The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (35 page)

Regardless, as just about everybody reading this knows, it’s an exciting, confusing, thrilling, and terrifying time ably chronicled by that ill-appreciated bard of the modern era, Alice Cooper, in his ballad “I’m 18.” And it is precisely at this age that we say you can vote. I’m not categorically opposed to eighteen-year-olds voting. It’s simply that in a properly ordered society, we would allow such people to vote on a case-by-case basis, if at all. We do not give drivers’ licenses to people based upon their age. We say qualified—i.e.,
tested
—drivers are
eligible
to apply for a license when they reach a certain age. The same, by the way, goes for military service. One is eligible to enlist or be drafted at eighteen, you don’t automatically get a uniform and a gun on your eighteenth birthday.

The argument that carried the day when America was debating lowering the voting age to eighteen from twenty-one was that it was outrageous for young people (men, really) to “fight and die” to protect democracy but not participate in it at home. To which I say, fair enough. If you sign up to wear the uniform, you can have a waiver and vote early. I don’t think that reform alone would put us in
Star Ship
Troopers
territory. Besides, I believe that
nobody
should vote unless they pass a basic citizenship test. That goes for eighteen-year-olds and eighty-year-olds. If you can’t pass the test we require of immigrants to become Americans, you shouldn’t be able to vote either. One man, one vote, should be changed to one man, one
opportunity
to vote. But that’s an argument for another time.

It is great fun to make these arguments to youth activists because they’re so
accustomed to having their propaganda applauded by condescending adults. When I tell them I’m not particularly enamored with the youth, they look at me the way my old basset hound would when I tried to feed it a grape: With total unblinking incomprehension. Then they get confused, furious, and anxious. “But… but… we are the future.”

And that reminds me of the great story about Ronald Reagan, who was confronted by a bunch of screaming hippies back in his days as governor of California. They swarmed his car yelling at him for cutting education funding or some such. One fellow—who I like to imagine looked like Shaggy from
Scooby Doo
—held up a sign to Reagan’s car window saying “We are the future!” Reagan quickly grabbed a pen from his suit pocket and wrote something down on a piece of paper and thrust it to his side of the window so the kid could read it. It said: “I’m selling my bonds.”

For generations now, but particularly since the rise of the baby boomers, we have institutionalized the idea that young people are simply fantastic for no other reason than that they are young. It has become part of our formal educational philosophy to tell kids they are awesome for no apparent reason. When I was a kid, Saturday morning cartoons were punctuated with public service announcements informing me, “The most important person in the whole wide world is you—and you hardly even know you.” Fred Rogers of
Mr. Rogers Neighborhood
used to end every episode by telling kids, “You make every day such a special day.” He added, “You know how—by just your being you. You are the only person in the whole world like you, and people can like you for who you are.” News flash: Some kids don’t make every day such a special day.

Today the payoff is all around us. In a recent study, “Egos Inflating over Time,” Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and a team of psychologists found that—you guessed it (Good for you! Gold star!)—egos are inflating over time. In particular, they concluded that America’s youth are the most self-absorbed since testing began. Math, science, and English scores have stagnated, but self-regard is off the charts.
¹
Way to go teachers! Twenge’s findings have been corroborated and confirmed not only by other academics but a host of journalists as well. CBS’s
60 Minutes
featured a whole segment on how so-called Generation Y is so full of itself that employers don’t know how to communicate with their youngest workers. New
employees expect to be told how wonderful they are at every turn. This is the best photocopying I’ve ever seen! Great job taking my phone messages! Everyone gets a trophy!

This is all the natural consequence of a political culture that nurtures the notion that young people are not only a special class but a source of special insight. Listen to liberal politicians talk about young people. It’s like they’re talking about business consultants from McKinsey. “They get this stuff…” “Young people understand that…” “The youth ‘get it.’…” And, to be sure, young’ns will always be quicker on the uptake when it comes to deciphering new-fangled whirligigs and thingamajigs.

But much of what passes for the wisdom and insight of youth actually stems from the basic fact that young people are ignorant. Take the Hans Christian Andersen classic about “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As the story is told, it’s a fairly sweet commentary on the pretensions and pieties of the aristocracy. Still, the boy who points out that the emperor is naked does so because he’s ignorant of social conventions. Because it’s a fable for children, the story ends well. But it doesn’t take much to imagine a more realistic narrative where the vain emperor has the child and his parents dragged off to his dungeons and dismembered. Meanwhile, in real life, the most common “emperor has no clothes” moments are not instances of stunning insight, but of mortifying embarrassment caused by the ignorant rudeness of children. Kids point out that Mrs. Smith “sure does drink a lot of wine.” They announce loudly that Mr. Jones smells like cabbage and old cigarettes. Then everyone stands around, mortified.

Politically, it’s worth recalling that the first modern “youth movements” of the twentieth century fueled both Italian Fascism and, more circuitously, German National Socialism.
²
It only makes sense that it would be so. Fascism, at its core, is a cult of action, unity, and contempt for the “system.” All youth movements share these values. Because what the youth lack in experience and knowledge they make up for with passion and energy. America’s youth movements are no exception. “In America,” quipped Oscar Wilde, “the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their inexperience.”

