Choose and Lose
Jonah Goldberg, who was rather enthusiastic a while back about efforts in college towns to keep students from voting, strikes again, this time arguing that only “the mentally challenged” are less informed voters than 18-24-year-olds. Young voters are unqualified, he claims, because they have “less education, less experience, less money, less property, and many fewer responsibilities than older people.”
We’ll start with “less education.” Like Goldberg, we don’t have any conclusive national statistics, but a Detroit News article reports that, in Michigan, 80 percent of 18-24-year-olds hold a high school degree, compared with 69 percent of those 65 and older. And a college education is more accessible and at the same time more necessary today than it was in previous generations.
“Less experience” is accurate, of course, but we wonder how much Goldberg would like the results of an election decided entirely by Medicare-benefit-receving, AARP-belonging seniors.
“Less money, less property” - we won’t argue there. If you’re a supporter of a white-male-landowner voting system, this is a compelling line of reasoning indeed.
“Many fewer responsibilities” - if the draft comes back, he’ll have to refine this part of the argument a little.
Goldberg is against young people voting mainly because he thinks they will vote Democratic. He pooh-poohs the notion that “youth issues” are anything other than standard Democratic rhetoric, as he did in his remarks about college-town voting. But college towns tend to be pretty solidly liberal. Here in A2, it’s two Republican council members, Marcia Higgins and Mike Reid, who have been among the most skeptical about the couch ban. If anything, an energized student vote could become a powerful check on local NIMBY liberalism. As for the national elections, we wonder if these college-town officials have ever considered the effect of suppressing a large population of voters in towns that are often Democratic oases in swing states.
The problem is that college student liberals (and this has definitely been the case in A2 within the past half decade) are so indoctrinated into their ideologies that they couldn’t swallow voting Republican, preferring instead to vote for the student-loathing Democrat. In A2, the only liberals who seem ready to stand up for students are the Greens, and even within Tree City’s limits they’re not a viable party.
Of course, this can all be blamed on the posturing of the City Council and the local non-blog media who don’t report thoroughly enough for students to be able to make an informed decision, but it still happens. See you in November!
posted by A2 grad 2002 on August 25th, 2004 at 10:15 pmWhat an ass. I’m assuming the constitutional amendment to raise the voting age will follow shortly after the gay marriage ban . . .
posted by Nick on August 26th, 2004 at 8:56 amI disagree that the Greens aren’t a viable party in AA. More than once a green has garnered over 25% of the vote in city council races — something I accomplished barely running a campaign at all. If local Greens threw their back into it, and garnered support of the populations in town that tend to be ignored or sidelined by City Council, they could easily pull a win.
posted by Scott T. on August 26th, 2004 at 10:51 amConsidering that most City Council elections are won by a much smaller margin than, say, the population of Bursley dorm, it should be easy for a student-oriented candidate if they can actually get students to vote. (And, since a lot of dorm residents can vote in their dorm, it’s not even a very high commitment. You just have to start running a “vote here and not at your stupid parents’ house” registration drive in early September.)
I think a Republican candidate could mount a pretty good campaign based on civil liberties and fiscal responsibility in Ann Arbor (Mike Reid is basically a 100% fiscal responsibility Republican, as far as I can tell), but it would probably be easier to stomach running as an Independant–I’ve known people who declined local-level Republican appointments because they didn’t want to be affiliated with the national Republicans.
Just think what a student candidate for City Council could do if they campaigned half as hard as Joe Random MSA Candidate…
posted by Murph on August 26th, 2004 at 1:15 pmStudents as a group have many important interests at stake in local politics. Those interests will be ignored if students fail to participate.
There will be a systematic student voter registration drive at UM and EMU in the next few weeks. I have been pushing this all year, and have found allies in the Kerry campaign. I’m hoping we can get at least two or three thousand additional students registered to vote here.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on August 27th, 2004 at 10:56 amIn fairness to Goldberg, he has a point: if you control for everything else, youth have the least experience by definition, and concequently the least understanding and intelligence when it comes to who to vote for.
That may not matter to you, but Goldberg has some “funny” views about voting and democracy - he believes that there is nothing intrinsically good about democracy, it is only useful as far as it helps us to choose good leaders. He has stated many times that democracy could be replaced by a perfect king who would rule properly. The reason we don’t go that route is that the perfect king theory doesnt work in practice, not becuase there is anything intrinsically wrong with it. There is precedent for this - the electoral college, for example, was basically a bunch of people who could be trusted to make the right decision even if the general population could not.
Anyways, if the point in having elections is to elect the best leader, there is not necessarily any reason to encourage voting by those who don’t have the experience to make the correct decision.
Note that I do not agree with Goldberg at all - I am simply pointing out that there is a lot more nuance (flip-flopper!!!) to his view then “youth are stupid so they shouldn’t vote”.
posted by dont_think_twice on August 28th, 2004 at 12:29 pmInteresting. I guess his views are at least consistent. But I disagree that having more experience makes you better able to choose the best leaders, any more than the declining cognitive function that starts sometime around your early 20’s makes an 18-year-old a better voter than I am.
And I don’t think he really believes all of it either, although I’d love to see the results of an election decided entirely by octogenarians and PhDs.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on August 28th, 2004 at 4:10 pmWell, I do share the lament that many voters in that age group are woefully misinformed about the candidates and the issues. Anyone who’s voting just because MTV and the Dave Matthews Band tells them to probably is better off not voting. While I believe, sadly, that there are all too many people in the 18-24 (and maybe even the 18-29) age group, to say categorically that EVERY 18-24-year-old is unqualified is horseshit. In my experience, there are plenty of uninformed voters across the entire spectrum of the voting population. Of course, I’m not sure what to do about that, other than just sit here and wish that people would take the time to really understand the issues and the candidates before they vote.
posted by Geoff Brown on August 30th, 2004 at 10:15 amWell, now that I’m 25, I can say with certainty that he’s right. Boy, those 24-year-olds, of which I was one until about two months ago, are such gibbering morons that they shouldn’t even be allowed outside, let alone to participate in the democratic process. They should all be kept in salt mines so that they may work for the great empire of their elders, rather than concerning themselves with the complicated affairs of state.
posted by js on August 30th, 2004 at 1:38 pm(Aside from that, you’ll see that Goldberg is a neo-Platonist, arguing for rule by a philosopher king driven by perfect wisdom. And as far as young people being uninformed and therefore not capable, that doesn’t follow from their lack of worldly experience. Anyone with a decent high school civics education is ready to vote on most things, and the rest— mostly local elections without much press— takes only a bit of research. But really, with the choices such as they are between the two parties, pretending that a gerontocracy is the only answer is, well, senile at least).
Good points, Geoff. I think that what younger voters lack in experience they may make up for in a fresh perspective. Older people sometimes become entrenched in their habits, like the conservative Southerner who continued to vote Democratic throughout a lot of the last century despite the fact that the party had long abandoned his ideals, just because he’d always voted Democratic. I guess younger people might get locked into voting the way their family has always voted, or the exact opposite of how their family has always voted if they’re feeling rebellious, but at least they have some chance to make a new start.
js - I can say that, having left the 18-to-24 age group myself, they were perfectly competent voters once, but the demographic’s really gone downhill. Especially in the last two months.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on August 30th, 2004 at 3:00 pmYeah, I was all into 18-to-24 before they sold out. Now it’s like, MTV, man, whatever.
posted by js on August 31st, 2004 at 1:35 pmUntil I was part of 25-to-55, I never realized how awesome it was to buy a Volvo.