Stop Me Before I Vote Again

They're not as young as you think. I made the same error. Somebody did a poll on Daily Kos -- I forget the exact distribution, but IIRC about half the participants there were over 40.

Does that make the picture more, or less, depressing? You can probably guess what I think.

glue:

"the package is eminently anti-bourgeois in form and utterly bourgeois in substance, the mirror image of Fox Network’s right-wing populist universe...."

i like the structure implied here
troubled only by the labels
a bit
but hey
u have
your
frankfurt school
i have my
hot dog academy

I have seen this same writing on Huffington Post and Moveon, and I am assured, by inside sources (my SO), that it is not limited to Gen Y. See, even I can write that way.
This raises the question, though, whether Karl Rove was right in saying "there is no anti-war movement", and "Cindy Sheehan's a clown."

Someone needs to analyse the forces of inertia in this country -- the little hooks of consumerism, govt support (unemployment) or intimidation, distraction (sports and drugs), parents' money, or whatever, that keep people from acting -- especially those who mouth off a lot.

I don't think it's a generational thing at all. If you spend time on the Left Hook boards, f'rinstance, you'll find plenty of folks half my age who can write well.

Also, as an Indymedia refugee, I'd have to say that spending an hour on some treatise written by somebody who carries on as if they're being paid by the word isn't a noticeable improvement over reading 3,999,999-per-hour one-sentence Atrios quotes where people make "Holden" jokes.

At any rate, youth-demonizing has never done all that much to advance any social movement, so even if the age speculation about these spaces were true, I'd be wary at looking at it from this approach. Remember that Aesop's fable about the crab and her daughter ? Children learn from watching what their parents do, not from listening to what their parents tell them to do.

i'll second xeno

40 years ago
this very summer

some old punk
tried to
write
a single message
on to
millionsand millions
of 'blank sheets
of paper'
all at once

the message:

"bombard the headquarters "

It seems that the echo chamber at these blogs and sites is full of voices of young ‘uns who have to come to political consciousness (if it can be called that) in the age of George W. Bush.

I'd guess there are two types (and this would describe Atrios more than Kos).

1.) 60s retreads.

2.) The larger group, people who came to political consciousness not under Bush but during the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the 2000 election. This is why they'll defend anything Clinton and the Democrats do and why they think anybody to the left of the Democrats cost Gore the election on Florida.

You very rarely run into anybody under 25 on Atriot. There are a lot more on Kos.

40 years ago
this very summer

On 6/26/66, I was all of eight days old.
Elaborate on the incident you're referring to. If you please, Uncle j...

Happy belated birthday, Ms X, you spring chicken, you.

bobw, if you want to pay me for that analysis, as a 25-year old big talker frozen by inertia with a rather devestating self-analytic streak, I could probably do you a book or three. One day, maybe.

I think Stanley's right about Atrios. I definitely get the impression that the dominant voices of youngsters on the pwogblogs are domestic media/politics oriented - whether impeachment, BvG, or Kerry 2004. Impeachment I think is the big one, after all, remember what MoveOn got its name from.

My "awakening" (though I was already rather aware) came from the Iraq War - "they can't possibly actually be carrying this thing out!"

My "awakening" (though I was already rather aware) came from the Iraq War - "they can't possibly actually be carrying this thing out!"

On one of the big democratic blogs, they're still blaming Nader for the fact that the Democrats supported the war in 2002.

They never get sick of this.

Ever notice how all of these Democratic blogs will leap all over themselves to praise any "country club Republican" saying even the most mildly critical thing about Bush.

But they still think people to their left are the second coming of Satan.

xeno

"nobody expects....
the cultural revolution!!!!"

Stanley, when it comes to politics, independent lefties are the owned. The DP owns them. It's their personal version of Bush's "ownership society." That's why, until his recent kissy-face with various Xtian Right factions, John McCain was hailed as a "maverick" while Nader was derided as an "asshole." Beautiful, isn't it ?

Oh, and I was just informed yesterday by a DP loyalist that all my heart and soul (and money) should go toward electing Wesley Clarke, because his platform is "just like Nader's," or something.

Yeah, I'm still picking my jaw off the floor over that one.

jsp, I'm still confused. I was wondering in your earlier poetic flight if you were referring to a specific cross-generational gap back in the day.

