There’s change coming from the youth, but it isn’t necessarily what you expect.
Last month, the U.K.’s parliament published a research briefing on the Labour government’s pledge to reduce the voting age to 16 for all elections (it is already 16 in Scotland and Wales). Not surprisingly, the conservative parties oppose such a move, and the more liberal ones support it. Frankly, after Brexit and the Boaty McBoatface debacles, you’d think Great Britain would be doing everything it could to limit the franchise, but clearly they’re not.
In the United States, a majority of Americans think 18 is a good minimum age for voting, according to a YouGov poll earlier this year. Only a quarter of respondents support a sub-18 voting age, though a cranky 19 percent would support raising it above 18. (Also, YouGov cheekily asked people if there should be a maximum voting age, and about 18 percent said yes.)
Here in the Bay Area, there is some limited voting for 16- and 17-year-olds and there have been repeated attempts to establish a 16-year-old voting age in San Francisco. In Oakland and Berkeley, they can vote in local school board elections. San Francisco voters have said no to the effort twice, but that hasn’t stopped supporters from trying yet again. (A narrower statewide effort was made in 2020 with Proposition 18, which would have allowed 17-year-olds to vote in primaries and special elections if they would be 18 at the time of the next general election; the proposition failed, about 56 to 44 percent.)
With rare exception, efforts to lower the voting age come from parties on the left, because they assume most of those young votes will be for candidates and parties of the left.
There was even an effort in the U.S. Congress in 2019 that would have lowered the federal voting age from 18 to 16; a majority of House Democrats supported the losing effort, with only one Republican in favor. They tried again with no luck in the 2023–24 Congress.
The voting age issue doesn’t really matter much; I wouldn’t support lowering the voting age, but it’s also not something about which I feel strongly. Young people rarely vote in large numbers; it’s possible in some elections where the margins are super-close that really young voters could put someone over the top, and the parties of the left assume it will be them. I say, don’t be so sure.
There’s good reason for doubt. In 2016, political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk looked at surveys of Americans on their devotion to democracy. Basically, from the Greatest Generation down through the millennials, they found a steadily declining commitment for the essentials of democracy; for example, 43 percent of older respondents thought it was illegitimate for the military to take over “when the government is incompetent or failing to do its job,” but only 19 percent of millennials were opposed.
That survey didn’t take into account Gen Z. Do you believe the younger generations will help usher in a more peaceful, civil politics in this nation? Think again. Politico cites two recent polls showing “Gen Z is actually more accepting of political violence under certain circumstances than any other generation.”
The Harvard Kennedy School notes a surge of support that Donald Trump received from Gen Z voters in the 2024 election; their support for the Democratic candidate going from a 25-point margin for Biden in 2020 to just 4 points for Harris in 2024. Worse, and rather ominous, is more results that echo the findings of Foa and Mounk. Christina Iruela Lane, a research assistant at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, said that before the 2024 election, only 27 percent of Gen Z voters surveyed strongly agreed democracy is the best type of government (it was 69 percent for voters older than 58); “Now, less than one-third of Americans under 30 trust the government. Only 16 percent believe democracy is working well for young people.”
Now, less than one-third of Americans under 30 trust the government. Only 16 percent believe democracy is working well for young people.
Which brings us to Thomas Mann, the German Nobel laureate who went on a book-length polemic against democracy (and his brother) in his 1917 wartime book Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. In the New York Review of Books edition (2021), an extra essay is included: “On the German Republic,” Mann’s 1922 endorsement of the Weimar Republic and defense of democracy.
What’s surprising and disturbing about the essay is the reaction of his audience. “On the German Republic” was a speech Mann gave to an academic audience in Berlin; he was interrupted numerous times by the students making noise in protest of his pro-democracy statements. He notes the sounds of discontent; “Now you are getting angry!” Mann said to his audience at one point. Even though his endorsement of democracy was, by our standards, weak — he was saying that with the abdication of the Kaiser and his military leaders after the disastrous war, government power has fallen to the people and therefore the people have no choice but to do a creditable job of it — those young people didn’t want any part of it.
The young people of Germany didn’t need Adolf Hitler to come along and turn them against the republic; they were already there.
For American young people of today, there are many reasons for dissociation from our political system, but the lack of economic prospects for most everyone who isn’t an AI investor is certainly a big one. While a lot of Democrats are talking up the affordability crisis, Rahm Emanuel seems to be catching the wider problem; it’s not just the price of eggs, it’s the American Dream being on extinction watch. “We used to strive to get into the middle class, now we just struggle to stay there, and we all know it,” he recently told an Iowa audience.
Young people aren’t a shoe-in for Democrats (or Democratic Socialists). They’re also not fated to march to the right. But Democrats and Republicans who believe in protecting democracy would do well to stop focusing on demographic gamesmanship and instead focus on real policies that can get the American Dream off of its deathbed.