1 Million Strong for . . . . Issue Activism and Youth Identity

One of the things I'd like to talk more about here at Future Majority is issue activism. Even during the long decline in young voter turnout from 1972 through 2000, issue activism remained a vibrant outlet for political action among young people. Whether it was Nader Raiders and corporate responsibility in the 70s, nukes and apartheid in the 80s, or the rise of the student environmental movement in the early 90s, issue activism has always had a place in forging the political identity of young people.

As we've noted incessently on this blog, electoral activism among young people has seen a significant rise in the last 4 years, but has it eclipsed issue activism as a primary form of political engagement among young voters? Here's some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the answer is no, and perhaps spark a conversation on what that means for Democrats, the Democratic Party, and youth organizations looking to speak to young voters.

In the last month, two Facebook groups have swamped anything accomplished by Barack Obama or any of the other presidential candidates on the social network:

Stephen Colbert - 508,978
Support the Monk's Protest in Burma - 430,725

Compare that to the much hyped 1 Million Strong for Barack Obama:

Barack Obama - 382,807

I don't want to make too much of this, because these Facebook groups can be fickle things. Yet it seems significant that a fake politician has accumulated in less than a week more support than Barack Obama, who is supposedly a youth juggernaut, has in half a year, and even more than all the official support of the Democrats and Republican candidates combined. In just over a one month time period, an incredibly dense and information rich Facebook group created in support of the protesting Burmese Monks has done the same. If you look at the numbers in Facebook Cause Applications you'll find a similar pattern. Darfur and Global Warming Causes both net hundreds of thousands of more supporters than do any politician.

Clearly our politicians are not connecting with young people to the degree that it is possible. Not even Obama. When I sat on the Future Technology panel at the Yearly Kos conference, my co-panelist (and sometime Future Majority blogger) Fred Gooltz noted that young people adopt issues like they wear pins on their bags and jackets. He didn't mean this in a bad way and he wasn't describing a shallow, consumerist activism. What he meant was that just as people use buttons or T-shirts or fashion to forge an identity, so too are young people's political identities tied up the issues they choose to support. The membership data for these Facebook groups, as well as the success of of issue-oriented groups like Step it Up seem to support that thesis.

Issue activism is alive and well, and I tend to agree with Fred that if Democrats or the Democratic Party wants to fully tap into the power of the youth vote, they are going to need to speak to those issues and forge a connection between their platform and values with that issue and the identity of those young people. We can continue to build the Democratic brand - and there is still much work to be done in terms of on the ground, peer to peer organizing for elections. But at some point, we're also going to need to reckon with the fact that the Democratic Brand can only go so far. If the youngest generation is forging political identity more through the issues about which they care than through a party allegiance, than the party is going to need to adjust to accommodate that trend if it wants to continue to increase its relevance.