Keys to a Future Majority

Crossposted at OpenLeft

Yesterday, Chris wrote a post that looked at a recently published paper on heuristics and politics, which he described as a "new approach toward how voters make decisions". The paper described a few psychological phenomena, and came to the conclusion that people do not make rational decisions in politics, but rather rationalize their rather irrational political decisions.  Chris then went on to discuss how he thought the study related to the behavior of supporters of various candidates, including Gore supporters:

At first blush, this strikes as something I once called Creeping Dear Leader Syndrome online, to describe a phenomenon where people back a candidate and then either change their issue positions to match the candidate, or use contorted, hermeneutical reading of candidate positions to turn those positions into something they are not. It something you see in the comments of blog posts on the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign all the time. Even though it is not an "issue position," exactly, one of the most gratuitous examples is how Gore supporters seems to be able to consistently read Gore's statements that he has no intention of running as actually meaning that he is, after all, certain to run. People invent narratives and facts surrounding the candidates they support, in order to convince themselves that their beliefs and their chosen candidate's beliefs are identical. Unless I am mistaken, in political science circles this is a phenomenon known as "projection."

Well, Chris was wrong on multiple points in this post, and so I thought I'd address a few of those mistakes, including his mischaracterization of why Gore supporters believe that the former Vice President will run.

Below is the letter that Mike, I, and some of our advisers wrote as an introduction to the (award winning) business plan that we developed to propose a new way of thinking about, and funding, the building and sustaining of progressive infrastructure. This is very close to becoming a reality, and we should know for certain if it is going to happen in the next few weeks.

Right now, the progressive movement is homeless. While the Christian Right is busy using churches to tap into evangelical culture, recruit new hearts and minds, and out-organize the left, progressives are scrounging for office space and seem incapable of tapping into one of our greatest resources – our culture.

What if we could create a space where local progressives could meet, network, and get organized? A space where independent music could thrive amidst an industry that is increasingly dominated by corporations unfriendly to progressive causes? What if – like the Christian Right and its churches – the two could feed off each other, creating a cycle whereby progressive-minded folks supported the independent music scene, which in turn fed new, younger faces into the progressive movement? That is the goal of 8th Street: to create a hotbed of cultural and political activity that will symbiotically provide a home for the progressive movement and allow independent music to thrive in the Philadelphia metro area.

If progressives want to regain control, we must learn to exploit the connection between culture and politics, and reconnect local activism with the every day lives of our constituents. In the coming years, Philadelphia offers us an ideal testing ground for this organizational model, and 8th St. is positioned as the perfect venue to accomplish these goals.

In the next three years, SE Pennsylvania will have nine competitive House races and a fiercely contested Senate race. As a swing state, it will be a cornerstone of both parties’ electoral strategies. And in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, it will most likely face a contentious redistricting battle around new census data. Philadelphia is also a hotbed of online activism, with many A-list bloggers located in the metro-area, including Atrios’ Duncan Black, MyDD’s Chris Bowers, as well as bloggers from Booman Tribune, Suburban Guerilla, and Whiskey Bar. Thriving Drinking Liberally and DFA chapters also call Philly their home.

The political machinery is in place, but it requires a home to live in, and a hook to draw in new members.

More than a political center, Philadelphia is also the cultural center of eastern Pennsylvania. For ten years now, R5 productions has been known for bringing the hippest shows and best concert experiences to the Philadelphia area. Thousands of students and young professionals trek into the city from the suburbs to attend R5 events. These concerts are the perfect vehicle to reach progressive minded folks under 30.

A captive, like-minded audience is available, but it has no official home, and no way to plug into the larger progressive movement.

8th St. will bring these pieces of the puzzle together. By using peer to peer outreach tactics at shows, we will make a connection between politics and the lives of our estimated 70,000+ concert-goers. We will identify and nurture the next generation of political activists by serving as the road to political participation for young, disenfranchised voters. Beyond basic outreach, we will recruit, train and track volunteers, and push our newly minted activists to join local campaigns in the city and suburbs. We will work with political groups from around the Philadelphia metropolitan area to train their members in traditional politics, while also teaching them how to use social activities to increase their reach and effectiveness.

