woefully off base.
I specifically explained that just because a candidate is a member of a group doesn’t mean they will necessarily represent the general interests (if any are discernible at all) for that demographic. The reverse is true as well.
Happy armchair endorsing!
“People who live in the same places have a great deal in common with one another. ”
They share a geography. Hence they will travel on the same streets, patronize some subset of the same set of merchants, etc. They will have no more in common than the facts of their location dictate.
“But more to the point, regions tend to share assumptions.”
No. Some set of assumptions may come to be associated with a region (just as some preferences in diet, dress, entertainment, etc., may come to be associated), but that only means that those variables are somewhat more prevalent there than elsewhere. It never implies that everyone, or even a majority, in that region shares them. “New York Loves the Met” may be true in that relative sense, but you can be assured that only a tiny fraction of New Yorkers are opera lovers.
“Certainly there are disagreements (and this is nothing new), but that doesn’t make everyone living in their own little world (and nor is this an acceptable ideal).”
People in civilized societies live in interconnected microworlds — the worlds comprised of their families, friends, co-workers, and others with whom they’ve freely established relationships of one kind or another, for one reason or another, most of which are pragmatic and endure only as long as the advantages they afford continue. They have some interest in the microworlds immediately linked to theirs, because events there directly affect their own. Beyond that adjacent shell their interests dissipate rapidly. The microworld is the modern substitute for the tribe as the basic social unit.
“Being pro-dialogue or pro-community (which the partisanship of the ongoing battles of the 60’s have worked so hard to destroy) doesn’t mean I want everyone to think exactly alike. What it does mean is a willingness to believe that we can work together, that compromise is possible, that pragmatic common-sense solutions are most likely to lead us to the answers to our most pressing challenges.”
But most “communitarian” ideologies aspire to exactly that — that everyone think — or at least act — alike in those matters considered crucial by the particular ideologue. But the key to success for civilized societies is to realize how limited the sphere of “common interests” actually is, and refrain from imposing policies which exceed those limits.
(A “civilized” society, BTW, is simply a society characterized by cities ((from the Latin “civis”)) and a city is simply a community so large that most of its residents do not know most of the others).
narrow the
Thinking critically about these under-studied demographics and how they affect policy is something we rarely do and should do more often. I am learning that we think about gov. we need to think about who we know that should run, and be very grateful for those amongst our friends who take the plunge for the benefit of our community.
I totally disagree that public schools lean left. But there may be some merit in being fresh out of the last phase of life where everyone is a part of a community (their school/college/U). We tend to lose that when we graduate if we don’t keep ties with our neighbors and our community and get involved with (or form) organizations that reflect our values and interests. Politics have gotten out of control and we like to blame monied lobby groups and campaign finance laws, but we also need to take a look at ourselves and assess why we don’t have “people like us” in government. If we can’t achieve a government that is more representative of ALL of Spokane (where we know who the power brokers are and can choose to ignore them), we can’t do it anywhere.
I hope this sparks more discussion and participation.
A voter trends article from the Associated Press for 2008:
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/jul/21/voter-turnout-rate-down-in-08-census-data-show/