Reading the recent articles of a couple of my fellow opinion columnists, Bryce Wilson and Alyssa Broer, I found myself agreeing with their basic premise that young people need to be more involved in politics.
Young people’s disconnectedness from the political process and cynicism about the way things are going is indeed troubling. While most millennials are registered to vote, 55 percent agreed with the statement: "There are better ways to make a difference than voting" and 62 percent with the statement: "My vote doesn't really matter,” according to a November poll cited in this article.
Ms. Broer’s coverage of Countable, an initiative that aims to increase voter awareness of potential bills and make lawmakers more accountable, is admirable. Applications like this have enormous potential in increasing civic involvement. Mr. Wilson’s concern for millennials’ lack of civic participation is also admirable.
However, it seems to me that both of these authors veer into the realm of identity politics, suggesting that age should be yet another of the numerous classifiers used by the ruling class to divide Americans, box us into prevailing narratives and tell us how to vote.
First off, what is identity politics? It’s formally defined, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, as “a tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc., to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional broad-based party politics.” In a two-party system like ours, these “exclusive political alliances” form factions within each major party.
To leverage identity politics to their advantage, candidates and parties pursue a divide-and-conquer approach, first trying to get people to identify strongly with their group, then appealing to a primary issue or issues that will make people within that group more likely to vote for them. This could be the message that working-class whites should vote Republican because the Democrats want to let in Mexicans to take their jobs, or that blacks should vote Democrat because Republicans support racist cops. The narratives potentially employed are endless and are perpetuated not only by political organizations and figures but also by the media and society at large.
Ms. Broer reflects two of these identity politics narratives when she claims that “it isn’t hard to understand why young adults, especially women, may feel disconnected from a group of men taking the first steps to defund organizations that support women in their right to their own bodies” (code speech for abortion). The first is that women should feel “disconnected” or unrepresented if their elected official is a man, which smacks of sexism. The second is that if you’re a woman, you should support abortion rights. Not only is this a gross generalization, but considering that polls indicate virtually no difference between men’s and women’s views on abortion, it isn’t even a justified assumption.
A culture of identity politics is harmful because it causes people to focus on their differences, not their common ground. It promotes groupthink and encourages the rejection or acceptance of ideas based not on their strength or quality but on the personal characteristics of the people who came up with them. Identity politics pushes an us-versus-them mentality and thus exacerbates the crippling problem of partisanship.
The nation has become polarized in so many areas that I doubt most people find as distasteful as they should Mr. Wilson’s bold claim that “As millennials, we have an obligation to take back our country, run for offices, vote for fellow millennials and support candidates that share our set of values.” What is this but a brazen ploy to make age the newest classifier for identity politicking?
The application of identity politics to age groups, or telling young people that they have an obligation to challenge and replace our current crop of leaders, risks introducing another fault line into our already fractured political and societal landscape. Instead, young people need to be seeking out ways to interact with and learn from older generations.
I’m not saying that young people shouldn’t run for elected office or support those of our generation who do. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t let ourselves be defined by our age. We talk a lot about diversity these days. Diversity in the age of our elected officials is a worthy goal, but so is diversity in the political opinions of young people.
People are much too complex and multifaceted to be adequately summed up by a single characteristic. We are more than our race, gender, sexual orientation, income level or age. So rather than being swept along by the assumptions and stereotypes about millennials, let’s assert our intellectual independence and refuse to be boxed in by how old we happen to be.