Envisioned as an organization with a dual non-profit/for-profit structure, 8th St will be more than the latest progressive vanity project, destined to disappear after the next election cycle. It will be a self-sustaining venture with high standards of accountability, and a diversified funding base. We are in this for the long haul, and hope that 8th Street will be making a difference in progressive politics long after George Bush is out of office.

It’s time for progressives to stop wandering in the wilderness. It’s time for the progressive movement to find a home. In the Philadelphia Metro area, we hope to make 8th Street that home.

If you, or anyone you know, would like to be involved in this project or check out our business plan, please shoot me e-mail me. I'll post updates here as the project moves towards completion.

November 2nd, 2004 was a dark day for me and tens-of-millions of other progressives around the nation. Despite a faltering economy, a war of choice that was sold with lies and horribly executed, and rising health care and tuition costs, George W. Bush, our own Nero, won reelection. John Kerry, the terribly out-of-touch, indecisive, and uninspiring Democratic candidate, couldn’t convince the nation that he would be better than the current disaster, and so the nation voted for Bush.

Though conventional wisdom holds that Kerry lost over “values” voters, the most compelling statistics that I have seen paint a different picture. In fact, it seems that Kerry lost on the issues of Terrorism and National Security. It appears that the Bush and Republican-aligned Campaigns (such as the infamous and typically ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) were able to convince many Americans that George W. Bush was a more capable handler of the War on Terror, and they were able to use John Kerry’s Vietnam service against him. I believe I had been correct in guessing that the election would hinge upon a war fought 30 years ago; that the memories of that important time in the lives of many, if not most, of the voting public would call upon the lessons of that war and color the decisions that these people made. However, I was completely wrong to believe that this would help John Kerry. I thought that people would look at this war as a new Vietnam and reject the President who put us there. Instead, the behavior of Kerry and other Democrats during the tumultuous 60s and 70s, and especially their protests of Vietnam, is what was brought to mind by skillful Republican messengers.

My conviction that perceptions about security and strength amongst the group that came of age around Vietnam determine the outcome of the election, and not so-called values like hatred of homosexuals, was hardened a few months after the Presidential election. In the most Republican district in the entire American North East, Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District, a little known Iraq War Veteran named Paul Hackett decided to run for office as a Democrat, in a special election for that district’s U.S. House Seat. Hackett, who said that those who opposed Gay Marriage were “un-American,” narrowly lost his election to Jean Schmidt, 48-52. Bush had won the district with 64% of the vote less than a year before.

I finally met Sean Agnew in person on Halloween night at a show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, just a few days from the election. As I mentioned in my last Keys to a Future Majority (my Masters thesis) piece, I had been told on numerous occasions that this was the guy to know in Philly if you were interested in both politics and music. I had attempted to meet Sean in person a few times to talk about politics, music, and the Philly scene, but his reputation for being extremely hard to track down was well deserved, and my NYC-Philly commutes made my schedule pretty inflexible. However, I did reach him via e-mail a few times; he was unbelievably helpful, and he allowed Music for America to work at almost all of his many events. He also was really excited by what MfA was doing, and seemed genuinely interested in helping to build upon MfA’s model of culturally based political engagement. Though he said the story I was often told about Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia, asking him to run for City Council wasn’t really true, I could tell from our e-mails about politics why it would ring true to people. When I e-mailed him that I wanted to bring him some MfA t-shirts for helping us out so much he seemed really excited, and asked if I could also get some shirts for his staff, who I had also found to be extremely helpful and politically engaged. He told me that he would definitely be at the show on Halloween, and so I gathered up a big bag of shirts and headed out to the show, where I was going to work as an MfA volunteer.

