Too tuned out to turn out

None of my current journalism students knows who Nancy Pelosi is. No one in a colleague’s class knew who Ben Bradlee was. But this is not a column about the know-nothingism of today’s college students.

We profs bemoan our students’ lack of interest in public affairs, but I’m not sure we can blame them. It only makes sense to pay attention to how you are governed if you believe you have some say in the matter. But unlike their baby boomer parents, today’s students don’t believe they have any say.

{mosads}Early in my journalism ethics class, I show clips of civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests. My thinking is that students cannot be expected to know why journalism ethics matters if they don’t know why journalism matters, and the way to prove to them that journalism matters is to show them instances where an informed populace raised its voice to demand change and, wonder of wonders, change occurred.

For an example of successful activism at the local level, I could show them “Rebels with a Cause,” a documentary about the battle to save coastal lands north of San Francisco from development. It’s a hugely inspiring look at how a bunch of volunteers gathered enough signatures to win the backing of Marin County’s board of supervisors, which provided the impetus for a bill to move through Congress, which led to President Kennedy signing the legislation that created the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, and President Nixon, of all people, doing the same for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area 10 years later.

But I doubt my students would be any more impressed by the “Rebels” who fought for these gorgeous parks, than they are by the marchers who withstood high-pressure hoses and police dogs to fight for social justice in the South or the masses who converged on Washington to say they had had enough of the killing in Southeast Asia.

Maybe mass political action could bring about change in those long-ago days. They doubt it would be effective now. The only way to have influence, they sense, is to buy it.

I would say we can thank the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision for that, except my students don’t know about the Citizens United decision. Nor do they know who the Koch Brothers are, or Sheldon Adelson or George Soros.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re indifferent to the state of the world. But they seem more interested in changing it through the work they do than in trying to wield the clumsy tools of democratic life — voting, petitioning, marching, “occupying,” speaking at public meetings or writing to their elected representatives.

Have Americans of all ages ever been less interested in politics? And by interested, I don’t just mean as voters or petitioners, but as potential candidates. Whenever a Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) rises from the ashes to win an election despite revelations about his personal life that would make the rest of us move far away, change our names and hire a plastic surgeon, I think, surely we can do better than this.

But who else but a person with a volcanic need for love (it shouldn’t surprise us that so many politicians become embroiled in sex scandals) would subject himself to the ceaseless scrutiny and fundraising required of homo politicus?

Our elected representatives have not only ceased to represent us in any meaningful sense; they don’t even look like us. While paging through the business section of The New York Times recently, I was struck by how many of the CEOs and entrepreneurs had gotten ready for their close-up by wearing blue jeans and open-collared shirts, and not tidying their bedhead ‘dos or shaving their stubbly chins.

It made me feel oddly sorry for the pols. In a world where every day is Casual Friday, they remain imprisoned in their undertaker suits and patriotic lapel pins, their Princeton haircuts and their clean-scraped jowls, looking either like geeky high-school boys on Picture Day or geeky college boys on Career Fair Day.

Turnout will doubtless be embarrassingly low on Tuesday, as it always is for midterm elections. We will therefore, as they say, get the government we deserve.

Well, to a point. We can’t give up on good governance. But it’s asking a lot for voters to turn out when they’re this turned off.

Frank teaches journalism at Penn State University.