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After you’ve read this chapter, you will be able to

 1.1 Describe the role that politics plays in determining how power and resources, including control of information, are distributed in a society.

 1.2 Compare how power is distributed between citizens and government in different economic and political systems.

 1.3 Describe the enduring tension in the United States between self-interested human nature and public-spirited government and the way that has been shaped in a mediated world.

 1.4 Analyze the role of immigration and citizenship in American politics.

 1.5 Describe values that most Americans share, and the political debates that drive partisan divisions in American politics.

 1.6 Understand the essential reasons for approaching politics from a perspective of critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation.

 1.7 Describe the role and responsibilities of citizens in American politics.

What’s at Stake . . . in Hashtag Activism?

The last thing they wanted to do was become famous. Not this way, not now. But when seventeen of their classmates and teachers were murdered on February 14, 2018, by a disturbed former student, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, decided to make some noise.

They had seen this movie before. There had been mass shootings. Ever since they were little they had practiced what to do if someone showed up with a gun in their classrooms. There was even an armed guard on their campus. And still, it happened again. So they knew the ritual that would follow.

Every time this nation experiences a mass shooting, a grimly familiar routine follows. First there is unrelenting press coverage—of the dead, of the bereaved, of the shooter. Then those who lost loved ones make impassioned calls for more gun control and those who oppose gun control make equally impassioned declarations that we should not politicize tragedy, that it is too soon to talk about it. There are funerals. The president (usually) makes a speech. Then the press moves on to the next big news and only the grieving are left to testify before Congress, create foundations in the names of their loved ones, and implore people not to forget. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But the MSD students knew the drill and were media savvy enough to figure out how to hack it. They were ready. Some, in the drama club, comfortable on stage; some, school journalists, eloquent and at ease with words; others, bright, articulate, privileged to attend a school with an embarrassment of extracurricular activities that had prepared them for their futures. Smart enough to know that their moment in the spotlight would be brief, they were determined to make it count.

The shooting was on a Wednesday. Cameron Kasky was so angry he took to Facebook, first to announce that he and his brother were safe and then to vent. “I just want people to understand what happened and understand that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Why is that so hard to grasp?” His social media posts caught the eye of CNN, which asked him to write an op-ed piece on Thursday, which led to television appearances. It became apparent to Kasky that his words were helping to shape the story of what had happened and what it meant. “People are listening and people care,” Kasky wrote. “They’re reporting the right things.”¹

To capitalize on that fickle national attention before it turned away, Kasky and several of his friends met that night to plan a social media campaign. By midnight they had a hashtag, #NeverAgain, social media accounts, and a message for politicians: legislate better background checks on gun buyers, or we will vote you out.

MSD student Jaclyn Corin took to her own social media accounts to express her grief and anger at the loss of her friends. She, a girl who had never been political, also began to strategize. With the help of Florida Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she planned a bus trip for one hundred students to Tallahassee to lobby state lawmakers.

By Friday, Corin and Kasky had joined forces, and on Saturday they added David Hogg, a student journalist who had conducted interviews while they were under fire; Sarah Chadwick, already famous for her angry, grief-filled tweets; and Emma González, whose speech at a local rally went viral. On Sunday they hit the morning talk shows to proclaim that the Never Again movement was planning the first March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24.

Two weeks later (forever in the typical media cycle), the kids were still making news. Boycotts were organized to put pressure on companies doing business with the National Rifle Association (NRA), which blocked background checks. A National School Walkout was planned for the one-month anniversary of the shooting. Thousands of students across the nation participated. Famous people donated large sums to help fund the March 24 March for Our Lives. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate, “These teens have—by most objective measures—used social media to change the conversation around guns and gun control in America.”²

The March for Our Lives, when it happened, defied expectations. Huge crowds assembled not just in Washington but in eight hundred places around the world. The only adults who appeared on the D.C. stage were entertainers. The Parkland kids, knowing they had created a unique platform, had invited other kids whose lives had been touched by gun violence. Yolanda King, the nine-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, confidently stood before tens of thousands to lead the crowd in a call and response:

Spread the word.

Have you heard?

All across the nation.

We

Are going to be

A great generation.

The event highlight was not words, eloquent as many of them were, but silence—four minutes and twenty-six seconds of uneasy, suspenseful silence as Emma González stood like a sculpture, tears tracking down her face, so that the crowd would experience the duration of the shooting that ended seventeen of her friends’ and teachers’ lives.

Just like the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches, which brought out millions of pink-hatted women marching for human rights around the world; like Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 to protest the unwarranted deaths of black men at the hands of police; like Occupy Wall Street, a 2011 movement to protest the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States; and like the It Gets Better Project, which works to convince LGBTQ youths that life does get better after the high school years, #NeverAgain was fueled and spread by social media.

Of course some older people know their way around the Internet, but #NeverAgain was the first mass movement planned and executed by digital natives, people who have never not known the world of digital media, for whom navigating digital terrain is second nature. It’s not clear what the generation—what Yolanda King called “a great generation”—will be called by history. Gen Z, maybe? iGen? Generational divides are blurry, and few social scientists agree where the dividing lines fall. But the post-millennial generation—those born since the mid-1990s or thereabouts—has an amazing political skill set to use if, like the Parkland students, they choose to do so. They have the ability, as Lithwick said, to “change the conversation,” or create a powerful political narrative that they can disseminate and that helps level the playing field with powerful opponents like the NRA.