When I was introduced to Sean I was a bit shocked. Whenever someone talked about him they made him seem like some sort of industry big-wig, and I fully expected to find someone who was, at the very least, full of themselves (even though he was nice enough over e-mail). Instead I met a young, punkish, and unbelievably humble kid my age, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. I wanted to thank Sean a thousand times for what he was doing, and yet he thanked me for the shirts and helping to turn kids out at the shows. I only got to talk with Sean for a few moments that night—keeping an entire city’s independent music scene vibrant is hard work for one man—but before he left he mentioned that this show was going to be the last for him at the Troc. The Chicago-based company House of Blues (who have since been bought out by Clear Channel) had just finished negotiating for the booking rights to the previously independently booked venue, which meant that Sean would no longer be able to throw concerts there.

This post began as a reply to Mark Ristaino, Music for America's Communication Director (the post, for those not familiar with MFA's past, formerly held by Future Majority's Mike Connery), who commented on my most recent thesis post -- Keys to a Future Majority: Experiencing the Problems of Progressive Politics. My response got a little long, and I covered some important ground (to me) so I decided to make it into a full post.

Mark asked:

But as you talked about in your previous blog, the key to movement building is a combination of connecting with members both online and offline. As in, connecting with them online, and then convincing them to do stuff offline, as mike did so well with you.

The million dollar question: What organizations are doing this effectively?

There are a few organizations on the left that are effective at this, while I would hazard to say that a good amount of Right Wing organizations are. The two orgs that come to my mind are Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (insofar as they are "left") and Cosmopolity, though both in different ways.

Cosmopolity and it's leaders-- Justin Krebs, David Alpert, Katrina Baker, & (Emmy Nominated Documentary Director & Producer) Matt O'Neill, along with a large group of some of the most amazing, energized, and hard working (despite all the liberal drinking) group of activists I have ever met -- have helped to foster Drinking Liberally's across America with little money whatsoever. And yet, even without resources, they are helping provide social spaces for liberals/progressives to meet, and they are able to keep a pulse on the activism going on throughout the nation (Katrina Baker, DL's National Organizer, leads a group of people who interact with local activists in 160 cities). Though some DL's are better attended than others, this is a group that is connecting people offline (and connecting with those people), with far fewer resources than MFA has had at its disposal (to put it extremely mildly). As you probably know they have recently branched out into Reading Liberally (progressive book tours and readings), Screening Liberally (free screenings of socially conscious movies), and Laughing Liberally (a progressive comedy series- which has been, to my consternation, selling out each week in NYC before I can my shit together to get a ticket). As a result of their work--helping motivated people build up small pieces of progressive infrastructure--Cosmopolity is extremely well connected and actively engaged with the larger net- and grass-roots.

I first heard of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) when they started blogging at MFA (they were known as Operation Truth back then). I was extremely excited to find a military organization reaching out to young people, and I have been beyond impressed at the amazing work that Paul Rieckhoff and his crew (who are all over the nation) do-- from advocating for the safety of our troops, to reaching out to Vets with PTSD and advocating on their behalf, to starting a PAC (which has since been spun off) which supports vets of OEF and OIF who run for office. The thing that impressed me the most about IAVA was Paul's extremely strong managerial skills, and his unreal ability to connect people and make things happen (I have my own selfish reasons for enjoying Paul's connecting skills- my current job- but if you want to see just how amazing IAVA is then you really need to see When I Came Home, which is about a homeless Iraq vet- Harold Noel- in NYC, who IAVA helps to get housing). I also highly suggest watching their new promo video. Anyway, I think that Paul has not only an org that can reach out to two communities that Democrats need to reach very, very badly- young people and the military (many of who are in their youth)- but he has the no-nonsense, results oriented, and battle tested managerial skills that the leaders of almost every other left wing groups lack (and I believe they could learn from Paul). IAVA, like Cosmopolity, also does a lot of work with relatively little funding, but I am sure that both of these groups would be able to have even larger, and longer-lasting, effects if they were given the resources to expand.

