The democratic impulse is resilient

On this day celebrating national freedom, there are material signs that enthusiasm for egalitarian democracy is surging after a season of seeming decline.

Just take a look at a new poll of thousands of young citizens from Tisch College at Tufts University.

Here are some summaries of findings:

Youth ready to seize their power. Young people see 2020 as a time to exercise their potential power. Overall, 83% of those surveyed believe young people have the power to change the country, 60% say they feel they are part of a movement that will vote to express its views, and 79% of young people say the COVID-19 pandemic has helped them realize that politics impact their everyday lives.


Youth take to the streets. Young people report that they are protesting at more than five times the rate of 2016. 27% of youth (ages 18-24) say they have attended a march or demonstration in 2020, a remarkable increase from the 2016 (5%) and 2018 elections (16%).
 

Young people reaching out. Along with political activism, peer-to-peer voter outreach is increasing to even greater rates than in 2018, which saw a surge in youth participation. After the 2018 election, 33% of youth reported trying to convince their peers to vote, and 11% said they had registered new voters. Those numbers have skyrocketed: Today, months before the election, 50% of youth say they’ve already tried to convince others to vote, and 25% say they have helped register voters.

Democracy is possible when people are willing, even eager, to participate in the decisions that determine their life chances. Dire times seem to have produced a generation which has decided its their time to jump into the fray.

This may seem to come out of nowhere, but it didn't. The Black Lives Matter wave of activism has been building since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013 (if not since 1619). Willingness to take to the streets among white people has been on the rise since Trump's surprise election.

According to a poll from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said that they had participated in a protest since the start of the Trump administration, and 19 percent said they were new to protesting.

... “It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change,” Professor McAdam said. “We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point — that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.”

New York Times, July 3, 2020

This protesting stuff -- whether against the Muslim ban, locking immigrant children in cages, the sexual entitlement of powerful men, or police violence -- is learned behavior and we have a generation that has learned well.
...Meanwhile, older folks are wising up. Here's a pretty amazing story about some mostly white Florida elders who have come to believe that their lives may depend on a change of administration.
These people aren't about to make a revolution, but they aren't standing in the way either. Once again, the citizens of this nation are called to struggle for "a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."