Election Demographics: The Impact of the Youth Vote
The past few years, I’ve heard folks claim that young people, the next generation, will save us. So, not to worry. “Described (favorably or unfavorably) as climate warriors and gun-control activists, youth was even [viewed] by some older commentators as ‘the nation’s last hope’ “ (Faith Hill. The Not-So-Woke Generation Z. The Atlantic. Nov. 14, 2024). I’ve always been skeptical, recalling how it felt to be young in the ‘60s. Part of the outsized baby boom, carried along, but often clueless, with typical adolescent and young adult insecurities and uncertainties. A visual and soundscape memory/ tableau: on an anti-Vietnam-war street march, with Stephen Stills’ For What It’s Worth wafting down from a second-floor window. “There’s something happening here; What it is ain’t exactly clear.” I’ll say. Yet by sheer weight of numbers, we managed to shift the national narrative for a while. And, in the process, sparked a dislocating culture-war backlash that still hasn’t quit.
Public Expression?
As per Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does [sometimes] rhyme.” And each generation more responds to than forms the zeitgeist, the “defining spirit, mood, ideas and beliefs” of its time (Oxford Dictionary). And I’ve talked with enough young folks to recognize significant areas of mismatch and disconnect. They’re not just following in our footsteps. So, not that surprising that many in both genders voted to the right in the recent election. And a few days after, I witnessed, while driving, what I took to be a mobile tableau of the moment. A lone young man in a shiny white pickup almost cut me off and I classified him as one young jerk. But then, I noticed three other immaculate pickups—white, black, silver—also piloted by lone young men, weaving in and out of traffic. Were they playing a game of chicken, full of themselves in a post-election celebration of wild oats and testosterone? In another turbulent time between the two world wars, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote that “…Public life is not solely political…; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and amusement.” (The Revolt of the Masses. C1932. W.W. Norton Co., paperback 1964. Reissued 1993).
An Adolescent Nation?
A miracle, it’s often said, that males between ages 15 and 25 make it to adulthood. And road accidents are a leading cause of death for a population prone to overestimating its own abilities and reflexes, while underestimating personal risks, let alone peril to innocent bystanders and drivers. For individuals, “Adolescence is a period…of begin[ning] to assume adult positions socially….[it also] is the most difficult period of one’s life…[with] far too many significant life changes occurring…physical, psychological, and behavioral….” (Chris Churchill. America is a Teenager. Literate Ape. May 28, 2018). At national levels, youthful populations make for far less stable societies. In search of certainty, young folks may be radicalized, drawn to extremist ideologies and/or religious cults. The US, despite our now rapidly aging population, still seems to present as a perpetually adolescent nation. Perhaps this reflects our pioneer and wild-west origin stories, always reinventing, in “identity formation, and sometimes impulsive behavior…still figuring out its place in the world while facing challenges and uncertainties, often leading to social and political turmoil.” Fareed Zakaria has called this, The most dangerous moment since the Cold War. (Washington Post column. Oct. 11, 2024), with significant potential to step away from and “upend the [Pax Americana] international order” the US has presided over since WWII.
Conveying Discomfort and Doubt
“Young men and women especially voted for Trump messaging…that speaks to their deep unease and uncertainty” beneath the bravado. “Many are struggling—to feel financially secure, psychologically safe, or hopeful. Trump managed to mirror what many young people already felt: The world is a frightening place, and it’s not getting better.” (Hill). And the spirit of this age has thrown up a “huge backlash to all the economic change, the technological change, the cultural change that has been roiling Western societies and really societies everywhere for the last few decades. We’ve thought that these changes get digested or maybe there’s a spasm of a backlash. But we’re in a long period of reaction to these forces. And we’re developing almost a kind of new politics around it….What we’re seeing is a major realignment of politics around the idea that we’ve gone too far. We have to rethink the entire way in which we have been approaching these massive forces of structural change, economics, globalization, information revolution, cultural change.” (Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next. Freakonomics Radio with Stephen Dubner. Nov. 14, 2024).