And a quick disclaimer- I do work with/volunteer/write about both of these groups, so yes, I am biased, but after what I went through with MFA you can imagine why I would be attracted to these two groups.

And not to beat a dead horse, but don't forget to watch IAVA's promo video. These guys and gals are the real deal and need/deserve the support of all of us.

***Update - If you haven't seen Matt O'Neill and John Alpert's amazing documentary - Baghdad ER- check out the site, watch the trailer, and keep your eyes out for showings of the film.

After working a few shows in NYC, and getting compliments from the bands and their staff sent through Music for America’s staff, I decided that I would be better off working in my home state, Pennsylvania, which was a much more important state. Unlike New York, PA is still competitive for Republicans, and there was no guarantee that Kerry would carry the state. It just so happened that MfA was sending out their staff on a field trip, and they were going to Philly. I figured this would be a great way to get started in Philly, and also a great way to get to know the MfA staff a little better offline. I offered the three staffers- Mike Connery (who you can find here on this site), Franz Hartl (the Political Director), and Taya Mueller (the Volunteer Coordinator) a place to stay, took a week off from work, and soon all four of us were in Philly checking out the scene, talking to local media types, and trying to get a feel for who in the city could help us get things done.

Almost every time we told someone what were doing and asked them “Who do you think we should be working with in the city?” the answer was the same- Sean Agnew. “Damn,” I said to Taya after the fifth or so person dropped his name. “We gotta find this kid.” We tried unsuccessfully to track Sean down, but it didn’t really matter at the time- we were busy working shows, meeting with activist types, and registering kids on some of the city’s campuses.

At the end of a busy day of working Temple’s campus, I sat on my parents porch with Franz throwing back a few beers. “So,” Franz asked me. “What do you want to do with your life?”

Reporter: Mr. Harrison, with all that's going on in the world today, why did you decide to focus on this (Bangladesh)?"

George Harrison: "Because a friend asked me to help."

From a press conference for the Concert for Bangladesh, posted in a diary at The Daily Kos

The first show that I successfully volunteered for with Music for America was a huge rock festival on Randall’s Island in NYC, in July 2004. I was excited to see how MfA worked, and how I would work with it. I went online and read up on all of MfA’s “issues”; I was familiar with most- the insane War on Drugs, the skyrocketing costs of education and healthcare, reproductive and civil rights, and the importance of youth participation- but I wanted to get MfA’s take on each, which basically meant looking at the issues in terms of youth and culture.

The next day I made my way to the venue and met with the other volunteers. I was the only male volunteer, and at the ripe old age of 25 probably the oldest. We gathered up our materials and made our way through security and inside the massive grass and dirt fields that housed the festival. I was pretty nervous as we setup our materials and arranged the stacks of voter registration cards. Even though I usually don’t have any problems talking with strangers I generally don’t like going up to random people and trying to get them to talk politics with me. I’ve always been politically focused, and I’ve always felt contempt or boredom from many of the people I’ve tried to talk politics with, so I wasn’t exactly excited when I was given a clipboard full of registration sheets, a box of issue cards, and was asked by the volunteer coordinator to go out, along with four of the young women, to the long line that had formed outside of the grounds to talk with kids and register as many as possible. The girls didn’t seem as nervous as they jumped at the opportunity to go, which emboldened me a little, given my macho older-brother ego- I wasn’t about to let a couple of younger girls show me up!

I came onto Music for America’s forums to tell their Communications Director, Mike Connery, about the research that I had done, and to try and see if they’d be willing to help me apply it.

My idea was to create a multi-media CD that would replicate the agenda-setting and priming effects that Iyengar had demonstrated. I thought that if we could convince, trick, or bribe young people to take a look at a CD that contained multimedia relevant to the campaign, that we could have a huge effect on youth turnout. MfA had a huge outreach operation, was extremely well funded, and I thought that it had the ability, if it desired, to get such CDs into the hands of tens of thousands of young people.

