Voting is Everything
Letter To the Millennials 6
Fifty years ago many of your parents gave up on politics. The assassinations in the spring and summer of 1968 of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had left many of my generation heartbroken and alienated and we turned away from electoral politics. Many of us found solace in music and some adopted a more militant stance, believing our country was on the verge of revolution. Some turned to the consciousness revolution, believing personal growth was all the mattered in the face of war and political murder. Whatever our choice, it was a huge mistake. It led to the election of Richard Nixon and six years of corruption and gangster politics. I ask you not to make the same mistake.
For the last 15 years I have taught thousands of you, first as a professor at the University of Southern California and more recently giving talks at colleges about my book about the Internet monopolies. These things I know. You are deeply skeptical of politics even though you represent more eligible voters than any other generation. As Pew researcher Richard Fry wrote, “While it might be a ‘slam-dunk’ that millennials soon will be the largest generation in the electorate, it will likely be a much longer time before they are the largest bloc of voters.” Why is it that your generation votes at half the rate of mine? Why are you surrendering the direction of your political future to men and women in their seventies?
You need to realize that the Trump plutocracy would not continue to exist if 5 million more of your brothers and sisters voted. Creating a political economy in which the wealthy minority rule over the middle and lower class majority is hard. It requires contrivances that suppress voting and instruments for propaganda that convince middle class voters that cultural divisions are more important than economic equality. But most of all it needs a majority of our citizens to think that voting doesn’t matter. In the 2016 presidential election, 94 million citizens who were eligible to vote declined to exercise that privilege, according to the United States Election Project. Your generation made up a large percentage of those non-voters.
Do a thought exercise with me. Imagine a Congress in which your generation had a great deal of influence over the majority party. That Congress could pass legislation that would make public universities free to your generation. This is not a pipe dream. I had friends in the 1960’s that attended the University of California Berkeley for $700 a year. Then imagine a Medicare for all health care system so that you won’t go into bankruptcy over a medical emergency in your future. And then perhaps that Congress might pass the common sense gun safety reform that many of you have been marching for. And might renew our commitment to fighting climate change rather than turning the EPA over to the Koch Brothers and their corrupt minions like Scott Pruitt.
And how might we pay for subsidizing college tuition and health care? In the thirty years since the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War our military budgets have continued to climb. Today, all most 60% of our discretionary spending goes to the military, more that the next seven country’s military budget combined. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $5.6 trillion since they began in 2001.”Imagine if that money had been poured into improving our broken infrastructure and paying off your college debts.
If there is one bit of wisdom my generation might impart to yours it is this. Voting is the only way to change things in America. Like many of my generation, I participated in street demonstrations for both Civil Rights and against The War in Vietnam. But when we didn’t vote, Nixon unleashed the criminal bombing of Cambodia and set in motion his Southern Strategy, the legacy of which led to the new Jim Crow and a Republican Party completely subservient to Donald Trump.Every activist needs to turn their attention to registering voters in the next two months.
Only your generation can change this. We need your help.
