A new Harvard poll
of likely voters between the ages of 18 and 29) drives home what
The Reason-Rupe Poll of millennials found this summer: The kids are
politically up for grabs.
The
national survey of 2,000 millennials found that among likely
voters, 51 percent wanted a GOP takeover of the Senate while 47
percent preferred the Dems to keep the reins. In 2010, the
respective numbers were 43 percent and 55 percent.
Reason’s poll of millennials was titled “The
Politically Unclaimed Generation” precisely because younger
voters appeared to be far less partisan than older Americans (this,
despite President Obama overwhelmingly winning the youth vote in
2008 and 2012). Of course they are, for at least two
reasons. First, they’re still working out their relationships
toward politics, where they came from, and the like. As Emily Ekins
and I discussed in our October cover story in Reason, it’s
a given among political scientists and sociologists that the decade
or your twenties is a time when you search around for your
identity.
Second, Obama and the Democrats have generally been awful to
younger Americans. Obama has presided over a terrible economy and
can no longer simply blame it all on Bush; in 2012, despite pulling
5 million more votes from the 18-29 group,
he actually lost to Mitt Romney among 18, 19, and 20 year olds.
And when you move past economic issues (as big as they are), Obama
and the Dems have been truly rotten on issues they care a lot
about. Obama and a number of high-profile Dems such as Hillary
Clinton are objectively pro-NSA surveillance, massive drone
attacks, and new and better wars. They’ve dragged their feet on gay
marriage, typically having conversion experiences in the thick of
electoral battlefields that only inspire cynicism. Despite other
recent “evolutions” on issues such as pot legalization and
immigration, he’s got a terrible record on both those things,
raiding medical marijuana joints in California at a quicker pace
than George W. Bush and deporting more illegals than Dubya did
too.
What’s even more interesting—and from a libertarian POV, even
more inspiring—in the Harvard poll is that millennials show genuine
signs of bypassing politics and diving right into life itself.
These kids don’t want to waste their time on political campaigns.
They want direct action:
That’s good stuff, I think, and again it correlates with
what Reason-Rupe found: Millennials are wary of politics but very
interested in real life—63
percent told us that regulators favor special interests but 55
percent wanted to start their own businesses someday. Of course
they are skeptical: Their entire lives have been lived in the
relentless clusterfuck of the 21st century, where the right-wing,
conservative failures of George W. Bush and the Republicans has
been supplanted by the left-wing, liberal failures of Barack Obama
and the Democrats.
As
Ekins and I wrote, millennials are different from older
generations when it comes to ideology.
…it would be a major mistake to think that millennials are the
second coming of Murray Rothbard-style anarchism or even
Reaganesque disdain for government solutions. While millennials
clearly prefer free markets to state-managed ones, they are split
on whether free markets are better at promoting economic mobility
(37 percent) than are government programs (36 percent). Seven in 10
support government guarantees for housing, health care, education,
and income for the truly needy. Yet almost as many—65 percent—think
overall government spending should be reduced, and 58 percent favor
cutting taxes.From the point of view of older Americans and the political
identities they inhabit, such seeming contradictions—government
should guarantee income but cut spending?—come across as the folly
of youth, an inability to hash out a coherent, systematic ideology.
That sort of response will doubtless allow Republicans, Democrats,
conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and progressives to keep
selling what they’ve been selling for decades with minimal
changes.
OK, millennials are willing to listen to new ways of thinking
about politics and life more generally. The next step for
libertarians (and conservatives, and liberals, etc.) is to explain
exactly why and how their ideas and policies are more likely to
create a world that is fun, interesting, innovative, fair, and
workable.
I think we libertarians can do that, don’t you?
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