“What This Country Needs Is A Movement To Lower The Voting Age To 10. Hear Me Out.”

by John Hawkins | August 6, 2010 2:23 pm

Liberals have such a childlike mentality that they can’t even see the problem with letting children vote. Think I’m kidding? Then read this piece by Matt Miller in the Washington Post[1],

What this country needs is a movement to lower the voting age to 10. Hear me out.

Wherever you look, from debt to schools to climate to pensions, the distinctive feature of American public life today is a shocking disregard for the future. Yes, politicians blather on about “our children and grandchildren” all the time — but when it comes to what they actually do, the future doesn’t have a vote. If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to change their incentives. It’s time to give politicians a reason not simply to praise children, but also to pander to them.

About 125 million Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election. There are about 35 million Americans ages 10 to 17. Giving them the vote would transform our political conversation. It would introduce the voice we’re sorely missing — a call to stewardship, of governing for the long run, via the kind of simple, “childlike” questions that never get asked today.

Even by the standards of modern liberalism, which is a suicidally stupid ideology that would literally destroy this country if there were no conservatives around to stop them, this is a moronic idea. Children are as a general rule ignorant, uneducated, uninterested in politics, and naive about how the world works.

What liberals like Matt Miller won’t tell you is that they see these traits as a feature not a bug. After all, if we added 35 million new voters who don’t understand what’s going on and can easily be persuaded by liberal teachers, celebrities, and cartoons, then it would be a great new day for liberalism.

You see, most of the American people don’t like liberalism very much. That’s because they’ve seen it in action and have figured out it doesn’t work. So, rather than acknowledging that their ideas have failed, liberals have hit upon a new solution: Get new voters. That is what’s behind their push to let criminals vote, it’s why they’re desperate to give amnesty to illegals, and why they want to give people who have to be reminded not to play in the street the right to decide who runs the government.

The very fact that bilge like this is considered to be mainstream enough to make it into the Washington Post tells you a story about the sad and pathetic intellectual state of liberalism in this country.