Lauren Duca is a fixture of current feminist journalism, probably best known for her viral article “Donald Trump is Gaslighting America,” or her Thigh High Politics column, which was published in Teen Vogue from 2017 to 2018. Duca’s debut book, “How to Start a Revolution” is a primer on democratic participation geared specifically towards young people. Duca asks readers to reevaluate many of their assumptions about the nature of democracy, equality, and civic participation. I talked with Duca about “How to Start a Revolution” and youth civic participation.
Although her name is now inextricably linked to politics, Duca only recently became politically engaged. “I wasn’t apathetic before. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in equality or wasn’t interested in social justice,” Duca said. “It was that I didn’t feel that I had any permission to raise my voice in the political conversation.” All of that changed after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
“I just thought I would really use my energy and time–full time–to be figuring out how to empower people to fight back and figure out how we got here and where we’re going,”
“I had this ‘click moment’ when I woke up to Trump’s win,” Duca said. “I had just been accepting the authority of the way things are in politics and not questioning it and not participating in it and I think what I really saw is that I needed to play an active role in challenging the status quo. I’m a journalist, so I thought, ‘how can I use my journalism to take on this atrocity? How can I think about using my journalism intentionally and specifically for democratic purposes to empower people with information that they need as citizens?’”
In the two days following the election, Duca wrote a proposal for the book that would eventually become “How to Start a Revolution.” “I just thought I would really use my energy and time–full time–to be figuring out how to empower people to fight back and figure out how we got here and where we’re going,” Duca said. She published a chapter sample, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” in Teen Vogue, and it went viral; almost one million readers viewed the article in just under an hour.
Although “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” received considerable acclaim, much of the praise directed towards Duca’s article contained a back-handed compliment in the form of incredulity that Teen Vogue had published such a serious piece of political commentary. “There was conversation about, do young people care about politics? Do young women care about politics?” Duca said. “So what the book really became is interrogating that question and looking at how our voices are so boxed out because it’s not that we’re apathetic, it’s that we’re alienated.”
“How to Start a Revolution” unpacks what Duca describes as “this complex system that makes young people feel like second-class citizens, and it’s not actually an accident, it’s all by design,” giving readers the tools they need to become civically participant. Her book is all about the power of the paradigm shift–the “click moment” when citizens start to question the unspoken rules about whose voice matters and whose doesn’t in American politics. “We are operating with all of these obstacles that we put onto ourselves and so much of it is made up. All these bizarre secret rules that create the idea of respectability and authority,” Duca said. “We’re just hard-wired with them in ways that we don’t even think to challenge.” She believes that it is a mistake to criticize young people for not being politically involved when there are a myriad of social cues telling them to stay on sidelines. Duca claims in “How to Start a Revolution” that America as it currently exists is not a true democracy, but an oligarchy “run by a ruling class that answers only to donors and the few old folks who show up to vote.”
“I think a huge part of the problem is that we think about being free in the abstract and we think about this democracy as something that we have and we’re all so proud of, but we’re not actually off doing the stuff of it,” Duca said. In her book she emphasizes the importance of the “habit of democracy,” a practice that goes beyond simply voting in every election. “Everyone needs to be registered and voting, but beyond that, the options for raising your voice, for participating in the question of how we live together for improving your community and improving the world is basically anything you can dream up that is a matter of putting the things you care about into real, demonstrative action” Duca said. In “How to Start a Revolution,” Duca includes interviews with a range of young people who have found a way to make a difference in their community; from running for public offices to campaigning for reproductive justice to updating their schools’ civics curriculum.
“The stuff that young women like is seen as anathema to political seriousness. I think that it’s a huge part of the problem, the stigma against young people and young women as stupid and silly. It’s something that I’m trying to actively combat.”
Some may be surprised to hear Duca talk so openly about political activism and progressive causes. The assumption is generally that journalists are nonpartisan, or even apolitical, able to “see both sides.” However, Duca believes that the emphasis on the appearance of impartiality in journalism is just another example of an outdated rule which needs to be reexamined. “I think there should only be one side, and there is only one side in journalism, and the one side is building equitable public power, giving people the information that they need to be actively participating as citizens,” Duca said. “The problem is that ‘fairness’ in journalism is often about creating some sort of one to one ratio between whatever debate is on display. Fairness though, is not a methodology of journalism, it’s an aim, and what the aim should be is fairness to citizens.” She argues that most of the “mainstream media gatekeepers” are more concerned with “the status quo as it stands, based on this mysterious expertise about the necessary bureaucracy of Washington” than making the news accessible or relevant to citizens’ lives.
“But my political opinion, my well-researched, intelligent, thoughtful political take on what is going on, is just as valid as my older white male counterparts.”
Duca believes that this emphasis on the status quo encourages political alienation among its audiences, particularly young women, who are rarely represented in the mainstream media. Much of our understanding of what constitutes serious political journalism, what constitutes objectivity, she says, is based solely upon the priorities of the older white men who traditionally dominate newsrooms. “The way that we can see young women being specifically, routinely, rigorously alienated is actually even just one way in to look at the wider alienation of the public and the kind of soft power enforcement of the oligarchy by making it so the bizarre secret rules of respectability that are in accordance with the white supremacist patriarchy become the unquestioned standard,” Duca said. “The stuff that young women like is seen as anathema to political seriousness. I think that it’s a huge part of the problem, the stigma against young people and young women as stupid and silly. It’s something that I’m trying to actively combat.”
She admits to not having the confidence to believe she could cover politics or form serious political opinions prior to 2016. “I never saw anyone like me; anybody who had on a face of makeup, clearly went out of their way to wear a cute outfit and got vocal fry and said ‘like’ and ‘um’ and touched their hair, having serious political opinions, and that’s why I never thought that I could,” Duca said.“But my political opinion, my well-researched, intelligent, thoughtful political take on what is going on, is just as valid as my older white male counterparts.”
The picture Duca paints of America as a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, oligarchy” where most Americans have little say over the political process can seem bleak. But she also believes that true change is possible. Duca cites the record youth voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections as evidence that the shift in public power that she writes about in How to Start a Revolution is already taking place.“I think that we have a lot more dismantling and disrupting and destruction to do to the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy before we can even begin to imagine equitable public power,” Duca said. When asked what a truly democratic America would look like, Duca replied “I think that it really is truly so much better than even the things that we can practically dream up… We’re talking about average American citizens being free in ways that include, not only political agency, but mental agency and physical agency. It’s a level of liberation and of accessing total human potential that I am very optimistic about.”
You can read more about Lauren Duca and her new book on her website.
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