About the Popular Vote
Elections matter, both in direct results and as public performances. “The health of democracies…depends on a wretched technical detail—electoral procedure. All the rest is secondary. If the regime of the elections is successful, if it is in accordance with reality, all goes well; if not, though the rest progresses beautifully, all goes wrong….[And] it might seem necessary to falsify.” (Ortega y Gasset). Speaking of reality, remember that no alternate-truth, “stop the steal” challenge of 2020 ever mustered sufficient fact-based evidence to make it through a court of law. The recent election was “clean,” yet not the landslide initially claimed. “…[T]he “steady drip of late ballots has eroded the percentage to (currently) 49.87%, with further slippage very likely before all the votes are in.” (Ed Kilgore. Trump Has Lost His Popular-Vote Majority. New York Magazine. Nov. 29, 2024). In fact, “the victory was slim, not a landslide.” (Anita Chabria. Column: The Trump landslide that wasn’t. Los Angeles Times. Nov. 21, 2024.). So, Donald Trump Doesn’t Have a Mandate to Radically Remake America (Eric Lutz. Vanity Fair. Nov. 22, 2024). The popular margin was the narrowest since 2000. But in the current environment, facts likely won’t keep landslide and mandate narratives from continuing to spin.
Who Will Take the Lead and Guide the Way?
Trump’s transition team, in triumphal mode, scoffs at the outgoing administration’s “niceness” and civility. (Asawin Suebsaeng and Nikki McCann Ramirez. Trump and His Team Are ‘Laughing’ at Biden’s Commitment to Decorum. Rolling Stone. Dec. 1, 2024). Why bother playing nice, when they’ve taken all the marbles and are here to change existing rules and even tear down much existing structure? Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramsswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency (not an actual department and supposed to be only advisory) has already started naming names, in what some call a “politics of revenge.” Not to mention conflicts of interest around large government contracts. Meanwhile, there’s a feeding frenzy of job seekers who want in on the action (Antonia Hitchens. Donald Trump’s Administration Hopefuls Descend on Mar-a-Lago. The New Yorker. Nov. 22, 2024). “It’s like to call out the absurdities of the system by forcing down your throat people that I like that I’m not supposed to.” And “With inexperienced people, I guess the question is, can they root out all the bad stuff going on at the departments, and still do good?” Yet a Goldman-Sachs survey of Wall Street revealed widespread investor skepticism that even a small portion of the new agenda will actually come to pass. (Sean Craig. The Massive Clue That Donald Trump’s Threats Are All BS. Daily Beast. Dec. 5, 2024).
Reality Lessons?
But even sticking with the preferred narrative won’t ensure the new administration smooth sailing. To paraphrase the policy analyst Aaron Wildavsky, the basic lesson of government is how hard it is to make even the simplest things happen. Republican control of Congress is not absolute. To avoid a government shutdown, the outgoing Congress (with a Democratic majority in the Senate) will need to pass a bi-partisan, short-term continuing resolution to maintain funding at current levels. That will push budget negotiations to March, which could pull focus from confirmation hearings for often controversial cabinet appointments. And there might also be another fight over the House speakership. And even in the new Congress, Senate Democrats may still have bargaining power, since funding bills are subject to a 60-vote threshold, while Republicans hold only 53 seats. (Sahil Kapur. Congress faces shutdown dilemma that could mess with Trump’s first hundred days. NBC News. Dec. 3, 2024). “Given that perilous hold on power, Trump might want to reconsider his current strategy of ruling Washington like a devastated and occupied enemy city with a Cabinet largely composed of men and women who appear to hate the departments and agencies they are supposed to oversee.” (Kilgore).
