No, don’t let kids under 18 start voting
“Youth,” wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “is the one thing worth having.”
And in the days after the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, commentators are proving that Wilde’s words are prophetic — they are promoting the unbridled emotionalism of teenagers over the wisdom of their elders. Media appearances by students who survived the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have cast a spell over adults smitten with the idea that children can be as knowledgeable and politically active as their parents.
But this has led to some terrible ideas, including proposals to allow children under the age of 18 to vote. Writing in Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein argued the voting age should be as low as 13 or 14, calling voting the “training wheels of political participation.” University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas wrote in support of 16- and 17-year-olds voting, calling them “the real adults in the room.”
This is on the heels of a fawning national media that realized children have political opinions the second they begin pushing for gun control. Curiously, thousands of teenagers take to the streets at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., every year but the major news outlets haven’t rushed to praise their political involvement.
This newfound enthusiasm for children voting is all the odder because it contradicts the message being pushed by gun control advocates. At the same time we are supposed to believe 16-yearolds are mature enough to vote on matters of national importance, we are also being told that the minimum age to own a firearm should be raised to 21.
It’s not as if immaturity is the one thing politics lacks. President Donald Trump’s critics frequently shred him for acting like a “child,” or behaving like a “teenager.” If we desire more of the juvenilia dished up by Trump on a daily basis, there would be no better way than to let actual juveniles pick the president.
In the wake of the shooting, the passion displayed by some of the survivors has been admirable. But the idea of pushing children onto a national stage to discuss complex issues hasn’t exactly been a success. One student, on national television, defended the school safety officer who refused to engage the shooter, blamed Florida Gov. Rick Scott for the failure of local law enforcement officials to enter the school during the shooting, and is trying to get vacationers to boycott Florida during spring break. (When the teenager realized the county sheriff was actually elected and not appointed by the governor, he backed off his criticism of Scott.)
The real lesson for these kids should be that their government — even if warned dozens of times — cannot always keep them safe. And that they should be wary of a bumbling government deciding how citizens should protect themselves when law enforcement fails.
There are kids who are eloquent and smart and who impress us with their maturity. But not even the progressive fever swamps have granted the full franchise to voters under the age of 18.
While some progressives are telling us that college students are so delicate they must be protected from “microaggressions,” they now seem to believe high school children are imbued with magical wisdom and worldly knowledge. It’s an argument one would almost expect from a 16-year-old.