Young Dumb Votes

Imagine my stupefaction as I roved out one fine morning in the merry month of sweet July, only to receive the New York Times daily email with the headline, “Should Teens Vote?”

From the jump, the Grey Lady editors must have taken their August holiday early. Teenagers already vote in America. Eighteen and nineteen still contain the stripling suffix. The issue of whether franchise should be conferred upon reaching twenty solar returns, two years thence legal adulthood, is altogether different than the perennial debate over lowering the voting age.

Park the pedantics for now. What about poor Ian Betteridge? His headline law answers the Times’s normative query with an affirmative no. But this is the country’s premier leftie fishwrapper we’re talking about. Not the stuffy Wall Street Journal, with its editors clothed in Corneliani-tailored suits, double-windsor-knotted ties, and Gucci loafers who long to re-employ kindergarteners in coal mines. If a policy boosts the number of Democratic ballots, the sweater-vested, spindle-shanked, macha-sipping gazeteers of the Times are, to a man, woman, and gender nonidentifying being, in favor.

What’s good for the paper of record isn’t necessarily good for our country. (Tom Friedman bad-mouthing his homeland to a Cairo taxi driver disagrees.) Evan Gorelick, the author of the Times’s aurora dispatch, broached the age-poll question by pointing to examples set in other countries. The U.K. is extending the right to vote to 16-and-17-year-olds—which is around the age a lad can legally share a pint with mum in a pub, but glaringly older than most rape victims in Rotherham. Many sorrys, dear lassies.

Germany also allows above-mean teens to vote in European Parliament elections. Then again, one infamously toothbrush-mustached Chancellor rolled into power thanks in good part to his youthful backing. Can’t always trust the jugendlicher’s judgment. Belgium also offers the same cohort similar suffrage. The effect is nugatory: Belgium’s nationwide median age is just over 40. Only a handful of frite-sized Belgians can exercise the right.

Gorelick pins up these examples as a preface to ask: “At what age does civic responsibility begin?”

This inquiry is premised on a category mistake. Why must the right to tilt society’s governance necessarily follow from a stack of torn calendar pages? The notion that the accumulation of sun-cycles bestows wisdom is quaint, stinks of reverse-ageism to lawsuit-sniffing attorneys, and is objectively disproven by boomers’ rampant sharing of AI memes on Facebook.

Toting up birthdays isn’t a decent measure of civic responsibility. Testing the historic knowledge and temperament of prospective balloteers would be a fine gauge to determine enfranchisement. A shame those ghost-gowned southerners ruined it for everybody.

Let’s not sideline ourselves with theoreticals, like undergrads shouting platitudes through a chiba cloud. Take the Schuylerian imperative and declare what knocking the planks out below the voting-age floor is really about: boosting the chances of left-wing candidates.

The logic is sound as far as political clichés go. If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 40, you have no brain a thousand white-haired CPAC attendees mindlessly mouth. A spittle of truth emerges from between their dentures. Underagers rely on daddy’s wallet for sustenance, shelter, and scrolling. Apply that same dependency to the dole. Register teens who want more freebies but are tired of hearing their ‘rents grouse about unmade beds and dirty dishes. Voilà: a dependable bloc that regenerates itself every year.

Or as the kids say: No cap! You be skibbidi schemin’ to ballot chase. Zoomie voting hits different. It’s a vibe. It’s pollcore. Conservacreeps be washed! And so on, with the braindead Twitch vernacular.

Really, what could go wrong with letting a generation who says “Ohio” but can’t locate it on a map pick pols? Doubling the national debt to buy more Fortnite skins? Beats dumb-bombing another MidEast country into glass.

American Democrats might be eager to mirror their colleagues across the pond—like amnestying millions of illegal aliens, extending the vote to 16-year-olds is an opportunity to bolster party ranks. The previous November should cool their eagerness to expand the plebiscite pool with unruly adolescents. Donald Trump made significant inroads with the college-age demo; Kamala Harris’s biggest supporters were comfortable retirees. As David Shor worried to Ezra Klein last spring: “[Y]oung people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”

Growing minds are volatile, liable to flip, change, and alter course, just as fast as the YouTube algorithm they live by autoplays a new clip immediately after one ends. Consider the mercurial taste of a testosterone-troubled teen: one day he sports a MAGA hat to school to trigger his puckered English teacher, the next he donates part of his allowance to the Luigi Mangione defense fund.

The electorate is sporadic enough. Must we tick up its volatile temper by packing it with neurotic TikTok zombies who’ve never tasted beer and haven’t heard of the Holocaust?

“I believe little boys should be whipped frequently and sent to bed supperless,” Evelyn Waugh quipped. The only worse punishment would be forcing a new milk-lipped voter to scour every candidate’s entire platform before making an “informed” choice.