Apathy,
Alienation, and Activism: American Culture and the Depoliticization of Youth
Golden
Apple Lecture
Matt
Lassiter
Jan.
28, 2004
II.
Apathy
III.
Alienation
IV.
Activism
I
would like to express my gratitude to the the SHOUT group (especially Andy
Shuman and Lauren Epstein), as well as the Hillel organization and Michael
Brooks
I
would like to thank the GSIs from my lecture courses in the last two
years--Matt Ides, Matt Turnbull, Tamar Carroll, Andrew Highsmith, Nathan
Connolly, Allen Ward, Rob Maclean
I
would like to acknowledge my colleagues, in history and beyond, many of whom
have as good or better a claim to be standing up here as I do
And
the many teachers in my own family and from my own years as a student who
convinced me that education is the most important and fulfilling profession of
all
I
would also like to thank the more than one thousand undergraduate students I
have taught here at the University of Michigan, in courses on the Sixties, Cold
War America, and the History of American Suburbia
And
finally, I want to acknowledge the many campus organizations that are engaged
in political mobilization, and are living proof that political activism is a
strong force among youth today, including but not limited to:
**Students for PIRGIM (working for sustainable
environmental policies)
**SOLE (Students for Labor and Economic Equality)
**Students Supporting Affirmative Action, which took nearly
one thousand students to the Supreme Court hearings on the U-M case almost a
year ago
**And without being too partisan I should also mention
the College Democrats, a group with dynamite leaders whom I have worked with in
organizing several campus forums
Their activism inspires me personally, and also demonstrates that many
of the charges of alienation and apathy that I plan to examine this evening are
either greatly exaggerated, or severely distorted, or based on a
misunderstanding of the broader constellation of forces within American culture
that serve to depoliticize youth—by which I mean not only high school and
college students but also young adults in their 20s and perhaps even in their
early 30s
**If "you can't trust anyone over
30," as the Sixties slogan warned, I crossed that barrier several years
ago—in fact, right before I arrived at U-M to teach my first class on the
politics and culture of the 1960s.
Now I teach two large lecture courses—United States History Since 1945,
and the History of American Suburbia.
Teaching the course on American suburbia has been one of the best
experiences of my life, and it has really been a joint adventure in which I
have not only lectured but also learned a lot from the students in the
class. My own research is about
the politics and policies that have shaped the development of the suburbs, but
I decided to teach the undergraduate course on American suburbia because of
three events that all happened in 1999: the national panic that followed the
Columbine school shootings in Littleton, Colorado [SLIDE];
the controversy over the meaning of the audience riots at the Woodstock '99
music festival [SLIDE];
and the systematic distortion of the "fair trade" protests that shut
down the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle [SLIDE].
**It's
hard now to remember 1999—it seems so long ago, before the Florida
recount, before the trillions of dollars in tax cuts by the Bush
administration, before the collapse of the dot.com bubble in the stock market,
before the terrorist attacks on September 11, before the launch of a
pre-emptive war in Iraq. [SLIDE] Newsweek came to this campus after the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center, and branded students here as part of a new
"Generation 9-11": "The
generation that once had it all—peace, prosperity, even the dot.com dream
of returning at 30—faces its defining moment." [SLIDE] In other words, a comfortable
generation of consumers and conformists, a thoroughly depoliticized generation,
finally had a serious mission in life.
This "Generation 9-11" framework imposed on college students
erased a substantial amount of political activism that did take place during
the 1990s, revealed most clearly by the labor and environmental campaigns that
culminated in the massive demonstrations at the WTO meeting in Seattle. The dominant response to all three of
these cultural events—Columbine, Woodstock '99, and Seattle—was to
deny any political voice to young people in this country—to represent
them as scary ticking time bombs after Columbine, or as alienated consumers in
a giant shopping mall after Woodstock, or as foolish rebels without a cause
after Seattle.
**Understanding
the depolitization of youth in American culture requires grappling with the
legacies of the Sixties, an era that functions simultaneously as an inspiration
and as a burden for young activists today. All three of these symbolic events of 1999 became part of a
larger cultural discourse that negatively contrasts young people today with
their more politically engaged counterparts in the Baby Boomer generation, in
their parents' generation—who supported the civil rights movement,
resisted the war in Vietnam, launched the feminist and environmentalist
movements, among many other accomplishments. I asked one of the leading political activists on this
campus about the legacies of the Sixties, and this is what she wrote:
"I often get
taught the lessons and stories of the 60s—the generation that perhaps
naively but nevertheless wanted to make America better. They searched for peace, love,
equality, happiness and whether or not they found it their intentions were
pure. Their intense politicization
gets boiled down into a nugget of communal utopia. This does a disservice to them for sure, but it does a
greater disservice to the current politicized generation. My generation is political, make no
mistake about it, but this dissent gets packaged as angry, hateful, privileged
violence with little political sentiment and no creative power. We came of age in the 1990s when there
seemed to be no alternative, when neo-liberal global capitalism was becoming a
mainstream political religion. So
we struggled as a generation to find a new discourse that not only demands a
more inclusive American Dream but demands a re-imagining of the Dream
itself."
