Originally printed in Columbia University's The Eye

His combination of a thoughtful, resolute voice and timid hand gestures lends Andrew Lyubarsky, the impression of shy assuredness. When I ask him what contribution this government has made to his ideology, he answers without hesitation. "The Bush presidency has been the most extreme rejection of everything I care about, in terms of what is manageable by government." It's mostly quiet in Butler Café on a Thursday evening--the students there more intent on the work in front of them than the friend next to them--but Lyubarsky appears not to mind that his voice projects above the rest. "Absolutely everything that's happened--from the Iraq war and even before that--definitely diminished my faith in the Bush presidency and the executive branch as well ... its ability to just bypass the legislative branch whenever it wants." At moments that he could get worked up, he remains steady-voiced and continues to assess his president. "The election of Bush in 2000 is definitely what politicized me, caused me to think critically about the American system. And paradoxically it was also what made me think more critically about the Democratic Party."

At age 19, Lyubarsky is squarely in the middle of a voter demographic that has inspired pundits to take notice and politicos to take notes. If generations are shaped by the uber-moments of their young years, the current crop of college kids has a formidable list staking claim on our political psyches: "impeachment, jihad, and polarization," as David Brooks put it in the New York Times.

Of course, all of America has lived through politically heated years since George W. Bush--the Courtney Love of approval ratings--took office, but this newest generation of voters has quite possibly been defined by it, given our inability to approach contemporary times with the wisdom afforded by experiencing the past. And the saga seems far from concluded. This past March, the Bush administration again came under fire, as Congressional Judiciary Committees authorized subpoenas of Justice Department and White House officials after the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, allegedly let go for unethical and politically motivated reasons. Adding this press darling of a scandal to the already turbulent Bush years, Lyubarsky may very well articulate the tenuous faith this generation has in our administration and, potentially, our government as a whole.

RIPE FOR THE PLUCKING

In the media's zeal to define the youngest voting generation, it has found little in the way of consensus. Even a name eludes them. We are Echo Boomers on 60 Minutes; Generation Next in USA Today; the Millennials and "real" Me Generation to various generational scholars; the "It-Sucks-To-Be-Me Generation" in Slate; and, probably most commonly, Generation Y. And all attempts at characterization are Janus-faced. Depending on who tells the story, we are "civic-minded" or "disengaged," "just too darn idealistic" or "anti-ideological," and "progressive" or "centrist."

The years shaping our generational character have been equally tumultuous. An 18-year-old first-year was about 10 years old during the Clinton impeachment trials, which rode on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and likely formed much of the generation's first political memory. The scandal and its coverage also amplified partisanship in Washington, a mood exacerbated by the 2000 presidential election. George W. Bush's eventual victory at the end of the nation's longest Election "Day" embittered many Democrats as much as it emboldened many Republicans. The six years since President Bush took office have seen a considerable expansion of the powers of the executive branch, the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, two wars, the sobering disaster of Hurricane Katrina, an uncertain economy, and the alternating high praise and sharp criticism for the president and his administration. Growing into political consciousness amidst such chaos makes the schizophrenic representation of our generation not so crazy, after all. And the scramble to define and influence college students' still-young political lives is understandable.

Youth are fresh, energetic, and prone to the kind of spirited opining that so tragically ebbs with age. What's more, this crop of youth has already shown its political muscle. In 2004, the first presidential election in which the oldest of us could vote, turnout among voters aged 18 to 24 increased 11 percentage points from the 2000 presidential election, rising from 36 percent to 47 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2006 midterm elections carried on the momentum of 2004, as more Generation Y voters came of voting age. Based on estimates (official censusdata is not released until November) by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), voters in the 18 to 29 age bloc cast 13 percent of all ballots, a significant increase over the 11 percent in the last midterm election in 2002, and also increased their turnout to 22 percent from 20 percent in 2002. The 2004 presidential election marked the highest young voter turnout since 1972, the first election year in which the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. And the 2006 election marked the highest young voter turnout in a midterm election since 1982.

