The 2009 Breakage:
In my experience, activism diminishes with age. The older Americans are, up to the point of incapacitation, the more engaged they are as citizens. It helps to be retired and have time. It helps to have resources. It helps to have education. It helps to have lived in earlier times when more people were active. It helps to have lived in other countries where more people are active.
On the other hand, and with millions of exceptions needless to say, it hurts to have grown up without activism around you. It hurts to have grown up with your brain marinated in television. Yes, many young people are active, and many of those who are have better ideas than do their elders. But too many of them do not add activism to their ideas. It hurts to have grown up in a society more heavily damaged by all the causes Levine has diagnosed, which have been worsening. It hurts to be growing up with diminished and diminishing governmental representation and responsiveness to the public will. The corruptions of money, media, party, militarism, election rigging, etc., have worsened and are rapidly worsening. So it would make sense that at some point our population would either break and give up or be radicalized and push back.
Well, another trend that has advanced to an extreme maturity is the equation of civic involvement with participation in presidential elections. The president is a character in a television drama, and our job is to vote the lesser of the two presidential contenders off the fictional island. And then our job is complete, and the good president will fix everything for us. So many people seem to believe.
We are obliged to spend our time registering each other to vote, because we are not simply registered upon turning 18, and we think of this work as activism. We think of activism as happening before, rather than after, elections. And we think of it as something national, rather than as something done at the levels of the congressional, state, and local districts through which we are supposed to be represented.
The year 2009 was different for those who have misplaced importance on elections, and in particular on presidential elections, and for those who have misplaced their loyalty on a political party -- that is to say, for nearly everybody. Those loyal to the Republican Party believed everything to have worsened dramatically at the start of 2009. Those loyal to the Democratic Party expected someone to fix their problems for them, but by the end of the year had ended up in about the same position of despair as the Republicans, or perhaps in a worse position. They believed they'd done everything a people could do, and that it hadn't worked.
We are now, entering 2010, in the position of having given the slightly better of the two parties dominant control of the White House and both houses of Congress (and don't talk to me about the filibuster, which the Democrats could throw out if they wanted to), and we've seen things continue to worsen rather than improve. Whether we take a different approach and correct for our mistakes, or dive into deep despair, cannot be divorced from the political situation and treated purely in terms of morale boosting. And if it could be treated purely with morale boosting, the problem would be back again soon enough if we did not direct our new-found morale into more effective strategies based on better analysis.
We've been told for years that we shouldn't impeach criminal officials, but wait and replace them in an election. Now we're told that we shouldn't prosecute their crimes, but elect people who might not commit all of them as severely. And we're told to support our congress members in dumping all of our resources into Wall Street, wars, and health insurance corporations in order to support the president, as if our duty is to him, rather then his duty being to the laws written by our representatives. There are more people refusing to do their civic duty right now out of loyalty to the president than out of discouragement in efforts to pressure congress. But those two groups combined dominate the handful of us belonging to neither of them. We need to recruit converts away from both despair and presidentialism with morale boosts, better analysis, or both.
No Encouragement to Be Found?
Above all, humans are imitators. It's how we learn when we are children. It's how we learn when we are adults. We do not, as Levine points out, need to be told to get active. Rather, we need to be shown others being active, enjoying it, succeeding at it, and being rewarded for it. When was the last time you saw that on television?
Recent studies of how children's' shows on television function are illustrative. Many of these shows depict children or cartoon characters disagreeing with each other and mistreating each other, after which a resolution is reached and a moral taught. Except that it isn't taught. Children don't view the story as a whole with a single moral, so much as they view each separate bit. And they learn more from the numerous examples of how to mistreat people than they do from the closing minutes explaining why such behavior is undesirable. Children who learn how to behave from television, for this and other reasons, behave less amicably than those who don't.
If we see activities that we think of as appropriate public activism fail 20 times and are then told to get out there and be active, the actions speak more loudly than the words. But if we see courageous and inspiring and successful activism, and enough of it, not much explicit encouragement to join in is required.
Some parts of the country I visited in late 2009, Maine for example, were much less defeatist than most. I think these may have been places where people were more aware of local and state victories and powers. But even in the heart of the defeatist heartland, people told me about local and state successes. I draw a couple of lessons from this. One is that we should be working more at the local and state levels, and working to shift more power to those levels. We should be testing out reforms for the national stage and pressuring our federal government through state-level successes. But we should also be doing a much, much better job of making each other aware of state- and local-level victories achieved in other states.
Some of the local victories I've heard about, such as victories in counter-recruitment (keeping military testing out of schools, closing recruiting stations, barring recruiters from school grounds, etc.) amount to progress on the national level when they are added together. But nobody adds them together.
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