**Port
Huron. This sense that history
is over flourished during the 1990s after the victory over communism in the
Cold War. According to this
consensus view, there are no alternatives to the "American Way of
Life" and the triumph of free-market globalization—we can spend our
time obsessed with O.J. and Monica Lewinsky. But in historical perspective, I am struck by the similarity
between this current call to reimagine the American Dream and the language of
student activists in the early 1960s.
The Port Huron Statement, the manifesto released in 1962 by the Students
for a Democratic Society, announced that "We are the people of this
generation [SLIDE], bred in at
least modest comfort [SLIDE],
housed now in universities [SLIDE], looking
uncomfortably to the world we inherit [SLIDE]." Drawing on the inspiration of the civil
rights movement, the Port Huron Statement offered an audacious
proposal—that privileged college students could be a vanguard for the
transformation of American society.
Students for a Democratic Society called this political model
"participatory democracy," a direct attack on the power of
corporations and impersonal bureaucracies over American life, and a full-scale
repudiation of the consensus belief that a liberal nation would cautiously
orchestrate reforms from the top down.
**End of History. The student movements of the 1960s challenged the widespread
belief that history had ended, that freedom to shop had supplanted political
citizenship, that there were no alternatives to the limitless horizons of the
mass consumer society. During the
Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which sought to put participatory democracy into
action on campus, philosophy student Mario Savio wrote that the "greatest
problem of our nation [is the belief that] history has in fact come to an
end."
**"America is becoming ever more the utopia of
sterilized, automated contentment. The "futures" and
"careers" for which American students now prepare are for the most
part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise
would have us grow up to be well-behaved children."
**"The university is the place where people begin
seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of
whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into. This is part of a growing understanding
among many people in America that history has not ended, that a better society
is possible, and that it is worth dying for."
[DVD #1, Mario Savio,
FSM, 27:33-29:00, Berkeley in the Sixties]
or
Transcript of
Savio Sproul Hall Speech
**[SLIDE] What would you think if you saw a young
person publicly demonstrating this kind of passion today? Expressing this type of philosophical
critique of the university administration, the power of corporations, the
seductions of a comfortable career, the promise of fulfillment through the
consumer society? Or challenging,
as Students for a Democratic Society did, the foreign policy of the nation and
the economic system that places "material values over human
values"? Most likely they
would be viewed as angry and alienated, instead of optimistic and
passionate—as if the only alternative for youth today is either political
apathy or nihilistic rebellion.
But the student activists in the early 1960s, like campus activists now,
believed that they were mobilizing to challenge a landscape of apathy,
surrounded by middle-class white youth who seemed so thoroughly conservative
and depoliticized that the mainstream media called them the "Silent
Generation." The mass
political movement of the 1960s did not arrive until after the Vietnam War, and
especially after middle-class youth became vulnerable to the military
draft. There is certainly more
political activism on college campuses today than there was before 1965 or 1966. And if the government decided to start
drafting middle-class youth again, then all this talk of apathy would suddenly
disappear.
**Branding
Rebellion. We have packaged the Sixties into a set of tidy
boxes—campus radicalism to stop the war, peace and love at the Woodstock
music festival, consciousness raising that the personal is political, hippies
retreating to communal living, Yuppies selling out to the gods of capitalism
and commerce. And more recently,
corporate marketing campaigns have co-opted the countercultural message of
rebellion, proving the seemingly infinite power of capitalism to absorb
alternative visions and market them back to youth as just another lifestyle
option. At first it was
controversial when Nike, which has adopted the countercultural slogan
"Just Do It" as its advertising motto, used the Beatles song
"Revolution" to sell sneakers.
