How the Young Entered Politics in 1968 And Transformed It
Coser, Lewis
ALMOST ONE HALF Of the population of the United States is now under twentyfive years of age. This unprecedented demographic fact is well on the way toward changing completely the texture of...
...Not only do the young have time, they also are willing to participate in the political arena without expectations of material payoffs...
...These crackpot realists, to use C. Wright Mills's telling characterization, forgot the young...
...About this I have never managed to share the enthusiasm of some of my fellow editors...
...Having few occupation or family responsibilities, they have not yet acquired the habit of assessing their political "inputs" in terms of pragmatic and self-interested ` outputs.,, These structural conditions do not in themselves account for the current crusade...
...As a result, the college young are now in the position to dispose as they please of much of their time...
...At the Convention some kind of arrangement between the McCarthy and the Kennedy forces might well be necessary in order to deny the nomination to Johnson...
...Some of the old party pros and their intellectual hangerson will now flock to him...
...If the young manage only to bring out the vote and to drum up temporary enthusiasm without really affecting political institutions, the hangover after the election might indeed be severe...
...This helps to account for the considerable overrepresentation of such professionals among active party workers in America...
...This must not happen...
...This state of affairs, I would like to suggest, is now in the process of revolutionary change...
...For the young to be willing to use their time for political purposes and social causes, there must be issues at stake that have acquired great salience in their perception of the world they live in...
...They still have immense resources of idealism—resources which tend to be quickly depleted among their pragmatically-oriented elders...
...As long as the political scene looked as bleak as it did till McCarthy's entry, it clearly fostered the growth of nihilistic and despairing tendencies on campus...
...This is why he appeals to a generation that is also willing to take them...
...If they manage to do this, at least in a number of key places, they will gain a confidence in their own abilities which will allow them to overcome whatever immediate disappointments may lie ahead...
...More recently it needed the particular constellation of the Vietnam War, the callousness of the Johnson Administration, the cruel joke of the current version of the War on Poverty, and many other outrages with which we are all too familiar, to lead to what is now clearly a political revolt of the young...
...Now that the political scene moves again, now that a thaw has set in, those on the New Left who are not willing to recognize the new tide and remain stuck in their old stance are indeed likely to become isolated and without influence...
...Only those who have some free time on their hands can hope effectively to participate in the political game...
...Nor have these parties been able, given their loose organizational structure, to employ many paid permanent officials in the manner of the British...
...These political events confound those cynics and professional pessimists who for so long have tried to make us believe that the world of politics remains forever frozen into the pattern of two competing but similarly structured major parties that present no real choices for liberals or radicals...
...They have no clear-cut program, but they believe in certain fundamental human virtues —loyalty, spontaneity, compassion, courage— which they feel their candidate embodies...
...In the long ran the young cannot be effective if they venture only sporadically into politics...
...It is conceivable that he will outpoll McCarthy in a number of primaries...
...They sense that McCarthy, though of course a practiced politician, himself remains at bottom an amateur who has been willing to throw aside many of the usual political accoutrements...
...Two OBJECTIONS might be raised: • Is this campaign not going to be just a flash in the pan, if for no other reason than that there is no ideological coherence and formulated program behind this thrust of youthful political enthusiasms...
...These young men and women command resources of time which are unavailable to almost all their elders...
...Bobby Kennedy may appeal to the bobbysoxers, but what most student activists say about his opportunistic avoidance of risks is not fit to print even in a radical publication...
...He argued that men on regular work schedules, be it in farming or industrial or office work, were not likely to have sufficient free time to engage in politics in a regular manner...
...The young idealists respond to a man whom they call Mr...
...What is relevant is that in some inchoate manner they articulated what many others felt...
...In ideologically-oriented European parties, agitation and propaganda was largely carried out by militants who were willing to sacrifice leisure time in order to devote themselves to the furtherance of their parties' ideological goals...
...Not only are there more young people today than ever before in American history, but a much higher proportion of them attend college...
...And after the war, if I am right in my contention that the young are about to help restructure fundamentally some of the bases of American politics, the old coalition slogan will be as superannuated as Johnson's Great Society...
...And not only do they have large chunks of time at their disposal, they are more dispensable than any other major category of men and women in America...
...The elation we all experienced after New Hampshire was due to the fact that McCarthy gained 42 per cent of the votes, not that he won in the technical sense...
...They respond to a man for all seasons...
...He is undoubtedly attracting some support among people who would otherwise have been for McCarthy...
...And so they have been ready to give of their time in the cause of peace or in the struggle for civil rights...
...He has been able to do so by bringing into the political arena tens of thousands of young people who have the energy, the time, and the idealism required to transform the political game...
...And they will not enroll under the tarnished banner of the man who always comes after, first after his brother and now McCarthy...
...As long as the war lasts, it has no relevance to the political scene...
...This is why the major American parties have traditionally been deprived of the support of the kind of committed militants on which European parties have been able to thrive for a long time...
...They must endeavor permanently to occupy the positions they have conquered, and they must reduce to impotence the political time-servers and party faithful if they are to help bring about a transformation of the American scene...
...In a sense, the American party system has been financed by the taxpayer in the form of transfer payments out of the public till to deserving party regulars who have been willing to work hard in the hope of one or another pay-off after the election...
...This is the way to proceed...
...This party system has been kept going by mobilizing electoral agents with time on their hands who, whether because of material or ideal interests, were willing to devote sizable chunks of time to their party's cause...
