The Youth Vote Has Never Been A Thing

It isn't just this generation of young people. ALL generations of young people, going back at least as far as 1972, can't seem to get themselves to the polls.

Kids these days! My latest, in The New Republic, is about the youth vote and how little it matters because even when younger voters turn out in record numbers, as they did in 2020, that’s only half of them. We live in a gerontocracy for two reasons: the Baby Boom consists pretty much entirely now of people aged 60 and over, and old people vote much, much more than young people do. During the 2018 midterms an ad firm called NAIL Communications posted the above ad (you can also watch it here), which basically attempted to taunt young people into voting, and it’s just about the funniest thing I ever saw. But the reality is sad. In 2020 slightly more than 60 percent of those who voted were age 50 or over. Only 17 percent were aged 18 to 29, with another 23 percent aged 30 to 44. Baby Boomers lost control of popular culture years ago, but we own the government at every conceivable level, because the youngsters let us. You can read my piece here.

Also, I have a piece out in Liberties Journal (“A Prayer for the Administrative State”) about the right’s attempts to repeal the New Deal by creating an alternative history of regulatory agencies. If you subscribe, you can read that here. If you don’t subscribe, I’ll alert you when they put it in front of the paywall.