We Are Not the Boomers

Harpers is running an interview with Sydney Blumenthal about his new book. During the interview, they got around to discussing the youth vote.

Shorter Blumenthal: they didn't turnout historically, probably won't this year, and if they do it won't be as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be:

4. In your analysis of the transformation of the electorate that brought the Democrats victory in 2006, you focus on the youth vote and note its sharp trajectory into the Democratic camp. Do you consider this to be a stable pillar on which to build a new Democratic majority? Young voters are not only less inclined to actually vote than other age groups, they are also famously fickle in their political attitudes. Isn’t it in fact only natural that a carefree college student will embrace liberal attitudes from which a later white-collar worker with a mortgage and children may turn?

The younger generation, responding to Bush’s radicalism, is emerging as a liberal one. Its development may be part of a natural cycle as the children of a liberal generation, just as their parents were children of the New Deal generation. Bush has been the formative experience in their political education. Yet the idea that the entrance of a new generation of young people will suddenly transform American politics is by now among the oldest, most romantic and least persuasive notions of so-called “new politics.” Proposed in the aftermath of the 1968 election, many Democrats pinned their hopes on the youth vote. That generation, my own, was and still is the largest numerically and proportionally in American history. Rather than try to analyze the internal reasons why the Democratic Party had come apart in the late 1960s, theorists suggested that a new generation would rescue the Democrats as a political deus ex machina. In a 1971 book, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s, Frederick G. Dutton, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, wrote: “Voter turnout increases with education, affluence, political awareness and social influence, and those attributes are all demonstrably higher in the coming generation than in any other new voting group in history.” This idea was one of the key underlying assumptions of the George McGovern candidacy in 1972. (McGovern, alas, lost 49 states.) A 1970 book, The New Majority, by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, describing the Republican sources of power as the “unyoung, unpoor and unblack” proved more prescient.

Voters under 30 during this campaign year have had a greater impact within Democratic primaries in terms of numbers and influence than they will in the general election. The Pew poll of May 8 now shows a growing generation gap, though “modest by the standards of the 1960s.” Yet a majority of those over 50 years old, according to Pew, do not share younger voters’ view, for example, of Barack Obama as “inspiring” or even as “patriotic.”

The “new politics” promising a youth-led renaissance, the transcendence of partisanship and the withering away of social need through the greening of America ended in tears 35 years ago. It’s a dream that apparently defies its repeated deaths.

I've got to disagree with Blumenthal. First off, the Boomers were not, contrary to popular belief, a liberal generation. Their values may have differed greatly from that of their parents, but as a generation they did not vote monolithically as we're seeing young people do today. Boomers are a split generation whose members have clashed for decades. That's what the culture war is . . .

Second, he assumes that young people today - their motivations, their engagement, the size of their generation, the mood of the electorate - are the same as back in '68 and in all those other elections when young people failed to turnout. This, fortunately, is not the case. Young voters are voting largely as a single voting block - a trend whose strength will only increase during the general election when Obama picks up Clinton's supporters. Thanks to new online tools like YouTube and FaceBook and MyBarackObama.com, engagement is easier, higher, and more effective than ever. Thanks to real field campaigns by third party groups and Students for Barack Obama, young voters are being incorporated into campaigns like we haven't seen in decades - since even before 1968, when LBJ kicked the college democrats out of the party. Obama's new 50-state voter registration plan will only amplify these trends.

Millennials are also a larger generation than the Baby Boom and this year it is highly likely that their turnout will top the record 55% set in 1972. I would argue that what we've seen in the primaries thus far isn't an outsized influence from young voters, but rather just a taste of what youth participation will be in November.

The generations are very different as well. As Strauss and Howe outlined in their work, and as Winograd and Hais just elucidated in their new book, Millennial Makeover, Boomers were an idealist generation. Their involvement in politics has been largely personal (moral), and outside the system. They rebelled against their civic-minded parents. Millennials are the opposite. they are a civic generation that prizes participation within the system and community engagement. Comparing the two generations is like apples and oranges.

Shorter me: This isn't 1968, '72, or '84. Millennials are different than their Boomer and Xer predecessors. Blumenthal's ideas are equally out of date.