Nowadays the colonization of Sixties rebellion by corporate America is
part of the wallpaper of our consumer culture. Rolling Stones songs sell Snickers Bars, and the Who's
generational anthem about a "Teenage Wasteland" is used in a
commercial for SUVs. The GAP
stores in the mall use countercultural icons such as James Dean, Jack Kerouac,
and Joni Mitchell
to sell clothes manufactured in Third World sweatshops. Apple/Macintosh markets countercultural
cool and Sixties nostalgia through its "Think Different" campaign,
including major Sixties musicians such as Bob
Dylan, John
Lennon, and Joan
Baez, and nonviolent political activists such as Martin Luther
King, Cesar Chavez,
and Ghandi. Macintosh officially pays tribute to
"the crazy ones/The misfits...The rebels....The troublemakers/The round
pegs in the square holes/The ones who see things differently/They’re not
fond of rules/And they have no respect for the status quo."
**Brand yourself—[SLIDE]. The logical destination of corporate
branding campaigns is to turn the self into a brand. In the spring of 1999, when I was teaching at a small
liberal arts college, the CEO of American Express came to campus at the height
of the "New Economy" boom.
His talk advised students to prepare themselves for the corporate world,
and secure their futures as top management material, by marketing themselves as
individual brands. This concept,
called microbranding in the corporate literature, became one of the most hyped
ideas of the 1990s. Microsoft
promised to provide the technology that would help you change the world through
self-branding. Anyone could Be
Like Mike or say I Am Tiger Woods—and ride Brand Me to success in the
boom economy. I confess that this
admonition to self-brand made me think . . . where's Mario Savio now that we
really need him? Was this the
final destination of consumer capitalism, now that the end of history thesis
was back in vogue?
II.
Apathy
**Polarized Era. The Sixties, often remembered as a radical era in American
history, was actually a polarized era when both the left and the right revolted
against the liberal center. The
Baby Boomers were in fact a deeply divided generation. One group of Boomers marched for civil
rights, protested Vietnam, embraced feminism and gay rights, and launched the
environmental and consumer movements.
The other group of Boomers is actually running our country right
now. Does anyone know what was the
largest campus organization of the 1960s?
Campus Crusade for Christ—an evangelical Protestant network that
launched the careers of many of the future leaders of the Religious Right. And the Young Americans for Freedom,
which began in 1960 during the same year as Students for a Democratic Society,
played a crucial role in the takeover of the Republican party by the New
Right. George W. Bush might have
avoided politics as a fraternity boy at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
but Karl Rove and many other current leaders of the conservative movement came
up through the ranks of campus activism.
The Republican party has adopted a strategy that the Democrats have largely
neglected—that youth should be cultivated as a political force, and that
the campuses are a powerful base for political mobilization. Youth movements on the Left have tended to fight with the
Democratic party, from the war in Vietnam to the recent battles over free
trade. Youth movements on the Right
have been skillfully incorporated into the broader Republican coalition.
**The prevailing view that youth are apathetic begins with
the very real problem of voter turnout.
Young people in America actually volunteer in record numbers, so they
clearly possess a civic consciousness.
But they widely believe that politics is corrupt and that their
participation will not make a difference, and they go to the polls in very low numbers. In the 2000 election, about
one-third of Americans under the age of 25 voted. The percentages doubled for their parents and
grandparents—about two-thirds of Americans over the age of 45 cast
ballots.
**The lack of
political participation by youth has direct consequences for the priorities
that shape the national agenda. We
live in a nation where both parties scramble to provide prescription drugs for
senior citizens, a genuine crisis, but where Washington can't seem to do
anything about 43 million working people and children who lack basic health
insurance—a national scandal.
We live in a nation where there is always enough money for prisons, but
never enough money for social welfare programs. We live in a nation where both political parties support a
war on drugs that cannot be won, that has criminalized an entire generation of
young people, and that has resulted in the incarceration of millions of
nonviolent citizens, disproportionately racial minorities and those under
30. We live in a nation where
there is enough money to provide trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the top
20%, and hundreds of billions more to fight a war in Iraq, but where schools
and universities face massive budget cuts in order to reduce the deficit.
**Rock the Vote-[SLIDE]. I thought about calling this talk
"Rock the Vote," but I worried that MTV would sue me for copyright
infringement. MTV is a clear
example of the paradox of youth consciousness, and the tensions between
citizenship based on political activism, and citizenship defined as consumer
freedom. The "Rock the
Vote" campaign began about fifteen years ago as a response to the
political effort to censor music lyrics in rap and heavy metal, and MTV uses
celebrity endorsements and concert tours to encourage youth participation in
politics. Bill Clinton supplied
the dominant stereotype of "Rock the Vote" at a forum in the 1992
campaign, where he expressed a preference for boxers over briefs, an exchange
that the national media reduced to a caricature of the shallow outlook of the
MTV Generation. The campaign's
greatest success came a year later when Bill Clinton signed the Motor Voter
Bill, which permits voter registration through the agencies that administer
driver's licenses, and which George Bush had vetoed. But in coverage of Rock the Vote forums, questions to
candidates about the war on drugs or zero tolerance crackdowns on youth crime,
issues that receive bipartisan support and provoke little debate in Washington,
are swept aside in the emphasis on the silliness of MTV audiences.
