The secret weapon in last Tuesday's historic election was a constituency Democrats barely bothered to recognize: young people.

Continuing a trend begun in 2004, this year's election may have produced the highest youth mid-term turnout ever. Early estimates suggest that 10 million voters under the age of 30 made up 13% of the electorate. They helped Democrats in close elections sweep into office in 25 states.

We know because our organization, the League of Young Voters, turned out 150,000 young voters who made the difference in races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Florida. We were just one of dozens of independent, under-the-radar, youth-led efforts to inspire and turn out young voters.

Young people are progressive on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. Most think the country is on the wrong track, and oppose the war. They vote Democratic by a 2 to 1 margin. So why are young people overlooked by political campaigners and pundits? The answer is what we call the myth of youth apathy.

I would say, “Right off the bat, I’m not the Hyphy spokesperson. I don’t go to shows—I hardly even go to clubs—I’m a good ten years older than most of the people in the scene, if not more.” But what I do tell them is, “Look, in the same way that you can be over here and listen to and understand bounce music but it really helps to go to New Orleans, and you can have all your Chopped and Screwed CDs but it really helps to go to Houston to understand, it’s the same with Hyphy.” From Sly Stone to Digital Underground to now, Hyphy is a witty, quirky take on things. And you have to be in the Bay and know the diversity of the Bay and its weird geographic shape, with its pockets of extreme poverty right next to pockets of extreme wealth, and all that weird interplay that creates the Bay as a whole. Even the weather—the weird way all the clouds butt up against the coast—it’s like everything’s cruising along and then all of a sudden you get to the coast and everything’s turbulent. And it’s always there, that energy in the air—it’s always turbulent, never still. And all that factors into Hyphy.

"My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries," Ms. Willis wrote in an essay collected in Beginning to See the Light (Knopf, 1981).

She continued:" Yet the modernists' once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly--not to say smug--as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists--credibly--that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane."

"My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries," Ms. Willis wrote in an essay collected in Beginning to See the Light (Knopf, 1981).

She continued:" Yet the modernists' once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly--not to say smug--as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists--credibly--that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane."