Your weekend was incomplete if you didn't catch Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's brilliant cameo at The American Scene arguing persuasively for the complete abolition of minimum voting age requirements. The argument works as a pincers, first by lowering resistance to the thought of toddlers lining up to fill out ballots they can't comprehend — children are much more perspicuous than adults like to give them credit for — and then shutting the door by pointing out the execrable qualifications and performance of adults as voters.
Gobry places his emphasis on the first point. It's worth taking some time to flesh out the second. The standard objection to the idea of doing away with voting age requirements is that before a certain stage in development, people have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Drawing the line at 18 years may be arbitrary, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. So the thought goes.
But to state the standard objection to child-voting is to refute it. The overwhelming majority of adults have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. In his classic study "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," Philip Converse found that for 90 percent of the public, voting is simply an act of tribal affiliation, having nothing to do with competing political ideologies, less still with inferring voting preferences from facts, logic, and background political beliefs. (The Converse study is from the 50s, but subsequent studies have simply reinforced his findings.) In other words, if you're like 98 percent of the public, and you buy the standard objection to letting kids vote, you ought to believe you shouldn't have the right to vote either.
Besides all that, if you're ahead of the curve, you already know that voting is a sucker's game in the first place. If you were truly rational, you'd never do it. So it makes no sense to insist that voters be able to make rational, informed decisions, because no matter what you're capable of, voting is neither rational nor informed — and irrational, uninformed people of all ages will tend to do equally well at it. (So would trained chimps.)
Still unconvinced? Then let me ratchet up the case rhetorically. Minimum voting age requirements are very much like Communism, and suffer from many similar fatal blind spots. The voting decisions an electorate makes today quite obviously not only affect today's voters, but also those of the future. By restricting the franchise to those above a certain age, we effectively socialize the preferences of everyone below that age, leaving it up to a cadre of elders to make what we hope will be enlightened decisions on behalf of everyone else. But of course, those elders don't make enlightened decisions. They make selfish, short-sighted, myopic decisions: In concrete terms, pensioners and boomers, thinking of themselves first, second, and third, are leaving as their lasting contribution to this country mind-boggling generational deficits, which Niall Ferguson and Lawrence Kotlikoff estimate at $45 trillion, or four and half times the size of the entire US economy.
Will younger voters behave any more altruistically? Of course not. If you're the average American, anyone my age who has taken a look at these figures has nothing but bottomless resentment for the debt you're leaving us (or at least should); but rest assured, we'll have our revenge. In the meantime, there's nothing to fear from abolishing the voting age: Infants (and dogs) couldn't squander what has been risibly called "our most precious freedom" any worse than most of the people who will read this already have.
Related: Babies might love Barack Obama even more than Jewcy does. Check out this hard-hitting report from CNN, below:
You write very interesting articles which are very fun to read.