Irony and youth: warhorses for more virtuous politics

Submitted by Coenraad Bezuidenhout

Activist filmmaker Michael Moore made three of the five highest grossing documentary films of all times (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko). Most recently, he drew attention with a free, feature-length online release — one of the first by a known director.

Slacker Uprising documents Moore’s personal 42-day, 62-city crusade through 20 battleground states to encourage more young Americans to vote in the run-up to the 2004 elections.

Stars such as Steave Earl, Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), REM and Roseanne Bar endorsed the tour with personal appearances, while threats of death and arrest and Republican pressure to bar him from venues — resulting in even bigger alternative gatherings — only further cranked the Slacker Uprising publicity machine. By the time the tour ended in Florida — symbolically significant for keeping the United States on a knife-edge in 2000 — 16 000 young people a night were showing up.

The tour proved at least a partial success. Young adults voted in greater numbers in that election since 18-year-olds were given the franchise. The youth vote was also the only age group won outright by the lacklustre Democratic challenger of 2004, John Kerry. But Moore could not succeed in helping to dislodge the Republicans from power.

The Slacker Uprising-campaign gestured at more than just a party-political aim, though. It emphasised the importance of civil involvement in ensuring a political space that is sufficiently expanded to ensure that voters remain excited about their political choices. As such, the lessons that there are to learn from Slacker Uprising, the film, will remain relevant for civil activists in any dispensation where choice is being hamstrung by the politics of the day.

Strategic political endorsements
Slacker Uprising shows Moore and his cohorts (sometimes crudely) exhorting young Americans to stop what they saw as the smothering of their political choices by the Republican Party’s exploitation of Middle America’s post-9/11 apocalyptic fears.

In 2008, opposition politicians and other opinion makers in South Africa enthusiastically hailed the newfound fluidity that the split in the governing party bequeathed our politics. But here, too, the politics of fear and victim-hood may still keep far too many voters locked into making traditional rather than wholesome electoral choices — something that could leave them just as despondent and uninspired after the 2009 election as they were during the dying moments of 2007.

Should any anticipated political violence materialise in the run-up to the 2009 elections, it may severely inhibit voter turnout and voter choices. Sustained political exploitation of the unsubstantiated fears of specific constituencies may also draw disproportionate amounts of electoral attention away from crucial policy questions, such as poverty and service delivery. Arbitrary threats that South Africa may be returned to apartheid (if black voters vote for the opposition), that the poor remain purposely oppressed (and therefore have to vote for the revolutionary left) or that certain language and cultural rights will be under threat (if there is not a strong right-wing opposition) are after all still far too prevalent in our politics.

Does this mean that South Africa needs its own Slacker Uprising to jolt our political space into focus? It could, but it would require civil society to claim a legitimate rootedness outside of the expressly political sphere. They would also have to make strategic political endorsements, rather than shying away from the question or going along traditional lines, as has been the routine since 1994.

Civil movements
Historical evidence says that in this regard, we do have something to build on in South Africa. During the eighties, civil movements such as the United Democratic Front (UDF) and Voëlvry contributed immeasurably to loosening political attitudes in minority-governed South Africa. They did this by injecting politically deadlocked issues with a healthy dose of irony.

The UDF fronted a diverse amalgamation of resistance campaigns questioning the legitimacy of the Calvinist, racially exclusive and butch government, with the flamboyant, pint-sized and wonderfully black Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the forefront. Voëlvry expropriated symbols of Afrikaner nationalism and mobilised them (think a funky rock’n’roll ox-wagon and a neon-painted Voortrekker Monument) against the oppressive dominance of reactionary Afrikanerdom.

This is little different from what Moore did in 2004, when he publicly traded imported consumer goods, such as Asian noodle snack packets and underwear, with the young of the “Buy American” public in exchange for promises that they would vote — hopefully against the political bastion of American “patriotism”, the Grand Old Party.

Slacker Uprising shows how he used the opposition he encountered to expose the ignorance and bigotry of Middle America. Should a comparative civil movement arise in South Africa, this aspect would also be a part of its task when revolutionary leftists, the far right and the government of the day start objecting, as they no doubt will.

Birthing a young generation of voters
Moore billed Slacker Uprising as a showcase for America’s “new political generation” — a burgeoning voter corpse under 29 years of age. He used this demographic grouping and the pre-electoral period (when political debate naturally blossoms) as the strategic springboards from which his movement could take shape.

An election is now approaching in South Africa and our society may also be birthing a young generation of voters that could sustain the political fluidity that Polokwane unwittingly left us. According to the Independent Electoral Commission, 77,9% of the 1,6-million new voters that registered over the last voter registration drive (November 8 and 9 2008) were people under the age of 29. They will now make up almost a quarter of voters — up from a fifth of the voters’ roll before the registration weekend — and all indications are that this figure could be even higher after the next voter registration drive (early in February).

These youths, who were 15 years or younger when South Africa made its transition to democracy, are still vulnerable to the politics of fear, especially where inequalities still disproportionately limit their life chances or where they are regularly exposed to crude racial bias. Still, they are a generation away from those whose choices shaped the first decade and a half of our democracy, which could mean that they are much less sentimental about their political choices.

Voter momentum
Moore released Slacker Uprising barely two months ahead of the November 2008 election so that it could be used for community screenings to rekindle some voter momentum in support of the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Barrack Obama. Whether it influenced voter turnout in 2008 to any significant degree is not certain, but that Obama’s task was made somewhat easier by the groundwork done by the Slacker Uprising tour in 2004 can only be disputed with great difficulty.

When Obama took his presidential oath on January 20, it was because the youth assured him his victory. It assured him the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the Iowa primary and carried him to November 4, when 60% of all youths voted for him in a year in which there was a 9% increase in youth voter turnout compared with 2000.

The result? They helped America access the opportunity to test the promise of change that they can believe in.

We may not have an Obama, but we do have centre-aligned political parties with good policies and promising leaders. There are parties with some capacity to capture the youth’s imagination with the cunning use of electronic media, the energetic spreading of appealing political messages, who can project a youthful image and who avoid unrepentantly populist utterances in favour of oratorical rock star performances.

These parties could make good endorsement material for civil society. But we first need civil society players who can recognise the opportunity and want to apply themselves to encouraging young voters to help South African politics break out of its traditional mould and into a more virtuous political cycle.

(Credit goes to Wits sociologist Andries Bezuidenhout for inspiring some of the conclusions contained in this article. Excerpts from Slacker Uprising are available on YouTube. Also see www.slackeruprising.com.)

Coenraad Bezuidenhout is a manager in the Democratic Alliance’s “air-war” division at Parliament. He is a former party researcher, parliamentary monitor, long-time waiter and bohemian. He holds a Master’s degree in South African politics and political economy. He recently exited his twenties.