No movement can create change or defeat an opponent if it is only hashtag activism. Eventually, you have to put your vote where your # is. What is especially remarkable about the Never Again movement is that it emphasizes not just marching but voting. March for Our Life rallies throughout the summer gave them the chance to hone the narrative, register people to vote and activate other students. Youth participation in the 2018 midterms soared.³ Some writers are calling for the vote to be extended to those who are sixteen years old. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein says that is a good idea because voting is “the training wheels of political participation.”⁴ By the time they are eighteen, kids are distracted by the drama of their lives and they tend not to want to be bothered.

In fact, since the military draft ended in 1973, young people have been notoriously uninvolved in politics, often seeing it as irrelevant to their lives and the things they really care about. Knowing that they pay little attention and tend not to vote in large numbers, politicians feel free to ignore their concerns, reinforcing their cynicism and apathy. Young people have turned out in larger numbers since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, however, and the Never Again movement promises to energize even more.

The American founders weren’t crazy about the idea of mass movements, political demonstrations, or even political parties, but they did value political engagement, and they knew that democracies needed care and attention in order to survive. In 1787, when Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman what he and other founders of the Constitution had created, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Today, many commentators worry that we are not “keeping the republic” and that, as new generations who find politics a turn-off become disaffected adults, the system will start to unravel. As one writer says, “a nation that hates politics will not long thrive as a democracy.”⁵

Yet protesters like Cameron Kasky, Emma González, David Hogg, and Yolanda King sound as committed to democracy as Benjamin Franklin could have wished, even though their efforts are not focused solely on voting or traditional methods of political engagement. Is a nation of these young activists a nation in trouble, or can movements begun via technology Franklin could not have imagined help to keep the republic? What, exactly, is at stake in hashtag activism—what one writer called a “netroots outcry” to follow an online call to political action? We return to this question after we learn more about the meaning of politics and the difference it makes in our lives.

HAVE you got grand ambitions for your life? Do you want to found an Internet start-up and sell it for millions, be the investment banker that funds the project, achieve a powerful position in business, gain influence in high places, and spend money to make things happen? Perhaps you’d like to make a difference in the world, heal the sick, fight for peace, feed the poor. Maybe you want to travel the world, learning languages and immersing yourself in new cultures and working abroad. Or maybe all you want from life is a good education; a well-paying job; a healthy family; a comfortable home; and a safe, prosperous, contented existence. Think politics has nothing to do with any of those things? Think again.

The things that make those goals attainable—a strong national defense, good relations with other countries, student loans, economic prosperity, favorable mortgage rates, secure streets and neighborhoods, cheap and efficient public transportation, affordable health care and family leave protections—are all influenced by or are the products of politics.

Yet if you listen to the news, politics may seem like one long campaign commercial: eternal bickering and finger-pointing by public servants who seem more interested in winning an argument against their ideological opponents than actually solving our collective problems. Far more often than not, political actors with the big bucks seem to have more influence over the process than those of us with normal bank accounts. Politics, which we would like to think of as a noble activity, can take on all the worst characteristics of the business world, where we expect people to take advantage of each other and pursue their own private interests. Can this really be the heritage of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln? Can this be the “world’s greatest democracy” at work?

In this book we explore that question, getting to the heart of what politics is and how it relates to other concepts such as power, government, rules, economics, and citizenship. We propose that politics can best be understood as the struggle over who gets power and resources in society, and the fight to control the narrative that defines each contestant. Politics produces winners and losers, and much of the reason it can look so ugly is that people fight desperately not to be losers, and to create and perpetuate narratives that celebrate their wins and put the best face possible on their losses. It can get pretty confusing for the average observer.

Contrary to the way they appear in the media, and maybe even in our own minds, the people who are doing that desperate fighting are not some special breed—more corrupt or self-interested or greedy than the rest of us. They are us. Whether they are officials in Washington or mayors of small towns, corporate CEOs or representatives of labor unions, local cops or soldiers in the Middle East, churchgoers or atheists, doctors or lawyers, shopkeepers or consumers, professors or students, they are the people that in a democracy we call citizens.

As we will see, it is the beauty of a democracy that all the people, including the everyday people like us, get to fight for what they want. Not everyone can win, of course, and many never come close. There is no denying that some people bring resources to the process that give them an edge, and that the rules give advantages to some groups of people over others. But as the What’s at Stake. . .? shows, what makes living today so different from previous eras is that we all have some access to the multiple channels of information through which battles over political narratives take place. The people who pay attention, who learn how the rules work and how to use those communication channels effectively, can begin to increase their chances of getting what they want, whether it is restrictions on ownership of assault weapons, a lower personal tax bill, greater pollution controls, a more aggressive foreign policy, safer streets, a better-educated population, or more public parks. If they become very skilled citizens, they can even begin to change the rules so that people like them have more control of the rules and narratives and a greater chance to end up winners in the high-stakes game we call politics.

In this chapter we introduce you to this fascinating world of politics, focusing on the meaning of politics itself, the varieties of political systems and the roles they endorse for the individuals who live under them, the American founders’ ideas about democracy and citizenship, the ideas that hold us together as a nation, the ideas that define our political conflicts, and the themes of power and citizenship that will serve as our framework for understanding American politics.