**MTV is a problematic champion of youth empowerment,
of course, since it is a subsidiary of Viacom, one of the five large global
media companies that control a substantial amount of the content available to
American consumers. From the
business side, MTV is just another corporation using the language of hip-hop
capitalism as a marketing strategy for the highly coveted 14-34 age group. The broadcast network will even sell
you an assortment of Rock the Vote paraphernalia, including t-shirts
and skull
caps and even thongs. Around the same time as the "Rock
the Vote" campaign began, MTV ran an advertisement in the business
sections of newspapers and magazines, featuring an alternative-looking white
male watching television, accompanied by the following text: "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends
absolutely free. He watches MTV,
which means he knows a lot. . . . What he eats, his friends eat. What he wears, they wear. What he likes, they like." Beneath all the rhetoric about
politically empowered youth, it is quite clear that MTV positions its audiences
as passive consumers, a captive demographic for a network in which the line
between programming and marketing has been completely obliterated.
**Landscapes of Control. [SLIDE]. One of the central concepts that we
explore in my course on suburbia is how the physical spaces in which youth grow
up are landscapes of control, from the cul-de-sac culture of the subdivisions,
to the arbitrary rules that govern middle and high school, to the
all-encompassing consumer environment of the shopping mall. The average teenager views about 3,000
advertisements a day, and will have seen more than 10 million by the time that
he or she turns eighteen. Soft
drink companies and fast food chains have used the budget crisis to infiltrate
the public schools, part of the marketing philosophy that younger children are
most susceptible to brand loyalty campaigns that will last a lifetime. MTV co-sponsors parties on college
campuses with Sprite and other corporate brands that market an aesthetic of
urban cool to a white suburban audience that has few opportunities to cross over
into actual urban spaces except through mass culture. The shopping centers that operate on low-wage teenage labor
are the most intensive landscapes of control, privately owned spaces where
freedom of speech barely exists, where young people grow up as consumers in a
mall instead of as citizens in a democracy.
**Woodstock '99—[SLIDE]. The Woodstock '99 music festival
managed to combine the consumer atmosphere of a giant shopping mall with the
nostalgic marketing of a romanticized version of the Sixties—the
culmination of turning the most famous rock concert in history into just
another MTV-style brand. The
promoters promised more than 200,000 fans a weekend of peace and music. More than one hundred bands played
during the three-day event, and concessionaires charged exorbitant prices for
pizza, sodas, and bottled water.
On Saturday evening, the promoters scheduled several hard-core rap-rock
fusion acts on top of one another, including Rage Against the Machine and Limp
Bizkit. Rage Against the Machine
is a very talented and overtly leftist group that plays political songs very
critical of mainstream American culture, railing against imperialism and
racism, and listing conformity and complacency as central elements of the
American Dream. Limp Bizkit is a
mediocre MTV-manufactured band that performs with a focus-group calculated
mixture of anger and alienation [at least that's my opinion]. At the end of a long weekend, some of
the fans began to riot, targeting the corporate booths that many believed had
profited off of their captive youth audience.
[Video #2, Woodstock Riot, 2:25, My
Generation]
**[WOODSTOCK
SLIDE #1,
SLIDE
#2, SLIDE #3,
SLIDE
#4, SLIDE
#5, SLIDE
#6]. The fans even tore down
the MTV
camera tower. Zach de la Roca, the lead singer of Rage Against the
Machine, told Rolling Stone that
"Kids danced around just like they see in MTV videos, beating each other
up and tearing each other's hair out, doing this stupid little
ritual." One of the promoters
told the media that Woodstock '99 had been a success because "no one got
in for free," although he lamented that "commercial opportunities
were not as exploited as they might have been." Few mainstream voices blamed the corporate sponsors of
Woodstock '99 for the riots, the $4 bottles of water and corporate mentality
that corrupted the original spirit of the counterculture, although this was the
dominant interpretation on the websites and in the chat rooms of members of the
audience. The mainstream media
paid attention long enough to highlight the difference between the committed
political activists of the 1960s, who really did seek peace and love, and the
apathetic and alienated children of the 1990s, whose violence tarnished the
memory and legacy of the Woodstock Nation.