Mike wasn’t convinced. He challenged me to justify a project on the scale I was talking about, forced me to consider production time and cost, and pushed me to solidify my ideas on how something like this could work. He did not dismiss me, even though he had never met me and didn’t know me at all. He engaged me, he challenged me, and he encouraged me to continue on, which I did.

Mike had two main criticisms of my ideas.

This is the third installment of my thesis, Keys to a Future Majority. Click here for the introduction, here for the second piece, and here for the third piece.

In my last post I looked at autobiographical and collective memory research, which demonstrated the phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. These studies showed that the easiest memories for people to retrieve are either those that happened recently, or those that happened during the "critical period" of their development, roughly between the ages of 16 and 26. But, some of you still may be thinking- "so what that these people can remember some things easier than others? What does this have to do with politics and Music for America"

Well, it has a lot to do with politics, and in order to explain why I'm going to turn to media effects research and decision-making theories.

The "Agenda-Setting Effect" and Priming

Every day tens-of-millions of Americans turn to some form of news to find out what's going on in the world. Naturally, many social scientists have asked the question "What effect does watching the news have on those who watch it" Media researchers have come to find that the most powerful media effect is not the ability to tell you what to think, but rather what to think about. In order to clear up what is meant by this statement I'll turn to a series of experiments which looked at what effect the news has on us. These experiments were conducted mainly by Shanto Iyengar, who is currently the director of Stanford University's Political Communications Lab.

In these experiments Iyengar and his colleagues would bring people into a lab, which was usually made to look and feel like a normal living room, and have them watch the nightly news. The experiments were carried out using one of two methods.
In the first method, Iyengar forced the subject to view, in a single sitting, a collection of different news stories that weren't necessarily from the same period of time. Subjects were told that the news they were being shown represented a sample of the current news. At the end of the viewing the subjects were asked to list which issues were the most pressing and they were also asked to evaluate how good of a job the President of the United States was doing.

Iyengar's second method had subjects watch the news at the lab for three to five days in a row. At the end of each day they answered similar questions as those who participated in the first experiment. What the subjects did not know was the researchers had slightly altered the news that half of them watched, discreetly inserting stories which had to do with some specific issue. The researchers might insert stories about the environment, civil rights issues, crime, or any other issue which the experimenters chose. This method was considered more naturalistic, while the first was considered more controlled, however both methods produced similar results.

What Iyengar found throughout his experiments were two significant effects, which are known as the agenda-setting effect and priming. The agenda-setting effect is also sometimes referred to as ‘framing', however I won't use the term here however so as not to confuse the agenda-setting effect with the notion of framing put forth by people such as the linguist George Lakoff. While "lakoffian" framing focuses on the images that certain words or phrases bring to mind, the agenda-setting effect refers to the ability of the media to affect which issues that a person sees as most important. If Iyengar and his colleagues had inserted stories about the environment, for example, the subjects would be much more likely to give the environment as the most pressing political issue of the day. This is what is meant by the news being able to tell you "what to think about." If you want to test out this theory on your own, try listening to the conversations that your friends or family have and ask yourself this question: how many of the events that your family or friends are talking about relate to something going on in the news at that moment? I'm sure you'll find that most of it will have to do with something that the media chose to highlight in the past few days.

Not everyone is affected equally by the agenda-setting effect. People belonging to social groups which were directly affected by the issue that Iyengar chose to insert would give that issue as the most important faster than people who didn't belong to the affected group. For example, if Iyengar highlighted the issue of discrimination, African-Americans would mention discrimination after one session while Whites start to exhibit the agenda-setting effect after two or three sessions.

But what effect does this have on our political beliefs and behaviors? Iyengar and his colleagues found that the issues they chose to highlight had a profound effect on their subject's evaluations of the president and the political parties. This effect is known as priming, and it refers to the abilities of the agenda-setting effect of the news to affect subsequent evaluations of the President and the political parties. Priming in turn affects the chances that a person would vote for the President or his party in the next election. So, if the subjects who were shown news dealing with environmental issues, and the President or his party were seen as weak on environmental issues, then they would be more likely to view the President in a poorer light. As a consequence these subjects would be less likely to vote for the President or his party if there was an election at the time of the priming.

