Anti-Climacus

WELL: So Amber Taylor at Crescat Sententia (guest-blogging) has a post on how awful and horrible it is that the youth vote is so disrespected nationwide--this has also been the general topic of various other posts on Crescat for the last few days. Now, then, is probably as good a time as any to make more widely known my support for re-raising the voting age to 21 (and, to calm OGIW's first objection, I'm perfectly okay with the draft age being indexed to the voting age, though I imagine you could make a not-ridiculous argument to support the opposite viewpoint). My commitments in political theory are all to republicanism, not democracy (I adore The Federalist Papers, after all), so I'm about as unconcerned over disenfranchising 18-to-21 year old as I am about our current refusal to enfranchise 15-to-18 year olds.

I suspect that, on balance, the best an 18-year old can do, politically, is be something of a mindless flack for whatever party their parents voted for (Kevin Yaroch will want to make a special note of the bit bolded below)*. You can make it to 18 without having any particularly relevant life experience, but it's a lot harder to have made it to 21 without worrying about holding a job, finding funding for your education, paying bills, dealing with landlords, and learning a bit how things work in life in general--the sort of broadening experiences you want voters to have--so that they can see a little better what would make their own lives, and those of people around them, easier.

I'm not an idiot, though: I recognize the voting age will never be raised (and perhaps this is a very good thing, because the exceptional cases (who do actually know what's going on) are precisely the ones you want in the system as early as possible). My only real consolation is that 18-21 year olds don't really vote, and most of the attempts to get them to turn out fail, for the simple reason that they incorrectly assume there's such a thing as a 'youth vote,' a set of issues that can electrify all young people into participating in politics. Truthfully, 18-21 year olds are no more cohesive a set of potential voters than any other three-year age swath: you'd laugh if part of the Democrats' strategy this year was to win as many 43-46 year olds as possible, because someone obviously didn't understand that's not the best way to work things.

*OGIW will here object, no doubt, that both she and her friends (who are also some of my friends) have all always been very conscientious about picking who to support and what issues to care about. No doubt--social network theory predicts this (people who spend lots of time around each other will coordinate their behaviors, attitudes, etc for the purposes of making their interactions go more smoothly), as it predicts, I'd imagine, that political consciousness will be higher in the communities she's lived in (downtown-ish Detroit, Ann Arbor, DC) than it might be elsewhere in the country. In fact, anyone who's reading this is probably in that top ten or eleven percent of the US population that's well-educated about their politics. There is, however, everyone else, so I feel tentatively confident about saying this as a general rule.