The March for Our Lives, when it happened, defied expectations. Huge crowds assembled not just in Washington but in eight hundred places around the world. The only adults who appeared on the D.C. stage were entertainers. The Parkland kids, knowing they had created a unique platform, had invited other kids whose lives had been touched by gun violence. Yolanda King, the nine-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, confidently stood before tens of thousands to lead the crowd in a call and response:
Spread the word.
Have you heard?
All across the nation.
We
Are going to be
A great generation.
The event highlight was not words, eloquent as many of them were, but silence—four minutes and twenty-six seconds of uneasy, suspenseful silence as Emma González stood like a sculpture, tears tracking down her face, so that the crowd would experience the duration of the shooting that ended seventeen of her friends’ and teachers’ lives.
Just like the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches, which brought out millions of pink-hatted women marching for human rights around the world; like Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 to protest the unwarranted deaths of black men at the hands of police; like Occupy Wall Street, a 2011 movement to protest the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States; and like the It Gets Better Project, which works to convince LGBTQ youths that life does get better after the high school years, #NeverAgain was fueled and spread by social media.
Of course some older people know their way around the Internet, but #NeverAgain was the first mass movement planned and executed by digital natives, people who have never not known the world of digital media, for whom navigating digital terrain is second nature. It’s not clear what the generation—what Yolanda King called “a great generation”—will be called by history. Gen Z, maybe? iGen? Generational divides are blurry, and few social scientists agree where the dividing lines fall. But the post-millennial generation—those born since the mid-1990s or thereabouts—has an amazing political skill set to use if, like the Parkland students, they choose to do so. They have the ability, as Lithwick said, to “change the conversation,” or create a powerful political narrative that they can disseminate and that helps level the playing field with powerful opponents like the NRA.
No movement can create change or defeat an opponent if it is only hashtag activism. Eventually, you have to put your vote where your # is. What is especially remarkable about the Never Again movement is that it emphasizes not just marching but voting. March for Our Life rallies throughout the summer gave them the chance to hone the narrative, register people to vote and activate other students. Youth participation in the 2018 midterms soared.3 Some writers are calling for the vote to be extended to those who are sixteen years old. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein says that is a good idea because voting is “the training wheels of political participation.”4 By the time they are eighteen, kids are distracted by the drama of their lives and they tend not to want to be bothered.
In fact, since the military draft ended in 1973, young people have been notoriously uninvolved in politics, often seeing it as irrelevant to their lives and the things they really care about. Knowing that they pay little attention and tend not to vote in large numbers, politicians feel free to ignore their concerns, reinforcing their cynicism and apathy. Young people have turned out in larger numbers since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, however, and the Never Again movement promises to energize even more.
The American founders weren’t crazy about the idea of mass movements, political demonstrations, or even political parties, but they did value political engagement, and they knew that democracies needed care and attention in order to survive. In 1787, when Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman what he and other founders of the Constitution had created, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Today, many commentators worry that we are not “keeping the republic” and that, as new generations who find politics a turn-off become disaffected adults, the system will start to unravel. As one writer says, “a nation that hates politics will not long thrive as a democracy.”5
Yet protesters like Cameron Kasky, Emma González, David Hogg, and Yolanda King sound as committed to democracy as Benjamin Franklin could have wished, even though their efforts are not focused solely on voting or traditional methods of political engagement. Is a nation of these young activists a nation in trouble, or can movements begun via technology Franklin could not have imagined help to keep the republic? What, exactly, is at stake in hashtag activism—what one writer called a “netroots outcry” to follow an online call to political action? We return to this question after we learn more about the meaning of politics and the difference it makes in our lives.
HAVE you got grand ambitions for your life? Do you want to found an Internet start-up and sell it for millions, be the investment banker that funds the project, achieve a powerful position in business, gain influence in high places, and spend money to make things happen? Perhaps you’d like to make a difference in the world, heal the sick, fight for peace, feed the poor. Maybe you want to travel the world, learning languages and immersing yourself in new cultures and working abroad. Or maybe all you want from life is a good education; a well-paying job; a healthy family; a comfortable home; and a safe, prosperous, contented existence. Think politics has nothing to do with any of those things? Think again.
The things that make those goals attainable—a strong national defense, good relations with other countries, student loans, economic prosperity, favorable mortgage rates, secure streets and neighborhoods, cheap and efficient public transportation, affordable health care and family leave protections—are all influenced by or are the products of politics.
Yet if you listen to the news, politics may seem like one long campaign commercial: eternal bickering and finger-pointing by public servants who seem more interested in winning an argument against their ideological opponents than actually solving our collective problems. Far more often than not, political actors with the big bucks seem to have more influence over the process than those of us with normal bank accounts. Politics, which we would like to think of as a noble activity, can take on all the worst characteristics of the business world, where we expect people to take advantage of each other and pursue their own private interests. Can this really be the heritage of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln? Can this be the “world’s greatest democracy” at work?
In this book we explore that question, getting to the heart of what politics is and how it relates to other concepts such as power, government, rules, economics, and citizenship. We propose that politics can best be understood as the struggle over who gets power and resources in society, and the fight to control the narrative that defines each contestant. Politics produces winners and losers, and much of the reason it can look so ugly is that people fight desperately not to be losers, and to create and perpetuate narratives that celebrate their wins and put the best face possible on their losses. It can get pretty confusing for the average observer.
Contrary to the way they appear in the media, and maybe even in our own minds, the people who are doing that desperate fighting are not some special breed—more corrupt or self-interested or greedy than the rest of us. They are us. Whether they are officials in Washington or mayors of small towns, corporate CEOs or representatives of labor unions, local cops or soldiers in the Middle East, churchgoers or atheists, doctors or lawyers, shopkeepers or consumers, professors or students, they are the people that in a democracy we call citizens.
As we will see, it is the beauty of a democracy that all the people, including the everyday people like us, get to fight for what they want. Not everyone can win, of course, and many never come close. There is no denying that some people bring resources to the process that give them an edge, and that the rules give advantages to some groups of people over others. But as the