I'd chat with you, too, MJS, but I have to get down to the mega-pharmacy for my Geritol now. :p

xeno

my reference is to
one
chairman mao tse tung

who unleashed his terrible swift brush
on a big character poster
aiming
to rally
the not yet hard wired
youth of new china
to the cause of revolution

in particular
post overthrow
continuing revolution
(soft ware division )

but ahhh
what followed
ended up
including throwing back and forth
lots and lots
of unexpected
hard ware division stuff too
sum up:
despite the chairman's warning about the differences
between heads of people and cloves of garlic
"this historic stage
in history"
left
plenty of "uncured "
dead struggle patients
strewn about the place

or so i'm led to believe

ie
what may well have started
as an iconoclastic agit prop
bust up frolic
ended tipped over
in the bloody ditch
with its wheels spinning like mad in the air

of course they shoulda known better

even if the original conception
had been adhered to
like the dictat of heaven itself
it had nothing about it
the chairman's exact contemporary
ike eisenhower
(or tipper gore for that matter)
would have approved of

but
i will gladly fess up
to my own dark past

it all seemed like a good idea
at the time ..to me

I guess I am coming late to this, but I'll put my two cents in anyway. Back during the runup to the 2004 election I was frequenting the Air America Radio site and posting on the Al Franken blog. One time when I was making the case for breaking with the Democrats and voting for a third party candidate, a lady responded, "Oh your youthful idealism is charming, but you are so naive honey. When I was your age, I thought like that too, but you have to be realistic." She was right that I am young, but what's funny - or sad depending on your sense of humor - is that I am only 24 and I fundamentally understand the "system" better than many people twice my age. Oh well...

I get so sick of older activists and their naive mature idealistic faith in the democratic party. It takes a cynical youngster to realize what a waste throwing away your vote on a John Kerry is.

You cannot make this stuff up.

From a major prog/dem blog.

"The Dems who voted for the war resolution (and btw, most Dems didn't) did so (with the exception of Lieberman) because they calculated Bush was too popular to oppose. That proves mostly just that the Dems are lousy at being in the opposition, which is just more reason to get them back in power.

Would we be in Iraq if Gore was President? No. Would Gore be President if Nader had backed him? Yes. How many thousands of lives have been lost because of the "principles" of those who voted for Nader? The number keeps mounting.

And the odds are we haven't heard the last from bin Laden, and that there will be another 9/11 (or worse). If that happens with a Wingnut in power, Tommy Franks prediction it would be the end of American democracy may come true. At least I'm not willing to take that chance.

But those on the Left who understand the stakes will vote Democratic this fall and in 2008. Those that waste their votes on some third party, or stay at home because they demand more than our system can deliver, well, again, Karl Rove appreciates their efforts."

Wow, Stanley. That may be the most jawdroppingly stupid thing I'm likely to read this year. Where do you find that sub-moronic kind of writing? I thought it was largely confined to the conservative wingnuts on Powderline & Little Green Feces.

MJS was far too generous in starting a thread with my ill-considered remarks, which quickly proved to be… ill-considered

Nonetheless – and I think MJS earnestly began the project a good while back with his character sketches of the normal Kosnik – there is great value to be reaped from exploring how the “militant liberalism” of the DP bloggers reflects something deeper and more pervasive about the culture of hyper-mediated late capitalism… and this too is responsible for the inertia that BobW bemoans… how is it that nominal opposition to the West Asian misadventure is well north of the 50% mark, yet the routine slog of processing data by day and toying with the X-Box by night goes uninterrupted

JSP, I didn’t have you pegged as a one-time little red book-toter, but then again I suppose the New Left anti-bureaucracy pro-people streak is the river than runs from then to now… Mao’s opaque intentions aside, there was a brief shining moment, the Shanghai commune of early 1967, when it looked like the reincarnation of Paris 1871 (also crushed!) might just last for a little while… it is a terrible shame that right-wing critiques (Chinese and otherwise) of the CR outnumber left-wing critiques by a factor of a thousand – not that such a crude political calibration does the CR or its historical revisions any justice – but whaddya expect?

Which leads me to comment on a point made by Rowan… how constricted must one’s imagination be to train his or her intellectual sights solely on the realm of invidious distinction US electoral politics? I take pity on such creatures

And Nader would be a clone of Jesse Jackson, Sr. if he'd backed Gore. Only childfree and with somewhat paler skin.

What was the old saying about whether it's better to be despised as an enemy than disdained as a fool ? Well, the triangulation squad has figured out to combine both. We should salute them. Perhaps send candy, too.

Alan, you speak too soon. Go check out jedmunds' latest DP posts on Pandagon. Lotsa' chuckles, there. ;)

js, thanks for the clarification.

glue:

remember

no one expects the cultural revolution

I get the "You only like Nader because you're young" pile of detritus as well...even though I'm not particularly young.

Yet at the same time, these people have voted for lesser evils for 40 years on end and look at what they have to show for it? Less now than they even did when they first started. As if that wasn't pathetic enough in it's own right, what they're saying is that they expect me to support this pathetic band of robbers that could only exist in the toxic hothouse environment that is the American political system and, as far as I'm concerned, is just as responsible as the Republicans for what America is right now-namely a menace to practically everyone and everything.

Those people make me sick. I remember one of them asked me "Well should I just kill myself and get out of your way?"

When she asked at first, I didn't say anything.

Now I'd say don't make a mess when you do it.