Ever ponder this question? Why would young people vote en masse for Barack Obama when he is running up a crushing debt for which they will be responsible? Even the faintest hint of reality should tell them they're screwing themselves by making such a choice.
The answer,
as presented by Robert Tracinski at RealClearPolitics, is simple: Look at how they live, especially those who are college students.
If we ask why this group leans so far to the left, on one level the answer is simple. College students and recent graduates lean left because of what they were taught in the universities, which are notorious as one of the last domains for Marxist theories and "political correctness." But this answer is oversimplified and perhaps a bit circular. After all, why are the universities bastions for these ideas -- and why do today's youth, raised in a culture of pointed, sarcastic skepticism, accept those so ideas with so little resistance?
The enduring influence of the left's ideas has to do, not just with the message students encounter at the universities, but with the environment in which they encounter it.
The reason I regard the left's lock on the youth vote as paradoxical is that youth is characterized by a desire for independence. No one wants to live in his mom's basement for the rest of his life -- or at least, that's considered something to be ashamed of. So why do young people want politicians to act as their
surrogate parents?
The first clue to the answer is to observe that most college students are not, in fact, independent. Or rather, the independence they seek is somewhat selective. Most of them are
economically dependent, with someone else paying for their tuition and their room and board -- usually their parents, or the government, or the givers of grants and student loans. And they have grown to regard this as normal, even as a kind of birthright, to be supported for at least four years of study, insulated from the pressure of making a living or even of preparing for a career. As for intellectual independence, well, I'm not the first to
observe that universities operate on a kind of factory model: they are assembly lines that install pre-fabricated ideas into students' heads. Yet young people do expect to be totally independent in one realm: their personal lives. The whole point of living on campus is to be out from under the watchful eye of mom and dad, while the universities have entirely abandoned the old idea of monitoring students' behavior
in loco parentis.
So take a look at the college experience, particularly for a liberal arts major, from this perspective. You study topics in which the answers are subjective, no one is too concerned about whether it has any practical application or economic value, and everyone is pretty much expected to repeat the conventional wisdom. You express abstract concern for the poor and for the starving masses of the Third World, while never actually mixing with anyone from outside the prosperous First World middle class. Someone else, off at a distance, provides for your material needs, paying for your housing, food, clothing, and condoms. But at the same time, no one pokes into your personal life or asks too many questions about who you're sleeping with, what you're smoking, or what you do with your free time. Finally, this whole lifestyle is paid for with huge amounts of debt, and it is considered bad form to ask too many questions about how big the debt is or how you're ever going to pay it all back.
Does any of this sound familiar? Put it all together, and college life
is the contemporary left's ideal. The universities are liberal utopias.
Anyone who has gone to college, especially if you enrolled at a four-year public university and lived on campus, knows this is true. Young adults crave their "rights" as adults - which basically means the right to drink alcohol and have all the sex they want - but they resist the responsibilities that go along with adulthood. Some of them become professional students and continue to resist these responsibilities well into their 30s, and if they've got someone who will pay the bills, God bless 'em, I guess.
Obama appeals to folks at this stage in life, and at this level of maturity, because he looks at the nation's finances in the same way they look at their own. We should all have whatever we want, and old rich people should pay our bills because they're paternalistic jerks and it's not fair.
Of course, someone has to go out and produce something so as to create the wealth that will allow these people to maintain their lifestyle, but you can't worry too much about that when you're under all the pressure that comes with a five-class courseload and you really need a beer, dude.
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