Overcoming student cynicism

My Vote Doesn't Matter - and other errors of judgement

My Vote Doesn’t Matter”:

Helping Students Surmount Political Cynicism

By Paul Loeb, Alexander Astin, and Parker J, Palmer

You’ve heard it again and again. “My vote doesn’t matter,” students

too often say. Others complain that politicians are “all the same and

all corrupt.” How do we overcome this cynical resignation and

encourage students to register and vote despite their conviction that

the game is fundamentally rigged?

”  In 2010 they did indeed stay home, with roughly four

million fewer students participating than just two years before,

according to the highly respected CIRCLE youth research center. For

instance, Ohio’s student participation rate dropped from 69 percent to

22 percent, Wisconsin’s from 66 percent to 19 percent, and Florida’s

from 61 percent to 19 percent.

In 2008, many students vested huge hopes in Barack Obama, reinforced

by the enthusiasm of their peers. Now, they’re dealing with what

veteran pollster Charlie Cook summed up as “disappointment and

disillusionment.” Too many regard electoral politics less as a

potential arena for change than a corrupt swamp likely to drown their

remaining ideals. In a Rock the Vote survey shortly before the

November 2010 election, 59 percent of students said they were more

cynical than two years before, and 63 percent of those who doubted

theyd vote justified their likely withdrawal by agreeing that “no

matter who wins, corporate interests will still have too much power

and prevent real change.” They did indeed stay home, with roughly four

million fewer students participating than just two years before,

according to the highly respected CIRCLE youth research center. For

instance, Ohio’s student participation rate dropped from 69 percent to

22 percent, Wisconsin’s from 66 percent to 19 percent, and Florida’s

from 61 percent to 19 percent. (The Ohio figure is based on a small

sample, but fits the larger pattern). Student participation dropped

significantly in nearly every state.

Toss in uncertain job prospects, cuts to higher education, and massive

student debt, and it’s no wonder that so many students despair about

their power to make a difference in the electoral realm. That’s true

even as they continue to volunteer in one-on-one service, with 70

percent of college freshmen considering it “essential or very

important to help people in need.”

For those of us who follow elections closely, this is one of high

stakes, with salient differences between the two major parties. It’s

also a key election for American higher education, given the fiscal

pressures that both individual students and most campuses are facing.

Because it’s a presidential year, more students will undoubtedly vote

in 2012 than in 2010. But for many, across the political spectrum, the

links between issues and candidates seem tangential and remote. If we

want them to fully participate, we need to create a commons where they

can reflect on issues and candidates, and provide a rationale for why

their involvement matters.

THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER

This means offering examples of how close electoral races can be,

educating students on issues and candidates, and making the case that,

even if their preferred candidates will not usher in the millennium,

working to elect them is still worthwhile--in part because it will

allow students to keep pressing them on all the issues they care

about.

We might begin by reminding our students of the very small margins by

which critical elections have been won and stress, the importance of

their vote, whoever they choose to vote for. That’s true both because

of the immediate impact it may have, and because their participation

will set a pattern in their lives going forward. We can talk about the

537 vote Florida total that handed George Bush the presidency in 2000,

or the 312 votes by which Al Franken won the 2008 Minnesota Senate

race. Students may assume that their votes will be inconsequential,

but multiplied by those of all their peers, they matter, time and

again.

Paul once interviewed a Wesleyan University student named Tess who,

inspired by an environmental conference, joined with several friends

to register nearly three hundred fellow students concerned about

environmental threats and cuts in government financial aid programs.

Nearly all ended up supporting their strongly sympathetic Congressman,

who won re-election by twenty-one votes. Tess had hesitated before she

began. She didn’t think of herself as a “political person,” didn’t

want to come off like “a politician spouting a line,” and wondered

whether her efforts would even matter. Nonetheless, she decided to go

ahead and do the best she could. Had she done nothing, her Congressman

would have lost.

But even when students understand the math, many still resist

participation. They’ll say they don’t know enough and that “the issues

are too complicated.” They’ll insist the candidates are really “all

the same.” They’ll say this even when candidates hold very different

positions on issues from health care, climate change, sexual politics,

and immigration to tax policies, higher education budgets, student

financial aid, and likely Supreme Court appointments. For some, saying

they don’t know enough may just be an excuse for withdrawal, though

we’ve heard such statements even from many who are very involved in

other ways. Others hold back because they feel helpless to change

things. Caught in a self-fulfilling perception of powerlessness, they

decide it makes little sense to take on the challenge of following

candidates and issues.

We can begin to counter these cycles of withdrawal by helping students

reflect on candidates’ positions, and helping them separate truth from

fiction amid the barrage of attack ads that many will encounter—ads

that risk deepening students’ sense of electoral politics as just a

toxic field of lies. Students have told us repeatedly they want “more

fact-based campaigning” and “to learn more about platforms.” That’s

something we can help with as educators, promoting both classroom and

co-curricular discussions about where candidates actually stand.

But it’s not just lack of information that leads students to withdraw.

When they say “My vote doesn’t matter,” they’re also conveying a sense

that the political system is so corrupt that no matter who wins, true

power will remain in the hands of the wealthy and connected, and that

the voices of ordinary citizens will be ignored. Even when they

concede that their votes could alter the electoral result, many doubt

that this will make a significant difference.

