At Georgetown, a Gen X Wave of Political Apathy

Bridget Siegel, 21, tutors inner-city children as a volunteer. She ran a college voter-registration drive that signed up hundreds of new voters. She wants to do something for her country after she graduates, maybe even work in a political campaign.

But the Georgetown University senior finds it hard to love the political process she sees on the evening news these days.

“I live with five other girls, and they want nothing to do with politics,” said Siegel, an energetic model of undergraduate idealism. “I try to get them to vote. They say: ‘On what issue? On the scandal? On the president’s private life?’ That doesn’t give them anything to vote for.”

On the handsome Georgetown campus, where the young Bill Clinton (class of ‘68) was enthralled by politics in the 1960s, his successors look at today’s national scene and say: “Yuck!”

Like citizens in every age group, Georgetown students say they are turned off by scandal, don’t see many reasons to vote and can’t name any heroes among the nation’s current leaders.

In the short run, the Clinton scandals have created turmoil on Capitol Hill, a backlash against Republicans in the polls and a general national frustration with politics.

But the reactions of Georgetown students may also be an early signal of potential long-term effects as well: increasing disaffection and declining confidence in political institutions, especially in the next generation of citizens.

Great events often echo in the life of a nation. World War II produced a generation of vigorous leaders. Vietnam spawned a long crisis of confidence. Watergate touched off a wave of legalistic reform, including now-tattered regulations on campaign finance and the increasingly unpopular independent counsel law.

The events that led to Clinton’s impeachment this month aren’t of that heroic scale, but some ripple effects are already being felt.

Last month’s congressional election, held in mid-scandal, produced the lowest voter turnout since 1942: Only 36% of the eligible population came out to vote, down from almost 39% four years earlier. “Our idea of ‘citizen’ . . . is descending from participant to spectator,” warned Michael J. Sandel, a scholar of political philosophy at Harvard University.

Public’s Confidence Is Waning Again

Public opinion surveys are finding that Americans’ confidence in the political system, which had been inching upward since 1994, is sliding again. “People want honesty and morality in their government, and they don’t see much of it at the moment,” said pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

As Congress has spun into a vicious cycle of sexual accusations, it is getting hard to persuade good citizens to run for office. “People just don’t want to put up with it,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is recruiting Democratic candidates around the nation for congressional races two years from now. “We’re still getting good people to run, but every year there are good people who decide not to.”

And at least one specific reform may result from Clinton’s troubles: The independent counsel law, which has now stung Democrats and Republicans alike, appears headed for major changes if not outright extinction.

But over the long run, one of the deepest effects may be on young people, whose images of politics and leadership have been formed this year by an uninspiring parade of leaks, depositions and audiotapes, on the unsavory topics of sex and perjury.

“One of the best-established findings in recent political science research is that there is a very real generational effect: People’s behavior in maturity reflects formative political experiences when they are young,” said William A. Galston, a former White House aide who now teaches at the University of Maryland.

“This is a scandal that every 14-year-old boy can understand,” he said. “I don’t think it’s convinced many young people that public service is a noble profession.”

That disaffection is palpable even at Georgetown, a campus many young people choose precisely because of its location in the nation’s capital and its record of training successful politicians like Bill Clinton.

“It’s demoralizing,” said Siegel, who came to Georgetown from Long Island to study international relations and who still hopes to work in Democratic politics.

“It’s demoralizing to see how much kids in the D.C. schools need, and then come back and watch a roomful of congressmen talking about the president’s private life,” she said. “I mean, I don’t condone anything, but why are we spending millions just to find that out when we could have bought books for kids instead?”

“A lot of people are turned off by the word ‘politics,’ ” agreed John Glennon, 21, of Pembroke, Mass., the president of Georgetown’s student association.

“One of the things that doesn’t help is that aside from the Clinton scandals, there isn’t anything like the civil rights movement to generate interest,” he said. “There isn’t any great cause out there.”

‘Not a Lot of Activism’

What issues have captured campus interest this year? “Student life--making it a higher priority for the university,” said Glennon. “Technology. Our Internet connections are behind where they ought to be. . . . And investment groups.”