**A typical response from the Sixties perspective came
from Todd Gitlin, once the president of Students for a Democratic Society:
"The teachers of my generation are more radical than their students, and
the rock stars are more anti-establishment than their audiences. This is mind-boggling for a Sixties
generation which believed youth had the privilege of vision."
**Generation X. The theme of alienated youth reached its peak with the
arrival of Generation X—my generation—which became caricatured as a
post-Boomer demographic of slackers and drop-outs, refusing to grow up and get
a good job. This media
construction denied any political voice to young people who came of age during
the triumphant conservatism of the Reagan years and the timid liberalism of the
Clinton presidency. The mainstream
media settled on the suicide of Kurt Cobain as the "defining event"
of Generation X [SLIDE]—the
young people who destroyed the idealism and optimism of the Baby Boomers as we
came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Hollywood quickly followed with a spate of films that collectively
served to depoliticize an entire generation of youth by portraying Gen Xers
either as pathological criminals or as aimless slackers and stoners—Dazed and Confused, SubUrbia, Clerks, River's Edge, Fast
Times at Ridgemont High, Breakfast
Club, Less than Zero.
**These cultural images served to reinforce the War on
Drugs that the Reagan administration launched against Generation X, and that
the Clinton administration expanded in the 1990s, resulting in the extreme
racial and class disparities of the American prison population. Wading through these images of
pathology and dysfunction, it would be hard to guess that members of Generation
X also helped turn the college campuses into an organizational base for the
massive nuclear freeze movement of the mid-1980s [SLIDE],
the successful divestment campaign that contributed to the fall of the
apartheid government in South Africa during the late 1980s, and the
anti-sweatshop protests against Nike and other corporations that exploit
overseas labor that accelerated in the mid-1990s [SLIDE].
**Generational labels serve most effectively as lazy
media stereotypes and as corporate marketing strategies. Reading through marketing literature, I
get the feeling that the main reason for the widespread anxiety about
Generation X is that we weren't very predictable consumers—too cynical,
too skeptical, too suspicious of brands, too IRONIC. Like the Baby Boomers before them, the current so-called
Millennial Generation is considered to be optimistic about the future, coming
of age in a time of prosperity and limitless horizons, eager to embrace the
rewards of the mass consumer culture.
According to a recent story in Business Week, "marketers haven't been dealt an opportunity
like this [the Millennial Generation] since the baby boom." Not too long ago, ABC News also
reported that members of this Millennial Generation grew up accepting the zero
tolerance policies for school violence, underage drinking, and drug use that
Gen Xers resented and resisted.
**Columbine. I'm not so sure about that. The watershed moment for today's high school and college
students came after the events of Columbine in the spring of 1999, when two
teenagers shot and killed twelve of their fellow students, a teacher, and then
themselves. Fifteen incidents of
school shootings took place in American high schools during the late 1990s,
mostly in white upper-middle-class suburbs considered safe havens from
violence, culminating in the made-for-TV spectacle at Columbine. The exploitative media coverage, and the
hysterical political debates that followed, completely obscured the fact that
there was no statistical epidemic of school violence, that students are far
safer at school than they are at home, and that maybe Columbine actually wasn't
a window into the souls of a new youth generation.
**Newsweek
asked "How Could This Happen"? [SLIDE], and
politicians of both parties quickly jumped on the bandwagon with their favorite
explanations. President Bill
Clinton blamed lax gun laws and mass media: "A changing culture that
desensitizes our children to violence, where most teenagers have seen hundreds
or even thousands of murders on television and in movies and in video games, .
. . and weapons which . . . are all too easy to get." Newt Gingrich, the Republican leader of
Congress, blamed liberalism, the 1960s, and the loss of faith in God. " We have had a 35-year experiment
in a . . . secular assault on the core values of this country. . . the elite news
media, liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite—I accuse you
in Littleton of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made.. . . .
Hollywood and computerized games have undermined the core values of
civility."
** In a political culture that spent the entire decade
celebrating the triumph of free-market capitalism, suddenly a broad consensus
emerged that mass culture was to blame.