This is not to say that young people don’t have their place in politics. When they bring their enthusiasm to existing institutions it is nothing short of invigorating. When they ask uninformed questions they provide a service by forcing their jaded elders to reexamine what they know or
merely
think
they know. And on occasion they will bring fresh eyes to old problems, which is often (though hardly always) helpful. Besides, any movement or ideology that fails to attract new generations of adherents will, by definition, die out. “If something cannot go on forever,” Herb Stein famously observed, “it will stop.” And old institutions cannot go on forever without new people. Hence organizations and institutions committed to larger ideals and traditions that seek to recruit youth to their cause are fine with me. College Democrats, Young Republicans, the Catholic Youth Organization, Young Presidents’ Organization, Young Americans Foundation,
^*
and countless other similar groups are essentially fine with me, insofar as they are trying to recruit new members to an old cause (“We need the dues!”).

With those caveats in mind, let me just say I find the political fetishization of youth and the whole effort to create a “youth politics” or “youth movement,” alternately ludicrous and repugnant. Youth politics are the cheapest form of identity politics. They are the fake Rolex of ideological causes. At least with the identity politics of race and gender the categories are for the most part permanent. If you hire a black guy, he’s going to stay black for the rest of his life (Michael Jackson being a notable exception to the rule). Young people aren’t nearly so reliable.

Ever since the 1960s, young liberal activists have been working to convince themselves and everyone else that it is a requirement of youth to be liberal. This is a very old notion. Recall that famous line from Churchill about how if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain. Despite my almost unhealthy admiration for Winston Churchill, I’ve never liked this formulation, perhaps because I’ve always been a conservative of one flavor or another and I like to think I have a heart as well. Also, I’ve never understood why liberals are so eager to embrace this notion. “Yay! People who are ignorant and overly emotional support
us
! People with experience, maturity, and intelligence agree with
them.
”

But it’s also simply and patently untrue. Young people are not inherently liberal.
Yet liberals—and the incredibly cloying youth activists who work for them—keep expecting otherwise. When the voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, the predicted hordes of progressive young people did not materialize to carry George McGovern to victory in 1972. Half of the eighteen-to-twenty age group stayed home, and the other half split about down the middle (52 percent McGovern, 48 percent Nixon). Though one should note that the youth vote was McGovern’s best demographic.

And that should tell you something. As a matter of gross generalization, the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who cast ballots for McGovern did so as “youth voters,” the ones who cast votes for Nixon were, simply, voters who happened to be young. What I mean is that liberal baby boomers have a messianic self-conception of their role in American life. They believe in a kind of secular astrology that holds that
when
you were born is as important, even more important, than where, what, or who you were born. They believed the hogwash spouted by a tiny, tiny minority of young activists, mostly living around New York City and Berkeley, that there was in fact a “youth movement” aborning. Worse, in their narcissism and nostalgia, they’ve never let go of the idea of youth as a political identity.

“Medicare had passed. Head Start had passed. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African American justice [was appointed to] the United States Supreme Court. We felt like we were all in it together, that we all had responsibility for this country…,” explained Howard Dean in a 2003 interview with the
Washington Post
about the role the 1960s played in his worldview. “[We felt] that if one person was left behind, then America wasn’t as strong or as good as it could be or as it should be. That’s the kind of country that I want back.

“We felt the possibilities were unlimited then,” he continued. “We were making such enormous progress. It resonates with a lot of people my age. People my age really felt that way.”
³

No.
Liberal people
Howard Dean’s age really felt that way. Or to be more precise, a small fraction of liberal people with backgrounds similar to Howard Dean’s felt that way. Other liberals felt there wasn’t enough progress being made. You could look it up. But Dean in his splendid arrogance thinks that because he and his friends felt that way, everyone must have. In
this you can glimpse the core impulse behind so much exaltation of youth in our politics. It’s about power. If you can convince young people to see the world a certain way—or convince them to use a certain kind of toothpaste—you can hold on to them for the rest of their lives. So marketers, political and generic, condescend to young people, telling them how smart and discerning they are when what they really mean is closer to the opposite: they are impressionable.

Indeed, the emphasis on turning out the youth vote has little or nothing to do with the idea of getting more youthful input into our democratic system and everything to do with getting the politically and historically illiterate to vote in higher numbers for Democrats. There is no way on God’s green earth all of these Hollywood “activists” would be haranguing young people to vote if they thought young people would actually vote in large numbers for Republicans. It’s very similar to the role the black vote plays in Democratic politics. Because blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the party can afford to simply send buses into black neighborhoods and drive them to the polls, confident that 9 out of 10 of the votes will be for the Democrat. This also explains the constant crisis-mongering about the return of “Jim Crow” and similar nonsense.

A similar logic is at work with youth politics. Liberals yammer endlessly with high-minded platitudes about the importance of getting young people involved “in the process” and touting turnout as a public virtue in its own right. But the reality is that this rhetoric is intended to boost turnout among young liberal voters who tend not to vote very much. And while it is false to say that young people are inherently liberal (Reagan carried the youth vote by 20 points in 1984), it is true that liberal young people are easily seduced by naked appeals to youth.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who takes “Rock the Vote” seriously, odds are you’re either an aging baby boomer stuck in a nostalgic cocoon like Howard Dean, a cynical political consultant, or a doe-eyed youthful ignoramus who thinks the country desperately needs the full benefit of your ignorance.

^*
Full disclosure: I have delivered many paid speeches on behalf of the Young Americans Foundation. I have been happy to do so.

20

OUNCE OF PREVENTION

A
n ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” So said Ben Franklin (some 500 years after English Jurist Henry de Bracton said something very similar). And who can argue? What people tend to forget (or more likely never knew to begin with) is that he employed this slogan in the context of his role as the founder of the first fire insurance company in America. It doesn’t mean he was wrong, but it’s at least worth remembering he was making pounds of profit from ounces of other people’s prevention.