Why the Youth Vote Really Matters

Two questions: Are you wiser now than you were 15 years ago? As brilliant as you are now, will you be wiser in 15 years?

Of course.

Barring traumatic head injury or degenerative mental illness, each individual grows in insight as they grow in age.

That's not the same as saying that some older people are incredibly unwise, or that some young people aren't really old souls.

But it does mean that that older person was almost certainly even more foolish in his youth, and that the young person with the old soul will be wiser in her old age.

So why is it that every election season we get worked up about the youth vote? Why do we make an effort to "get out the vote" or to "rock the vote?"

And what does it tell us that we can even use such an insipid phrase to attract voters in that age group? Can you imagine someone trying to get seniors on voter rolls by unveiling a "hum the vote" campaign?

Other than little league baseball, is there any other process, job or function where we as a society say, "let's make sure the least qualified people eligible participate as much as possible?" Yay, sportsmanship!

IDEALISM? NO THANKS.

It does no good to say, "yes, but the youth are idealistic." This isn't an ideal world. To face it with an idealistic vision is to attempt to apply solutions to problems that can't exist. In other words, in a non-ideal world, ideal solutions will always fail to take into account the very nature of the world the solutions are supposed to impact.

Such an approach leaves you more vulnerable to the Law of Unintended Consequences. After all, it's difficult to see problems down the road if your road is a woodland path festooned with rainbows, unicorns and solar power that gets better than 29% efficiency ratings. Such thinking is why Progressives pushed the kinds of laws that got us into our current financial crisis.

Don't misunderstand: it is just to allow the vote at 18; that's the age of emancipation from your parents and conscription to the State. But whether it's wise to encourage 18-year-olds to vote is another matter.

Look at it another way. In traditional societies, reverence was always paid to the elders because the odds of getting useful input from people who had been around longer was better.

Of course, all sons rebel from their fathers, as we must if we are to become men of our own. (Most of us, anyway. Some just write memoirs.) I suspect the same process is largely true for women. But regardless of how crazy Crazy Horse was, he still had his Chiefs Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, and nobody considered them too old to be out of touch. After all, great leaders aren't there to handle the small things - that's what White House interns are for - great leaders are there to see the large picture, to understand fundamental, universal and timeless human motivations, to counsel and to lead.

THEY ARE NOT THE CHANGE WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

Certainly, around the two decades surrounding our participation in the civil war in Viet Nam, there was, taken as a whole, a marked shift in the nation's attitude toward the wisdom of the young. But those generations are now older. Without a doubt they are almost all wiser people, though clearly some of them seem to cling to the awful ideas of their youth, then get jobs in universities to push those ideas into the next generation of hapless youth. Sometimes they find prodigies to sit on the kinds of boards designed to further the radical education of American children.

But if the youth of today are as unable to understand the subtlety of what they're voting for as we were when we were younger, the youth vote shouldn't, on the face of it, profit those of us who are older, since the votes of the callow young dilute the votes of the canny old.

Perhaps, "though this be madness, yet there is method in't."

It's almost as if some of our political leaders need the support of the least experienced, most naive group of Americans to win elections. As if those political leaders' ideas and policies are simplistic or emotionally-driven enough that their ideas and policies could be fully internalized, then advocated by a group of Americans at the age where death by alcohol poisoning remains a possibility.

Makes you wonder if one party or the other spends a disproportionate amount of time indoctrinating the youngest segments of the population.

Oh, look:

This kind of insanity is exactly why Obama needs to lose this election in a bad way. The cult of personality has no business in American politics. It is the kind of foolishness reserved for the rest of the world, for Pan-African and Pan-Arabic dictators, Latin American Marxists, East Bloc tyrants, Europe's genocidal madmen and Asian mass-murderers.

Not in America. Its supporters need to be rebuked at the polls. Hard.

Living Colour got it right. (Embed disabled.)

Eric Hoffer had it better, though. Must read.