College-age voters are notoriously fickle. Surveys find 18- to 24-year-olds are significantly less likely to cast ballots than the rest of the electorate. Even as the youth vote surged in 2004, only 47 percent of voters under age 25 cast a ballot, compared to 66 percent of all other voters, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
But once making it to the polls, young people vote more liberally than other demographics. In fact, John Kerry lost every age group to George Bush but one. He captured the under-30 vote by 10 points.
Here lies the schizophrenia of our generation. Voicing a too-cool cynicism one election and a yearning idealism the next, young voters ache for a transformational leader while withholding the emotional investment that too often disappoints. That needs to change.
Timidity is unaffordable today. It may be warranted after seven years of presidential incompetence wreaking mayhem from Baghdad to New Orleans, but it is unacceptable. One of Bush's most lamentable legacies is the extent to which his administration turned "spreading freedom" into a punch line and tarred the brimming optimism of a can-do people.
Ironically, while campaigning in Indiana in 1999, Bush expounded on "the duty of hope." He promised, "Americans will never write the epitaph of idealism. It emerges from our nature as a people, with a vision of the common good beyond profit and loss. Our national character shines in our compassion." But now even leading Democrats warn against idealism. Yet Barack Obama's rejoinder is powerful: "In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
A generation ago, the political outlook was similarly bleak. Menacing Soviets, a tragic war and racial violence could have left America exhausted. But instead of offering despair, President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps, one of the country's greatest answers to and generators of youthful idealism. Instead of anxious hand-wringing or debilitating self-questioning, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, "We are not wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God almighty is wrong. ... If we are wrong, justice is a lie - love has no meaning."
Idealism, the makers of history knew, is not na'veté. It is the restless promise that progress is both possible and urgent. It is the unapologetic attack on sterile traditionalism and the superficial stability that thwarts justice and suffocates our enterprising dreams. It is the charge of malcontents, the battle cry of hope-peddlers, the allegiance of those who rally to the slogan "Yes We Can."
The brave abolitionists centuries ago knew it was not enough to be right. India's independence was not won by establishment politicians or Facebook petitions. Yes, recapturing the promise of our country will require the sweat, responsibility and acceptance of risk that our generation has shied away from in politics. What will be our response to inevitable obstacles? John Edwards warns presciently, "Any time you speak out powerfully for change, the forces of status quo attack."
Michael Gerson, presidential speechwriter, defends idealism eloquently: "Given our historical challenges, an adolescent disillusionment is an unaffordable luxury." Great causes, he reminds us, are never easy. "Setbacks should neither surprise nor discourage us. And it would be a pathetic kind of idealism that allowed those setbacks to undermine our commitments to justice and liberty."
Do we turn to a defeatist libertarianism, which one liberal blogger aptly labels as "glorified, self-centered apathy?" Or do we accept the torch of heroes before us and agitate for social justice, peace and hope wherever the night is dark?
Jacob Shelly is a junior in the School of Public Affairs and a liberal columnist for The Eagle.
