To illustrate the point: Older voters were more opposed to the Vietnam War than younger voters. Younger voters in the 1960s and early ’70s were more hawkish than their parents. Richard Nixon did much better with people under 30 overall in the 1972 election than the conventional wisdom suggests, but George McGovern cleaned up with college students and recent grads. When ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age to 18, many assumed it would help Democrats, but Nixon and McGovern split the youth vote. George Wallace’s best demographic in the 1968 presidential election was 21- to 29-year-olds.
But forget about America for a second. If the youth are so inherently noble, how do you explain the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution with all of those vicious kids? Heck, how is it that both Italian fascism and German Nazism began in many respects as youth movements?
That’s a good place to pivot to the I told you so. Yair Rosenberg has a troubling Atlantic essay on the fact that the most antisemitic cohort in America is young people. A Yale Youth poll Rosenberg cites states it plainly: “Younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.”
“When asked to choose whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States,” Rosenberg summarizes, “just 8 percent of respondents said ‘negative.’ But among 18-to-22-year-olds, that number was 18 percent. Twenty-seven percent of 18-to-22-year-olds strongly or somewhat agreed that ‘Jews in the United States have too much power,’ compared with 16 percent overall and just 11 percent of those over 65.” A slew of other polls find similar results. A recent Manhattan Institute poll found that a quarter of Republicans under 50 say “they themselves openly express” antisemitic views. That’s a sixfold greater share than those over 50 (4 percent).
Note: This is a bipartisan problem. The issue isn’t right-wing antisemitism or left-wing antisemitism. It’s antisemitism.
Now, I’m happy to debate the issue if necessary, but I will simply assert that antisemitism is bad. I also think it’s wrong—morally and factually.
One of my rules of thumb is that you can tell how much merit there is to a position by how much those holding it have to lie to win the argument. If you have to make up facts to prove your claim, it’s evidence that the actual facts aren’t on your side. The second you tell me “the Jews” were responsible for everything from Charlie Kirk’s murder to Pearl Harbor, I know you’re either a fool or a liar.
More to the point, I don’t think antisemitism is one scintilla less bad because a lot of young people are antisemitic. (A related point: I don’t think racism is one scintilla less bad just because a bunch of new, young Republicans are racist.)
I don’t think these young people are bringing some fresh insight or experience to the question. They’re just wrong. Their wrongness stems from not knowing very much history, or anything else. It also stems from the fact that they are impressionable, more emotionally motivated, and disproportionately get their “news” and “facts” from frauds, ghouls, bigots, grifters, jabronis, and/or airheads.
Forget “the socialism of fools” and consider plain old socialism. Once again, older socialists are convincing themselves that socialism will finally be tried because young people like socialism. (In case you’re too young to get the joke, it’s an ancient cliché for socialists to respond to the claim that socialism doesn’t work by saying “True socialism has never been tried!”)
Now, I think the old socialists have a lot in common with the youth, in that they both reject the verdict of history. But the old socialists reject it out of a quasi-religious conviction (and a profound confusion about the difference between is and ought), while the bulk of the young ones just have no idea what they’re talking about.
I’ve been saying for a very long time that youth politics is the cheapest form of identity politics. But it’s also a form of populism (as is identity politics), and not just because populism supplants arguments with passion, a common tendency among the young.
One of my core problems with populism is that it assumes the plural of one wrong person is many right people. In other words, if you get enough wrong and angry people to organize around their wrongness, they become a constituency that must be listened to, appeased, and cultivated.
Among the many reasons the cult of youth is the worst mixture of identity politics and populism is the fact that old intellectuals and politicians just love to be supported by young people. It boosts their egos and corrupts their judgment. The youth “get it,” they tell themselves. The future belongs to me because I have the youth on my side!
Or as Hitler put it in a 1933 speech, “When an opponent says ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’”
Yes, I could have picked plenty of quotes from far less sinister figures. No, thinking the youth are with you doesn’t make you Hitler. But the point is, it doesn’t make you not-Hitler either. Because fetishizing the support of young people has no intellectual or logical heft to it. It is simply power-worship and vanity.
If some student walks into a professor’s office and says, “The Jews control the world,” or, “We must solve the Jewish problem” you’d expect the professor to either patiently explain why the kid is wrong or maybe throw him out of the office. But if a thousand students say it, there’s a certain kind of intellectual who responds by saying, “I gotta get out in front of this.” If a single voter tells a politician that we need to socialize American industry, most politicians outside of Bernie Sanders would politely disagree or dismiss it. But if enough of them say that, they become Ferris Buellers getting out in front of the parade. Even if most intellectuals and politicians can resist the corrupting temptation to “meet the moment,” enough of them still cannot.
My response is screw that. Meeting the moment is easy when you’re telling one person they’re wrong. The test of your character and your convictions is when you meet the moment by telling the crowd, “Your boos mean nothing to me, for I have seen what you cheer.” You can multiply wrongness as much as you like; there’s no number at which it becomes rightness.
I’ve spent much of my career being lectured to, mocked, and taunted by progressives besotted with the cult of youth, telling me that my views are wrong because they’re unpopular and they’re a waste of time because young people are on their side, so I too must get on the right side of history. For the last decade, I’ve been hearing much of the same from the right. I’m happy to tell them all: I told you so.
But I’m perfectly happy to toss my stack of I-told-you-sos into the trash in exchange for some buy-in on fixing the problems. Those on the left can learn so many lessons from this moment. And I think many are. For instance, there used to be mostly scorn for federalism from the left, but now many are realizing that state sovereignty is a useful bulwark against centralized power when, for example, the president wants to send the National Guard into Illinois or California. Many on the left took for granted that young people and minorities would always be in their column and that there was no price to pay for alienating the white working class. And many on the left convinced themselves that young people were inherently more moral and tolerant simply because they were young. But I now hear the same garbage from the right. Curtis Yarvin is—I defecate you negatory—talking about a “1,000 Year GOP Reich”—whatever the hell he thinks that is.
There is no right side of history if you ignore the lessons of history. There are no permanent victories because there are no permanent defeats. Young people can be taught to be wrong, but they can also be taught to be right. Demography is not destiny when it comes to political attitudes. The only way out of these problems is arguing through them. Pandering to mobs—old or young—is surrender.
