- It’s about influence and engagement. You have a theoretical 7.1 million (mostly young) followers on Twitter. They will have their own opinions about everything and I have no intention of patronising them. But what I will say is that when I was 15, if Stephen Fry had advised me to trim my eyebrows with a Flymo, I would have given it serious consideration. I don’t think it’s your job to tell young people that they should engage with the political process. But I do think that when you end a piece about politics with the injunction “I will never vote and I don’t think you should either”, then you’re actively telling a lot of people that engagement with our democracy is a bad idea. That just gives politicians the green light to neglect the concerns of young people because they’ve been relieved of the responsibility of courting their vote.
I was actually just about to post this when I found your post checking for reposts. Quite liked this part:Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of “thinker”, with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won’t really do.
I think all one needs to do in order to assess whether or not you can change the system from within the system is look at modern US politics. We recently came to the brink of financial collapse at the behest of a small faction of uber-conservative tea party republicans. They're a new political contingent of US politics that didn't exist only a few years ago. They voted and now they have major sway within the system. If the Left were as organized as the right they'd get a lot more done. The OWS movement really wasted some opportunities IMO.
I tried to find ways to mobilize and organize some of my friends in OWS Oakland and SF when I lived in the Bay Area because I had a good number of friends out there taking part, but it just wasn't the right movement for it, seemingly. The people all had a cause, and maybe tangential causes from there, but it was exceedingly broad and fractional. They were all centered around making the financial sector responsible, but that's moving into territory that hasn't been done outside Glass-Steagall. There are so many ways to approach it. The major problem progressives and the left face in mobilizing is that it involves moving forward and doing new things to change, while the right has it easy due to simply moving backwards. Their ideas have already existed for a long time and have been implemented, the left attempts to progress from them.