The low point in the mass media coverage came with the Newsweek cover story on the "Secret Life of Teens"—which
warned parents of all the trouble their children were getting into through
unsupervised use of the internet, through playing violent video games, through
their musical tastes. When an adult
goes on a killing spree, American society doesn't usually place the blame on
New Country Music, or look for answers by indicting an entire generation. But when two young men commit an
exceptional act of violence, it somehow becomes an opportunity to create the
seeds of panic about a wave of potential mass murderers, about the ticking time
bombs that could destroy any placid suburban community.
**Zero
Tolerance. Columbine
accelerated the turn to zero tolerance policies that have been building in American
high schools since the 1980s. The zero tolerance crackdown includes the random
drug testing of students without probable cause, the surveillance systems now
in place that have turned high schools into miniature police states, and the
criminalization of behavior once considered a typical part of adolescence or a
permissible form of political dissent.
Last fall I asked the students in my suburbia course, many of whom were
seniors in high school at the time of Columbine, to write an essay about their
experiences in high school. This
is a sampling of some of the more interesting replies:
**"High school is the ultimate
Orwellian police state"
**"If you were outside of the norm
you were a target of harassment"
**"Every
day a parade of Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle"
**Cliques
of jocks, brains, drama kids, freaks"
**"A
culture where money dominated morals"
**"A
social pressure cooker acting as a catalyst for rebellion"
**"Entering
my high school was similar to entering a jail"
**"The
most stiflingly conformist, insulated, boring, hysterical environment in
history"
**"High
school isn't a separate world, it's the gateway to society's problems"
**"Most
of us thank God we are still alive"
**"The
ideal wasn't to be smart, but to be popular"
**"An
insulated world where irresponsibility and apathy dominate"
**"Machine
that I was cycled in and out of"
**"You
couldn't pay me enough to do it over again"
**"If
high school is a model for suburbia I'm not going back"
**I
asked some follow-up questions about Columbine specifically, and many students
believed that the backlash after Columbine served to criminalize politically
subversive behavior among youth in general. One student reported a widespread panic because of a rumor
that anarchists across America were going to stage a mass murder on a
particular day, which they were pretty sure was a "national conspiracy to
prevent anyone under the age of 19 from having anything resembling fun." Another student sent me a newspaper
story quoting him as saying that the challenge for high schools after Columbine
was to "build a community where all people can express ideas and be
themselves and not get ridiculed"—which strikes me as an amazing
outbreak of reasonableness. And
finally, another student related her verdict on the aftermath of Columbine:
"Two young men fit well into a narrative that was being constructed about
how the current generation of young people dissented in all the wrong ways. The fact that there is no distinction
between real political dissent and angry violence depoliticizes my generation
and curtails the ability for us to build a counter political and popular
culture that can galvanize our peers."
**Think Global, Act Local. The cultural narrative that draws no distinction between
real political dissent and angry violence became most evident in the coverage
of the Seattle demonstrations that took place at the end of 1999. The broad-based grassroots mobilization
against the agenda of the World Trade Organization built on more than a decade
of activism on the campus left and in the labor, environmental, and consumer
movements. This loose alliance can
best be described not as anti-globalization, but as a multifaceted challenge to
the power of multinational corporations in the New World Order of free-market
globalization that has replaced the Cold War framework. Fair trade and workers' rights
activists have refined the Seventies environmental motto "think global,
act local," [SLIDE]
and in many ways updated it in a new version of "think local, act
global" [SLIDE].
**Building on the model of the
anti-apartheid divestment campaign, the student left began to pressure
university administrations to require codes of conduct by companies that
profited from their brand names but exploited low-wage workers overseas, such
as Nike in the sports apparel market.
Both on and off campus, the new student left has joined with other
activists in "living wage" campaigns and consumer boycotts of
corporations such as Nike and the Gap, by exposing the dirty secrets behind the
products sold in the malls and endorsed by the hip celebrities and dead Sixties
icons. Here at the University of
Michigan, the Students for Labor and Economic Equality has led the way in
events ranging from the anti-sweatshop campaigns to the campus support for the
recent Borders strikers. SOLE is a
member of a national umbrella organization of more than 200 campus movements
called the United Students Against Sweatshops. By the late 1990s, these living wage and workers' rights
campaigns had forced most American corporations to adopt codes of conduct for
out-sourced production, at least on paper, and pressured many reluctant
university administrations to sign agreements to enforce labor standards. The political consciousness raised by
the anti-sweatshop campaigns has led in many directions, including a grassroots
movement for a global living wage, and the fair trade protests that escalated
with the 1999 "Battle in Seattle."