Investment groups? “Students are taking their savings and going into the stock market,” he said. “Some of them have had really good results.”

“There’s not a lot of activism among these kids . . . because there are no defining political events,” said Georgetown professor Stephen J. Wayne, who has taught political science since 1968, when many campuses were racked by protests against the Vietnam War. “There’s not even any student agitation to lower the drinking age,” until recently an issue in Georgetown.

Wayne invited students in his class on the presidency to debate the Clinton scandal but found that the undergraduates, including student body president Glennon, were less interested than their teacher. “It got old pretty quickly,” Glennon said.

Most Studied Notes, Not Debate

When the House Judiciary Committee debated impeachment resolutions this month, few students watched the drama on their television sets; most were studying for final exams instead.

“Ever since these kids have come of age, they’ve seen scandals and investigation. They’ve seen sexual behavior brought into politics. It doesn’t have the kind of impact on them that Watergate had on an earlier generation,” Wayne said.

“Our students here would have liked to look up to Clinton as a Georgetown alumnus,” he said. “I don’t see them looking to politicians for leadership.”

Political activism and voter turnout among young people has been in broad decline since 1972. But for a while--after voter turnout bounced up in the hotly contested presidential election of 1992 and the MTV cable network launched rock-star registration drives--scholars hoped Generation X might defy its slacker image and come out to vote.

It was not to be. “Youth turnout has declined more in the last 20 years than any other age group,” said Ruy Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute, a voting expert who studied the issue for MTV. “Young people are starting out their adult lives at lower levels of engagement in politics, and that tends to lead to lower participation over their entire lives.”

Precise figures aren’t available yet, but early estimates indicate that turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds in November’s congressional election hit a record low--a notch below the previous low of 20% recorded in the previous congressional election year of 1994.

“We have no hard data to indicate that the events of the last year depressed turnout directly, but it would be difficult to see them as a plus,” Teixeira said.

Siegel has hard data, though: She spent most of the fall trying to encourage her fellow Georgetown students to vote. Her “Campaign Georgetown” organization manned card tables on the campus and went door-to-door through dormitories, distributing “motor voter” registration applications.

“In 1994, 20% of 20-year-olds voted and 80% of 80-year-olds voted,” she said, citing an MTV conference she attended at Harvard. “We came back to campus and decided to do something about it.”

The results, she said, were mixed. When students focused on local issues with obvious impact on their lives, like a recent D.C. proposal to prohibit more than three unrelated people renting a house together, they marched, signed petitions and turned out to vote. But national issues left them cold.

“Local issues have been a real mobilization tool . . . but I see it sinking on a national level,” Siegel said. “There aren’t leaders and aren’t issues people want to vote for.”

Even among her own five housemates, Siegel confessed, she could persuade only two to vote this year.

Georgetown students don’t seem disengaged or cynical about other issues, though. Volunteer work, from tutoring in Washington’s struggling public schools to working for public interest lobbying organizations, is booming. A recent campaign to put students on the Advisory Neighborhood Council, a city advisory board, brought out hundreds of volunteers.

“In some ways, young people are less cynical than older people,” said Teixeira. In polls, for example, young people express more confidence than their elders that hard work and honesty will lead to success.

“The real issue, though, is whether they feel some sense of connection with the political system,” he said. “The problem isn’t that people are cynical; it’s that they just aren’t bothering.”

Indeed, in the electorate as a whole, political scientists have found an intriguing disconnect: Cynicism isn’t the same thing as political disengagement. Many people who are cynical--who believe the system is unfair and unlikely to produce much good--go out and vote anyway. It is the apathetic who stay home.

“The presidency has become merely another source of entertainment and moral disapproval, just as celebrities are,” said Harvard’s Sandel. “We don’t regard the president, any president, as a moral authority anymore.

“That accounts for the perplexing fact that people in Washington took this [scandal] so seriously, but the public didn’t, even though the public was riveted by it. The standard explanation has been that the economy is good and people are content, but I think it’s more than that.”

The college students he teaches “don’t think politics, as presented by the two major parties, speaks very powerfully to their lives,” Sandel said. “They’re interested in public service, but they don’t see politics as the main arena for social change. And they may be more right than wrong.”