But why does this happen? Well, when people make complex decisions, like evaluating the president, they don't scan through their memory for all of the information that they possess. Instead, people tend to rely on shortcuts to decisions known as heuristics. We use all sorts of heuristics in our daily lives, usually referring to them as "rules of thumb." In general these rules of thumb are beneficial. Imagine if you had to search through every memory that you posses each and every time you had to make a decision, you'd be paralyzed by indecisiveness. But while some heuristics are beneficial, some can cause errors of judgment and lead to other problems; these are known in psychology as cognitive biases. One prominent type of heuristic is the representative heuristic, which leads to, amongst other things, stereotyping of different social groups. Another prominent political heuristic, which is often a cognitive bias, is party identification, meaning that many people don't think about why they vote for a certain candidate. Instead, they just assume that the candidate from their preferred party supports their position on the issue or is the best person for the job. This would help to explain why a survey done before the last election found that many Republicans didn't know where President Bush stood on a number of key foreign policy issues.

The heuristic that is manipulated by the agenda-setting effect is one of the oldest known and well documented and is known as the availability heuristic. Psychologists have found that people base their decisions on what information comes to mind most easily, meaning that whatever affects the accessibility of your memories affects the decisions that you will make. Because the media has a profound effect on which information will come to mind with the greatest ease, it also has a large effect on how we make our political decisions.

But is the media the only thing that affects which memories are easiest to access? Let's take a look again at the chart of the reminiscence bump from last week.

(Source: Rybash, J.R. & Monaghan, B. E., Episodic and semantic contributions to older adults' autobiographical recall, The Journal of General Psychology; Jan 1999)

As you can see, for older people there are two areas of their memory which are most easily accessed, those that are most recent and those that are from the reminiscence bump period of life. So while the media certainly have significant effects on what memories are most easily accessed by older viewers, so do those memories from their reminiscence bump period. I would guess that the two may combine to have an even stronger effect.

This is why I thought that the 2004 election would revolve around Vietnam. First, we have a war in Iraq and as a result I thought that there would be large portions of the news devoted to the war in Iraq. This would bring the more general category of war into the minds of the American public, which would bring the Vietnam War to the fore of the minds of the "Vietnam Generation." (This is still speculation, since as I noted in my first essay I abandoned my proposed research in this area in favor of working with Music for America. However, I think that most of the reasoning here could be experimentally validated).

But while I figured that simply reporting on the Iraq War would bring Vietnam to the minds of the Vietnam Generation, I also thought that comparisons of the Iraq war with the Vietnam War would be made in the media, since the creators and editors of the media are primarily from that generation. This, I thought, would create an amplification effect, since news viewers would probably make their own internal comparisons, plus the media would make direct comparisons. And thus I thought that in the end, the election would be decided by the Vietnam War, more than by the Iraq War.

At first I thought that these memories would increase support for John Kerry, but when I started to research the opinions of Americans at the time I realized that this was probably not the case. I am going to have to save a deeper analysis of opinions of the Vietnam Generation towards that war for later. For now I will say that despite the fact that a majority of people believe that the Vietnam War was a mistake, they have differing reasons for believing so, and blame different groups or events for the war's failure. In my eyes the failure to understand and directly address the complex emotions and memories of the Vietnam Generation led to Kerry's losses amongst that age group, for example amongst the so-called "security moms."

Youth Voting

By now you might be wondering: "What does this have to do with Music for America ?" Actually it has a lot to do with MfA, and this research is what led me to believe that MfA was performing some of the most important functions during the last election.

