It’s Their Fault

Dennis Prager today has an pretty annoying column in which he says that youth supported movements are often naive and narcissistic (based on just two examples from the same time period), and uses that observation to proclaim that he therefore distrusts Obama. While his leap from distrusting historical youth movements to distrusting Obama’s candidacy is pretty clearly unfair, since Obama leads McCain nationally, it is true that Obama is associated with youth and that other memorable youth movements (i.e., that of the Boomers) have not-so-great legacies.

We regularly hear about Barack Obama’s appeal to youth, about how he has been able to excite and mobilize a generation of young people to become politically involved…All this seems to be true. The question, however, is whether it is a good thing for the country…

The answer is that it probably is not. With a few exceptions — and those exceptions are usually those rare cases when young people confront dictatorships — when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing.

It’s a scary but not unprecedented conservative conceit to not like it when people become “involved in politics in large numbers” and to discourage turnout, but there’s more to say (in bullet point form!) about why the youth support of Obama should be considered differently than, say, the hippie movements or the French youth demonstrations.

• First, as Paul Waldman puts it in a thoughtful article on this subject:

There’s a fundamental fallacy in any analysis that says that one particular group is the “key” voting bloc, whether it’s soccer moms or NASCAR dads or whoever. In a close election, every group is a key group whose votes determine the outcome. We’d now be winding down the Gore presidency had he only been able to persuade 537 more of Florida’s Lithuanian haberdashers to come to his side.

This fact alone should prove that Obama’s popularity should not be judged according to his youth support…but that’s despite the fact that this youth support means something different, as you’ll see below.

• In the National election, young people won’t be voting for Obama as much as they will be voting against Republicans in general. This isn’t a George McGovern-style outpouring of unchecked enthusiasm - young people are simply more democratic than ever because of bad Republican administrations and out-dated Republican value systems. It’s an important distinction because previous youth movements clung to one or two issues–this one is simply a turning of the tide against a political philosophy that has already failed. As Waldman puts it: “In short, it isn’t just that young people take the progressive side in the culture war; for them the war is over.”

• The late 1960’s protests that Prager refers to became violent and unruly…does he really think this “Obama revolution” ever will do that? Unfortunately for him, this generation is much more mature than his…probably because we don’t have it so easy.

• The 60’s protests had a bad legacy because they exacerbated a larger class struggle: advantaged student protesters protested and enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle while the poor soldiers they were supposed to be fighting for suffered in Vietnam: the resulting bitterness and guilt over the unjustified escalation of these student protests got Nixon and Reagan elected and has clouded U.S. politics ever since. There was a similar situation in France: see this and this article (I might have to go into these protests further… interesting stuff). As Jean Cabral, the author of the second linked piece, writes:

For at a time (he’s referring to the present here, and in France - but it works for the U.S. too) when the majority of the population believes that future generations will be worse off than the preceding ones, where the social and ecological disasters of an unbridled capitalism plunge millions of workers into poverty, then revolt is not only possible, but much more justified than was the case forty years ago.

• Also interesting to note: McCain has more of a youth movement than any other Republican. From Future Majority.com:

John McCain was consistently one of the strongest performers in the GOP field among conservative youth. He won the youth vote in more states than any other GOP contender on Super Tuesday. He won swing states like New Hampshire and Florida, and in many places where he didn’t win he was highly competitive.

How do you explain that?

• The fact is, Obama beats McCain among youth only by the same numbers that youth prefer Democrats in general. Obama’s margins are much higher among African Americans, for example. Want to start complaining about them, Dennis?