That’s particularly true in the current election, where many students

are dealing with dashed hopes from 2008, and students of all

perspectives have ambivalent responses to both presidential

candidates. In Obama’s case, because his campaign drew so strongly on

slogans of hope and change, and because so many students supported

him, one-time supporters are particularly wrestling with

disillusionment.

FROM LYNDON JOHNSON TO THE TEA PARTY

One antidote to cynical resignation is historical context—which is

something we can do our best to offer even if we aren’t historians or

political scientists. The more students see their vote as promoting

the kinds of changes they’d like to continue to work for, the more

likely they’ll be to show up at the polls, bring others along, and

stay involved after the election. We might suggest they view voting

not as a sole way to make change, but one in which electoral politics

complements other approaches in a toolbox of change such as one-on-one

service or political organizing and protest. Carpenters don’t discard

their saws or drills just because they prefer swinging a hammer. They

recognize that you can’t build a house without using all three.

To familiarize students with the toolbox of social change, we can

explore ways they can reach out on issues they care about, build broad

coalitions, tell the story of the causes they embrace in a ways that

will resonate beyond the already converted (think of the gay rights

movement for a successful example). More than anything, we can

encourage them to persist in working for what they believe, whatever

the inevitable setbacks. They’d do well to heed the conclusions of

Meredith Segal, a young woman who founded Students for Obama on

Facebook, grew it to 150,000 members, and then co-chaired the national

student campaign from her Bowdoin dorm room.“Your candidate gets

elected,” she said, “Obama or anyone else. People think, ‘Here’s their

platform, here are their policies. They’ll magically become law.’ But

that’s never the way things change. You have to keep pushing. You have

to keep working. You have to keep building that engaged community. You

can never expect any elected official to do it all on their own, no

matter how much you admire them or how hard you worked to help them

win. Your election night victory is just the beginning of the

process.”

For a recent example, think of the Tea Party. They began (before they

took the Tea Party name) by showing up at Town Hall meetings on

Obama’s health care bill, publically speaking out while most of

Obama’s supporters did little beyond signing online petitions or

emails. They organized through friends, colleagues and online

networks. They aggressively recruited candidates and volunteered to

get out the vote, sweeping state and Federal offices in 2010. They

obviously received a boost from financial backers like the Koch

Brothers, and from conservative media. But without ordinary citizens

acting in a way that combined electoral and non-electoral involvement,

they would never have made an impact. And they’ve clearly succeeded in

changing contemporary American politics.

From a different political perspective, the Occupy movement similarly

shifted initial public debate. Discussion of income inequality and

unemployment rose dramatically in the major media in response to the

(mostly young) people rallying in New York’s Zuccotti Park and similar

public spaces throughout the country, targeting financial institutions

they considered responsible for widening America’s economic divides.

The movement influenced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to reverse his

initial opposition to renewing the state’s “millionaire’s tax,” and

the Los Angeles City Council to pass a "responsible banking" ordinance

that requires banks doing business with the city to disclose detailed

data about local lending practices. The movement highlighted our

distribution of wealth in a way that liberal economists had been

trying and failing to do for decades. And many students still seem

passionately interested in what’s happened with it. But because Occupy

has been so adamantly non-electoral in its approach, and often

ambivalent about coalitions with allies like unions, its impact on

political policies and choices has so far been muted.

Our challenge is to make our classrooms and campuses venues for

thoughtful debate, reflection, and discussion, bending over backwards

to ensure students of all political perspectives feel welcomed. To

emphasize this last point, if we’re politically liberal and just a

single student of ours is conservative, or vice versa, they need to

feel encouraged—even if we have to go out of our way to help connect

them with ways to participate consistent with their values. This

election will affect students profoundly, as will future ones, so we

need to model a climate where they recognize the stakes, argue the

issues, yet respect those with differing opinions, refusing to

cavalierly demonize them. The more we can do this, the more we can

chip away at the toxic political culture of our time.

If students are politically disappointed, and many are, we might do

well to stress the words of Czech dissident (and eventual president)

Vaclav Havel, “Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of

the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” Or as Jim Wallis of

Sojourners puts it, “Hope is believing despite the evidence and then

watching the evidence change.” That means hope can never be the

property of a particular political leader, party, or campaign, though

candidates can certainly tap into it. Rather, it resides in the

actions of ordinary citizens, including, but not limited to showing up

at the polls to exert what influence they can. We’d do well to use the

podium of our classrooms to encourage student idealism, whatever its

political direction, including when it breaches the boundaries of

what’s deemed politically possible. We can emphasize that those we

elect will make immensely consequential choices in our common name,

and that whatever the political visions our students embrace, they’re

most likely to achieve them by actively supporting the candidates

closest to their stands, rather than withdrawing from the fray and

allowing those whose values they most oppose to be elected by default.

In other words, they can challenge the degradation of our politics

without withdrawing from the process, or holding those who nonetheless

participate to an impossibly perfect standard. As Meredith Segal

stressed, working for change requires using all available tools, and

taking advantage of every key moment to move toward the political

goals they believe in.

Paul Rogat Loeb is founder and Executive Director of Campus Election

Engagement Project, a nonpartisan effort to get students engaged on

America’s campuses, and author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible

Will Take a Little While. Alexander Astin founded UCLA’s Higher

Education Research Institute and is the Campus Election Engagement

Project Advisory Board Chair. Parker J. Palmer is founder and Senior

Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, and author of Healing the

Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the

Human Spirit.