Young People, Politics and Television

Abstract

We have seen that the capacity for representative democracy to be representative of social interests other than capital is on the decline. Therefore, the rationale for popular involvement in and representation through the political process is being eroded in the minds and actions of many social groups within Western democracies, including young people. After two world wars, the winning of the popular franchise laid the basis for the social democratic Keynesian welfare state in Europe and post-Roosevelt (and later after the black civil rights struggle) a similar if somewhat watered down social democratic model in the US. The establishment of the social democratic settlement in the UK after the Second World War had removed young people from exploitation in the labour market by providing universal state education and other welfare benefits. Phil Mizen argues that young people were one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-war strategy of inclusion (Mizen 2004:17). In underscoring the break with this strategy of inclusion and universal support inaugurated by the new neoliberal dispensation, Mizen is arguably a little uncritical of the social democratic model. The welfare state was still a compromise between capital and labour after all and the state still undertook to mould the latter to the needs of the former through its various apparatuses, such as the education system (Willis 1977).