**Global Left. An umbrella organization called the
Direct Action Network coordinated the protests in Seattle, especially by taking
advantage of the internet to connect groups across the nation and around the
world. The slogans of the Direct
Action Network directly challenged the corporate agenda in the global economy:
"People before
Profits", "Planet
before Profits," "Fair Trade not Free
Trade." The media quickly
dubbed this the anti-globalization movement, a description that is as
misleading as it is widespread.
The real showdown in Seattle was between the advocates of free trade
without any barriers, bringing together international corporations and their
political allies, and the advocates of fair trade agreements that include
environmental protections and labor rights and preserve the autonomy of less
wealthy nations. This is a
legitimate political debate worth having in a democracy. But the simplistic caricature of the
fair trade movement as the anti-globalization movement completely misses the
deep alliances between progressive activists in the United States and their
counterparts in Europe, in Central and South America, and around the
world. The best description of the
fair trade and workers' rights alliance that had its coming-out party in
Seattle is the Global Left. If it
is anti-anything, the global left is anti-corporate, in the sense that
grassroots activists contest the free trade mantra that whatever is in the
interests of the most powerful international corporations is also good for
everyone else in the world.
[Video #3, Seattle/WTO, 2:28, This Is
What Democracy Looks Like]
**The
grassroots demonstrations in Seattle succeeded in changing the national
conversation about free trade and fair trade. The protesters also discovered the same thing that the
antiwar movement also discovered in the Sixties—the government will
respond with violence when challenged directly by grassroots activism that
seeks to stop the institutions of power.
The police violence against the fair-trade movement has recurred at
every major demonstration since Seattle, including the recent protests in
Miami, and has been systematically underplayed by the national news media [this
footage was shot by alternative media
groups]. Coverage of the
Battle in Seattle focused extensively on a very small number of protesters who
smashed the windows of Starbucks, the Gap, and Niketown. Just as in the Sixties, this overemphasis
on property destruction by a small group of dissidents served to discredit the
much larger group of nonviolent demonstrators who offered a coherent political
alternative to the gospel of free trade.
The distortion of the fair trade movement as the anti-globalization
movement could be seen in caricatures such as one that ran in The New
Republic under the
headline The New
New Left: Bold, Fun, and Stupid—steelworkers who cared only about
protecting their own jobs, college students flirting with rebellion out of
boredom, dolphin lovers and tree-huggers who wanted to deny prosperity to the
Third World. In the New York
Times, influential
free-trade liberals such as Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof have
repeatedly charged the fair trade movement with a politics of selfishness by
wanting to hurt poor workers in poor countries, denying them the chance to work
for a dollar a day in a multinational factory.
**I
asked a student who has been active in SOLE and United Students Against
Sweatshops, and who has traveled to Guatemala for workshop training with poor
women who are trying to start a labor union, what she thought about these
criticisms.
"I think the
most common media tactic simplifies the discussion into sound bytes, turning
the anti-sweatshop activists into anti-globalization protectionists, which in
media logic will therefore hurt workers in developing countries. Of course this really isn't true; I
would say that most anti-sweatshop kids that I worked with are way more opposed
to capitalism and neo-liberal economic/political policies than the concept of
globalization itself. It's really
important to remember that SOLE/USAS will never run a boycott of a corporation
when we haven't been asked to first by the workers. The media/corporate agenda tries to simplify the argument in
order to shut us down, dumb us down, and delegitimatize our voice as youth who
really are pretty smart when we put our minds to it."
**Hipublicans vs. Deaniacs. Many activists in the fair-trade
movement supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, and as a result they have
been widely blamed by liberal Democrats for the defeat of Al Gore. The Republicans and the Democrats seem
to have very different philosophies about the political power of youth, which
parallels the portrayals of student activists in the national media. Last year, the New York Times
Magazine ran a long feature on the
"Hipublicans"—a new generation of right-wing campus activists
in training to take over the country, with substantial support from the
interest groups of the conservative movement. More than anything else, the news media and the Republican
party take these young conservatives seriously as political actors with genuine
ideas, which is exactly as it should be.
**Last December, the New York Times Magazine also ran an article about the swarm of young people
who were volunteering for the Howard Dean campaign and playing key roles in his
internet-savvy operation. But the
article presented these young activists as aimless twenty-somethings, drifting
college dropouts, lonely guys hunting for girlfriends—as people
volunteering for Dean as some sort of exercise in personal therapy. The tagline on the cover read: "To
be young, at loose ends, and searching for a cause—or anyway, looking to
connect with some cool friends."
In the Iowa primary, a conservative organization ran advertisements
against Dean that ended with an elderly couple saying: "I think Howard
Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking,
sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont - where it belongs"
(Club for Growth).
