Whether or not Barack Obama can win his party’s nomination, there’s no doubt that he’s entrancing young Democrats. That trend has sparked comparisons to the iconic youth movements of the 1960s—not least from the campaign, which calls its youth wing “Generation Obama.” David Morey, an Obama advisor, says the young people supporting Obama are, in a sense, the ideological descendants of the protestors of the 1960s. “They’re just not wearing tie-dyed shirts, listening to rock and roll and taking acid,” he says.
But the comparison only goes so far. In fact, the real takeaway from Obama’s youth support is how political activism has changed since the 1960s, the last time a war pushed waves of young people into politics. I asked two key figures from the protests of 1968, Mark Rudd and Robert Friedman, to contrast the Obama campaign with the student movement of their generation. They say the big difference is the shift away from confrontational politics—and with it, the decline of the idea that real change has to come from the people, rather than politicians.
Rudd was the leader of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, which organized an occupation of Columbia’s campus 40 years ago this week—protesting, among other things, ties between the university and the Defense Department. He says that then, as now, young people were coming together to try to transform the country. But the key question is how.
“On the positive side, young people have a sense that by doing something they can make a difference,” says Rudd. “On the other hand, what they’re doing is electing somebody to do it for them, which generally doesn’t work. SDS had as its goal radical participatory democracy.”
Robert Friedman was a junior in April 1968 and the editor of the Columbia Spectator, the university newspaper. He sees similarities with the atmosphere then and now—a sense of idealism and a demand for change. Like Rudd, he says the difference is tactics.
“The fervor, the engagement, the political juices that were flowing are in some ways similar to what’s going on with Obama,” says Friedman. “But there’s no sense of confrontation. It’s working within the system, whereas what was going on at Columbia was clearly an escalation of tactics.”
For both Friedman and Rudd, the shift away from confrontational politics is explained by one thing above all else: the end of conscription. “There is no draft, so your body is not on the line,” says Friedman. While the war in Vietnam was a very real concern for every fighting-age American, Friedman says the lack of a draft means that the Iraq war “hasn’t invaded the U.S. consciousness as much.” Rudd agrees, arguing that without a draft, young people are free from the need to pay attention to the war.
A second change is the news media. Some argue that the media’s failure to do its job on Iraq contributed to public apathy over the war. Rudd says that the media’s unwillingness to examine critically the government’s argument for war, and its hesitation to criticize the persecution of that war, helps explain the lack of anti-war protesters on today’s campuses.
“The press is much more concentrated in ownership and controlled now than it was even 40 years ago,” says Rudd. “Look how The New York Times, the most hostile to Bush, completely fell for the war and trumpeted it. And the New Yorker magazine. And that’s just the liberals. It’s disgusting.”
Friedman, who has continued to work as a journalist since graduating from Columbia, disagrees, saying the same criticisms made by Rudd were made during the Vietnam war.
“People criticize the media for not being tough enough on administration, but same arguments were made in the ’60s,” says Friedman. “There was good reporting being done back then, and there’s good reporting being done now. I don’t think kids today are any less informed.”
A third change from the 1960s is a shift in the culture of politics itself. “The Protesting College Student has almost become a social cliché,” says Drew Pierson, an undergrad at Columbia and a volunteer for Obama’s campaign. “Most of my peers recognize that progress is going to come through knowledge and understanding, not protest or social disobedience. It was the tool of our parents’ generation.”
Rudd agrees, arguing that a culture built around entertainment and materialism has left neither the will nor the interest for sustained public opposition movements. “People believe that nothing they do can make a difference,” he says. “Forty years ago no one believed that, because it was so obviously not true.”
What remains to be seen is whether the shift away from confrontational politics is to be celebrated or mourned. Friedman believes that on this question, Obama’s campaign may indeed carry the weight of a generation.
