Why Young Voters Believe In An “Impossible” Future — And Why History Shows We Should

I’ve been having some very heated but also incredibly illuminating conversations with my family around Bernie/Hilary and the possible in American politics, and I wrote an e-mail to my dad to share two articles I felt captured my sense of the process well. It turned into a small essay so I share it here:

As somewhat heated as our exchanges around Clinton/Sanders have been, I think they’ve moved me towards a less embattled position. It’s well documented that Bernie supporters are much younger — the graph in this piece on Vox is especially striking — and I think Bernie’s support amongst young people helps illustrate the conventional wisdom of why older people tend to be more conservative. When you’re older, you have the vantage of history, which means your sense of the possible tends to exist for the most part within those bounds. So for you, who’s had 70+ years of watching democratic politics in America, that’s sort of just how it is. You may not like it, but you accept it as reality, and so to imagine otherwise is foolish naiveté (I’m slightly exaggerating — consider this a more plural, general “you” of the olds/the establishment, typically white men). So therefore Hilary is the best option for reality. You’d prefer Bernie, but you’d also prefer a magic dragon that makes America like Northern Europe, but you see that hope as silly.

The Atlantic recently published a great piece looking at what drives the enthusiasm among young people for Sanders, but it doesn’t address a more fundamental, almost existential divide between young people and older generations - that for young people though, the lack of worldly experience means that the possible is whatever they imagine. You can see this all the way down into childhood where fantasy and imagination tend to be stronger forces — just because we haven’t seen a magic dragon, it doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. In other words, we believe in the impossible.

This doesn’t mean however that we are living in a fantasy world, but rather that we do believe the political system as it exists is inevitable. Rather, it is something that can be changed, and we believe Bernie presents a plausible mechanism for making that change. All serious progressive change has happened in contrast to what was previously thought impossible. Often this takes a long time, but in the 21st century we are seeing some incredibly rapid changes — even though the struggle for queer rights has been going on for decades, it’s certainly fair to say it’s history is much shorter than the history of women’s liberation or civil rights for black people. And so for the youth of this generation, we’ve *seen* change manifest during our lifetimes, so we believe it to be possible (of course, the same could be said of what happened during the sixties — I’d be curious to read a history — or your own analysis — accounting for how all that revolutionary fervor died out). In effect we think the machine is broken, and that the machine can be changed.

This Gawker piece nicely illustrates how Clinton represents the establishment, in the context of her relationship to Kissinger, and these two paragraphs (as first highlighted by Glenn Greenwald on twitter are particularly telling:

The point I’m making here is not, [Glenn Greenwald voice] HILLARY CLINTON SUPPORTS A WAR CRIMINAL. (Trust me, I know Kissinger isn’t moving many votes in New Hampshire.) It’s that Hillary Clinton exists in a world where “Henry Kissinger is a war criminal” is a silly opinion held by unserious people. Her problem? Lots of those silly and unserious people want to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its current leadership, which is exemplified by people like Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders’ critique of Clinton is not that she’s cartoonishly corrupt in the Tammany Hall style, capable of being fully bought with a couple well-compensated speeches, but that she’s a creature of a fundamentally corrupt system, who comfortably operates within that system and accepts it as legitimate. Clinton has had trouble countering that critique because, well, it’s true. It’s not that she’s been bought, it’s that she bought in.

The very next paragraph of the piece talks about how the conversation around whether she is a true “liberal” or “progressive” is silly in part because it rests on totally different meanings of the word. For me — and I think this is relatively common amongst the critical left — she is a liberal, because that word now accurately describes the pro-corporate war machine of establishment politics. I think we chafe at “progressive” because, to mangle a Simpsons quote, “that our word!”

Is it naive to believe in the possibility of this transformative change? Possibly. I haven’t read Naomi Klein’s latest book on Climate Change, but her core thesis is that climate change doesn’t illustrate the problem with energy consumption, it reveals the true broken nature of capitalism itself. She thinks this is a good thing, because it provides us a collective and concrete target to begin dismantling the system. While I am persuaded by her observation in me it triggers only gloom, because I think capitalism will win and that we/the planet are fucked. Then again, I haven’t read her book, and while I was initially suspicious of her overarching theory in Disaster Capitalism, by the end of it I was thoroughly persuaded. She’s recently posted an entire chapter of the book about post Katrina reconstruction, which was perhaps the most brutal in the book, and links the disaster capitalism thesis with climate change. It also is super relevant to today’s police violence — in her posting of the chapter she writes “rereading the chapter 10 years after the events transpired, I am struck most by this fact: the same military equipment and contractors used against New Orleans’ Black residents have since been used to militarize police across the United States, contributing to the epidemic of murders of unarmed Black men and women. That is one way in which the Disaster Capitalism Complex perpetuates itself and protects its lucrative market.

I read that and think — yes, this is how the world goes. Evil wins. The long arc of history does not bend towards justice, but (as Ta Nehisi-Coates said on the Daily Show), towards chaos, and for the most part it is the powerful who take best advantage of that chaos. But perhaps I am being too cynical. Perhaps the chaos of climate change can be an opportunity for dismantling the worst evils of capitalism. Perhaps I need merely believe, as I do in Bernie, that we can change the boundaries of the possible.