**Democratic leaders and the New York Times have repeatedly used the phrase "latte-sipping
left" to describe Dean supporters [as if there are no latte-sippers in the
Starbucks of every Republican suburb in America]. Howard Dean may well become a footnote in the history books,
but whether or not Dean wins the nomination is less important than the broader
message that mainstream liberals seem to be sending—grassroots reform
movements are not welcome, progressive young activists are not really wanted in
the political arena, and they should go back to hugging trees or piercing their
navels or whatever else they would really rather be doing.
**About 1.2 million first-year students
enter college every year, representing a massive potential base for political
organization. According to the
American Freshmen Survey conducted annually by UCLA, about 20 percent of
current first-year students consider themselves conservative and about 30
percent label themselves as liberal—the highest degree of on-campus
liberalism since the Vietnam Era.
In the 2002 survey, almost half of the respondents reported that they
had participated in a political demonstration in the past year. At the same time, almost three-fourths
of college freshmen express the goal to "become well-off
financially", while only half as many say that they want to "develop
a meaningful philosophy of life."
Based on the constant messages of American culture, the constant
pressure to define your identity through consumerism and material values,
should it really be any surprise that a majority of 18-year-olds express these
values and goals? Critics might
argue that this justifies the depoliticization of youth, but to me it seems
like a golden opportunity—there are still almost four years left to
reverse these priorities.
**When I took my first college job in
1999, the economic boom was still going strong and the internet bubble had not
yet collapsed. My very best
students from history classes were taking high-paying corporate jobs, making
more money than a 22-year-old really knows what to do with. Now the job market facing college
graduates is reported to be the worst since the 1970s, and maybe even since the
1930s. This may seem like
counterintuitive advice, but I think that the bad job market can be an
opportunity in disguise, and in political terms could even be the best thing
that is happening to youth today.
Who wants to be in their early 20s and have their whole life planned
out? If you think that your future
is secured, and that everything will work out just fine, that security and
contentment is what ought to scare you to death.
**Sometimes I think that small groups of
young people today should be writing their own Port Huron Statements, and then
hope that history rolls over them as it did during the Vietnam years. But then I realize that achieving
genuine democracy—participatory democracy—requires political
mobilization from the grassroots and political organization on the
campuses.
**Today as in the early 1960s, the belief
that history has ended is a myth.
The message that there are no alternatives is a lie. The growing recognition of these basic
truths is one of the most hopeful developments that I can see today, from the
campuses to the nation and to the world.
We all still have the ability to choose to be citizens in a democracy
instead of consumers in a mall.
Resources
In addition to the various students from History of American
Suburbia cited in this talk, I would like to thank four students in particular
who helped me think through these issues and from whom I quoted directly: Jackie
Bray, Emily Squires, Jess Piskor, and Heather Radke.
Sources for specific quotations and general information include:
Barbara Kantrowitz and Keith Naughton, "Generation
9-11," Newsweek
(Nov. 12, 2001), 46-56.
Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (1962)
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/internetdocuments/porthuron.html>
Mario Savio, "An End to History," Free Speech
Archives, (1964)
<http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/endhistorysavio.html>
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture,
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).
Thomas
Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the
End of Economic Democracy (New York:
Doubleday, 2000).
Rebecca
Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999).
Jean
Kilbourne, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and
Feel (New York: Free Press, 2000).
David
Samuels, "Rock is Dead," Harper's (Nov. 1999), 69-82.
David
Rricke, "The Battles of Rage Against the Machine"
<http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/articles/rs99.htm>
"Generation
Y," Business Week (Feb. 15,
1999)
<http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_07/b3616001.htm>
Bill
Clinton on school shootings
<http://www.cnn.com/US/9805/23/oregon.shooting/>
<http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/10/youth.violence.summit/>
Newt
Gingrich, Speech to Republican Women Leaders Forum (May 12, 1999)
<http://rightminds.8m.com/archives/newt_speech.html>
Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 2000).
Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front
Lines of the Globalization Debate (New York: Picador, 2002).
William Finnegan, "After Seattle," The New Yorker (April 17, 2000), 40-51.
The Merchants of Cool (PBS Frontline, 2001) <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/>
John Colapinto, "The Young Hippublicans," New York
Times Magazine (May 25,
2003).
Samantha M. Shapiro, "The Dean Swarm," New York Times
Magazine (Dec. 7, 2003), 56-61.
American Freshmen Survey, Higher Education Research Institute
<http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html>