Book Alert / Millenial Makeover

Millenial Makeover -- MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics by Morley Winograd & Michael D. Hais, Rutgers UP '08, $24.95, 309 pages, ISBN #0813543010. Index, references, no source notes or illustrations.

"Every generation needs a new revolution," observed Thomas Jefferson. Scholars and pundits since have pondered the cyclical nature of democratic political life and how, in the American context, conservatives and liberals tend to alternate as kings of the mountain.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, successes in business but perhaps better known as being among those who revived the moribund Democratic Party in Michigan following the Nixon landslide of 1972, supply the latest take on this principle. In their view, American political realignments seem to come approximately every 40 years, and they dub the alternating political generations "idealist" and "civic." In case you've been on Mars, we're in one right now.

"The members of 'idealist' generations strongly adhere to their own personal values and are unlikely to compromise what they consider to be fundamental questions of right and wrong," the authors write. "Realignments fueled by 'idealist' generations, of which the Baby Boomers are the most recent example, therefore, result in decades of political gridlock, atrophy in governmental institutions, and an inability to resolve big societal and political issues and problems.

"By contrast, members of 'civic' generations tend to be upbeat, optimistic, and group-oriented. Realignments based on the emergence of 'civic' generations....result in periods of new governmental and societal institution-building and in the resolution of major issues and problems." Winograd and Hais also suggest that the ascendancy of each "civic" generation is marked by its use of cutting-edge technology to attain power.

So don't expect the "Millenials," those born in the past 25 years, to park themselves in front of MTV. For MySpace and YouTube is where it's at (to use a construct from an even earlier generation!). As proof of the potency of such technology, they point to the 10,000 "friends" John Edwards racked up on MySpace within a month of announcing his candidacy and the use of Facebook's platform by Barack Obama to coalesce campaign giving by what is now estimated at 1.5 million individual donors.

OK, class, your homework. Go home and try to envision what revolutionary political technology will be employed in the next political revolution after this one. Correct answer: "Not a clue."