I hadn’t noticed this when it first came out. But early last month Jonah Goldberg went on a general tirade against the role of young voters in politics, arguing — perhaps in jest, perhaps not — that the voting age should be changed back to 21 or made even higher.
Hyperbole is Goldberg’s calling card in public debates. So I don’t know how seriously he expects anyone to take the suggestion. But it is of a piece with a general trend on the right these days: the effort to take non-right-leaning segments of the electorate and simply ban them from voting entirely. That’s what’s behind the big push for voter ID: the fact that it hits primarily poor people, immigrants and minority groups, people who don’t tend to vote for Republicans. And it’s the same with young voters.
Remember: we’re not just talking about voter ID, but efforts to make voter registration drives much harder and various roll-backs of early voting. All of these tend to tighten the constraints on voting and trim back voting by predominantly Democratic parts of the electorate.
Let’s remember that it wasn’t always the case that young voters leaned so heavily in favor of Democrats. Back in the 1980s it was different. Young voters, if not the very youngest, leaned Republican and it was older voters who tended to be most reliably Democratic.
Goldberg’s argument about taking the vote away from young voters is simply that they’re idiots. Too young to have any real knowledge about how to run the country. I don’t have any particular sense that young voters are special fonts of wisdom. But if we get into which voters are smart or knowledgable enough to vote, there’s really no end of the slicing and dicing (all inherently self-serving) that would leave us with. This was all the rage in the late 19th century. And for the same reasons — too many and growing numbers of people who voted the wrong way.
The premise of our system is that the public is entitled to govern itself. Idiots, technocrats and very wise people all get the same bite at the apple. That’s the system. Finding ways to take voting away from people who don’t vote for your candidates is, to put it charitably, a very different approach.
