I've never been a fan of the idea of enfranchising younger people - until I realized the arguments against it are bollocks.
We've gone along with this notion that until you're 18 (formerly 21), you're not mature enough to be expected to vote responsibly. Below 18 you would be susceptible, easy meat for hustlers and con artists preying on your emotions, your fears. Below 18 you really wouldn't be able to achieve "informed consent."
Really?
Just look at what the grownups have done. They put Trump in the White House. They put Doug Ford in the premier's chair. They elected some hammerhead named Moe. They've bestowed premiership on thugs named Erdogan, Orban, Duterte.
What could those hustlers and con artists do to a 16 year old that they haven't already done with the grownups? Adults today are freely manipulated by fears and paranoia and appeals to their basest instincts, even to the point of voting against their own interests.
What did Trump promise his Gullibillies? Vastly improved healthcare for everybody that would put Obamacare to shame. Lower taxes. Slashed government debt. Oh yeah, and that wall. He hasn't improved healthcare one bit. The bought and paid for Congress won't hear of it. He's lowered taxes, mainly for the few at the top, and he's paid for it by adding about 1.5 trillion to the national debt, a form of indentured servitude for their children. Yet those Gullibillies cling to Trump just like... (your metaphor here).
The fact remains that you can't trust adults to vote responsibly. There's a reason we have such inept government today. That's what the voters are prepared to take. Voters today are largely fine with neoliberalism. They're largely fine with visionless short-term governance. They're largely fine with their politicians ducking the debt we owe to future generations. And their political maturity is better than a 16 year old's, why?
Now, imagine what this year's federal elections might look like if we extended suffrage to 16 year olds. These kids are aware of what's coming their way in the three or four or five decades ahead. They know that we're leaving them to take it in the neck. Frankly I think lowering the voting age would mobilize young people from 16 to 25 to turn out to vote responsibly, to vote for their future.
That would be like a 2X4 upside the head to this moribund political caste we have today. It would probably spark a major interest in climate change - mitigation and adaptation - that we haven't witnessed to date except in hollow campaign promises.
No, it's not 16 year olds I can't trust with the vote. It's 30 year olds and 40 year olds and 50 year olds and 60 year olds and their elders I don't trust with the vote.
Young people have more skin in this game than we ever had. Let them have their say and let our miserable political caste hear their message.
16 comments:
Why stop at 16? If you can think, you can vote. I know some 12 year olds who are more astute than 50 year olds.
When I was 16 I wouldn’t have wasted two minutes’ time listening to someone who thought I should have a vote. While I had some ideas, I was aware that I didn’t have a clue. I had arrived at this conclusion, at least in part, by having listened to people from dad’s and grandad’s generations who, obvious to any listener, had some understanding of historical cause-and-effect that had been informed by their life experience and by some knowledge of that of their forebearers. Those guys didn’t take anything for granted. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was never to get any saner than that.
On the other hand, my generation and its immediate predecessor, the Pepsi Generation, and at least a couple of those that followed (and I would expressly include the Grass People), have been allowed to skip some grades that we would have been better off attending. We knew everything (and we still do); we didn’t trust anyone over 30; we didn’t listen to anything that contained a subordinate clause; and we eventually became a collection of libertarian milksops and situational rugged individualists dumb enough to be conned by the likes of Doug Ford and Donald J. Trump, the adult versions of the loudmouths that had lorded over our schoolyard. As presently disposed, the sales resistance and reflexive sycophancy of today’s teenagers couldn’t be any worse than that.
If schools had a meaningful way of engaging the minds of young people on important issues both current and historical, I would support your proposal, Mound. However, at least in Ontario, History beyond one year is not compulsory, and the old civics course, unless it has improved dramatically over the last decade of so, is wholly inadequate. Engage minds meaningfully, and young people are empowered. Give them mere pap, and you have betrayed these young citizens.
Why stop at 12? If you can think... libtard.
And anon 3:10 is proof positive of some one less mature than a 12 year old.
mr perfect
The real reason it is opposed is it would cost the right seats.
These days, 30 is the new 21; 25 is the new 18; and 21 is the new 16. So 16 YOs already have the right to vote!
Giving the vote to toddlers in the control of silly schoolmarms – who condition the kiddies like Hitler Youth – would be far from an exercise in democracy.
That's the problem with today's world: it has gone back to Lord of the Flies. It has been giving over to children – and not the kind who enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The rotten kind in the novel!
Children are polar thinkers. They have not reached a level of experience and maturity where they can be tolerant of a diversity of people and opinions – not to mention developing on what they already know beyond their little sphere. They think they are the good people and the others not like them: evildoers.
When the children are in charge, they will wage a war against the evildoers: whether Wiccan or heretic, adulteress or atheist, infidel or Jew, capitalist or socialist, real or imagined.
The evil-doers cannot be tolerated. They must be wiped off the face of the Earth to bring about a beautiful utopia.
Of course, although history is filled with the genocidal acts of Fake Do-Gooders, nothing remotely resembling utopia has yet been produced.
(At least, not by them. The people, on the other hand, brought two Progressive eras on their way towards the 'end of the economy': Keynes' peaceable and achievable utopian vision based on natural human development.)
If those kids marching around don't convince us nothing will. They are smarter than many of the senior folks I know and I can say that because I am a senior myself.
"21 is the new 16" - that's horseshit. And, no, kids won't turn on their elders as you contend. It hasn't happened in Austria, Jersey, Guernsey, Argentina, Ecuador or the Isle of Man.
They might, just might, shift electoral focus from the present to at least accommodate some attention to the future, their future. No generation has had to face such a tenuous future and see it shaped by those who really don't give a shit about it.
John B. Can you recall when you were 16 whether anyone was credibly warning that, unless a wholesale shift to a new energy paradigm was effected within 12 years the world would face runaway global warming? I thought not. You can't compare your 16 to today's 16. They're not the same.
Lorne writes, "If schools had a meaningful way of engaging the minds of young people.." Well what provides us with a meaningful way of engaging the minds of grownups? The right to vote every four years for a some sugarplum platform that will begin dissolving just as soon as the ballots are counted?
Listen to those young people who are boycotting classes to take their protests to the streets, who get directly into the faces of the "not their" elected representatives. They're far more mature and clear-headed than a lot of grownups who currently decide our elections.
I agree, Gyor. It would cost the right more votes. The Fossil Fuel parties should take that hit. I have confidence that they would pursue their partisan interest and alter policies as needed to remain electorally relevant.
Perhaps a prerequisite of voting should be a basic test of governmental workings knowledge.
This could apply not just to 16 year olds but all the voting public?
TB
May I add. that; I and many others had to show some proficiency in the workings of Canada to become a citizen.
Is it not too much to ask a voter something similar?
TB
Really Anon 5:20, your post is actually insinuating Hitler Youths create Hitler and not the other way around. Strange logic indeed.
mr perfect
Mound @ 7:41 AM
I concur. The situations aren’t comparable. The disposition of today’s 16 year-old is a product of his understanding of the current one.
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