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| Some Indonesian millennials in front of the Jefferson Memorial. |
Last week, I had the privilege to spent a week touring Washington D.C., capital of the United States, as part of the 2017 Civic Education Workshop.
This workshop was designed to give selected exchange students from my exchange student program, the Kennedy-Lugar YES program, to learn and explore the dynamics of American political and government system.
I had meetings with members of the Congress and their staffers and study visits to Smithsonian Institution museums and memorials. As a high school student with interest in politics and current affairs, I was particularly delighted with the experience I had. The most valuable one is how it opened my mind about the state of democracy here in the United States and back home, in Indonesia.
It is important to note that the current political climate in the United States is quite extraordinary and historic. Last year’s presidential election, which ended with the rise of current presidential administration, brought an interesting yet intriguing situation.
The institutions that defined American democracy, including but not limited to the independent judiciary, free press, and democratically-elected legislature, is now under a special kind of test. Online, too, the rise of cyber challenges like fake news and other, haunted the society like a spectre.
The battle for the soul for American society today is not only defined between urban and rural communities, older and younger generation or right-wing and left-wing politics, but also by nativist and globalist. The election was dominated with debates over the likes of immigration and health care, while still within the larger frame of the battle between globalism and nationalism. Americans, to some, are more divided than ever.
It is no different with the theatre of Indonesian politics right now. The rise of conservative nationalist movement, often joined together with religious factions, promote their goal as a fervent opposite to the wave of globalization. It is not dissimilar with the situation across the Pacific, let alone across the globe.
We could not forget the 2014 presidential election, a democratic process so infested with chaos and smear, had changed the Indonesian political discourse into a debate between nativist conservatism and pro-diversity globalism. The idea of a predominantly Muslim society who elected a Christian governor to lead our nation’s capital and a nativist-based economic nationalism building more free economic ties with foreign nations had sparked an unprecedented backlash, dividing our nation like nothing ever.
As an exchange student, I had a very interesting year in the United States. It had enabled me to explore and learn how norms and institutions that shaped its civic and democratic society. The idea of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”, as defined by founding father Thomas Jefferson, were enshrined in mind of every American: stamped in the Bill of Rights, practiced in the halls of legislature, and yelled at street protests.
To compare America, a land that once prided itself as “arsenal of democracy”, with our young yet dynamic democratic society in Indonesia, might sound somewhat naive. But as I already mentioned before, both currently faced the same challenge: whether to open our doors with the rest of the world, or to build a wall and close it. The threat no longer came from the right or the left: it is from outside or inside the border.
What I learn from my experience here so far, is that the young generation will play a huge role in defining the future of our democracy. Millennials, if you prefer to call it. These are the generation— my generation — that grew up with Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and other technological advancements.
They are the same generation like the Baby Boomers generation in post-World War II America that grew up in time of economic prosperity and American superiority, or 1970s generation of my parents that came in age in the time of Soeharto’s authoritarian yet economically stable government.
The so-called “”demographic bonus” will soon constitute the major portion of Indonesian society for better or worse in the next one or two decades. They were born after the student protesters brought down Soeharto’s regime in the streets of Jakarta, seeing all from Iraq War to the 2007–08 global recession. Their biggest difference with their parents, like the rest of the world, is that they are now connected with the rest of the world like no generation ever did before.
And the most crucial thing: they’re the first Indonesian generation that fully grew under a democracy. They had lived under a women president, watched their parents cast vote for the first popularly-elected president in 2004, and seen the first peaceful transfer of power in 2014.
Here in the United States, millennials played a crucial role to influence the political discourse: from Barack Obama’s historic campaign to be the first black president in 2008, his re-election four years later, the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, to election of current President Donald Trump in the same year, we can found the energized teen-age volunteers and enthusiastic first-time voters.
I expect Indonesian millennials to shape the battle for the soul of our democracy in next ten or twenty years. Their battle would be different with their fathers or uncles who fought to establish a democracy. It is a different terrain now. They will need to maintain and preserve the young democracy, preventing it to fell to the cliff of authoritarianism their previous generation had fought.
The millennials would need to address the urging issues that had prolonged our archipelago for too many years: economic inequality, accessibility, and quality of life. Many questions from the past, like our dark and shaky connection with human rights issues, will also left to be answered. Combine it with the rising trend of automatization, which had slowly but surely decreasing jobs availability and could define the future of the economy, there will be no reason not to predict the battle would be long and contentious.
And don’t forget: they may be into the left or right of the political spectrum, in favour of a secular or religious politics, but the big question will remain whether they join the world community, or isolate themselves. Remember: the preamble to our Constitution explicitly said the republic to “contribute to the implementation of a world order based on freedom”.
Former President Obama, in his farewell speech in Chicago last January, warned that “our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted”. Obama, for more or less the leader of free world for eight years of his presidency, is not only talking to his fellow Americans, who had lived under a democratic nation for their entire life. He is also delivering a cautionary tale to other democracies and its citizens across the globe.
Indonesian millennials, like me and million others, are one of them.
