Communication Currents

In 1936, journalist Maxine Davis spent four months traveling around the country talking to young people. The result, The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today, criticized the youth of that era for their “complete nihilism” and “vegetable passivity.” In recent years, we have heard similar laments, including descriptions of both Generation X and the so-called Millennials as “lost generations.”  Are young people any less engaged or any more nihilistic than they were fifty or seventy-five years ago? Are they squandering their democratic inheritance by “tuning out” politics and neglecting their civic duties?

Unfortunately, there are indeed troubling signs of political apathy, historical ignorance, and civic illiteracy among today’s young people.  The pundits may have proclaimed 2008 the “year of the young voter,” yet fewer than half of the eligible voters between 18 and 24 actually showed up at the polls in 2008, despite eased voter registration requirements and massive “turn out the vote” campaigns. Even more troubling, there have been sharp declines over the past fifty years in almost every otherform of civic engagement among young people, including paying attention to the news, attending public meetings, writing letters to local newspapers or elected representatives, signing petitions, and working for candidates or political causes. As Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone, young people’s participation in these activities declined by about fifty to sixty percent between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, and more recent studies confirm that a majority of young people today know and care little about politics. Even at elite colleges and universities students pay little attention to public affairs and display appalling levels of ignorance about America’s history, political institutions, and democratic traditions.  

Worse yet, many of today’s young people do not seem to care that they may be the “dumbest generation” in history, to invoke Mark Bauerlein’s memorable book title. As Academically Adrift and a host of other recent studies have shown, many college students today lack even the most basic requirements of engaged citizenship: information and media literacy, critical thinking and reasoning skills, and the ability to speak and write intelligibly.  Some scholars assure us that young people have simply shifted away from “old forms" of politics to "new forms of political interest and engagement"—a new “lifestyle politics,” as Lance Bennett describes it. Yet as Cliff Zukinand his colleagues concluded in their recent study of youth politics and civic life, “sizeable portions” of the last two generations of young people have simply “opted out” of politics altogether, and that “portends a less attentive citizenry and potentially dire consequences for the quality of our democracy.”

We already live in what Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol has called a “diminished democracy.”  And nowhere is that more evident than in the character and quality of our public discourse.   As more and more Americans have become spectators rather than participants in civic live, special interests and professionally managed advocacy groups have taken over the public sphere, displacing the collective voice of ordinary citizens with the rhetoric of slogans and sound bites. Principled leadership has given way to appeals shaped by polling and focus groups, and the techniques of the propagandist and the demagogue have become increasingly common in our mainstream political talk. During election campaigns, what Bill Clinton famously called the “politics of personal destruction” prevails, while our legislative assemblies are characterized not by negotiation and compromise, but by partisan posturing and gridlock.  No wonder so many young people are "turned off" by politics. As a recent study by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) revealed, young people rebel against the "spin" and "polarized debates" of today's mass mediated politics, and they are looking for more "authentic opportunities for discussing public issues."

So what can communication scholars do to promote more “authentic” deliberations and more civic engagement among young people? We can begin by reminding our students what it means to be a “good citizen” and by providing them with the knowledge and competencies they need for civic life.  We also might revive the classical tradition’s emphasis on the ethics of speech, and we could do a better job teaching the habits and skills of civic participation: how to speak, how to argue, and how to deliberate in a diverse, technologically advanced society.  Beyond that, we can educate young people to be more critical consumers in the “marketplace of ideas,” and we can fight to uphold higher standards of public discourse in politics and mass media. In both the classroom and the public sphere, we need to help citizens distinguish between sincere, ethical, and well-reasoned persuasive appealsand the deceptive, manipulative techniques of the propagandist and the demagogue. Finally, we need to recover our nation’s rich heritage of democratic deliberation, illuminating what it means to deliberate “in good faith” and recapturing that sense of mission that defined the land-grant movement of the late nineteenth century. Scholarship and teaching in rhetoric and communication should be more than an academic enterprise; we should rededicate ourselves to combating historical and civic literacy, inspiring engaged citizenship, and promoting more robust and productive public deliberation.

At the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State, we view the democratic crisis in America as both a challenge and an opportunity, and we are pursuing a variety of research, teaching, and outreach initiatives designed to reinvigorate public deliberation. Our approach is primarily rhetorical; in collaboration with colleagues in English we have revived the scholarly and pedagogical spirit of the classical tradition, particularly its emphasis on the ethics of speech and theresponsibilities of citizenship. At the same time, we  collaborate with our colleagues in the communication sciences, and our Center has attracted affiliated faculty from across the university, including law professors, philosophers, historians, political scientists, and scholars of information technology.  Civic literacy, which Henry Milner defines as the “knowledge and skills to act as competent citizens,” is not within the domain of any one discipline. To the contrary, it should be part of higher education’s mission across every field, particularly at public and land-grant colleges and universities. 

As the great philosopher and popularizer of science William James once said, the “civic genius” of a people is demonstrated “day by day, . . . by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men [sic] when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.”  With all due respect to Stanley Fish and others who urge us to “save the world on our own time,” I say we have a duty to help our fellow citizens reclaim their democracy from the corrupt, ill-tempered, and hyper-partisan “quacks” who have hijacked our public sphere. People are not born citizens; they must be educated for citizenship, and communication studies has an important—indeed, a central—role to play in that effort.