The numerical surge provokes so much attention in part because of the sheer size of Generation Y. Most commonly, Generation Y is defined as those born between 1980 and 2000--making the generation almost 75 million people. That's one-fourth of the U.S. population--nearly as numerous as the 76 million Baby Boomers. If voter turnout trends continue, the 2016 presidential election may never push past a debate on student loans.

RULE OF ENGAGEMENT

Not only does increased young voter turnout indicate that Generation Y is a potentially powerful swing vote (soccer mom out; MySpace-cruiser in), but, if voting is one measure of giving a political damn, it also repudiates the well-worn gripe about the indifference of young people.

While our voting patterns defy the cynicism projected upon us, they say less of the cynicism we project onto ourselves. Rudi Batzell, CC '09, talks with me about his efforts to form the Columbia Coalition Against the War this semester. As he worked to kindle support for the coalition and the student strike, he knocked on doors and spoke with students, and in so doing gained the opportunity to consider their notions of political involvement. "The most concerning response was 'we can't do anything, we're powerless.' Or 'leave it to the experts--us students, we don't have the expertise to make decisions on complex issues, like welfare policy or the war in Iraq.'" With a quick shake of his head, he muses, "And as soon as you get to that sort of deference to technocratic authority, we might as well just give up on democracy altogether. I mean, the whole essence of a democratic state is that people ought to control the society they live in."

One measure of those efforts is our engagement with news, where we indeed make a poor showing. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in spring of 2006 reports that in the 18 to 25 demographic, 49 percent knew the Republicans held the majority in the House of Representatives at that time. Only a quarter could name Condoleezza Rice as the secretary of state; just 12 percent knew Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia. Only 33 percent of those surveyed said that they follow what's going on in the news and government--a very different beast from the one day every four years when we choose a president. Election Day turnout numbers mark more of a response to the hype of campaign season than a sustained civic engagement. And despite the apparent trend toward political obliviousness--it is a trend likely to be turned on its head in years to come--Pew also finds that news consumption rises as generations age.

In the end, political strategists care far more about how many of us go to the voting booth than turn on CNN. Hence the clamor over voter turnout numbers and the scramble to classify us as red or blue. After all, if the young vote is turning out, presumably it's because something is worth the turning out. And no greater force has affected this country's political landscape than President Bush and his administration.

For one Columbia student, the reasons to go to the polls are clear: "I don't have any other administration to measure them against ... only my own sense of what is a moral imperative," Jon Blitzer, CC '07, says, appraising the presidency under which his political consciousness was formed. "But I don't even know if an administration was ever so flagrantly disinterested in what its own population was saying to it." Blitzer is impassioned, his hands working as hard as his mouth, as he labors to articulate what he finds problematic in the Bush years. "Hearing the administration call for war, and the wire-tapping, and Guantánamo--everyone was willing to accept it. With the war in Iraq, the New York Times didn't even question the administration."

Blitzer's and Lyubarsky's descriptions of the Bush administration's legacy are perhaps unsurprising inside the notoriously left-leaning walls of Columbia. Indeed, the latency of ivory-tower mentality cautions against a hasty conclusion that these students' opinions represent theirgeneration as a whole. Blitzer is careful to note his awareness of that fact. "To be a young liberal-minded wannabe intellectual ... You just find yourself in some sort of, like, long rant all the time that everyone else seems to be partaking in, in their own way. It's hard to feel like it gets you anywhere."

The Ivy League gets pinned with the stereotype of intellectual elitism as much as of radical lefty-ism, but even a cursory glance at the most popular Facebook groups indicate that college-aged kids across the board trend leftward. Groups like Legalize Same-Sex Marriage (100,015 members), Americans for Alternative Energy (100,022 members), Support a Woman's Right to Choose (97,708 members), Abolish Abstinence Only Sex Education (86,042 members), and Support Stem Cell Research (85,445 members) top the list of political advocacy groups. Their conservative counterparts include Stay in Iraq until the Job Is Done and Abortion is Murder, with 43,302 members and 37,117 members, respectively. A 2006 Pew Research Center study of 18- to 25-year-olds found that "they are the most tolerant of any generation on social issues such as immigration, race, and homosexuality."

