Every few years the political and media class notice the young. The temptation is acute. Who doesn't want to look into the future? The reasoning is that the political and social views you form in the first years of adulthood are often pivotal ones.
In many ways, for example, the divide in American politics today is an echo of the divide in the Vietnam era, when today's baby-boomer political leaders came of age.
Bush and Kerry deepened the resonance of that war for the new millennium - one a conservative who stayed in the US, the other a liberal who fought in the war and then campaigned against it. And so many are eager to see Iraq in the same way; the moment when an entire generation of Americans commit to one view of the world or another. The inference is that the young must surely be the most antiwar of any age cohort. After all, their peers are the ones fighting and dying.
The inference is wrong - and long has been. In the early days of Vietnam, the war even enjoyed popularity among many young Americans. That changed, of course, with events - but even then, the class divide between antiwar college kids and the rest was acute. But the young are often not as jaundiced as their elders. And the polling results on Iraq are more intriguing than you might expect.
The New York Times, MTV and CBS conducted a large survey of 17 to 29-year-olds. The results show that the underthirties are marginally more supportive of and optimistic about Iraq than the rest of the country; 27% believe the war is going somewhat or very well, compared with 23% of the entire population; 51% believe the war is somewhat or very likely to succeed (6% more than the total population).
Americans are a naturally optimistic nation; and the younger they are, the more hope they have; 31% of the underthirties even believe the chaotic occupation of Iraq has made the US safer. Fewer than one in five believe it has made the US less safe, and 38% believe that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do, compared with 35% of all adults. If you want to find the most antiwar part of the population, you need to look at senior citizens, not the young.
Does this make the next generation more conservative? On some issues, the answer seems to be yes. Take abortion. The undertirties are marginally more opposed to abortion than their parents: One in four want it made illegal altogether. Thirty-seven percent of the underthirties are pro-choice, compared with 39% of the population; 38% of the underthirties want more restrictions.
The young are also slightly less likely to support gun control than their elders, even in the wake of the college shootings at Virginia Tech. A solid 43% of the underthirties, moreover, believe being gay is a choice, compared with only 34% of the general population. Seventy-four percent said that most people they know would not vote for a president who had ever used cocaine.
So are they a more Republican generation than Democrat? Here's where the surprise is. Despite their marginally more conservative views on the war and Iraq, the underthirties are strikingly more committed to the Democratic party than at any time since the high-water mark of young Republicanism in the Reagan Eighties. Bush has turned out to be a reverse-Reagan.
This has something to do with the fact that the underthirties are less white than their elders. But it's hard to explain the massive gulf that has opened up between the parties by race along.
Take the presidential candidates. Barack Obama is the favourite, with 18% "enthusiastic" support, but Clinton is essentially tied at 17%. The first Republican, Giuliani, comes in at 4%. Both Obama and Clinton each have more enthusiasm from the young than the entire Republican field combined. The generic party support comes out at 54% Democratic to 32% Republican. Fifty-two percent believe the Democrats reflect their moral values, compared with 36% backing the Republicans. This is grim news for the right.
Even grimmer: 62% want a government take-over of health insurance, compared with 47% of all adults. Forty-four percent favour marriage rights for gay couples, compared with 28% of all adults.
Some shifts in the US now seem simply a matter of time. The private healthcare system appears doomed - as young Americans favour government control and rationing of healthcare rather than the free-market system they now have. Ninety percent of the underthirties either want fundamental changes or a complete rebuild of the system. And very few now doubt that marriage rights for gay couples is simply a matter of waiting for the older generation to die.
The usual caveat to all this is that the young will get more conservative as they get older, and that the young don't vote anyway. The historical trends don't really confirm this. Barring major events, people's political make-up is often formed in their twenties. The Republican triumvirate of Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have poisoned their party's image for a generation. And the evidence suggests that the young are actually becoming more reliable voters. In the last two election cycles, the under thirty vote has increased at twice the rate of the total voting population. It's still underrepresented. But less so than before.
My own sense is that the next generation is not ideologically leftist. Their support for a government take-over of healthcare is more of a pragmatic response to the insecurities and inefficiencies of the status quo than a clear-eyed assessment of the alternative.
The same with drugs: most of the young have become completely tolerant of marijuana use, but draw the line at cocaine and harder drugs. Again, this is less a left-right issue than a pragmatic-ideological issue. Similarly homosexuality. The underthirties are the first generation to grow up alongside openly gay peers and to have the concept of gay marriage as part of their background nose. It is not a big leap to put the two together - and certainly not as a big a leap as for those who have lived their entire lives associating marriage exclusively with heterosexuality.
As for party identification, the truth is that the Republicans have never been as incoherent, corrupt or ridiculous in my lifetime. The preference for the Democrats can be explained in part by default. Ditto the candidates. If the Republican elite is underwhelmed by the current crop, why do they expect the unaffiliated young to feel any differently? And there is a cultural alienation among the Republican leadership; a crew of old, white, straight men who do not even begin to speak the language of Generation Next. Obama and Clinton simply reflect the cultural reality of a multicultural, multiracial generation.
On this, perhaps, the immigration question is one of the more salient. The Republican base defeated an attempt at a bipartisan immigration deal, in a debate that, for all the merits of the arguments on both sides, was conducted with an excess of cultural and social fear and loathing.
The young heard it. And young blacks and Latinos heard it more clearly. It's about time the Republicans realised that the next generation is less white and less afraid than a lot of their elders.
- Courtesy: The Muslim World
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