Opinions

Taking the progress out of Campus Progress

In print | September 3, 2009

Max Weber, the distinguished and prolific German thinker, characterized modern politics in the early 20th century as a game of vote grabbing played by amoral “professional politicians.” An enterprising bunch, these unprincipled men made a living by writing and revising party platforms according to the changes in popular opinion, greedily chasing votes. While propping up charismatic front men in the bid for the highest office, they remained in the background, quietly facilitating the flow of financial support into the party “machine.”

This summer, I attended a political conference in Washington, D.C., that made me reconsider whether Obama and the Democrats were as above Weber’s analysis as I naively wanted them to be. The conference was held by the non-partisan political organization Campus Progress, which, according to its website, “works to help young people – advocates, activists, journalists, artists – make their voices heard on issues that matter.” To that end, Campus Progress publishes a weekly online newsletter and provide funding to help students hold progressive events on their campuses. (In fact, I believe they have provided funding for at least one event at Swarthmore in the past.)
While I believe the organization succeeds in its day-to-day mission of helping young people make their voices heard, their national conference was a different story.

Campus Progress is a project of the non-partisan Center for American Progress. That it is non-partisan does not prevent it from being on the far left of the political spectrum, or from being headed by high-up members of the Clinton administration. Both are largely funded by George Soros, who is known to have donated a significant amount of money to a failed attempt to defeat Bush’s re-election. Soros has been so financially involved in the Democratic Party that Saturday Night Live once did a spoof of a Soros press conference, in which he was depicted as the “owner” of the Democratic Party.

When I heard about the free national conference in D.C., for which they would provide free housing and transportation, I thought, why not? So I bused myself down to D.C. at Campus Progress’s expense and checked into the George Washington University dorms, also at Campus Progress’s expense.

Then I showed up at the fancy hotel where the conference was held, excited to be around so many young progressive students and learn about so many progressive issues and hear so many progressive speakers!

The event seemed to be largely coordinated by young people: college student interns and other 20-somethings stood in the lobby handing out free gifts, registering attendees and introducing speakers. But the bulk of the speaking at the conference was done by members of the Obama administration and Democratic Party hot-shots including Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Entertainment was provided by a spoken word artist who regaled us with a piece about vaginas and periods during our lunch break.

At first, I was filled with the collective euphoria of being in that gigantic ballroom full of young progressives who would give a standing ovation to a spoken word performance about vaginas and periods. (There aren’t many crowds like that in the world, I think.) But as the day wore on, I began to get a sense of superficiality.

Political speaker after political speaker tossed empty rhetoric to us from a podium about how much progress was being made due to our organizing efforts!

And how we were going to reform healthcare!

And how we were going to Go Green!

And how we were getting everything done that we ever wanted to do!

But are we? Not really.

What’s more, while we talked a lot about helping all the various marginalized people of the world, the conference itself was catered to a pretty privileged group: college students. The conference cost a hell of a lot of money to bring a hell of a lot of people together to talk about how we all want to help other people.

What if they spent all the money used for the conference — for the free housing and train trips and plane rides and catered “ethnic” food and fancy hotel ballroom — on helping all those people we supposedly want to help? How much more could have been accomplished?

But their goal was not to convey to us any real facts or information about important issues or the political process or to help marginalized people; their goal was to inspire us with slogans and political rhetoric, to aid their politicians — their front-men — in gaining power. It felt less like a conference and more like a rally, meant not to educate us but to make us excited and happy. It seems to me that they are the “professional politicians” that Weber wrote of. They are people who work behind the scenes, pouring money into efforts to gain votes to put their party in power.

They realized that the young progressive population en masse can be a powerful political tool, but that if they did not rein us in, we could go all Ralph Nader on them.

So they created Campus Progress to target us specifically, to cater to our wants and needs and make us feel like they understood us like no one else did.

That the organization’s brand of political persuasion was emotional and identity-based is demonstrated by the extent to which it was aware of its target demographic. After only attending the conference, an objective observer would be able to list the following characteristics of progressive students:

1. College students cannot say no when confronted with the word FREE. They dangled it tantalizingly in our faces: free food, free housing, free transportation, free t-shirts, free buttons, and free tote bags. We grabbed it all up shamelessly.

2. We like our food ethnic. They offered an impressive array of Japanese, Middle Eastern and Mexican food and desserts.

3. We like indie rock. During breaks and intermissions, an indie rock mix that could have been on WSRN drifted through the room as we mingled and munched on our sushi and hummus.

4. We (apparently) Twitter and Facebook obsessively. Campus Progress is all about new media.
It’s not that I think that Campus Progress is an illegitimate organization, or that they haven’t done any good work. It’s that I don’t like the feeling of being used. I don’t like that they have anticipated my every like and dislike based on the demographic group of which I am a part, that they have used this knowledge to make me feel comfortable enough to kick off my shoes before realizing that there might be something bigger at work here.

And finally, I don’t like that it feels awfully similar to the Sarah Palin brand of politics, just with a different set of cultural symbols.

Sofia is a senior. You can reach her at ssaiyed1@swarthmore.edu.