Ignore the Youth Vote at Your Own Peril

By Matisse Bustos Hawkes, AlterNet. Posted May 2, 2008.

Michael Connery has written a necessary and accessible primer on the status of the progressive youth vote in the U.S. Youth to Power is a slim volume that gives important historical context to the youth vote and an in-depth look at the current activity of young progressives aligning with the Democratic Party, turning on its head the long-held perception of youth in America as apathetic and disconnected from electoral politics.

Connery essentially issues a wake-up call to progressive leaders: ignore the youth vote now and in any election in the future at your own peril. With good reason -- the Millennial generation, defined in the political realm as those born between 1978 and 1996, includes 50 million eligible voters for this year's presidential election. And more and more of them are aligning with the Democratic Party on issues like health care, the war in Iraq, foreign policy and environmental standards.

Connery, a respected progressive blogger, maintains the blog Future Majority and is a contributor to MyDD, DailyKos and the Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" project. As a veteran of the 2004 presidential cycle -- Connery co-founded a get-out-the-vote organization called Music For America -- he is well positioned to share observations and suggestions to those in power and simultaneously share experience and inspiration with youth voters and young leaders during this historic presidential election cycle.

He addresses Gen X and Baby Boomer leaders as well as Millenials throughout the book, in chapters that cover the 2003-04 rise in political participation in the Howard Dean campaign ("Deaniacs") through what he terms the "dot org boom" -- when an array of organizations were established by a few key progressive funders after the Democrats lost the presidential bid in 2004. He also spends time explaining how funding for progressive youth leadership training pales in comparison to the "conservative youth factory" established by the right wing. Connery also discusses methods of engaging youth through social justice activism -- a strategy deftly employed by communities of color. And he illuminates how new communication technologies, and the advent of Web 2.0 specifically, has helped shape new opportunities for unprecedented levels of participation by youth in electoral politics.

Youth to Power concludes with a warning that is also an invitation to those in power in the Democratic Party: "[O]ver the past five years ... young people have started a conversation of their own -- online and on the ground -- to engage one another politically. If the Democratic Party and the mainstream progressive movement want to see ... the future majority realized, it is high time they joined this conversation."

In the book you describe the Millennial generation really well -- it was the first thorough explanation I had read of it. What part of the generation do you consider yourself? Gen X cusper or straight up Millennial?

Personally, I consider myself a Millennial. In part, Generation X is defined by the declining birth rate after the Baby Boom. I was born in 1978, which is when the birth rate started to climb again. That's the year that a lot of political pollsters and some think tanks like the New Politics Institute use as the start date.

Millennials are far more progressive as a generation [than Generation X]. We are optimistic and believe in the power and responsibility of government to create opportunity and positive change for its citizens. There are also cultural markers that are more identified with Millennials than with Gen X, like an affinity for mashup culture and a level of comfort with peer-to-peer and social technologies. In all these categories I find myself identifying more with Millennials than Gen Xers.

You run your own blog, Future Majority and you're a frequent contributor to MyDD. How did you make the leap from blogger to author of your first book?

In 2004, when I was working at Music for America, part of my job was running our community website. That meant I was blogging on a daily basis on the site. It also meant that I would occasionally cross post a diary on some of the larger progressive community sites like Daily Kos and MyDD. At first, I did this under a pseudonym, as so many people do.

After '04, I was burned out on politics and didn't blog for over a year, but kept reading a few blogs, particularly MyDD. In 2006, I noticed that despite all the great work and new institutions springing up to organize young voters, no one was blogging about them and old attitudes about "apathetic youth" still seemed to hold sway in the blogosphere. The youth revolution that started in 2004 was essentially absent from the online conversation. That's when I started Future Majority. It's also when I abandoned my old accounts and started to blog under my real name.

I spent the next 6 months blogging on Future Majority, which at the time was read primarily by my old coworkers and a few folks who were involved in youth organizing in 2004 and 2005. But I would also cross post some of my more lengthy, analytical pieces to MyDD and Daily Kos.

Over at Daily Kos, a lot of quality content tends to get overlooked purely because of the sheer volume of content. To remedy that, one of the moderators, Susan G., began the "Diary Rescue Project." Eventually my diaries began to get rescued on a regular basis.

That's how my publishers -- Ig Publishing -- found me. Ig was starting to make a name for itself publishing bloggers, and Daily Kos was something of a recruiting ground for them.

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