By Chris Satullo
You can nail the diagnosis and still miss the cure.
The people now marching across the land to protest police brutality and systemic inequities are clear-eyed about the root of the ills they decry. Racism is America’s original sin, made all the more damaging for having gone unacknowledged for so long by so many.
Yet, at times, many of these impassioned advocates sound a bit like anti-vaxxers: They reject a key ingredient of the cure. It’s called voting. An activist who doesn’t vote isn’t an icon of principle; he or she is an oxymoron.
Let’s review a couple of quotes from a recent New York Times story on young activists’ skepticism about the worth of voting and “working within the system”:
“I’m tired,” said Aalayah Eastmond. “I’m literally tired. I’m tired of having to do this. We do our job and then we don’t see the people we vote in doing their job.”
Eastmond is 19.
That seems a little young to be so weary, though I’ll readily grant that, as a Parkland, Fla., student, she has every reason to be traumatized and angry as hell. But she’s worked for change in precisely one election. What led her to think that would be enough to undo trends and laws hundreds of years in the making?
Well, for one thing, America’s public schools have pretty much abandoned teaching civics. Perhaps that’s why so many young people seem to think politics is like shopping on Amazon: Click on Reform, pick the brand and color you prefer, fill your cart and schedule delivery.
Later in the Times story, Evan Weber, a 28-year-old environmental activist, explains why he’s nearly given up on institutions:
“We have grown up – millennials and especially Generation Z – with a system that has either delivered too little or not at all.”
Since Weber was in elementary school, he has experienced 9/11, the Iraq War, the fiscal meltdown, the foreclosure crisis, several government shut-downs, dozens of school shootings and fatal incidents of police brutality, and the soaring of student debt, along with complete federal inaction on climate change and gun violence. Not to mention, Donald Trump. So, yeah, for sure, he has a point.
But do those failures prove institutions and politicians are intrinsically rotten? Or did they happen partly because the failure of people to vote handed rotten politicians too much power over our institutions?
The Times piece describes Weber as disappointed in Barack Obama’s role in all this – as are many young progressives, whose jaws clench these days as the one-time hope-and-change guy launches into one of his sermons about the value of voting and keeping protest civil.
I’d like to linger on Obama a moment – because the story of his administration points up some uncomfortable truths about the blame younger Americans share for the inaction and bad actions they deplore.
So, Obama. Let me grant that the man’s penchant for caution could be maddening. The trait limits him to only a B-plus as president (a high A as a human being, though). But there are reasons he had to settle so often for half a loaf and small wins.
Please do not forget what he achieved in his first two years in office. The Affordable Care Act is a huge accomplishment, putting health coverage in reach for 20 million people, cutting the nation’s number of uninsured in half. Watching Donald Trump right now has to make you appreciate Obama’s steady hand in preventing the even scarier economic crisis he inherited in 2009 from spiraling deep into another Great Depression. (He deserves blame, I admit, for not doing more to curb foreclosures.). His modest steps on student debt and climate change look like genius compared to what we get now out of the White House.
So why doesn’t it feel like Obama accomplished more?
I’ll give you one number: 2010. Meaning: the midterm elections just two years into his first term.
That was the fateful election when – powered by the Tea Party movement, but also permitted by stay-at-home millennials and Gen X’ers – the GOP took back the U.S. House with a vengeance. That election spawned the obstructionist Freedom Caucus in the House, plus the dim duo of John Boehner and Paul Ryan as House speakers.
Worse, it was the election that gave the self-described Grim Reaper, Mitch McConnell, a foolproof filibuster in the U.S. Senate, empowering him to fulfill his pledge about Obama’s agenda: “None of that stuff is going to get through.”
Worst of all, it was the election where Project REDMAP succeeded beyond the GOP’s wildest dreams.
REDMAP was the savvy Republican strategy to pour money into 2010 governor’s races and obscure state legislative races in key swing states, so that red hands might hold the pens that redrew election maps after the 2010 Census. As a result, swing states such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina were gerrymandered to a fare-thee-well, ensuring that Republicans would hold onto their U.S. House and statehouse majorities, even when Democrats in those states cast more votes.
What did Republicans do with this power, gifted to them in 2010 by Obama’s stay-at-home voters? Nothing much, except underfund and undermine the health reform law at every turn, unwind Wall Street and student loan reforms, radically defund public education and social services, merrily fund local police’s paramilitary ambitions, block any climate change or gun control action, and – ultimately – wink at Donald Trump’s authoritarian incompetence.
And who let those dogs out? To a large degree, the same young progressives now marching and chanting for justice in the streets – or their older brothers and sisters.
How did they do that? By staying home. By not voting. By deciding that, I don’t know, going to a Phish concert, playing hacky-sack or posting a fiercely cynical meme on Twitter was a better use of their time than exercising their franchise as an American citizen.
Here’s a brute fact of American politics: The modern Republican agenda is not popular with the majority of Americans. They can only win if large numbers of people who would never vote for them stay home and don’t bother. Yes, the GOP tries all kinds of tricks and lies to prevent people from voting – but too often those schemes are just icing on the cake. The apathy or cynicism of voters who should know better does more of the damage.
This is what happened in 2010. Turnout among voters under the age of 30 fell by 27 percent from 2008 – 27 percent. Back then, I remember hearing impatient tropes of disillusionment similar to what we hear now: Obama was such a letdown; he hadn’t yet wiped out student debt, stopped the oceans’ rise, gotten us out of Iraq, closed Guantanamo.
By staying home in 2010, in a very real sense young people who’d soured on Obama and the Dems allowed our state and federal governments to be controlled – for four election cycles – largely by voters who think taxes are evil, “death panels” are real, climate change is a hoax and all Muslims are terrorists.
The 2016 election just took the disaster to new levels. Democrats like to grouse that the darn Electoral College cost Hillary Clinton the White House. That’s like a losing coach in the Super Bowl going, “Oh, I didn’t know we were supposed to kick the ball between those yellow posts.”
Trump would not be wreaking the havoc he is today if he had not eked out wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined total of 80,000 votes. Yes, in those states, Trump did mobilize some whites who rarely vote. But the bigger story behind the thin MAGA margins in that unholy trinity was the likely Democratic voters who either stayed home or wasted their vote on the ridiculous Jill Stein. (I’m not a violent man, but I have an urge to slap every voter who did that.)
And I wish this next point weren’t true but it is: Lower black turnout in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia played a huge role in Trump winning in those three states. By staying home, those voters allowed a president whose Justice Department worked aggressively to reform rogue police forces to be replaced by a stone-cold racist who cheers lawless, brutal behavior by people with a badge.
Elections have consequences, huge ones. The two parties were never identical and now they are sharply different. To argue otherwise is lazy and irresponsible. Similarly, it is simply not true that governments never do big things to bend history’s arc towards justice: the New Deal, Social Security, the G.I bill (though, yes, it was tainted by racism), Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, the Americans with Disabilities Act, gay marriage, the Affordable Care Act.
So, I feel for Aalayah Eastmond. She’s experienced things no American her age – or any age – should have to. I also get why Evan Weber feels disillusioned.
But I’m begging them and millions like them: Don’t give up on voting; don’t give up on politics, in the higher sense of the word. There’s no other path to the righteous changes you seek.
Meanwhile, giving up on voting is the one sure path to getting more of the awfulness we’ve experienced out of Washington the last few years.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.