Jonah Goldberg, king-of-projection editor-at-large for the National Review Online, thinks that young people should shut up. You’re too stupid to vote.
“I am not particularly enamored with (air quotes) ‘the youth.’” said Goldberg in an interview with the Daily Caller, “I don’t think youth politics is something very special or enviable. Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher and not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest.
I think that there is a certain power worship that comes, that finds its expression in the adulation of youth. ‘Well they’re gonna run the country one day, so therefore, we should really kowtow and cater to them.’
My view is, they’re going to run the country one day so we should really explain why they’re so friggen stupid about so many things. It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots and we only get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing in this culture where ‘oh, young people are for it, it must be so special!’ The reason that young people are for it is because they don’t know better. That’s why we call them ‘young people.’
There’s this whole sort of shabby identity politics built into all this kind of thing and part of it has to do with the narcissism and vanity of our culture today, generally speaking. We all want to be younger. We all want to look younger. Men trade in their wives for younger wives. I meant there’s all sorts of stuff going on out there in the culture that makes youth culture more powerful today than I think it’s ever been and I think that’s unhealthy for a society.
The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism, that’s proof of what social scientists call, ‘their stupidity’ and ‘their ignorance’ and it’s something that conservatives have to work harder to beat out of them, either literally or figuratively, as far as I’m concerned.
The simple fact is that there is no system that was ever created, will ever be created, that creates wealth other than democratic capitalism. As Margaret Thatcher said, socialism is fantastic but the problem is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The good news is that in America, we actually do learn from our mistakes in a way that other countries don’t, in part because we don’t have the intrenched, aristocratic elites that have rigged the system to justify their own status in perpetuity, the way…we don’t have them here in the United States and that allows us to sort of have creative destruction and learn from our mistakes.”
Here’s the video:
On one element, I agree with Goldberg. Our country does suffer from youth worship. That’s where my agreement ends. Age is neither a guarantee of intelligence nor is youth a guarantee of stupidity. Youth does make it less likely that the Fox Propaganda Channel has gotten a hold of a voter’s mind, since young people watch very little cable news. In fact, the stupidest (yes, that word is cringe-worthy) voters are Fox News viewers and they are not hindered with the burden of youth (to put it politely). They do, however, vote conservative and by Goldberg’s definition, that is the sign of intelligence, which he also seems to define as having been beaten into submission by him and our corporate overlords.
Perhaps Mr. Goldberg should take it even further. If young people are too stupid to vote, aren’t they also too stupid to enter into a contract with a bank that will bury them under decades of student debt? Aren’t they also too stupid to give their lives for our never-ending quest for world and oil domination? At what age is a person smart enough to vote? Apparently it’s the age where idealism and altruism are supplanted by cynicism and greed. By that standard, even with the wisdom that has come with my middle-aged body and mind, I am still too young to vote.
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I am not young and I think Jonah Goldberg has it backwards. After a lifetime of playing the ‘game’ trying to ‘amass wealth’ I have come to realize that I just want enough… no more, no less… than just enough. I want a society that is not focused on consuming. It is not possible in an economy based on capitalism. I am just coming to terms with the realization that consumerism is not only unsustainable, it isn’t healthy either. I think the children and youth are the smart ones, and in many ways, the older we get, the less we understand about the truly important things…
“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth.”
Funny, all the news stories I’ve seen lately about scientific research about intelligence indicate that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than conservative thinking.
The young gentleman should educate himself about why and when the voting age was lowered to 18. Young men were compelled to fight for the nation, yet could not have a say in who ran it.
Perhaps he would prefer the era of the “forty shilling free-holder” qualification. Or, he could take George Will’s “Money is speech” to its logical conclusion, and assign each “qualified” voter a number of votes based upon her/his wealth.
Then, at least, it would be open and upfront.