It is not uncommon to hear people ask what we need to do to get young people more engaged in politics. As a university professor, this is the sort of query that often comes my way. Do the schools need to include more civic education? Should there be some sort of national service program? Can foundations provide grants and fellowships for young Americans who want to devote their lives to public service?
Many of these young people have also grown up participating in active shooter drills at school. Unlike the famous duck-and-cover drills of the 1950s meant to prepare kids for a nuclear war that never happened, this country has witnessed the persistent drumbeat of school shootings. Can we really blame young people for feeling disillusioned with the US political system that allows this to continue?
And since March 2020, these Americans have spent key moments of their youth struggling to survive a global pandemic where many of our leaders offered meager, contradictory and half-hearted policies as core institutions, including schools, shut down.
We’ve been through moments like this before. Indeed, right before what is often considered one of the most productive eras in national politics — the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a series of legislation that tackled poverty, education, social security and more — young Americans in the early 1960s were likewise frustrated with the inability of Washington to act on the great issues of the day.
The major roadblock to progress at the time was, ironically, bipartisanship. Scholars such as James McGregor Burns wrote about a “deadlock of democracy” that revolved around southern Democrats and Republicans teaming up through the congressional committee system to prevent the government from addressing racial segregation and voter disenfranchisement, inadequate health care, underfunded schools, and environmental degradation. Like today, there were ongoing complaints about the age of senior Congressional leaders.
But change did come. One of the most important developments revolved around a series of elections between 1948 and 1964 that brought in waves of younger Democrats who elevated new issues, such as civil rights, by organizing on Capitol Hill to fight against the bipartisan obstruction.
Spurred by these new faces, the 89th Congress worked at a furious pace: it passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected the right to vote; the Social Security Amendments of 1965, establishing Medicare and Medicaid; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as well as the Higher Education Act of 1965, both of which poured federal funding into education; the Water Quality Act of 1965 and much, much, more.
But these legislative breakthroughs didn’t quell the unrest among young Americans. The movement in Washington left them wanting more and the social movements of the 1960s that dominated the political landscape often centered on younger people demanding greater action on civil rights, economic justice and social and cultural liberation. Johnson’s disastrous war in Vietnam undercut progress the new Democrats had made with younger voters and President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal ended up confirming their worst fears about abuse of power.
Despite the long-term disappointments of Watergate and the devastating war in Southeast Asia, it is important to remember that there was the moment in 1964 and 1965 when younger Americans helped usher in fresh faces in Washington to tackle some of the political and policy problems that had been mired in gridlock for over a decade. That window of legislating energized people, who saw how social and political pressure could make a difference.
We need another moment like this in 2022. At the height of the pandemic, the nation witnessed the intensity with which young people gathered in the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. But the burden should not just be on young people to remain engaged. The burden also falls on our leaders to start listening and responding to a new generation of voters who feel the political system failed them.
