Introduction
Mills, Nicolaus
Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 15 PARTY OF THE FUTURE Party of the Future: Voices from the Next America NICOLAUS MILLS There is a small fortune to be...
...We expect more writing from the young to appear in future issues of Dissent, and we think that as our collection of young, generational voices expands, it will provide an important record of how our new century began as well as an indication of where it is headed...
...We have simply taken Terkel one step further...
...The young who have come of age in recent years, and in the process bridged two centuries, have grown up with YouTube, Facebook, and email, but the presence of the Internet in their lives has not meant, as so many of their critics have charged, that they only speak and think in shorthand...
...It is more than a product of America’s historic fascination with youth culture...
...If anything unites them, it is their search for political and social solutions that don’t leave America isolated in the world or divided into a nation of haves and havenots...
...Teachers want to know more about their students...
...Instead of interviewing our subjects, we have asked them to write out their thoughts and be in control of their words from the start...
...They may have grown up with the Internet, but the Internet has certainly not SPRING 2010 DISSENT 15 Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 16 PARTY OF THE FUTURE stunted their ability to express themselves and describe the turnofthecentury world they have inherited...
...Parents want to know more about their children...
...This situation is one that has encouraged a series of writers who have specialized in studying generations to operate on the premise that they know more about the young than the young...
...The shocks of recent years—from 9/11 to the Great Recession—have, as might be expected, made a deep impact on our writers and often elicited disappointment from them both with Washington and with the critics of Washington...
...It is social engagement, not personal retreat, that most characterizes the lives of the writers who appear here...
...NM is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and coeditor with Michael Walzer of Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press...
...Movie and television producers want to know more about their audiences...
...Dissent Spring 2010:Dissent, rev.qxd 3/4/2010 11:08 AM Page 15 PARTY OF THE FUTURE Party of the Future: Voices from the Next America NICOLAUS MILLS There is a small fortune to be made writing about the young...
...Neil Howe and the late William Strauss showed that in 1991 with their bestselling Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, and since then, Howe and Strauss have had a host of imitators...
...Rather than seeking refuge in the familiar, they have challenged themselves with jobs that include serving in the military, working in post–Katrina New Orleans, joining the Obama presidential campaign, and teaching in the inner city...
...There is, however, little incentive at present to move cautiously when it comes to playing the game of “Name That Generation...
...They have begun their lives by taking stock of themselves, then going out in the world...
...The model for our undertaking is Studs Terkel, who in such oralhistory collections as Working and Hard Times put the voices of his subjects, not himself, front and center...
...It helps to be able to distinguish between the interests of Baby Boomers (19461964), Generation Xers (19651981), and Millennials (19822003), and giving a label to each of these cohorts makes talking about them easier...
...Indeed, what is most distressing about so many of the books and essays we have about the young is that they refuse to let the young speak at length about themselves...
...We have tried to remedy this seenbutnotheard problem by letting the young writers (all of them under thirty) who fill this special section of Dissent and who belong to the next generation to govern America speak about themselves in the first person...
...But for all their differences, when it comes to their writing, what they have in common is a prose that is rich and complicated...
...Among them are an Iraqi vet, the son of a famous civil rights leader, a lawyer for children with specialeducation needs, a magazine editor, and a divinity student...
...By any historical yardstick, they are kindred spirits with the men and women whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, looking back on his own remarkable, nineteenthcentury generation, described as the party of the future rather than the party of the past...
...But our writers have not used their disappointments as an excuse for arguing that at this stage of their lives their primary concern ought to be looking out for Number One...
...Our national fascination with the young makes sense...
...The nine writers who are featured here come from a variety of backgrounds...
...For the authors of these books and essays, it is as if the inner lives of the young were a side issue that was not nearly so interesting as the circumstances the young have faced in coming of age...
...The problem is that it is easy for such labels to paper over differences within a generation and still easier for the labels to end up offering a compilation of statistical categories rather than indepth understanding...
...In today’s competitive media world, the biggest rewards go to anyone who can come up with a generational label that sticks for even a little while...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
