No, today’s teenagers aren’t going to grow up more conservative
by David Atkins
In the simplest terms, the Democrats control the White House (and, for now, the Senate) at a time when the country is struggling. Economic growth has been disappointing for almost 15 years now. Mthat ost Americans think this country is on the wrong track. Our foreign policy often seems messy and complex, at best.
To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.
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President Obama and many other Democrats argue that they could help lift this funk if congressional Republicans weren’t blocking nearly every Democratic proposal. The Democrats essentially won that debate in 2012 and will probably be favored to win it again in 2016. But the case will become harder to make with each passing year if living standards do not start to rise at a healthy clip for most households — which has not happened since the 1990s.
This dynamic is likely to be Hillary Clinton’s biggest weakness, either as a candidate or as a president. Talking about the Clinton-era 1990s boom — as she’ll surely do, to distance herself from today’s economy — will go only so far with voters too young to have any memories of the 1990s.
Some political analysts believe that teenagers are already showing less allegiance to the Democratic Party than Americans in their 20s, based on recent polling data. My own sense is that their argument rests on small, noisy sample sizes, and Mr. Taylor, of Pew, is also skeptical. The larger point, however, remains: The Democrats face challenges with today’s teenagers that they did not face with today’s 25- or 30-year-olds.
These are fair points from a certain perspective, but they in no way indicate that today’s teenagers will become more conservative. The one does not follow from the other. If the Democratic Party fails to assert a strongly economically progressive stance and prove that its policies can work, at least at a statewide level (since obstruction is the name of the federal game), then it stands completely to reason that many of today’s youngest voters would become disenchanted with politics or even reject the Democratic Party as ineffectual. One unmistakable trend among younger voters is toward not registering with either major political party.
But that’s a trend among older, decidedly more progressive Millennials as well. That bespeaks a disenchantment with the political process and a belief that both parties are at least partially in hock to corporate interests. But it doesn’t indicate centrism, much less conservatism.
If today’s teenagers feel that the Obama Administration didn’t do enough to fix the country, they’re not going to suddenly embrace the party or the ideology that wants to kill public education and food stamps, lower corporate taxes, deny women contraception and put gays back into the closet. There is almost zero chance of today’s teenagers favoring those policies any more than their older Millennial counterparts do. They may or may not distance themselves from partisan politics itself and from the Democratic Party–a move I feel would be unwise in our binary system. But the fact that they may fail to vote at all doesn’t mean they’re about to start voting more Republican. They won’t.
Obviously, Democrats need strong turnout numbers from progressively-minded voters to win, so a dispassionate and anti-partisan electoral bloc might be a challenge. But that’s different from a hostile voting bloc.
And even then, conservatives might not want to take solace in that. Angry young people who have been denied the economic opportunities of their parents and who believe that the political system cannot give them redress, tend to be destructive to status quo power hierarchies in unpredictable ways that generally aren’t described as “conservative.”
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