Voting patterns back the Pew findings. In 2004, 55 percent of 18- to 29-year-old voters supported John Kerry, and they were the only age bracket to do so other than the G.I. generation. The 2006 elections saw an even greater majority vote Democratic, as more Generation Y-ers entered the under-30 voting bracket and more Gen X-ers aged out of it. According to the CIRCLE report, which measured patterns in House of Representative races, voters under 30 were more likely to choose a Democrat than voters as a whole (58 percent versus 52 percent), and less likely to vote Republican (38 percent versus 45 percent). With a six percentage point differential (62 percent to 56 percent), more young voters disapproved of the Iraq war than the total electorate, more supported ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, and more self-identified as "angry" with the Bush administration.

Anger is a negligible force in our generation if it does not inspire action. Even more than their decisions at the polls, young voters' involvement in Democratic campaigns last fall could be one manifestation of that self-identified "angry" bloc. In a recent syndicated article, Peter Leyden spells out the potential for the newest voting generation to affect national politics. He writes, "The 2006 campaign was characterized by people-powered politics, using grass-roots media such as blogs and videos on You-Tube," a phenomenon that he explains in part by the fact that Generation Y were notable "actors in this last election cycle." When George Allen, campaigning for re-election to his Virginia Senate seat, used a racial slur to refer to a staffer of his opponent, Jim Webb, a tape filmed by the offended staffer, 21-year-old S.R. Sidharth, landed on YouTube. Minimally tech-savvy Americans watched the clip 340,000 times. The incident lost Allen eight points in the polls, and possibly the election.

Extrapolating from Leyden's analysis that the nature of youth culture today opens up a new kind of involvement in politics, the resulting nature of national politics today has invited more youth to participate in the elections process. Batzell says, "I've always been sort of disillusioned with mainstream politics," clarifying that his idea of activism has more to do with "movement politics" than political campaigns. "Even before Bush and before all this stuff happened, I was pretty skeptical about the ethics and motivations of our politicians." As evidenced by his involvement in the anti-war coalition, Batzell does not shy from political action, but he does question the legitimacy of both major political parties. This sentiment is one that voters widely echo, with the catch phrase that elections amount to choosing "the lesser of two evils."

Despite Batzell's qualms, he says that "Bush has made me much more willing to support Democrats electorally because he's demonstrated that it is incredibly dangerous to have Republicans in office." Partly because of Bush policies, Batzell campaigned for both John Edwards in the 2004 Democratic primaries and John Kerry in the general election.

Liz Lamoste, CC '10, reports that the political climate has affected her ideology more than her political alignment. "I had this oppositionary response to what George Bush was doing, but it helped me to find my own areas of interest and to look at them outside of what George Bush was doing." Those are issues like comprehensive sex education, women's reproductive rights, education, and HIV/AIDS prevention, all of which have factored into Bush's presidency. Any president sets a tone for issues that pass through his administration--and executive orders, judicial appointments, and No Child Left Behind set a tone for Lamoste's issue interests.

She elaborates, "In terms of those [education] issues, we can't completely blame it on George Bush himself, and because I'm a student those issues would probably be relevant to me regardless of who was president. But I attribute a lack of response ... to this president and to the Congress too. If we're spending all our attention on the issues of terrorism and war, I feel there's been a forsaking of some of the domestic issues."

THEY'RE ONLY KIDS

Stereotypically, youth trends liberal. But Generation X did not trend liberal with the intensity of the current young voting bloc. From 1988 to 1998, the youngest voter bloc was more likely than those aged 26 and older to vote Republican than Democrat, peaking at 55 percent Republican at the polls in 1990. The last time a midterm election year followed a surge of youth turnout in a presidential election as in 2006 was in 1994. But the outcome of the midterms of 1994--which ushered in the first Republican majority since 1954 and the House Speakership of Newt Gingrich--could not have been more different from this past November's election.

Generation X came into political consciousness during the Cold War Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior years, when big government was under attack and social malaise was blamed on the failure of the welfare state. Despite his partisan popularity, Clinton's presidency was one of increasing centrism and changing social welfare programs. Robert Shapiro of Columbia's political science department says, "The Clinton reforms were a center movement for Democrats, and there was no national impetus for more liberal policies on the 'welfare' front."

