Speaking as a 31-year-old, semi-establishment type, I think Mark Schmitt is really hitting on something when he speaks of “The Progressive Generation Gap, which Markos “DailyKos” Moulitsas riffed on a few days back.
I’m gonna plaigairize and rephrase Mark at length here, because it speaks so powerfully to what I’ve experienced over my 10 (amazing) years in the Northwest environmental movement:
Mark identifies two ways in which the “policy literalism” of traditional advocacy misses the boat:
1) Generational gap and “missing 40-year olds”
>I’ve recently noticed a… dynamic, especially in the kind of smaller, more grass-rootsy and more truly left-wing groups…. Such groups tend to have an executive director. Usually a white guy, often somewhat over 50, who’s put a lifetime into his cause. Never made a dime, the car he drives is still called a Datsun, he’s entirely admirable….. He’s probably a lawyer, started off thinking the courts could solve all problems but has since learned otherwise…. He’s entitled to be burnt-out, but isn’t.
>And then there’s the rest of the staff. They typically range in age from 25-32, they’re more racially diverse or biracial, extremely energetic, imaginative. [T]hey are more into community and organizing constituencies than promoting an issue, and they can be more collaborative, less turf-conscious…. They have seen political success not so much in the liberal movements that the boomers are nostalgic for, but in the unity and motivate-the-base strategy of the current Republican party, and in the exciting communion of the Dean campaign.
>…But the political experience of this generation is much narrower, and for all the excitement of organizing communities, they don’t yet have much to show for it. There’s a lot to be learned from the people who now have a couple decades of activism and learning….
>[O]ne reason that these two groups often seem to be talking past each other is that there aren’t very many people in between…. there are relatively few of us in our late-30s/early-40s in these organizations. That’s a bridge generation that can be very useful. When you’re 23, and your boss is 53, that’s a big gap, literally a generation gap.
I’m not sure the situation is as bad at the state/local scale, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that the most dynamic environmental groups I see at the state and local level are those led by these 40-something types who can relate both to their 50 and 60-something major donors and their 20- and 30-something hot-shit staffers.
The second gap is one between folks who are policy- or issue-oriented and those who are organizing-oriented:
>This is another familiar distinction to me from the foundation world. The distinction between “organizing” and “policy” often seems much starker than it is. “Organizers” are devoted to street-level democracy, to helping people define problems for themselves and find their own solutions, and bringing voice to the political process. “Policy people” are devoted to understanding the issues, developing new approaches or critiquing conservative ones, and enlisting people to support those strategies. “Organizers” sometimes think “policy people” are arrogant, white, older, over-educated, trying to set people’s agendas for them. Policy people think organizers are naive, sloppy, disconnected from real politcal power, and miss opportunities for change. Again, these are exaggerated stereotypes, but I’ve heard them from both sides. But it’s yet another matter where people have different functions within a larger progressive system. Everyone’s got their own strengths. And again, one needs bridges….
>The most important task for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, if there is one, is to find ways across the very real internal divides, which are divides of culture and attitude, not simple matters like different opinions about abortion, toward a common purpose.
Ding ding ding! Mark cites the Center for Community Change as the best example of a bridge-building organization he can think of. Here in the West, I think that the Western Organization of Resource Councils does something pretty similar, but at a much smaller scale. Overall, though, I think the environmental movement is tipped way too far towards policy and not enough is going into nuts-and-bolts organizing and that all-important bridge building work that lets each role leverage the other.
Yikes, what makes one a semi-establishment type (looks around, is that me?)?
Does one have to be eccentric to avoid falling through the 40yr old gap?
Well, I figure that working for an organization that is regularly funded by major regional environmental funders makes one at least “semi-establishment.”
This is really hitting the nail on the head, Jon.
I have actually seens this problem more at the state and local groups I have worked for/with. At the the gigantic dinosaur where I am employed (for now), there is so much organizational inertia that you hardly even need an actual person to represent the old school.
Thanks so much for sharing this, I will pass it on.
What I think is still hard to understand is what concrete steps different folks can take to overcome this. These are hard issues to solve — they take time and money and both are scarce.
Heya Jon,
Speaking as a 41-year-old with a fairly steady history of some or other progressive political work, but without a long-term organizational affiliation (I’m a useful bridger!) , I might well define the kind of person Schimitt’s counting as missing in action. But I don’t think he’s right about this as a major cause:
“There was almost no progressive activism on campus in the late Carter and Reagan years, which means that there are relatively few of us in our late-30s/early-40s in these organizations.”
I seem to recall quite a lot of activism on my campus, and Rutgers, The State U. of New Jersey in New Brunswick was not exactly a hotbed of radical student politics in the early 1980′s. There was anti-apartheid organizing. There were “Take Back the Night” marches, and rallies protesting Reagan’s bombing of Libya. There were anti-nuke organizations, and peace organizing–”The Day After” aired in 1983, right? There was the whole “We Are The World” anti-hunger movement. There were PIRGs (I interned and went on to work for one).
In short, there was a lot of progressive stuff going on.
So, if there’s a big dropoff of people in their 40s in the progressive establishment, I strongly suspect there are other reasons…inflation? Economics? We’re in the second big economic downtown of my two decades of adulthood.
The gap between 60′s-70′s idealism and 80′s-90′s pragmatism?
Were we too close in age to those 50-something bosses to get good mentoring? Or did we have some sort of edge-of-boomerdom sense of entitlement that made us too impatient to stick with a job for the long haul?
I’ve noticed this very generation gap many times over the years. In Oregon, if you look around, you’ll find quite a few political professionals (hacks, consultants, lobbyists) in their middle-50s and older – and quite a few in their late 20s and early 30s. What you won’t find are nearly as many in their 40s.
Why? I think it has to do with the life-changing effects of an inspirational presidential campaign during the years they were forming a concept of their career/life’s work.
Many of the older cohort will tell you that they’re in politics because of Bobby Kennedy (and the follow-on experience of Watergate). Many of the younger cohort will tell you about their first political experiences during the Bill Clinton campaign (and the follow-on experience of the Gingrich takeover.)
But there wasn’t anything like that in the late 1970s and 1980s. Just the (then) uninspirational Carter presidency and the 12 years of Reagan/Bush. Thus, no 40-year-old politicos.