Rockabye the Vote

Posted on December 29, 2007. Written by Adam Rosenblatt

Kids should vote. Period. I’m not talking about lowering the voting age by a few years to 16, or maybe 15. I mean we should scrap age limits and give suffrage to anyone who wants to vote and is capable of getting through the process (with forms of assistance that don’t entail voting for the person-in other words, the same forms of assistance we offer to the elderly and physically disabled).

It’s an idea that’s pretty easy to chuckle at: unrealistic, potentially chaotic, and probably something kids themselves aren’t even that interested in. We all agree, after all, that children haven’t reached the age of reason, and if democratic politics require one thing, it’s that citizens’ make political choices based on reason.

But what is reason, exactly? As early as 1781, Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, was pointing to reason as both the most fundamental and most vexing concept in Western philosophy. In politics, “reason” stands in, all too often, for “the way I think, but not the way that those other people (with whom I disagree) think.” An even darker part of reason’s history in the West is its use to create a dividing line between those who are treated as full persons and those who aren’t: women, blacks, non-landowners and colonial subjects have all been considered unable to reason, and thus unworthy of the vote-dangerous to democracy, even. It should go without saying that, to an Englishman in, say, 1869 (the year John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, his radical call for sexual equality), many of these ideas seemed as natural as children’s lack of suffrage seems to us now.

If you look at suffrage throughout history, you often see the real story of political power buried under the rhetoric of equality. Right now in the United States, the fact that prisoners can’t vote shows how little incarceration has to do with rehabilitation for reentry into society, how much it has to do with the creation of a space where people, overwhelmingly black and brown males, feel the effects of the law but don’t have any say in writing it.

Not that reason is always about identity and exclusion. The argument for excluding “unreasoning” people from the vote rests on the dream of a perfect democracy, where every voter deliberates and makes choices that are based logically on the evidence presented, even if interpreted through particular values and interests: a Detroit autoworker, for example, may vote differently from a Seattle environmentalist even when they are both being reasonable. The reality, however, is that in modern democracies most of us tolerate (grudgingly, perhaps) not only interests, but also types of reasoning, that are different from our own, perhaps even “impaired” by most definitions. Few people argue for taking the vote away from elderly voters who may occasionally forget what year it is, or what war is going on. They’re citizens, and the law applies to them, so they should have a vote even if that vote is somehow flawed or unreasonable. Why doesn’t the same argument seem to apply to kids?

Children are different from women or colonial subjects, some will say, because they are by nature, not merely by health or social position, dependent on others. The danger of child voters is not just that they will be capricious, but that they will merely vote how their parents instruct them, conferring more political capital on a Utah Mormon with 10 children than on a Boston banker with only one. This argument has some truth to it, but it is also remarkably similar to the old belief that a husband could be trusted to vote in his wife’s best interests, so why bother to let women vote?

As Mill pointed out in his defense of women’s suffrage, the problem with what we might call the “dependence” theory is that it creates the very reality to which it claims to respond. If women in Mill’s day seemed unprepared to get involved in politics, it was because they were confined to the home and the kitchen, kept from reading the newspaper, given less education than their male peers. They were nurtured, not natured, out of politics. Youth voter turnout, in the United States and the democratic world at large (acknowledged by the United Nations in a 1995 report) is low, giving young people disproportionately little voice in politics. But what exactly do we expect when, for the formative first 18 years or so of their lives, we deliberately box them out of the political process? We don’t wait until age 18 to buy our children an iPod and see if they’ll take to music; so how could we think that, after 18 years without the basic right of political participation, they’ll passionately enter democratic culture? Isn’t encouraging a life-long interest in voting and politics worth the cost of some immature votes?

Another way to dismiss or ridicule the idea of children’s suffrage is to compare it to children smoking, driving or any of the other generally harmful things adults can do and kids, at least in theory, can’t. But the analogy is a false one. One of the important distinctions in democratic theory (which, despite some reservations, I won’t be deconstructing in this particular post) is between a privilege and a right. A privilege, like driving or smoking, is something that makes your life more convenient, happier, perhaps more profitable in financial as well as other senses. A right, on the other hand, is one of the preconditions of living life within the political community. If you can be tortured, imprisoned without charge, spied on (how sad that these words now immediately evoke thoughts of my own country rather than somewhere else), then you don’t live in a democracy. You may live under a democracy: under its boot, or under the layers of secrecy it uses to cover its undemocratic spaces. Because democracy is a political system whose principle tool is the vote, there is perhaps no clearer difference between those who live in and those who live under democracy than the right to vote. I don’t see why it should be more “natural” to us for children to live within our borders and subject to our laws without voting rights than it is “natural” for women not to vote, or for inner city blacks to wait in polling lines for four hours while white suburbanites cruise through the voting process, as is the current situation in many states. Show me someone who wants to vote but isn’t permitted, and I will show you someone whose life in a democracy is a geographical, not political, fact. That will be true for my son sometime soon.

Tags: children, democracy, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, rights, suffrage, The Subjection of Women, voting

Posted in Childrens' Rights, US politics