Here's why:

First of all, you can see that the most important demographic for political groups and parties to communicate with are those in their critical period. This is because the memories and behaviors of this period of life affect the opinions and behaviors of people for the rest of their lives. Focusing on younger voters is therefore a double investment. Getting youth to support an issue, candidate, or party when they are young increases the possibility that that issue, candidate or party will win the day in a current election. But, it also helps to ensure that the person will support that issue, candidate, or party for the remainder of their life.
Because the reminiscence bump forms over a span of 10+ years, we can see that it is important to engage young people over a long period of time. Music for America seemed to have a model of sustainable engagement. First of all, by working together with bands and venues MfA held the potential to continue to communicate with young people even when an election wasn't approaching. Along with this, MfA volunteers got to see their favorite bands for free, and sometimes even got to meet their favorite musicians, which would hopefully help to keep them politically interested, if not active, after the election. Instead of focusing on political candidates or parties, MfA focused on issues, and as I liked to tell the kids at the shows, these issues aren't going to be solved in a single election, even if the better candidate wins.

Since the media have such profound affects upon the things that we see as important, it is imperative that those who want to build a future majority help to set the political agenda of young people, pushing the issues that effect our generation to the fore of their thoughts. It's important to note that our perceptions of each party have not been completely formed until we are 30, and so while the priming effect might be predictable once we reach an older age, when we are younger there is still the possibility that we can change how each party is seen in relation to each issue.

Music for America also seemed able to overcome some of the media obstacles standing in the way of communicating effectively with young people. First of all, MfA had access to large numbers of young people (in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands). If MfA could get their attention and motivate them to visit the website then there was the possibility of bypassing the extremely expensive broadcast channels of communication. In a future post, when I discuss persuasion, I'll come back to the topics of attention and motivation.

Because MfA was created and run by young people it held the possibility of speaking to other young people about politics in their language. This is extremely important since, to a large degree, those in the mainstream media talk to young people from the perspective of an older generation. As the collective memory studies showed (and as common sense dictates) people remember things in relation to their notion of self, and so it's imperative that communications aimed towards youth speak to them from their own perspective.

But possibly the largest obstacle created by the media that I felt Music for America could overcome was the unidirectional communication flow information of the broadcast and print media. On the one hand this meant giving visitors to Music for America's site the ability to self-select what information they wanted to see/read/hear/watch. However, I also felt that MfA's outreach efforts could enable progressives to collect data on the opinions of our generation. Since our youth dominates our memories when we are older it's imperative to understand the opinions of young people, and especially the movements of opinion through time.

And so with thoughts of setting the agenda for my generation, and hopes of figuring out what the rest of the kids out there were thinking, I came onto Music for America's forums. Soon, however, I would be convinced that I had misunderstood the power of the internet and the nature of what was going down with our generation.

This is the third installment of my thesis, Keys to a Future Majority. Click here for the introduction, and here for the second piece

"I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty." Kerry proclaimed as he saluted the crowd at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he would accept the Democrats nomination to run for President. Kerry's biographical film had just ended, with about half of it dedicated to Kerry's Vietnam experiences. This was not the first time that Kerry used his Vietnam experiences during the campaign- many people credited his victory in Iowa to his appearances next to the Vietnam Vets that he served with.

Soon after the convention ended the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" began running ads questioning many aspects of Kerry's Vietnam service, from where he was on a certain Christmas night, to the events surrounding his combat metals, to the severity of his battle scars, to his membership in the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Kerry wasn't the only one dogged by his activities during Vietnam; Bush's service in the Air National Guard, as well as his alleged AWOL status, also became an issue, though it seems to have affected Dan Rather, who was forced out as CBS News' head anchor, more than Bush. It may seem odd that the 2004 election would be so focused on a war that ended almost 30 years ago while over 100,000 US troops occupied Iraq, but after doing research on a phenomenon known as "the reminiscence bump," as well as media effects theories (for various college courses), I came to the realization that this was not only the obvious course that the election would take, but almost inevitable (I first proposed a study to prove this theory in November of 2003). In this post I'll talk about the reminiscence bump and in the next post I'll turn to media effects.