The Populist Shift
So, Democrats, traditionally the party of labor and have-nots, have landed on the side of the status quo, while “the mood…as in electorates all over the world, [has turned] profoundly anti-establishment.” Zakaria paraphrased from a conversation with Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister: “When people feel deeply insecure, they don’t move left economically. They move right culturally…their impulse is to say, ‘I need a return to the world I knew.’ That’s why the politics of nostalgia are so powerful. It’s a return to something comfortable.” And this will likely be most extreme in young people in most extreme time of life. But yet another lesson of politics is that nothing lasts forever. And “The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems…ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots [rampant]….[and may] turn on one another….[and] overreach on [polarizing] issues such as abortion and immigration, [and] enact[ing] economic policies that favor…allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off.” (George Packer. The End of Democratic Delusions. The Trump Reaction and what comes next. The Atlantic. Dec. 2, 2024).
MAGA Visions
Speaking of nostalgia, MAGA seems to envision a return to an earlier “golden age,” when men were men and women were, well… “If you think about gender issues, you’re seeing on the one side a lot of women feeling like they need to have their rights protected. But you’re also seeing a lot of men who feel like politics has gotten too feminized, that they are being forgotten and that in a post-industrial world, women do better than men. There is a kind of male backlash. Just take me back to before all this was happening. Take me back to that world where a man was able to be a man and was the dominant player in the family and in society.” (Zakaria). Wildly unrealistic to expect change to happen once and for all, a done deal without backlash, and women welcomed to take seats at the table. We have, after all, only had the vote for about 100 years and now, some extremists want to take that away. Now, I too recall how it used to be, but refresh my memory watching episodes of the old 1950s Perry Mason and Peter Gunn TV series. Both featured huge, gas-guzzler cars with giant fins (“drill baby drill?”) and caricatures of women in Stepford Wives mode. In the former, oblivious women were often railroaded as defendants for Perry to save in the courtroom. And all in the context of his sexless “office wife” relationship with his often-smarter secretary Della Street. Gunn featured lots of gunfire without blood or consequences and moved closer to the “sexual revolution,” generating some heat with his chanteuse girlfriend. But it’s in Hugh Hefner “Playboy” mode, with “the girl” longing desperately for a real relationship and marriage yet falling for the well-dressed “bad boy.” No wonder Betty Friedan felt compelled to write the Feminine Mystique a few years later (1963). And “Today, by the very fact that everything seems possible to us, we have a feeling that the worst of all is possible: retrogression, barbarism, decadence.” (Ortega y Gasset).
What’s Next?
After 2016, a friend wondered if somehow that outcome was what the country needed to go through. Does that mean we now need to go through a more extreme version? That said, I believe it’s important not to fall into general outrage and despair. The President-elect says he’ll pardon January 6 defendants (Michael Sainato. Donald Trump promises to pardon January 6 rioters on ‘day one.’ The Guardian. Dec. 8, 2024) and that January 6 committee members should be jailed. (Mariana Alfaro. Trump says members of Jan. 6 committee should be jailed. Washington Post. Dec. 8, 2024). Don’t know what else to expect, but like Democrats in the Senate, we have some leverage and work to do. The Brits have the concept of “loyal opposition,” not giving fealty to the current regime, but to our shared, collective, life as a nation. “Despite the sea of red on the electoral maps, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this election was close…millions fewer people voted this year than in 2020. That alone tells a story of lack of enthusiasm, or perhaps of other disenfranchising conditions in our ostensible democracy.” (Lorrie Moore. A Fourth-Rate Entertainer, A Third-Rate Businessman, and a Two-Time President. The New Yorker. Nov. 7, 2024).
Envisioning a Future?
So, perhaps, as with teenagers, we might take a few steps back approach our nation, caught up in the current moment, with a degree of exasperated affection, patience and hope rather than scorn. That we can listen and try to understand and respect more. It’s often said that all politics is local, even in this digital age. And that people (including the young) “are complicated and even persuadable…” Packer quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wish that we can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Thinking back, I recall Lincoln, that “you can fool some of the people, etc.” And that reminds me again of the ‘60s, and the Who’s We Won’t Be Fooled Again. We probably will be and more than once, but, in the process, I hope we’ll grow up some, figure things out, and find a way forward.