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Agent of Democracy
traditional means, service is a viable and preferable
(if not superior) alternative at this time. 9
I suspect that a major reason for this rejection of formal politics
was the failure of the Clinton administration to achieve goals prized
by leftist students, following the built-up hopes of the Reagan and
Bush years. The spike in youth voting in 1992 gave way to a substantial
turnout decline in 1996 and 2000. However, the rate of student
volunteering increased just as turnout fell. As Bill Galston and I
wrote in 1997:
Citizens—particularly the youngest—seem to be
shifting their preferred civic involvement from official
politics to the voluntary sector. If so, the classic
Tocquevillian thesis would have to be modified: local
civic life, far from acting as a school for wider political
involvement, may increasingly serve as a refuge from
(and alternative to) it. The consequences for the future
of our democracy could be significant. 10
In the 1990s, disillusioned leftists could find common ground
with some conservative and libertarian youth who were equally
skeptical about state action, and equally optimistic about voluntary
work in the nonprofit sector. Activist students of the right and left
developed a non-state-centered theory of politics and social change.
These young proponents of “service politics”—optimistic about
direct work with human beings in need, concerned and self-critical
about personal attitudes and behaviors, relatively skilled at interactions
with people different from themselves, and disillusioned
with formal politics—encountered a group of academics whose own
thinking had moved in compatible directions.
9 “The New Student Politics: The Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement”
(2002), available at http://www.actionforchange.org/getinformed/nspdownload.html.
Discussed at length in David D. Cooper, “Education for Democracy:
A Conversation in Two Keys,” Higher Education Exchange (2004): 30-43.
10 William A. Galston and Peter Levine, “America’s Civic Condition: A Glance
at the Evidence,” The Brookings Review, vol. 15, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 26. This article
is reprinted in Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America, ed. E.J.
Dionne Jr. (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 30-36.
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