The nationwide small-government policies of the succession of recent presidents created a conservative friendly climate for Generation X's political development--very much in contrast to the shifting political climate under George W. Bush. In a Pew study conducted from 1987 to 1998, 18- to 25-year-olds were just as likely to agree as to disagree with the following statement: "When something is run by the government it is usually inefficient and wasteful." In 2003, Pew asked the same question and found that in the contemporary group of 18- to 25-year-olds, only 32 percent agreed that government programs were wasteful and 64 percent disagreed. The social politics of the two generations differ as well. In the same Pew study, 38 percent of young people in 1987-1988 answered that it was not all right for blacks and whites to date each other. In the second, more recent study, that percentage dropped to 10.

Still, Democrats should not count their eager, young, anti-Republican chickens before they hatch. Research shows that college students are hardly sworn supporters of either party: 26 percent of voters under 30 years old identify as independents, compared with only 18 percent of those over 30. A report by the UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute on the "national norms" of college first-years in 2006 confirms that students do not favor the left over the center--slightly over 28 percent of students self-identified as liberal, slightly over 43 percent as "middle-of-the-road," and just under 24 percent as conservative.

While Generation Y trends left on social issues, the stripes turns purple once we look toward economic politics. Pew finds that 52 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds think of corporations as positive institutions that "generally strike a fair balance between profits and public interest." Of those aged 26 and higher, only 38 percent think the same.

SPLIT PERSONALITY

Chas Carey, CC '08 and a Spectator opinion columnist, is a self-described moderate-conservative, who first started following politics when John McCain ran in the Republican primary elections of 2000. His first political memory, he recounts, is a trip to the voting booth with his parents. "My father goes into the voting booth, takes me with him--it's one of those old voting booths with the pull-down things--and when he votes for Clinton he says to me, 'Don't tell your mother.'" Carey pauses here to laugh and then continues, full-throated: "Now of course we're a Republican family, so I'm shocked by this after months and months of listening to my family talking about supporting George Bush. So, I walk out of the booth in tears and say to my dad, 'Why did you vote for Clinton? Why did you do it?' My mother turns to him and goes, 'You voted for Clinton?!'" The lively way that Carey spins his tale demonstrates his comfort talking conservative politics--even at Columbia. He enjoys challenging the notions that students here hold up as "Gospel truths." When debates are intellectually rigorous and open to disagreement, he relishes political clashes with his peers.

What he does not relish, however, is the perception that his party affiliation necessitates his support for President Bush. He asserts, "The Bush presidency does not represent the aims of the Republican Party--of Ronald Reagan, of Gerald Ford. I think it's a dangerous precedent--this idea of you electing a figurehead, effectively, and then let his cabinet make the policy." For him, the events of Sept. 11, 2001 sped up a shift that he believes was coming anyway under Bush. It gave the Bush administration a steroid shot that has turned it into "this whole political beast that is difficult to understand."

Stepping back from the politicized aftermath of the tragedy, Carey believes that it made an indelible mark on his peers: "I think that was the galvanizing moment of this generation. It was shocking to everyone that you could no longer afford not to have a position on something. It was not enough to say, 'no I'm not interested in politics' because politics was interested in you all of a sudden."

But is it Sept. 11, or its politically charged aftermath, that has set the political tone in subsequent year? Robert Shapiro says, "It's usually the years that come after [a nation-shaking event], as in 'what happens next?' But for your generation, 9/11 itself is going to stand out. And I think depending on how things shake out in Iraq, there may be a certain amount of cynicism toward the presidency." He argues that because Sept. 11, 2001 happened when Generation Y was young and impressionable, the threat of terrorism plays a primary role in our generational mind. "It will strongly affect your age cohort with regard to attitudes toward terrorism and security because it's something that your generation's experienced that no other generation has, and in a way that no other generation has experienced it," he says.