...But if they succeed in actually capturing at least some major institutional bulwarks, if they get hold of major pieces of the party machinery and in conquering the machine transform it, then the campaign will have been more than a flash in the pan...
...and not all machine politicians are likely to be structurally unemployed after the election...
...Their efforts had to be supplemented by regular party workers who were attracted by concrete returns in the form of patronage and petty or not-soIA COMMENTS AND OPINIONS petty graft...
...In contrast, independent professionals, from medical practitioners to lawyers and newspapermen, or, in lower strata, from undertakers to preachers, could afford to arrange their work schedules so as to take off for fairly lengthy periods of political activism...
...When thousands of new men participate in the democratic process, those that accept "participatory democracy" only on their own terms will be seen as cop-outs...
...But something radically different COMMENTS AND OPINIONS and qualitatively new has happened on the political scene—and the repercussions will be felt for many years to come...
...Caught in the routines of their occupations, they were not dispensable...
...Yet the American party system has never been able to rely solely on such volunteers for its regular operation...
...It is hence basically irrelevant for Seymour Martin Lipset to point out that the alienated activists of the New Left represent only a few thousand people on all the campuses combined...
...The major Ameri can parties, given their largely non-ideological character, have hardly ever been able to appeal to engaged political partisans...
...Even if the anti-Johnson forces were to get only 40 per cent of the votes at the Convention, this would be a major victory...
...Whereas in the past the great majority of the young were caught very early in occupational routines, at present millions enjoy a moratorium during their years in college...
...When trying to account for the different amounts of political participation among various strata in the population, Max Weber long ago introduced the useful notion of "dispensability...
...A LAST woRD about the entry of Kennedy into the race...
...It may be all to the good that the McCarthy movement is not frozen into rigid ideological stances...
...And this change is coming about as the young invade the political arena...
...But until then nobody should exchange his McCarthy button for that of the former Attorney General...
...They did not create nihilistic despair, they gave despair a voice...
...Furthermore, a majority of votes is not the only measure of success...
...Yet it would be unfortunate, I think, if McCarthy were to give up his campaign before the Convention...
...To be sure, not every political bastion of the Democratic party is likely to fall during this campaign...
...Where it might be difficult to quit a job in order to engage in political activities, it is easy enough to skip a semester in school or a few weeks of classes, especially with the often explicit or implicit support of liberal professors...
...And what about the morning after the conventions, when—though this is not as likely by any means as it was a few weeks ago—we might after all be faced with a choice between Johnson and Nixon...
...But what about the day after...
...As to the first question, it is true of course that no formulated political program sustains the efforts of the young, but it is true also that they are not simply responding to the appeals of a charismatic demagogue...
...And it needed the emergence of a man who, just because he departed radically from prevailing political styles, being neither a party hack nor a demagogue, could appeal to the young...
...In the colleges themselves, the pattern of supervision and restriction has been increasingly relaxed, and parental restraints and the inhibitions of parietal rules have almost disappeared...
...Here much depends, I think, on the further course of the campaign...
...Mayor Daley is still going to be the Chicago kingfish next year...
...An appeal not to remain out in left field is not an appeal for the traditional idea of "coalition politics...
...They respond to one who is said to have been for long a passionate student of the life of Thomas More...
...Such men might also hope to profit professionally from the contacts made in their political work...
...Enthusiasm and passion for abstractly formulated and transpersonal ideals has in any case been uncommon in America, where pragmatic matter-of-fact judgments have tended successfully to scale down the impact of ideology...
...This unprecedented demographic fact is well on the way toward changing completely the texture of American politics, as the McCarthy campaign has shown in recent months...
...Will the young enthusiasts just return to the campus in disgust and alienation if they should not manage to attain victory...
...Eugene McCarthy has been willing to take risks...
...Were Kennedy to take over the anti-Johnson forces, a high proportion of the young might leave...
...This would be seen as a betrayal by the masses of young men he has attracted...
...The young activists are learning by doing—and thus appeal to what is a major strain in the American tradition...
...New Hampshire has shown, and I am confident that Wisconsin and subsequent primaries will show again, that professional politicians will find it hard to shore up their traditional bulwarks against the sudden onrush of youthful activists...
...Clean, whom they see as actuated by deeply-felt convictions...
...To prat COMMENTS AND OPINIONS tie about "participatory democracy" and then withdraw into the security of tight little sects will not endear them to the new activists...
...no small matter...
...The measure of political inexperience, and a certain amateurish quality, are precisely what makes their politics so delightful...
...EUGENE McCARTiY, it seems to me, is in the process of changing our political life...
...When it comes to political organization and activity, the most precious commodity is time...
...The press has reported that hundreds of university students recently registered in the regular Minnesota Democratic party organization, turned out in force at party meetings, managed to outvote the regulars and to win the day for McCarthy, leaving Hubert Humphrey's hacks aghast...
...They have relied instead on two main types of active supporters to do their organizational work, from manning local or regional party offices to ringing door bells: those aspiring to a political career and with time on their hands, and those engaged in politics for tangible returns in the form of patronage or various kinds of graft...
...Since there always have been only few such men, and since politics always has had a somewhat negative ring on the American scene, active participation, as distinct from voting, has been restricted to a small minority, and politicos have traditionally lived in a circumscribed world of their own...
Vol. 15 • May 1968 • No. 3