Mark Xue, CC '06, experienced Sept. 11, 2001 as a high school student in New York City. It "set in motion a lot of changes in terms of the way I looked at the world," he says, ultimately affecting the direction of his post-collegiate life. A longtime conservative, Xue made his mark at Columbia through his presidency of the College Conservatives--where he presided over its notorious Affirmative Action Bake Sale--and as an active member of the College Republicans. After Xue graduated last year, he joined the United States Marine Corps.

Currently stationed in Virginia, Xue relates over the phone that joining the Marine Corps changed the nature of his long-standing neo-conservatism. "I stepped back from the politics of it all, started looking at warfare, international relations, from a more professional standpoint. And I started re-evaluating my positions. It was not a total 180 [degrees], but they started getting more complex."

More than anything, Xue is disappointed by the current debate on Iraq; the very debate that has defined the nation's political discourse. "I'm less than optimistic about how much 9/11 has changed our people's view of the world. ... People have seemed to return to the '90s peace-keeping mind-set that if we isolate ourselves from the world and back off and don't offend anybody, then nobody can hurt us. In reality, that's not at all the case." Xue supports the decision to go into war, and to continue the effort. The problem, he says, is that the president has had trouble articulating his rationale. "I don't agree with everything he's done. But by and large, he's going in the right direction--reaching out and eliminating instability in places where things like terrorism foment."

What Xue disputes is what he perceives as the shortsighted attitude with which Bush and his administration took on the war. "We expected to march in there and take Baghdad, thinking there'd be no rebuilding, no counter-insurgency effort, no sort of civil military relationship."

In March of 2004, four American military contractors were killed by Iraqi insurgents in the city of Fallujah. Their bodies were mutilated and mocked, photographs of which reached U.S. news agencies.

The administration's response to these events, Xue says, wears heavily on his evaluation of our commander- in-chief. "For the most part, the conservatives said ... 'Let's go in, burn the city down, show them that they don't mess with Americans.' It was a highly emotional response, and that response ended up coming from the White House down all the way to the commanders on the ground, who had to say all right." The White House order Xue describes was the administration's unsuccessful attempt to retake the city, an event that began to change the minds of many Americans about the war. But at the time in 2004, not Xue's: "I saw the photos [of the killed Americans]. I was outraged. I wanted revenge."

His new relationship with the war in Iraq prompted a reconsideration of his political position. "Coming back on it two years later, it turns out the Marine commanders on the ground ... felt that if we went in heavily it would damage the relationship they were trying to build within the city. The incident was regrettable, but you don't sacrifice the long-term goals for this one little incident," he says.

While Xue steadfastly supports the war--unlike 65 percent of Americans according to a March Newsweek poll--he has also, like most Americans, reconsidered the manner in which war has been waged.

Bush's astronomical approval ratings manifested the faith Americans placed in his office. The volatility of his ratings since attests to the chaos of Iraq itself, and of the national mood.

GENERATION W

As thoroughly as Xue retells the tale of his political formation, he spends most of our time on the phone speaking about international relations and the optimal role of the military abroad--what works and what doesn't. In fact, the breadth of political conversation is the most striking part of all of my conversations with students. Jon Blitzer debates the precarious position of liberal intellectualism and its bearing upon the "real" world. Where Rudi Batzell discusses the benefits of social democracy and the methodology of political movements, Chas Carey catalogues trends in historical moments from Thucydides to Bill Clinton. Each of the students certainly defies the norm in terms of engagement with political discourse. They also illustrate the naïveté of trying to pin down the voice of a generation--or even of just Columbia--in the ideas and predilections of a few individuals.

Still, they are a part of a huge and varied national dialogue of young people. David Brooks writes a column in the New York Times of the centrism that Generation Y will some day exact upon the country. Three weeks later Peter Leyden writes that the very same generation is "poised to drive a new progressive era that will reinvent what it means to be 'progressive' and take on the new challenges of the 21st century." Indeed, such varied dialogue could construct a pretty rickety political rollercoaster filled with uncertainties. Red or blue? Centrist or progressive? Hopeful or hopeless?

The answers might prove our political character today is just coincidence, timed so that the world could look upon us as the voting generation. We might all fall back into voting apathy after a new president is sworn into office in 2009, plagued by the chaos of the past years and comforted by the coziness of apathy.

But for now, at least we're asking questions.